If you read my last blog post, hopefully you have better understanding of why we experience pain and how said pain can become a chronic issue. In this blog post I'm going to discuss preliminary concepts that will make it easier to undertand the Left AIC/Right BC Pattern (the holy grail of postural restoration) as well as why we end up here. In particular I'm going to discuss the relevancy of regional interdependency & synergistic dominance in the context of postural restoration. If you understand these concepts it becomes a lot easier to make sense of the Left AIC/Right BC pattern. And as a little FYI, this is simply my interpretation of how these concepts can be applied to Postural Restoration.
Regional interdependency revolves around the idea that one 'isolated' issue in the body, creates more 'isolated' issues in the body. And yes, those apostrophes are purposefully there to emphasize that there is really no such thing as an isolated issue in the body. To help explain this, consider the internal combustion engine that gasoline powered cars run off of. Gas and air combine to explode in a cylinder, which a moving piston compresses via crankshaft, which moves the wheels of your car and makes it go. This kind of engine is reliant on all these separate parts and actions working together to make it so that the car can move, just as the body is reliant on different joints to perform differnt actions to accomplish different tasks (walking is a perfect example of this). In the context of chronic pain, regional interdependency proposes that the root cause of your chronic pain might not be a directly related to where you experience said pain. For example, knee pain might actually a problem that originates from positional issues at the hips, just as shoulder pain might actually be a problem of positional issues at the ribcage. For illustrative purposes I've attached an image below to show how just one joint becoming positionally compromised can lead to compensations throughout the body that change joint positions from their optimal patterning.
Synergistic dominance builds off of regional interdependency. It revolves around prime movers (primary muscles used for a particular movement, which are usually larger and stronger) becoming inadequate at their primary functions and allowing synergists (secondary muscles used for a particular movement, which are usually smaller and weaker) to take over completely. In an ideal world, synergists do what motor oil might do for your car. While the oil helps keep your engine running, it isn't what actually makes the engine work and by extension the car move. For illustrative purposes I've attached in image below demonstrating glenohumeral rhythm which shows the concept of synergistic dominance in action. See, for every 2 degrees your shoulder moves your scapula moves 1 degree, which implies that as the larger muscles of your shoulder (the primary movers) move so do the msucles of your scapula (the synergists) to help faciliate said movement. If your shoulder flexes (arm goes in front of the body and up) your scapula will elevate (vertically rise) and externally (upwardly) rotate with said shoulder. When your shoulder extends (arm goes behind the body and down) your scapula will depress (vertically descend) and internally (downwardly) rotate with said shoulder. This is how synergists ideally function. But what happens when the position of that scapula is altered due to the positional issues ? Well now the prime movers aren't able to work the way they should, so synergists attempt to take over in order to make it so you can still move. And if you look like that skeleton up there you're probably going to have a lot of compensation that leads to synergistic dominance.
Both regional interdependency and synergistic dominance provide background as to what happens in the primary pattern of the postural restoration institute. Just as the relationship between the body and the brain is interdependent so to can the relationship between completely separate joints be as well. Now that the stage has been set, we'll discuss exactly what the Left AIC/Right BC Pattern is and how we end up stuck there in the first place.