By Sandra Genest-Boudreau [email protected]
Sandra Genest-Boudreau is French-Canadian, who graduated from the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in 1990 before coming to the Algarve in 2002. She spent 10 years in a house practice in Québec city and two years in Vancouver. She is passionate about adjusting all her patients, particularly children.
We live in a world where our lifestyle has changed drastically. Most of us have little or no time available to take proper care of our health.
There seems to be no time to simply relax, exercise or sleep enough hours to be able to fully recover. A great number of people nowadays have jobs that do not require much physical activity, but may demand high level of concentration and repetitive task. Maintaining a sitting position for many hours during the day, using very little body motion, leads to increased stress levels on already fatigued and underused muscles.
It contributes in making these muscles more likely to tense up and creating those so-called “muscle knots”.
On the other hand, by a repetitive task at work, overused muscles will also strain and stress and may too develop muscle knots.
What is muscle tension?
Muscular tension, spasm or knots occur when muscles contract involuntary for a sustained period of time. These bundles of muscular tension have altered circulation and nervous system activity.
If left untreated, muscular fibres remain in a locked position which may become permanent, causing local pain and increased stress level on the body.
How can Chiropractic help?
I am sure you know people who are always stressed. By stressed, I mean not only emotionally but also physically, always feeling tired as if they were carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. They do occasionally find time to get a massage but to return a few days later to the same tensed state as before. Why is that?
The truth is that muscles only very rarely tense up by themselves. When your spine loses flexibility or your vertebrae lock up from lack of physical activity or when your muscles are damaged due to too much repetitive activity, the brain sends signals through the spine telling the muscle to tense up even more in an attempt to protect the body.
It is like the fight or flight response; you tense up when you are about to enter in a fight to be ready to protect yourself.
Muscles tense up because the brain tells them to do so. By removing blockages on your spine, Chiropractic is able to change the signals sent to your muscles, and allowing them to pass from a reactive fight situation back to normal. Only then your massage will be more effective and will have more long lasting effects.
A flexible spine will enable you to carry the electrical activity of your spinal cord through your body in a more efficient way, and will require less activity or response of the surrounding muscles, making you more efficient and less likely to be affected by stress. And life gets better with Chiropractic.
Possible causes of
muscle tension
• poor posture
• repetitive task
• misaligned spinal segment
• emotional stress
• poor sleep
• dehydration
• excess exercise
• desk or computer job
• inadequate healing of old injury
Sandra can be contacted at her clinic in Pêra on 282 312 853
