Muscular Underuse & Overuse: Are You Trapped in this Painful Cycle?
Exercising is wonderful and essential for a healthy lifestyle, but too much too soon can quickly unravel into a spiral of pain, muscular imbalances, and even injury. When it comes to a healthy movement routine, it’s important to customize a plan to your unique body’s conditions.
As we approach the holiday season, many people decide to push any major lifestyle changes off until the new year, perhaps overwhelmed by holiday stress or tempted to indulge in eggnog and any free time spent cozy on the couch watching holiday movies. This period of little activity can lead to overdoing it when the time comes for New Year's resolutions, starting the vicious cycle of underuse and overuse/misuse.
In this article, our Muscular Activation Technique specialist, Maurice Harden, explains how underuse and overuse are closely linked and what you can do to break the cycle and start moving functionally for better health.
The Dangers of a Sedentary Lifestyle
You don’t need us to tell you that a sedentary lifestyle can be harmful. By getting wrapped up in an inactive lifestyle, you speed up the aging process and increase your risk of many chronic diseases. A sedentary lifestyle causes the following:
Fewer calories burned, which can cause weight gain and metabolic issues such as trouble breaking down fats and sugars
A decrease in muscle strength and endurance – use it or lose it, as they say
Weakened bones and a loss of mineral content
Weakened immunity
Poor blood circulation
Increased inflammation
Hormonal imbalances
These problems can lead to a host of other issues. While we don’t want you to exercise from a place of fear, it is important to find something that motivates you. Focus on how good you will feel once you are moving more consistently. You will boost your mental health and cognition, improve your mobility, and look good. Let’s face it – feeling and looking good will boost your confidence, and that's definitely a plus.
Shifting Away from a Sedentary Lifestyle
So, now you’ve decided you want to start exercising. That’s great! But here’s where many people run into challenges. When muscles have not been used in a long time, they have to be warmed back up into activity, especially the older you are. Otherwise, you risk overuse injuries.
Disuse Syndrome
When you spend most of your life on the couch, a force as seemingly negligible as gravity may be enough to cause overuse injuries and complications. Activities as simple as picking up your grandchild or bending down to pull weeds from the garden may be more than what your skeletomuscular system can handle. Perhaps you can hold your grandchild for five minutes, but once you hit the six-minute mark, your body says no more.
Research has determined a clear connection between inactivity and chronic pain, enough to label this condition “disuse syndrome.”
This most obviously occurs when someone has been bedridden due to illness or severe injury, but it is equally as possible when someone simply doesn’t move enough.
To break the pattern of Disuse Syndrome, the best course of action is to see a professional who can evaluate and monitor your current state and give you the best exercises to strengthen stabilizers and get the body going again.
The Muscle Activation Technique, offered at Dynamic Fitness & Rehabilitation is a great way to reactivate muscles that haven’t been used in a long time in a way that is gentle yet effective. Call our team today to schedule your evaluation.
Too Much Too Soon
With the new year just around the corner, you may feel tempted to spend the next few months in ‘couch potato mode’ with the intention to hit January full steam ahead.
Maybe you decide to sign up for a boot camp or cross fit class. Perhaps you decide you’re going to revisit the workout that worked for you when you were 20 years old. But this is a key point to remember: you cannot go from 0 to 100 just because you want to lose weight.
This will shock your muscular system and lead to your body shutting down certain muscles while overworking others, causing imbalances and injury.
Overdoing It
Overuse injury can also occur when you add a new workout, extend your workout, or push harder than normal. When people think of muscular overuse, this is what tends to be the first thought.
This can lead to a domino effect of muscles shutting down. Your hip flexors may fatigue and shut down, putting pressure on your glutes and adductors. Then, the glutes turn off and leave all of the work for the adductors. This “shutting down” ultimately leads to way too much pressure on the joints. Hello, pain.
Reactivate Your Body Properly
While you may recover from overuse, your body will not get to where it needs to be without a specific, targeted exercise plan. Your body might feel better and reset your muscles, but certain muscles may stay unengaged so you only target half of the muscular system when exercising. This further exacerbates imbalances, leading to more pain.
Learning and monitoring your limits is the first step to overcoming this cycle. This is why working with a professional is often the best step forward, since chances are, you are disconnected from your body and its limitations.
Recalibrating your body may look like adding in a new exercise here and there – not changing the whole program. You also might add only 5 - 10 minutes to your workout – not an extra 30 minutes.
Learn more > Tips for Mentally Recovering After Injury
Switch On So You Don’t Shut Down
Going a long time without properly engaging your muscles can lead to injury when you decide to get moving again. But that doesn’t mean staying inactive is the answer. Movement is truly the best medicine, after all.
With Dynamic Fitness & Rehabilitation, you can correct muscular imbalances and joint instability with noninvasive techniques to reduce pain, movement limitations, and functionality challenges. You don’t have to stay stuck in a sedentary lifestyle.