The Straight and Narrow

There are just so many Straights and Narrows. Not just the moral ones, the religious do's and don'ts, but all sorts which apply to all aspects of our lives. Even to pain, which as you may gather is one of my main interests.

When it comes to the capabilities of our bodily tissues, the Straight and Narrow varies steadily over time. When we are young, the Straight is quite bendy and the Narrow is quite wide. What I mean by this is that we can subject our tissues, our muscles and joints, to a lot of stress when we are young and get away with it.

We can stray from the path of tissue protection quite strongly and do it more often, a bit like staying up for parties for a few nights in succession and still managing to function afterwards. When we are older we can't do this!

If we stray from the path there are consequences. Sometimes they are not too severe. So the path here has nice surroundings, a bit like short rough just off the fairway in golf. We don't suffer too badly and can quickly return to what we did again.

As we get trained in an activity, the path gets very wide indeed and we find it harder and harder to get off it. If you've trained for sport or in the gym, you may have got to the point where you had to make extreme efforts to push yourself to feel muscle soreness or tiredness. You were just so damn fit.

As we get older the path gets straighter and it gets narrower. This means it's easier and easier to fall off, to make our body suffer, if we push ourselves to overdo things. But that's not all. I haven't finished with the path metaphor yet!

When we move into the realm of pain conditions, the path becomes a scary place, a hard place to keep to. And the consequences when we stray can be severe.

That's because the path "develops" a drop on each side. It can be a small drop, causing a problem and some difficulty climbing back up, an additional delay before we regain normality. Or it can be a huge drop, a catastrophic loss of bodily abilities and a long, hard climb to get back to the path. If we can at all.

Every human being alive today is constrained by the resistance of their bodily tissues to physical stress. To some, who are young and strong, it really doesn't show itself. It's still there however. For others the sensitivity of their body to activity is so acute that it dominates their lives.

This is a favourite subject of mine and I do go on about it. But I believe it has something really useful to teach us, a way of coping with our difficulties. Pacing is the name given to this technique. My ebook on the subject, for people with chronic pain problems, is at
http://www.thephysiotherapysite.co.uk/business/pacing_sales.html .

There's more to go on the Straight and Narrow, and also on the Hare and the Tortoise!