You Body is a Four-Story Wonder!

You probably, like most people, see your body as a single item - your body, and nothing else. But modern science (ain't it a grand thing?) will tell you that in fact, your body isn't even all yours. We are home to, and most likely fully dependent for survival on, hundreds of species of other beings that perform very critical tasks on our daily behalf. Bacteria. That's what I'm talking about! No, actually, I won't be talking about bacteria - that's just a ploy to get you to read further.

 

What I AM talking about are the four levels of your body that we use to describe how you compensate when your table, er, supports, well, that is, your legs are not of equal length. Like the table I spoke of in the last post, your two legs have to perform in a similar fashion as that table - they need to provide equivalent stability in as bi-lateral a fashion as possible. When they fail to do so, the body becomes imbalanced, and force the body to begin compensating for that imbalance.

 

To describe that compensation, and to aid in determining how to respond to effectively change that compensation back to a more normal bi-lateral state, we need effective language and ideas in order to communicate what is wrong, where it is wrong, and what to do to respond to the problem. This is no different than any other scientific or technical issue - without good, descriptive, and accurate language, we cannot effectively resolve the problems that crop up.

 

We begin by dividing the body into four segments - primary - from the floor to the knees; secondary - floor to hips; tertiary - floor to shoulders; and quaternary - floor to the top of the head. As the body is essentially a structural chain, changes made at lower levels of that chain promulgate proximally - that is, from the initial location of the imbalance upward toward the center of gravity. Because we humans - as well as every other being and object on Earth - reside at the bottom of a gravity well, anything that alters our balance alters how we react and operate in relationship to the direction of gravity. This is a very important concept for the purposes of our understanding of bi-lateral biomechanics, just as it is for that table.

 

So when we talk about how a given body compensates for an imbalance in their bi-lateral functioning, we describe where those compensations occur, and to what degree they are occurring, by indicating to and at what levels we see compensatory changes. If, for example, we see a simple change where the foot on the apparent short-limb side of the body begin to walk more on the ball of the foot, raising the heel more rapidly on the affected side, but no change in the levels of the hips or shoulders, we would describe this as a primary compensation. And for most primary compensations, the body often maintains only that level of compensatory involvement for many years, sometimes for life, without eventually moving to another level of compensation.

 

But there is no guarantee of this. Our bodies are being acted upon by forces both external and internal. Gravity we cannot resist, but that is also true for many of the internal forces at work. One example is the state of any one individual's ligaments. Not everyone has the same tone to their ligaments - some of us have very tight ligaments, some fairly middle-of-the-road ligaments, and still others have a very loose ligamentous tonality. The term "ligamentous laxity" properly describes what is more commonly known as "double-jointedness." It merely means that such an individual's ligaments are so loose as to permit their joints a far larger range of motion. Such people are sometimes more prone to injury, but they are also prone to developing more and far more problematic compensatory mechanics. We will touch on this more in future installments here.

 

For now, just remember that your body works to manage compensatory demands by adjusting itself across these four levels. Note that each level incorporates all the levels distal, or below that level, so Secondary also encompasses Primary, and so on. This, too, will be important to recall in our other installments.

 

Next time: why you can't resist my compensatory charms!