Knees & Ankles – Get The Spring in Your Step Back!
Knee pain or ankle pain can be quite common in a lot of people. This is especially true when you consider that our lower limbs (legs) have a lot of work to do carrying us along and moving us from A to B. Often it is thought that a weakness in the leg or leg joints is the reason for the many forms of common knee pain and ankle pain issues. From reading our other posts you now know this is not always the case if at all.
Ailments such as muscles strain, twists, meniscal injuries, arthritis, ligament sprains, tendinitis, tendinopathy, Achilles rupture etc. or more often than not a result of poor balance/biomechanics due to a crooked frame (poor posture).
You would have learnt from earlier posts that bones in your body (particularly in the spine) can go out of place that the body cannot otherwise bring back in correct alignment. Instead it has to twist and stiffen up in order to compensate for the misalignment(s).
Your legs are the greatest tool for finding compensation room for the rest of the body. This means your legs will often twist and move off centre to reduce the stresses elsewhere in the body, often the back. In doing so however the joints of the legs (hips, knees, ankles) will no longer bend in one uniform direction. If either leg is twisted or rotated as a compensation, the amount of strain and stress on the joints, ligaments and muscles increases vastly.
Biomechanical Origins of Knee Pain / Ankle Pain
Here we can clearly see how improper bone alignment of the leg(s) as a result of compensating for injuries elsewhere in the body will cause improper biomechanics and joint movements of the leg, resulting in pain, degeneration and injury. Ankle pain and knee pain is often most common as these joints are towards the bottom of the kinetic chain.
You can do a quick test of your own leg alignment at home. Simply stand in your normal standing position and look down at your feet. They should point almost straight ahead. Are your feet pointing in this way, or are they pointing in/out? How about your big toe? What about your feet? Are they flat or arched? When you bend to squat are your knees bending straight ahead or off to the sides? Anything other than straight ahead will indicate some misalignment and twisted legs. You may or may not have accompanying pain but you will develop joint degeneration long term.
Your arms too can also become twisted but they are not as affected as your legs as the legs are weight bearing appendages. They have to deal with a lot of forces when walking, running, jumping etc. These forces can affect any part of the leg(s) and result in the myriad of injuries/ailments listed earlier.
More often than not those of you with such misaligned legs will have at some point used stretching, massage, taping, orthotics or a combination of such methods. Unfortunately, these methods only mask over the problem offering minimal symptom relief if any. In fact, some could be doing you more harm than good. Please see our post on ‘Orthotics – A Helpful Aid or A Painful Hindrance?’.
The reason for their failure is because they do not address the underlying problem. No matter how much stretching, physio rehab or massage you do you are only tackling the superficial problem – overly tense muscles. Even osteopaths and chiropractors, despite knowing bones are the issue, approach the problem incorrectly. Despite knowing your bones are misaligned they fail to appreciate WHY they became misaligned. With the legs in particular they fail to understand that the misalignment was as a result of the body compensating for a bigger problem elsewhere.
Thankfully at Body Centric Wellness we understand the difference between bones that go out of place as a result of compensations that the body could otherwise fix itself, and bones that go out of place because the body has no muscle or combination of muscles to pull the bone(s) back in place. This fundamental axiom is the key to why Advanced BioStructural Correction™ (ABC™) – the method we employ – works so well in helping reverse ailments no other methods can, consistently and predictably.
Our goal is to help you get back to health and be the best you can be. Let us get to the root cause of your ailment(s). We offer a FREE consultation including a demo of the ‘First Rib Manoeuver’ before you decide on proceeding with any treatment. You will feel the difference to your pain and movement right from the off.