Hey everyone,
Today, I wanted to share an awesome little epiphany I had while I was hiking recently.
It was at one of my favorite places– a hidden gem where you can hike over all sorts of terrain, before getting to the lake where you can go swimming.
I could just feel that all of the systems in my body were “on”– everything was coming together, to help me stay stable.
And it just kind of hit me:
I got here by maximizing my body’s own stability mechanisms.
Your ligaments are a “passive” method of stabilizing your joints. If you’ve had an injury to your SI ligaments (or if you’re genetically hypermobile) they may not be up to the task of keeping your joints in place.
This type of injury is typically when SI joint dysfunction begins — when this passive stability system we’d been using is no longer able to stabilize our joints.
However, we also have ACTIVE modes of stabilization.
Your muscles and nervous system work together to sense where your body is in space, respond to your environment, and generally help keep things stable.
Often, when someone’s had an injury or trauma to their body, these reflexes become inhibited. That’s part of why an injury like SI joint dysfunction (or any ligament sprain) can become chronic. Not only did we injure our passive stability system, but now our active stability system has been interrupted as well.
The good news is that you can TRAIN the active system.
Practice makes perfect. Our nervous system is always learning new tasks and adapting to new demands.
With the right tools, we can learn how to optimize the active system. We can help our muscles and nervous system remember what it means to stabilize us and how to respond to our environment. We can not only get back to where we were before the injury, we can actually train these active systems to come back STRONGER.
If you feel like you’ve lost function after an injury, it doesn’t have to be that way forever. The longer I’ve been running this site and coaching, the more I see that the lack of strategy many people first encounter is actually one of the biggest hurdles– but that is something you can OVERCOME.
I share my story here, and all the false starts I went through, so that you don’t have to.
You can stabilize your SI joints again– what you need is a strategy.
I’m so glad you’re all here, and look forward to having you come along for the ride!
My Sacroiliac Joint Saga 