I really wish there were places that could legitimately analyze muscle imbalances and suggest corrective exercises. The internet only works for the most common ones, such as pelvic tilt, and sometimes you mis-diagnose yourself.
A lot of the "great" information online is bro-science, and doctors generally don't care at all, so neither is optimal.
P.S. The military uses fancy position sensors to track muscle imbalances in Pararescuemen. I really wish there was some access to that facility:
"To improve, the trainees must first be shown where they are deficient. So when they arrive, they enter the Dari Motion Capture system, something similar to what Hollywood uses to fuse actors with their CGI characters. Dari doesn’t use on-body sensors, just cameras that capture the biomechanical motions of subjects."
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a26256665...
One of the interesting things my trainer did before we started was three sessions of analysis. Measuring flexibility, symmetry, strength, and recovery. We then put together a plan to fix issues identified from that to get to a solid baseline, so that when we work all the muscles together to get better systemic performance they participate in the motions as designed.
This was stuff that he learned getting a kinesiology degree SJSU and followed up with the personal training coursework. And for a data set of one, it has helped me tremendously.
So the bottom line for me is that while there is a lot of questionable stuff out there, there are also people who have actually studied and worked on the mechanics of how all this works, which lets them create exercises that achieve a specific result. For me, I'm not interested in being a weight lifter or showing off how strong I am or big my biceps can be, I just don't want to end up driving a mobility cart around Walmart to pick up groceries when I'm 80!
Is your trainer in the bay area? I'd be interested in a trainer that is good at those things; or if anyone else has a trainer in San Francisco that does those things, please comment!
> I really wish there were places that could legitimately analyze muscle imbalances and suggest corrective exercises.
I think what you're looking for is a physiotherapist's office.
Somehow we now expect to find everything on internet or apps, and avoid human interactions &c. The truth is some things need in-person expertise and advices given by experts.
I had IT band and hamstring attachment tendinitis. I went to the best orthopedic doctor in the city. I explained my symptoms very clearly. He did identify the IT band tendinitis and walked out of the room. I had to catch him "after the appointment" to ask him why the back of my knee hurts then. He THEN did additional tests and identified the other source of the problem.
This is my experience, always. At best, the doctor confirms the problem if I prod them toward it.
I have some pain on the top of my feet now that I am running pretty fast. I am almost sure when I go to the doc they will give me a bs answer.
Shit, last time I had a pulled muscle in my back some doctor wrote "damaged disk" because he needed to put something on the paper to send me to his friend's physical therapy place. I then had to go to another doctor and get an MRI to prove that I don't, in fact, have disk damage, which would otherwise mess up my insurance rates.
I know I sound very bitter, but I find doctors literally worse than useless in most cases.
An unfortunate amount of my interaction with doctors has just been waiting for them to diagnose me or a family member with the same thing I already figured out is probably going on, so we can get the drugs or treatment to fix it. Self-diagnosis on with the Web has a bad name for a good reason, but with a critical eye you can nail what the doctor's gonna say damn near 100% of the time, or at least narrow it down to the couple things they'll run tests to decide between. It's kinda fun but also kinda sad knowing everything they're gonna say and order in advance because you read stuff on the Web for 10 minutes before the visit. Obviously never let on that you've done that.
The best are when you go through a couple and they can't figure out WTF is wrong and you finally get one who's like "oh yeah, I can't believe they didn't check for this, circumstances and your symptoms make it pretty likely and it's not uncommon" and you're like "yeah, I f*cking know, I read some Wikipedia before the first visit and have just been walking you all through the process of figuring it out, while I pay you for the privilege, but I can't push too hard or you'll think I'm a crank".
> ... but I find doctors literally worse than useless in most cases.
Yeah, same here. My hot take is: if you're not an elite athlete then you're basically shit out of luck and you are on your own, regardless of how much money you might be capable and/or interested in spending on your problems.
I have retrocalcaneal bursitis and a chronic muscle tear in my left calf. I ran through nearly a dozen people, specialists and physical therapists and physiotherapists, and no one could help. They wanted to give me cortisone injections in my heel or sent me to the ER for DVT for the calf. I spent a lot of money to _not_ be helped by these people over a period of 4 or 5 years.
I eventually found a legit physiotherapist (he works with some local athletes... MMA fighters and a couple of NHL players, so there it is) who wasn't just out to take my money from me. Through him, the chronic muscle tear is now managed completely (when I feel it coming back, I give him a call and pop in for a few sessions of excruciating deep cross-friction massage that keeps me exercising without needing breaks) and the bursitis is managed entirely by myself through a daily stretching and mobility routine that he helped me develop.
I am honestly concerned about what happens to me in the future. If he retires or moves or if I move. If I have new minor/major injuries to contend with at that point then I'm going to be back to this dreadful search or worse, having to give up specific exercises that I enjoy.
edit/ Oh, and another horror story that I managed to forget about. I popped 2 ribs last fall (brain fog, was lifting too heavy while I was tired and just trying to grind a workout out) and couldn't get it properly diagnosed either. Went to my GP, he thought it was a muscle strain. Sure, okay. I believed him. So, I had a week long backpacking trip 3 days later that I ended up going on anyway. Hurt like hell. I knew it wasn't a strain by the time I got home. Popped in to see my physiotherapist and he was able to isolate and diagnose the issue in just a couple of minutes. How can my GP miss this? You literally rub your fingers between my shoulder blade and spine and it was as clear as day. I went to a Chiropractor for a few sessions, in addition to some rehab at home like rolling on a racquet ball, and now everything is back to normal. This sort of shit, "professionals" who are utterly horrible at their chosen profession, borders on fraud for me.
All for 3x45s holds. Don't overdo it to the point where you are sore from stretching.
I also stretched my hamstrings and hip flexors. I do believe that it's all related. Specifically, I know that hip flexor tightness and weak glutes can put more strain on the IT band.
You can strengthen glutes with planks, glute bridges, and step ups.
Yup, as is evidenced by the opioid genocide... I mean epidemic. I do know some exceptional doctors, but WTF happened to cause so many to forget the hippocratic oath?
I'd contend that the very notion of muscular imbalance as pathology is somewhat in the realm of bro science. It's not that the mechanical descriptions in the article are inaccurate - weak abdominals will negatively impact your squat, sure - but there is no causal association of said imbalances or strength deficiencies with injurious outcomes. Doing a movement with less mechanical advantage just means you have to work harder to do it; but if you're physically able to do the movement, you're not going to injure yourself just by virtue of doing the movement, even if the movement doesn't conform to the mechanical ideal. The actual correlative with injury risk is stress. The cause of confusion is that doing the same movement with the same resistance but less mechanical advantage will be more stressful and thus have a higher injury risk.
> The actual correlative with injury risk is stress
This seems like a strange take to me. Aren't you essentially arguing that a faulty seatbelt isn't really a problem because the real source of injury is the collision?
The obvious response would seem to be, "well yeah, that's why we want working seatbelts", and analogously, "we don't want muscular imbalances because of increased injury risk under stress". Although other reasons also exist.
A properly trained massage therapist can do this for you. However you probably won’t find one at your local $49 massage factory. Search for “integrated manual therapy” or “orthopedic massage” along with some talk of sports or athletes. Be aware there is a ton of woowoo magical thinking in the field, but there really are practitioners who can identify weak firing patterns and suggest corrections.
Meh, I've used that system. It's no better than a well trained physio.
The problem is finding a physio that's worth a shit. I've dealt with serious injuries and complications (and recovered) over many years and I can tell you that most of the physios, chiros, trainers, and acupuncturists are no more useful than YouTube and some are even counter productive.
My best advice is to just line up the physios and work your way through them one by one until you find one that really knows their science and has intuition. You can and should expect immediate progress. If it's two steps forward and one step back you've got the wrong help. I've found that the practitioners who really understand how to help you make immediate and steady progress. Relapses are a sign that your issues are not being properly addressed. Take this advice with a grain of salt, it's from my own painful experience over several decades of sports injuries.
The problem is finding a physio that's worth a shit. I've dealt with serious injuries and complications (and recovered) over many years and I can tell you that most of the physios, chiros, trainers, and acupuncturists are no more useful than YouTube and some are even counter productive.
What I find interesting is that you'll hear similar types of comments from both people who know what they are doing and people who don't. For a lot of people "usefulness" for a professional is based solely on whether they say things they want to hear.
Totally agree. I was working out irregularly for past few years, however, in a crappy "bro-science" way. I did heavy squats, deadlifts which made my muscle imbalances even worse.
When I visited few physioterapists, they just showed me few exercises (which I could find on the internet). I recently started to work out just with my body weight and focus on my core strength. It's been better, but my back still hurts after exercise from time to time... Fuck sedentary job.
Yet their gif of a stiff-legged deadlift has the lifter bending his back.
Most fitness trainers went through a crappy class/college program and know less about fitness than the average fitness bro, let alone anything about muscle imbalances. At least, in my experience from paying a couple.
Running shoes are fine, but after you stop rotating at the hip, you've reached the bottom of the stretch for the hamstrings, and everything else is just stretching the lower back for no apparent reason; could lead to a bulging disk.
Running shoes are a bad fit for it because they both alter the mechanics of the lift by raising your heels above the toes (which is why you shouldn't deadlift in oly weightlifting shoes with thick heels either) and use amortizing cushioning that compromises your stability. You are better off using something with a thin flat sole (think chuck taylors) or just taking off your shoes.
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A lot of the "great" information online is bro-science, and doctors generally don't care at all, so neither is optimal.
P.S. The military uses fancy position sensors to track muscle imbalances in Pararescuemen. I really wish there was some access to that facility:
"To improve, the trainees must first be shown where they are deficient. So when they arrive, they enter the Dari Motion Capture system, something similar to what Hollywood uses to fuse actors with their CGI characters. Dari doesn’t use on-body sensors, just cameras that capture the biomechanical motions of subjects." https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a26256665...