The Basics

With Thanksgiving over and Christmas and the New Year around the corner many people begin to plan for the New Year and the New Year resolutions. In this post I want to talk to you about how your muscles work so when you start working out you will understand what is actually happening with your muscles.

Let’s start with the basics…a quick breakdown of muscles and how they work.

I want you to envision one piece of sewing thread…this thread represents a muscle fiber. Now let’s envision 100 pieces of this thread bundled in saran wrap….the saran wrap represents fascia. Ok, so let’s wrap 100 pieces of thread (muscle fibers) in saran wrap (fascia) and if we do that 10 times we would have 10 bundles. If we take those 10 bundles and saran wrap all 10 together we now have a muscle. Each muscle has a different amount of fibers this is just an example.

A quick side note before we continue, Tendons connects muscles to bones…there’s an origin (the beginning) and an attachment (the part that moves) to a muscle. Ligaments connect bone to bone.

Now that we have discussed what a muscle is, let look at how they work.

The muscle fibers slide back and forward quickly against one another to create movement. This movement happens all day long, so you can imagine that by the end of the day your muscles are fatigue. Once a muscle gets fatigued they are more susceptible to injury, so what they do to prevent that injury is they spasm. When your muscle spasm, your nerves sends a message up to your brain and says “something is wrong in this muscle” your brain sends a message to that nerve telling it to ‘CONTRACT THAT MUSCLE”…the muscle contracts but the problem is still there. The nerve send another message to the brain “nope didn’t work…something’s still wrong” your brain again sends another message down “CONTRACT” your muscle contracts but the problem does not get fix….as a matter of fact now because of the constant contractions you are starting to feel pain in or around that area. The more that muscle contracts the more pain you will start to feel, and if left untreated you will start to compensate by using other muscles to do the job of the muscle that has contracted and stop working. All of this is due to muscle fatigue…how crazy is that?!?!

Our body need balance, if we don’t give balance to our bodies…our bodies will make its own balance. Let’s work on balancing our body…give it plenty of water, good nutrition, good exercise and stretching, and good bodywork.

Until Next Time….Take care of your muscles and they will take care of you!

Cheers