Rehabilitation has undergone a major transformation in the last few decades, and it can be challenging to see the bigger picture and provide evidence-based care. Often, research doesn’t match the specific needs of the patient, leading to pressure to rely on popular techniques in one’s profession instead. Despite the fact that we have intuitively recognized the need to tailor our care to each individual client, no educational program or advanced training has systematically taught us how to effectively manage the interrelated biological, psychological, and social factors that play a role in our clients’ issues.

As a result, we took on the challenge and created the Human Rehabilitation Framework (HRF)™ as a systematic and comprehensive step forward. The HRF™ is a biopsychosocial process-based approach to rehabilitation that is accessible by all disciplines and provides a new perspective on personalized care. It takes into account the complex aspects of pain and movement, and replaces traditional diagnostic methods with a process-based approach.

The HRF™ is an evolutionary step forward for Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) and embraces the scientific philosophy of Functional Contextualism to ensure a coherent approach to clinical reasoning, decision-making, scientific research, intervention, and outcome measures. This approach supports advances in Personalized Precision Medicine and the Value-Based Care Model, and is designed to be ready for the future of Biopsychosocial research.

 

Check out our latest YouTube video and HRFhome.com to learn more about the HRF™ and its potential to transform the way we approach rehabilitation.

Rehabilitation, and much of healthcare, has reached a point of reckoning. We are stuck in a world where we operate in “protocol-driven clown suits”, putting on an entertaining simplified show for the world to watch. These suits ultimately relegate us to the future of becoming replaceable technicians (hello AI & robotics) that worship the idol of a “specific diagnosis” leading to some sort of step-by-step cookbook approach to intervention. We see this growing daily as all around us as “evidence-based” healthcare providers are scraping, bruising, and poking needles into people like pins into pin cushions based on false “specific diagnostics” and a poor understanding of neurophysiology. While many of these providers are well meaning and attempting to help the person in front of them, ultimately, whether consciously, or unconsciously, they are entering into a theatrical show that sells a false value of their shiny interventions. The show continues to grow in popularity despite access to the evidence that consistently demonstrating no additional value from their new treatment addictions. This show goes by the name “XYZ might just be the thing that finally works!” even when it doesn’t, because we haven’t even defined what “working” is and what it is “working” for. This show is not just about our hands on interventions, but it also speaks to our exercise interventions where we randomly throw exercise based on such false diagnoses as an “instability” of some imaginary sort, without knowing what the exercise actually does for that individual, in what context under what instruction. The show can also sometimes sell this idea that exercise alone is this holy grail. Exercise is medicine, right? …But do they really need medicine right now? Are we medicalizing something that does not need to be medicalized? There also is this lingering belief, often from academics, that we can save the day by protocol-based clinical reasoning. Graduate education, post grad courses, certification, residencies, and fellowships promise clinical reasoning and critical thinking but all they’re doing recycling the same inadequate protocol driven drivel that has very little to do with the person in front of us.

Like our psychology colleagues before us, the time is here for a complete paradigm shift in the way we look at the problems of the people who come to see us. The person before us comes with an individual history, a story, and that story in large part determines how that person and their body is operating now. The way the biopsychosocial processes function in this moment was built on years of interconnecting biomechanical, physiological, psychological, and social behavioral relationships and networks unique to that individual in that moment and time. No diagnosis or protocol for syndrome can possibly meaningfully, or practically, be useful in the context of past and present behavior. When someone comes with a report of knee pain, but then also notes significant impairments associated with shoulder pain, and that they have a history of chronic back pain, not to mention they struggle with anxiety and depression, how many diagnoses do we assign them? How many tests do we need to do, how many interventions, how many referrals need to be made, and how many healthcare providers need to be involved only to ultimately not communicate with each other in any meaningful way? Even a single pain complaint is far more layered if we actually ask more closely about the nature of their complaint. Why does lifting their 20-pound child not hurt their shoulder but a sandbag roughly the size and weight of the child in the same manner cause excruciating pain? Why does that shoulder only hurt on Saturdays when doing the same movement as they would on Tuesday at work does not? History and context are key! Even if you are looking simply at sensorimotor and loading capacity variables, what preceded and what is present in the environment and inside of that individual person changes everything! This is the core of a process-based approach to evaluation, intervention, and prognostication, a science-based, critical clinical reasoning approach rooted in learning how to see where people get stuck across of a lifetime and how to help them get themselves unstuck. No more collecting diagnostic labels, no more piles of homework for the client, and no more handing fish to a hungry client when you can teach them how to fish for themselves!

At Dynamic Principles, we are committed to a future of educating clinicians in a process-based approach. We are excited about what this means for humanity in the future of helping people and we hope you’ll join us in this journey!

An important role of human body is to protect itself, in particular the health of the nervous system, a somewhat important system that sustains conscious human existence, which has physical, cognitive, and emotional layers attached to it. It is likely not helpful to label these protective behaviors as bad or good, but to recognize in some circumstances that these protective behaviors may begin to limit function. Often, movement and physical behaviors of the body are perceived as part of the musculoskeletal system alone, however cognitive and emotional states, which are intricately bound to social/cultural demands and expectations, also influence body behaviors, including postural and ideomotor tendencies that could manifest as protective strategies of the human body. Some of these protective behaviors may limit movement and movement variability and this could be sensitizing to the peripheral nervous system because nerves might not be experiencing adequate blood/movement/space, chemical irritation might not be dispersed quickly enough, and/or they could be undergoing possible noxious mechanical deformation. While the goal should always be to have the client independently explore variability and quality of movement, sometimes they simply can’t find the area of their body to move, have poor sensorimotor awareness and coordination, and generally have difficulty creating movement variability without some guided tactile input from another person. There is notable evidence in research that somatosensory neuroplastic reorganization is constant and that certain areas of the body are poorly mapped, such as the back/pelvis/hip. Furthermore, a sense of self is more than simply “where are the body parts”, how humans see themselves internally via interoception has been recognized as an important component of their behavioral and emotional states. Lack of movement, movement invariability, and pain experienced with movement may result in changes of these body maps that make sensorimotor awareness and coordination challenging. Tactile input and tactile cues do not necessarily need to be considered “manual therapy”, however, many traditionally taught manual therapy techniques can easily be “re-framed” in ways that could help someone to better “get to know their own body and behaviors”, including influencing somatosensory mapping and sensorimotor behavior through various forms for clinician “manual” input. I would argue that in our continued efforts to improve on the application of a biopsychosocial framework, we move beyond using manual therapy simply for “symptom modification”, but rather helping a person to better understand their body and the behaviors it exhibits, not only in the clinical setting, but in broader biopsychosocial contexts.

This post is far more personal/autobiographic in nature than anything I have previously posted. I hope it does not detract too much from my intentions for this blog, but I have found that reading and hearing other clinician growth/life stories has tremendously helped my professional growth. I hope that perhaps this post may be meaningful for someone else.

Preparing for the journey:  Pain and Movement

I was exposed to the experience of persistent complex pain early in life. Shortly after birth, my family started to question why I was in near constant distress. Countless medical care visits later, I received my first pain diagnostic label; chronic cluster migraines, at age 2. This made for a challenging childhood, I missed many typical school age experiences and averaged ~50 days of lost school a year. I know it was a terrible burden on my family, and the physicians didn’t help the problem by telling my family to watch out for possible suicide efforts, as historically, cluster migraine was labeled the “suicide headache”, now that is nocebo!! Imagine as a parent, or a sibling, how that felt to think about? I was thankfully oblivious to this information until later in life. I can relate with the social implications of persistent pain quite closely. I can also relate with my patients on how pain negatively influences your relationship with movement. I wanted to move, I was a kid, I wanted to go out and play and hangout with friends, but the fear of triggering a cycle of pain sometimes prevented you from wanting to try to move. Despite this, I had this intense inner desire to move, and by grace and with the resiliency of youth, I was able to find a movement experience that fit my needs, falling in love with martial arts, and later stunts and movement choreography. With martial arts, I progressively, yet unconsciously, found a balance between intense physical training and rest though a 7-year sedentary career in information technology during the dot.com boom in the 90s. Perhaps this paced rest-to-work ratio was part of what made such a profound dent in in the frequency and intensity my headaches in those years. Likely, these effects were combined with the reduction of social pressures by dropping out of high school at that time… Regardless, all other medical interventions had failed prior to that point to improve my pain.

Another important observation to note about that time was when I instinctively recognized there was something more to human movement than the physical domain. Movement at times would resonate with me emotionally, it stimulated me cognitively, and as I explored different martial arts styles, I found the cultural  variations of essentially the same movements fascinating. Long before I knew the science, or what the words meant, there was this unconscious awareness that movement and pain was bio-psycho-social in nature.

The Journey There

In 2002, I was training and teaching at a kung fu school which decided that they wanted to expand their strength and conditioning offerings for their San Shou (Chinese Kickboxing) program. The school owner invited me to join him in attending a Perform Better seminar that year. I gladly accepted the opportunity because at that time only thing I knew about “Conditioning” was working yourself into the ground combined with traditional “Chinese torture” conditioning methods. There were several great speakers at that seminar, and being blissfully ignorant to the world of performance enhancement, made me feel like a kid’s first experience in a candy shop. I cannot recall all the speakers for the seminar, but I was most influenced by Mark Verstegen and Michael Boyle that day. Michael made a statement during his presentation that finalized my decision to become a physical therapist. It was the early days of the joint-by-joint, correctives, and of course, “core stabilization.” We had previews of the Gray Cook Movement trend to come and looking at the landscape today, it is shocking how little has changed in the last 16 years. I was also introduced to the idea of mobility work with various tools and rollers and this magical “fascia” and phenomena called “Trigger points.” I had dabbled with manual therapy before then, in particular with “trigger points”, having received treatments which had given me some short-term benefits for aches and pains from time to time. It made sense to me that hands on care had some value. If I’m honest, it didn’t take much to sell me on the dream of being a manual therapist to “fix” and train people, I still had aspirations to grow up to be the legendary martial artist and Chinese Medicine “bone-setter” “Wong Fei-hung.”…

I remember the thrill of the experience of being at that seminar clearly to this day. It created that feeling of the days of learning that “secret” technique in martial arts. I was enamored by all of it; I loved the “structural” thinking and the “healing” potential of the concepts of the biomechanical/pathomedical model. Being an IT guy at the time, the idea that there was some sort of “ideal” motor control and motor pattern for all sorts of movements that every person should be adhering to avoid “dysfunction”  seemed so logical, people had to be fixed! This started my first “binge phase” of learning. Before I went back to school to become a physical therapist and athletic trainer, I already had purchased the red tome of Travel and Simons, picked up a copy of Florence Kendal, and memorized Netter’s musculoskeletal pages, excluding the nerves of course, what good were those to fascia?! I bought a treatment table and lined up my “victims” to develop and practice my new-found skills using hands and other modes of manual therapy combined with my growing collection of “correctives”.

Doubts on the Journey

Fast forward through the roller coaster of information and skills I explored between the years of 2002 to 2010. It was a head first dive into a wide variety of manual techniques, Thomas Meyer Anatomy Trains, FMS and SFMA, Vladimir Janda, Stuart McGill, Pavel Tsatsouline, and countless other concepts and “thought leaders” at the time. No questions asked, if the pros were using it, I had to learn it. Besides, there must be evidence for these things somewhere right…? All I knew was, I wanted to be a movement expert and a highly skilled manual therapist, I had no concerns about the tens of thousands of dollars I invested in these resources along the way, or thousands of hours exploring them. But some tiny doubts started to creep up as I started to realize how much of my own training time was used for preparation and mobility work, and it was beginning to cut into skill training. Plus, I started getting frustrated because none of it was really helping any of my body aches and pains, instead, it seemed as though they were starting to become more frequent and persistent…

In 2008, I started to wonder why it was so hard to find research to support all these amazing outcomes we believing we were seeing in the field. So, I did what any other sane person would do, I decided I should start learning how to “science this shit of this” and begin adding to the literature myself. As is classic me, I fumbled my way into learning the scientific method with whatever resources and mentorship was available to get the job done. I chose something simple at that time which was the “hot topic” of dynamic vs. static stretching and chose to look at their roles in agility performance because nothing had been published at the time in that area. You can see the results of that experience here.  There are many things that can be learned in the process of developing, conducting research, writing, peer-review, and publishing a research article. The most important thing I learned was to be very systematic/procedural about literature review and begin to question my biases. By no means am I saying somehow I have succeeded in completely overriding my biases, but it was enough for me to start questioning some of my core beliefs about movement, manual therapy, and pain. The literature review process for stretching also brought me into the world of the nervous system and how it would be impossible for me to truly know about movement if I didn’t understand the nervous system better. Up to this point, my understanding of ROM and mobility was based on traditional biomechanics and the stress strain curve, so this was eye opening to be learn non-mechanical properties had a more profound role in available ROM. It was also when I first time was exposed to the idea that nociception does NOT guarantee pain, nor was pain it’s only role, but that it had other important biologic purposes. Of interest to me at the time, nociception’s role key role in stretch tolerance, the cornerstone of ROM and mobility. I didn’t realize how important that bit of learning would be in my current growth, because I still had my blinders on and had a fairly structuralist based mindset, but my curiosity was increasing.

Fast forward two more efforts to contribute to scientific literature, both of which had their own positives, negatives, and flaws (here and here). After completing these, I decided to take a break from being involved in active research to focus just on clinical practice with my new thinking in place. I have no doubt I will revisit the role of being a researcher again in the future.

Finding Ground

From movement and manual therapy came the opportunity to learn about pain science. I figured a good part of my life I had experienced some form of pain, sometimes finding relief for short periods of time, but I wondered why no treatments or magic trick seemed to have lasting benefits. So naturally, it was time to learn more about pain. Between natural curiosity, expanding available literature, and the “hivemind” that is internet social media (filled with its own opportunity and pitfalls), there was a great deal to learn. The constant feed of people smarter than myself on Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and sites such as SomasSimple forced me to constantly question my interpretations of literature. There were times I felt my beliefs and interpretations were under constant threat and the ground beneath me was going to give way, but I knew that struggling with these ideas were vital toward my goals. It was a challenging time but my own struggles with pain made me realize the biomedical model was woefully inept at addressing the Complexity of Pain and I finally had to embrace the biopsychosocial framework.

It is hard for me to make a single list of all the people who inspired me and helped me understand pain better and how to implement it into clinical practice, but I must at the very least mention Adriaan Louw, Lorimer Moseley, David Butler, Louis Gifford, Diane Jacobs, Greg Lehman, Peter O’Sullivan, and Todd Hargrove. I owe Adriaan for not only helping me connect some important dots in pain physiology, but for changing my life in a short conversation he had with me about the fears I had about my own pain problems. His approach resonated with me and greatly influence my education style a great deal. I recommend anyone who works with people in pain consider taking part in the Therapeutic Pain Specialist program at the International Spine and Pain Institute.

With my foundation and framework somewhat stable, I began to nearly exclusively treat complex and persistent pain problems. The demand was so high in my community, I could not keep up with the number of referrals myself. To meet these needs, I developed an outpatient pain treatment division for Generation Care. This meant beginning to develop a curriculum and a system to start sharing my ideas with other clinicians. Through 2017, I had 10 clinicians suffer through my attempts to get ideas out of my head and try and making meaningful applications to their clinical practice. I can proudly say we have made a successful team to take on extremely challenging cases in our community and I look forward to new additions joining this year as the demand is not slowly down.

Back again

This brings us to 2018. Before the start of this journey, there was pain and movement. When I started the journey, it was about movement and manual therapy. As the journey continued, I reconceptualized pain and realized understanding pain meant understanding movement and manual therapy better. Now, the realization is there is a person behind all these things, which is an amazing conversation in and of itself. But in the meantime, I have a new-found love for all things movement, manual therapy, and pain.  Having realized how valuable it was for me to take a multitude of perspectives and interpretations of science and clinical experience, I felt it was my turn to give back by sharing my interpretations. This year, I will officially offer my first full course: Pain Science, Movement, and Manual Therapy. This course work is designed for Physical Therapists, Athletic Trainers, Occupational Therapist, Chiropractors, Physical and Occupational Therapist Assistants, Massage Therapists, and physicians who work in rehabilitation settings. The course work is designed both for those new to these topics, but also to offer some twists for those who already have experience, and are familiar, with these topics. These will be offered in 2018 with live classes and by 2019 I will hopefully have the online with live lab hybrid classes ready to go as well. By 2019, I also hope to expand to offering courses dedicated toward my physician colleagues as their needs are truly unique compared to the movement based rehabilitation profession. I am teaming up with a fantastic advisory board to make these products with the goal of improving communication and patient care through shared understanding of pain and science based interventions across multiple disciplines. Every effort will be made to keep the courses current with the evolution of research and changes in my own thinking. Change and improvement is inevitable, this will be reflected in revisions of the course as the years move forward. I look forward to the process and I hope I can be a small part of helping someone else in their journey.

I haven’t updated in a while due to time devoted to opening a new clinic called Generation Care Performance Center.

However, I felt compelled to make a quick, blunt, review of Todd Hargrove’s: A Guide to Better Movement: The Science and Practice of Moving With More Skill And Less Pain. Simply put, this book is the most important book on movement in the last 20 years, possibly in existence up to this point. It will become a required reading for every movement professional to truly understand movement and pain. I have made pitiful attempts to touch on some of the concepts of this book in the past, but Todd has so elegantly written words which convey a clear understanding of the integration of movement in the Neuromatrix, that  I don’t know if I could ever add to it (but will foolish try at some point!). This book is fully accessible to both the clinician and the patient/client. Thank you Todd for your efforts, your clarity, and how incredibly affordable you have made this knowledge in an age of academic inflation. If you don’t buy this book, you are doing a disservice to your patients, and yourself. Buy it now!

*Note: This is part of a series of thoughts on the topic of looking at movement and movement related symptoms as influenced by the nervous system. These will be dynamic posts with additional content and references being added as time allows, but the primary purpose of the posts are to share my current thoughts on the influence of manual therapy and exercise on what we see and feel in our patients. I hope others will engage me in these thoughts and provide their perspectives and also criticism into the process.

In part 1, I wanted to provide the definition for post-antalgic patterning which I believe is important to understand before thinking about how we treat it (if it even needs to be treated), for which I lay the ground work here:

Post-Antalgic Patterning – Part 2 – A Quick Reference for Manual Therapy and the Nervous System

A little over a year ago Jason Silvernail released a great video summary on manual therapy and the nervous system called “Crossing the Chasm” which definitely had its intended effect on me. This discussion has been a “hot topic” for at least a decade. As I have attempted to share this same information with other clinicians, I have noted a trend towards wanting more “practical” connection between the techniques we use on a daily basis and the nervous system. As a result, over the last year I have started to formulate a way to bring a little bit of clarity to a very complex topic.

Mechanoreceptors – The elephant in the room

In most of our academic preparatory programs for various rehabilitation disciplines, our afferent and efferent sensory nerve fiber education has focused primarily on severe neurological conditions of the peripheral and central nervous system (stroke, spinal cord injury, CNS disease, etc.). However, when it comes to the role of the nervous system in musculoskeletal conditions, the focus tends to be on nocioception (note of importance: nocioceptors are NOT PAIN RECEPTORS!), chemoreceptors (in particular the relationship to inflammatory mediators), proprioception, muscle spindles, and the golgi tendon reflex. We might touch on some afferents when we talk about gate control, but in general, mechanoreceptors are a very minor part of “most” professional academic programming offerings. This is despite that fact that mechanoreceptors may be one of the bodies most densely dispersed points of interaction with our nervous system, in particularly in the tissues we commonly claim to be treating (joint capsules, fascia, ligaments, muscles, etc.).

I remember vaguely talking about Ruffini Endings, Merkel’s discs, Pacinian and Meisners Corpuscles, but I don’t remember much emphasis on them and I certainly didn’t see any value in even recalling their names at the time. Yet now I realize they are probably some of the most important structures I deal with on a daily basis, in particular when it comes to manual therapy interventions. We get so obsessed with the biomechanical properties of soft tissue and joints and the illusion that we can mechanically alter them through our hands and various tools despite growing evidence that this simply is not the case, or at best, has an extremely small role in the big picture. Yet we choose to ignore, or at the very least downplay, the one basic fundamental pathway, the cascade of neurophysiological events which occur every time skin is compressed. These events can result both in short term and long term tissue and movement quality changes which have the potential to explain every single “change” seen through the use of manual therapy. Furthermore, any inflammatory, fluid dynamics, or thermal responses which potentially could come about from an aggressive intervention could have chemical, thermal, and fluid interactions with mechanoreceptors, chemoreceptors, and thermoreceptors thereby compounding and/or altering an existing externally induced neurological stimulus. If the inflammatory, fluid, or thermal process remains active for hours or days, this could yield a sustained stimulus on mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors, and chemoreceptors thereby influence the nervous system for an extended period of time (think of a “built-in portal e-stim unit” that already exists in all humans).

Perhaps more important than the external stimulus itself is the ability to modify, enhance, and/or guide the therapeutic outcome of the neurophysiologic response from the stimulus with an educational context provided to the patient, allowing for a profound impact on how they perceive touch and movement.

So what does the pathway for this manual therapy to mechanoreceptor stimulus to tissue quality/movement change look like? Dr. Schleip has perhaps best described this in his work on fascial plasticity, of which this diagram provides perhaps the most concise explanation of the relationship between manual therapy and the nervous system.

Schleip, R. (2003). Fascial plasticity–a new neurobiological explanation Part 2.Journal of Bodywork and movement therapies, 7(2), 104-116.

Schleip, R. (2003). Fascial plasticity–a new neurobiological explanation Part 2.Journal of Bodywork and movement therapies, 7(2), 104-116.

To further help solidify the connection between our commonly utilized manual therapy techniques and the nervous system, I put together a couple of acronyms to show the connection between groups of mechanoreceptors and various manual therapy technique:

“RuffMerks need tender care”

  • Ruffini Endings (End Organs) & Merkel’s discs are slow adapting mechanoreceptors which respond best to slow sustained and deep tension
  • ANS (PNS) & CNS interactions
  • General massage, myofascial release techniques, and possibly even ischemic trigger point releases likely preferentially engage these mechanoreceptors

“PacMeisners need action”

  • Pacinian and Meisners Corpuscles are fast adapting mechanoreceptors which respond best to fast & vibratory inputs and are key to texture discrimination (think edged/textured tools)
  • Predominantly CNS interactions although ANS (PNS) possible
  • Greater concentration subcutaneously are also more frequent on the tendinous site
  • IASTM style, cross friction (hand or tool), and oscillating techniques likely preferentially engage these mechanoreceptors
  • Also thought to play a role in high velocity manipulation

 “Free nerve endings do it all”

  • Some free nerve endings are intermediate adapting mechanoreceptors and can respond to any form of touch, or any modality (chemical, thermal, electrical) for that matter.

 “Ligamentous Mechanoreceptors – I got nothing”

  • 4 types, varying adaptability, primarily stretch mediated, although possibly facilitated through touch if the ligament is superficial enough to be compressed
  • Engaged primarily with mobilization/manipulation

Last but not least, how can so called “inert” soft tissue, or fascia, have tissue tension or “tonus”?

Smooth muscle fascia copy

More regarding the existence of smooth muscle cells within fascia can be found here.

To be continued in part 3..

A few months ago I talked about the Gluteus Maximus Activation Enigma and the conflicting information obtained on the glute max in the clinic versus what has been demonstrated in literature. It has been difficult for me to address this because I too was guilty of really perpetuating the idea of “gluteal inhibition” and that your “glutes are shut off”, when the evidence for these theories does not exist unless you have a true nerve lesion. It may seem like semantics to the some, but the reality is that our patients and clients take these words very seriously. In fact, I would say a good chunk of them catastrophize the fact that their “glutes aren’t working” and likely worsen the associated symptoms involved in the hip extension dysfunction. I think for athletes in particular to be told that something isn’t working in their body is detrimental to performance for individuals with certain psyches, a point which Vern Gambetta really drives home with his opinion on corrective exercise. At the same time, even if the glutes truly are not “Turned off” or “Firing in the wrong order”, clinically, they are clearly not working very efficiently either, especially if they are significantly asymmetrical. Therefore to find middle ground, I like to look for solutions which help the client/patient remain independent while still participating in their sport even if some form of dysfunction exists by using self evaluation and treatment. I previously mentioned my suspicion that muscle fatigue, rather than muscle inhibition or activation order, may play a part in why our glute emphasized treatments result in reduction of symptoms. A recent article from Hong-You Ge, et al.1 demonstrated that latent trigger points have measurable effects on muscle fatigue made me want to revisit fatigue in the evaluation and treatment of general hip extension dysfunction.  However, I’m going to broaden this idea even further (I’m once again breaking my own rules regarding excessive extrapolation of a research study by doing so) by first looking at addressing the antagonists to hip extension, the hip flexors, prior to attempting to address trigger points/restriction in the gluteals.

I want to preface this write-up to make it clear that I have no evidence for the process that I am about to describe and I am certain there are at least 10 other ways to independently evaluate hip extension. I think both Stuart McGill and Bret Contreras have touched on the use of  different types of bridges in determining hip extension dysfunction in the past, but I couldn’t find the articles offhand, so here is my take on it.

I use a 15-20 rep range of single leg bridges for the patient/client to subjectively identify whether they feel a perceived difference between sides relative to fatigue, ease, and whether it feels disproportionately loaded on the hamstrings, possibly even painful if that is their primary complaint. Then, based on which side is perceived as more challenging, we slightly butcher the classic Janda lower cross syndrome2 and just associate hip flexor involvement with gluteal function rather than look at his original cross of abs to glutes.We’ll generalize it even more and call the hip flexors over active antagonists with possible active or latent trigger points in them decreasing performance of the agonist hip extensors just to integrate the Hong-You Ge et al. 1 discussion a little more.

So for the patient to independently treat this, we start with them attempting to inhibit the hip flexors through a 30 second static stretch for and then retest the bridges. They don’t have to go all the way to 20 reps but they should just be able to go 2-3 more reps more and perceive the exercise as easier. If it does improve, have them do a full minute of static stretching of that hip flexor followed by 3-4 sets of 15-20 reps of single leg bridges to reinforce the more efficient hip extension pattern.  If it doesn’t improve, or they feel only a little better, try a self-TFL release next. Use 1-2 minutes of self release on a tennis ball followed by the same 3-4 sets of single leg bridges discussed earlier.  If they still don’t feel an improvement, go for the glutes directly with a self release. If it works, follow the same pattern of reinforcement from earlier. If there is no change, there is a slim possibility they simply need to train that side more aggressively in hip extension. If this is the case, then we want to have them work on quality reps of single leg bridging on a daily basis for the same pattern of reinforcement as described above. If within one week of working this pattern they still find a single set is fatiguing, the problem does not lie specifically in the hip musculature and it is going to require a bigger picture perspective and likely more involved manual therapy (starting with a pelvic/lumbar eval).

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPebQCkSLCs&w=420&h=315]

A couple of notes: First off, verify that the fatigue is not just related to the position of their foot and whether they are driving from the heel versus the toes because this can significantly impact loading of the hamstrings between sides.  Second, I recognize not every one of our clients and patients can even do a single leg bridge, let alone 20 of them, but this test and these self-treatment options is not for those individuals anyway. Third, by the 3rd set of bridges, if they’re not used to doing these bridges, they’re going to be fatigued anyway, just do a couple reps for them to subjectively evaluate any chance in the performance of hip extension.

Finally, I admit I am probably still going to use the terms gluteal inhibition from time to time, but I swear I’ll do my best to not give patients or clients the anecdote that their glutes are “shut off” again.

***Update 6/24/12: A great example of when self treatment for hip extension dysfunction fails and more involved manual therapy is needed  from Bill Hartman is found here on his blog.

1. Ge H, Arendt-Nielsen L, Madeleine P. Accelerated muscle fatigability of latent myofascial trigger points in humans. Pain Medicine. 2012:no-no. doi: 10.1111/j.1526-4637.2012.01416.x.

2. Janda V. Muscle strength in relation to muscle length, pain, and muscle imbalance. International Perspectives in Physical. 1993:83-97.