When Tyler Haley came to One Body in early 2021, he had been told by two Physical Therapists that “running a marathon wasn’t in the books for him”. He had been suffering from “tightness and stiffness” on his left hip and significant back pain for over a year, which in the last two months had gotten “awfully painful”. Considering his earlier diagnosis of disc herniation (L4-L5) back in 2010, the two professionals now working with him advised against pursuing his athletic goal. So Tyler stopped running.
Upon assessing Tyler, however, I saw no reason why this young, healthy, and fairly fit gentleman should stay away from running the 26 miles race he clearly really desired. Sure, we found a few compensations in his movement and dysfunctions in his neuromuscular system creating some problems for him, but nothing that should deny him his athletic dream.
Watching Tyler walk, I immediately noticed his right hip was stuck, chronically pushing his weight towards the left hip, more than likely due to a sprain he suffered on his right ankle back in 2008. I see this all the time, but it goes completely unnoticed by people and health professionals. Further complicating his wellbeing, his torso was rotated left, contributing to more overloading of his left side, where the pain was experienced. All of these were subconscious compensations from a defensive mechanism we call behavioral avoidance, to prevent him from loading his right side, previously injured over a decade earlier. His right shoulder was also stuck (no swing) as an extension of these compensations. This is a classic example of how local problems have a global impact; one small injury can affect the whole body, particularly coming from the ground up, ascending from lower to upper body.
Moving forward to test his muscles, I found numerous imbalances and compensations, particularly among his hips, ankles, and core musculature, which was to be fully expected. Some muscles were overactive while other were underactive, and this was provoking problems for his motor control and nervous system, which contributed to his pain. Further adding to his issues, his soft tissue quality on multiple muscles was compromised, and upon assessing his hip mobility I found an impingement on his left hip, which came as no surprise to me given everything I had observed during our session.
Proceeding through my protocol of assessing and correcting such dysfunctions, over the course of several months, one by one we cleared all the problems mentioned above, from his movement deviations and joint restrictions to his neuromuscular compensations. As we successfully progressed more and more from therapy into training, Tyler happily began running again and on December 2023 ran his first marathon!
Then, after not seeing Tyler for a long time, he recently came back to One Body in October of this year suffering from a new pain while running for the entire year, this time on his left ankle. Compared to our first time working together, this issue was a much simpler one: he lacked supination on his left ankle, the mechanism of propulsion during walking and running. As we addressed this mechanical issue along with its accompanying neuromuscular deficits around his ankle musculature, we immediately eliminated his pain at once, freeing him up to continue pursuing his preparation for his next and upcoming marathon pain-free, which he accomplished on December 7th while breaking his personal record for his best time (3h27m)!
If your body is having issues preventing you from accomplishing your athletic goals, regardless of what you have been told, I highly encourage you to give your body a chance under proper guidance, you will be amazed with what you can accomplish! If you need any guidance I’ll be delighted to help, I can be reached at 1 (916) 365-5345.
