PPS Episode 2: The Forces Behind Pain

PPS Episode 2: The Forces Behind Pain

Why can a muscle feel incredibly tight when it is actually being held in a lengthened position? Why can working somewhere far away from the painful area sometimes change the pain almost immediately? And why does tissue we work over and over sometimes seem to come right back?

Those were some of the questions that led me toward Pain Patterns & Solutions Bodywork.

In this second PPS episode, I'm taking you deeper into the principles that changed the way I began thinking about pain, inflammation, scar tissue, and eventually force within the body.

We start with something almost every massage therapist has encountered: that stubborn, painful spot in the rhomboids. I'll walk you through why “tight” doesn't necessarily mean “short,” and I'll tell you about the client who unexpectedly showed me a relationship between her painful rhomboid and scar tissue along her IT band.

That discovery created more questions than answers.

Why did working the IT band change the rhomboid? Why did the scar tissue eventually return? Why did the IT band stop responding after several treatments? And what was the body trying to maintain that I hadn't understood yet?

Those questions eventually led me toward the idea of paired scar-tissue relationships, the order in which those relationships develop, and some surprisingly simple physics principles that helped me begin understanding what I had already been observing in my clients.

We'll also begin exploring one of the larger ideas behind PPS: pain doesn't necessarily tell me where to work. Pain gives me a clue about where to start looking.

This episode lays another piece of the PPS foundation and introduces concepts we'll continue developing next month when we explore direction, reversals, transfers, and what happens when the body's efficient suspension against gravity begins shifting toward compression.

If PPS is new to you, I recommend beginning with PPS Episode 1: Learning to See the Body Differently, because these episodes are intentionally building on one another.

Interested in learning PPS?