Monday, September 11, 2006

Muscle Imbalance: What we need to know about it

Imagine your body like a piece of cake. To make it tasty and delicious, you need to put many different ingridients (sometimes at once) equally. Say, not too much salt so that it would not taste too salty or not too much sugar thus it will not make you sick. Our body is just like that. Anatomically, each part of the body is in a pair. We have a pair of arms, a pair of legs and so forth where each component (e.g.: right or left arm) is developed by several muscles that work synergistically to perform a nice and smooth (just like the tasty cake) movement.
In normal situation, all the muscles will act equally in terms of strength based on their function. For example, when we are rising one of our arms vertically, muscles around the shoulder and upper back will work together to keep the arm staying in its neutral position. For this purpose, the shoulder muscles should be as strong as the back muscle.

What will happen if one is weaker then another?
In this sort of situation, if a group of muscle is weaker than others means that the other muscles will be working dominantly. Rising one arm upward where the upper back muscles are weaker then the shoulder muscles will result in arm will moving upward excessively. Consequently, this will impinge the nearest structures (e.g.: blood vessels, nerves or other muscle tendons) which in turn can stimulate shoulder pain.
Another problem that might happen is muscle stiffnes. The stronger muscles will contract dominantly to subtitute the action of the weaker muscles. As a result the shoulder muscles adopt this action and they will become tight and stiff. Therefore pain and muscle stiffness can be the major problem for muscle imbalance.

What can we do?
Simple. Stretching the stiff muscle and strengthening the weak ones.