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When have I injured myself and when is it the brain being careful?

What aspect of pain comes from actual tissue damage and what comes from my brain being careful?

This was a question from one of our Facebook followers. It’s a pretty big topic to say the least. What we experience as pain is an output from our brain in relation to the input it receives from the tissues of the body and our experiences such as previous injury to ourselves or others we know, what we read about it or see on TV, what else is happening in our lives at the time. Interestingly the  International Association for the Study of Pain describes pain itself as an experience. Continue reading “When have I injured myself and when is it the brain being careful?”

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Building a champions mind

This is a really interesting podcast from The Well Rounded Athlete. It is a discussion with Dr Jim Afremow and whilst it is looking at things from the point of view of athletic performance you could apply the principles to all walks of life. Dr. Afremow is a leading mental performance consultant, and the author of The Champion’s Mind: How Great Athletes Think, Train, and Thrive Continue reading “Building a champions mind”

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How does your brain respond to pain?

This is a great little video that explains that though we all experience pain we all experience pain differently. Put together by Karen D. Davis, PhD. Karen is a Professor in the Department of Surgery and Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto, and heads the Division of Brain, Imaging and Behaviour – Systems Neuroscience at the Toronto Western Research Institute.

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Dynamic movement skills

I was on the Dynamic movement skills course in November and have been integrating it into the treatment of one or two clients over the last month with great success. We are getting very noticeable differences in as little as a couple of sessions so I’m really looking forward to rolling this out as a stand alone system in the January.

The course works on developing and refining neuromuscular efficiency and motor patterns. This helps improve gross motor skills, balance, rhythm, coordination, speed and agility. These ultimately help to increase movement competence and confidence during daily activities and sport. In re-educating the neuromuscular system we are able to react more quickly and dynamically and through working in all planes of motion develop more rounded movement skills. The system also aids in correcting single leg dominance and through the progressive nature of it develop dynamic balance and core engagment which in turns allows for the development of better turning ability in sport.WP_20141220_001

 

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Aerobic exercise training increases pain tolerance

The study talks about exercising 3x a week for 30 minutes in healthy individuals. If we are talking about those suffering from chronic pain we might want to increase the frequency but decrease the length of time. Even going for a very short walk of 5 minutes at a time can make a significant impact. From there we can increase the number per day and then perhaps the number of times per day but the bottom line is that easy effort aerobic exercise is good for dealing with pain.

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Pain

Over on Facebook we’ve been sharing a lot of links lately about different aspects of pain as we feel that understanding the mechanisms of why we hurt is incredibly important. The more we know about these the the greater the chances of being able to deal with more chronic issues and help prevent acute injuries becoming chronic ones. So you can expect more in the future as we look to expand your ,and our, knowledge about it.

So here’s one of the posts from earlier this week. It’s a link to a blog post over at the Running Physio which is aimed at runners but contains some great information that is useful for everybody. Pain in runners: why do I hurt?