My intention with this article is to give people some tips for addressing aches and pains that come up in their bodies, and empower them to feel good and take ownership of their healing. For injuries and intense or long-lasting pain, I highly recommend consulting with appropriate medical and bodywork practitioners. In fact, I recommend regular bodywork of some form (even if it’s just dancing) for everyone! Finally, I welcome feedback – please let me know if you think I’ve gotten something wrong or something I could add to be more right.
1. Don’t Just Rub Where It Hurts
All of the fascia (connective tissue) in the body makes up one single continuous web. It extends all the way from your skin, down around your muscles and bones and organs, to the INSIDE of your muscles and bones. This fascial mesh transmits and distributes the various forces and strains your body undergoes. That is to say that all the parts of your body are connected, and a misalignment in your ankles could be causing your neck pain!
So, in terms of self-care, this means rubbing the spot where it hurts won’t always help make the pain go away and can sometimes make things worse. (Note: Sometimes, rubbing the spot that hurts will totally help.)
A spot on your body can be hurting for multiple reasons, to name a few: a muscle holding too tight, a muscle or tissue that is overstretched and complaining about that, a rip or tear that is attempting to heal, or tissues that aren’t able to move properly because they’re held in place by overgrown connective tissue. (I’m sure this isn’t an exhaustive list.) Considering these different possibilities, you’ll notice that if you try to relax a muscle that is already overstretched, you may cause it to be even MORE overstretched, potentially making your pain worse.
So, instead of just rubbing where it hurts, what do I recommend? Start by feeling around the spot that hurts, seeing if another muscle nearby is extra tight, especially if it’s a larger muscle. If your low back hurts, check if your glutes are tight. It can take some time to feel the difference between a tight and taut(overstretched) muscle, but if you spend some time with your body, you can probably learn the difference. If you’re having headaches, check the muscles in your neck! And if your neck hurts, check your shoulders.
Next, after checking nearby areas, consider the muscles on the opposite side of the joint. Muscles only contract, so for joints to move in both directions, they must have muscles on both sides. If you’re having upper back pain, check your pectorals and check your subscapularis. Considering that so many of us work on computers with our shoulders forward, in my estimation it’s almost more likely that the back muscles are overstretched from this habitual posture. Same with the lower back. Lower back pain can sometimes indicate that your hip flexors are too tight. Do some lunges to stretch them out.
2. Use Tools for Leverage and Pressure
An awkward thing about self-massage is the difficulty in reaching your own back, or getting enough pressure to be effective. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools that can help you in this process, and I highly recommend using them.
One of my favorites is the lacrosse or tennis ball. The glutes are a large muscle group and they layer on top of each other. Below all of them is another set of muscles called the deep hip rotators. I simply am incapable of massaging through all of these layers to get any meaningful amount of pressure on my own glutes. BUT, if I lay down on my side and put the lacrosse ball right below my hip bone (ilium) and roll out the space between it and the top of my femur, front and back, following where I feel tension — that’s the good stuff! Lacrosse balls are also great for rolling out tension on the bottom of the feet.
Cane-style massagers (like the Theracane), are great for reaching difficult spots on your back with good leverage, and also for getting good leverage on your neck. Foam rollers can put really nice distributed pressure on the quads and up the back. Finally, massage guns can be a great tool for general soreness or achiness with the caveat that they can very quickly overwork or overrelax areas that don’t need to be relaxed (see above).
3. The Internet can be a Valuable Resource
YouTube contains many videos by physical therapists, massage therapists, chiropractors, and other bodyworkers who have helped people with all kinds of issues. You can find stretches, exercises, and explanations for basically any issue you might ever have with your body. In fact, there can sometimes be too many explanations for your problem. How do you know which to try?
Use discernment, watch a few different videos and see which explanations show up multiple times. Pain in an area CAN have different root causes. Choose a few stretches, massage areas, or exercises to try based on your body and….
4. Take a Scientific Approach
The body is an incredible and complex thing, and there is an astounding variation in body types and lifestyle patterns among people. The messages our body gives aren’t perfectly clear even for those who have studied it intensively. So, take things slow and pay attention to what works and what doesn’t work. If stretching your hips alleviated your back pain, take notice of that. If it doesn’t seem to help after a few tries, move on to a new hypothesis and experiment. Of course, we want the pain to be gone now – I know I do! But sometimes it can take time to figure out what’s going on with your body and sometimes things simply take time to work out and heal.
Now that you know the pain isn’t always caused by the spot where it hurts, form theories about what could be causing it, test them and keep track of the results. Pay attention to when your theories seem wrong just as much as when they seem right. When you work with professional practitioners, do your best to make it a collaboration – learn from their expertise. Build up a knowledge base about how your body works — over time, you should notice that you’re able to alleviate your aches and pains quicker and more easily.
5. Don’t Run Away from the Pain — Listen to what it’s Trying to Tell You
I almost wanted to make this number one on the list, but I think it may be the most difficult piece of advice on here to follow, possibly taking years or a lifetime to master. I decided to put it at the end because I didn’t want people to be turned away from the more concrete advice above. It personally took me years to learn this lesson, and I still struggle with it sometimes. If you’re still reading, I assume you’re serious about feeling amazing in your body, and can handle hearing this.
Your body hurts because it’s trying to tell you something.
I used to take painkillers regularly. I used to constantly be fidgeting and trying to stretch the area in my back that hurt. For years, I think I did just about everything BUT slow down and ask myself, what is this pain trying to tell me. What in my life, posture, emotions, activities, or thought patterns is actually causing this? There was no single moment of epiphany, but eventually I was able to sit with the pain — and then turn towards the pain to look at it — and then meet the pain with curiosity — and finally meet it with love and gratitude. This is about loving yourself on a really deep level – not just those parts that feel and look good, but the ugly parts and the parts that fucking hurt, too.
It probably doesn’t start with full-fledged love and gratitude – it starts with listening. Your pain is screaming the secret to your wholeness. Have the courage to listen!