Over time, a muscle that has been strained or misused can become hard and knotty. You've heard of muscle memory? Well, muscles forget too, and they contract and forget how to relax. As a massage therapist, I find these hardened, dense muscles on clients every day. The muscle can be loaded with trigger points and perhaps scar tissue. It's main characteristics are: A. it hurts, B. it's not working well, C. it won't relax enough so that they can sleep.

Hard, dense muscles cannot function correctly because they cannot contract and relax. The muscle fibers have lost their ability to slide over one another to shorten and lengthen the muscle (short is contracted, long is relaxed). It has lost it's power. Blood cannot get into the tissue because the blood vessels are compressed in the hardened muscle. Oxygen and nutrients, carried by the blood, can barely get in there to do their job of hydrating and nourishing the muscle. Lactic acid, other chemicals, waste, all build up and have a hard time being exported.

If you keep making the muscle work after you feel pain or fatigue, you cause more strain and scar tissue builds up to try to make the muscle bigger and stronger. The scar tissue cells are slapped down haphazardly, not nice and smooth like the original muscle fibers, the ones that glide over and under each other. Layers of muscle start to adhere together - again, trying to make themselves stronger to do what you are asking.

The muscles pull at their edges where tendons and ligaments attach muscle to bone, sometimes ripping off, sometimes tearing. The bone feels the strain and tries to make itself stronger and bigger and lays down new bone, called bone spurs, which are again stuck here and there haphazardly. The bone spurs can even grow into the ligaments and muscle tissue and tear it! The joint itself gets squeezed by the tight muscles around it, the cushion between the joint wears out, gets inflamed. And on and on, the damage and repair cycles as the body tries to fix itself, you obviously aren't helping!

The result of all this? Pain, loss of function, dis-function, and soon perhaps pain killers and surgery - the very LAST options you should consider, but the only options you have if things get this bad.

If you listen to your body's pain the very first time you hear it, you can avoid it all of this. But you have to be Aware, Listen, and Act Differently. Each page of this website is devoted to a way to Act Differently.

You do not have to live with chronic pain, it is not a natural state of being!

2007 © Lisa Henderson, NC-LMBT #4665. This article not to be copied for commercial use.