Pain Management Through Movement

When I began working as a movement coach a few years ago I wanted to help people improve their dancing through developing a regular strength & flexibility practice and was amazed to discover that I was also helping clients with back pain, knee pain, hip pain, shoulder pain that they’d been suffering with for years.

As I started to talk about how these clients had got free from pain, people started coming to me for help specifically for their aches and pains.

I’ve used various ways of talking about my programme, including saying I could help people dance “pain-free.” I didn’t stick with that one very long as it didn’t sit right with me somehow, I didn’t feel like I knew enough to really help chronic pain sufferers and as a coach, dealing with musculo-skeletal pain is not within my remit - this is the job of a clinician such as a chiropractor or osteopath.

However what if multiple visits to the clinician is not really helping things? They make an adjustment and it feels better for a while and then the pain comes back?

This is where movement can help! And not only that, understanding some of the science behind your pain can give you the confidence to move and know you are safe.

What I have come to realise through studying with Luke and Sam in the Back 2 Roots Internship is that there’s often a lot more to pain than biomechanics and it may well have been just giving my clients a regular, gentle movement practice, with incremental challenges, that helped relieve their discomfort.

When we are in pain, we don’t want to move the affected area, which is logical if there is tissue damage that needs to heal. But what if the tissue damage has healed and there is still pain? Refraining from movement could actually be hindering things.

Not everyone is going to be able to get “pain free”. However it is possible to learn how to manage your pain in order to continue doing the things you love, like dance, dance dance!

If this sounds like something that could help you, shoot me a message, I have a couple of spots open for new clients.