In my last blog post I discussed some preliminary concepts that relate to why the Left AIC/Right BC Pattern might be causing you pain. To briefly summarise the contents of my last post, there were two important takeaways. The first important takeaway is that your body is more interconnected than you think, where what you believe to be one issue may inadvertently affect your whole body. And by extension (because of this concept) the root of the issue may not actually be where you're experiencing chronic pain, rather the chronic pain is merely a symptom of another issue somewhere else in the body. The second important takeaway is that your body has larger muscles (prime movers) and smaller muscles (synergists). Sometimes, especially in the context of regional interdependency, our smaller muscles start doing jobs that our prime movers were designed to do and this in turn creates a cyclical process of pain because of the compensatory patterns that arise from this (referred to as synergistic dominance).
But just how do we end up with these issues that lead to us getting stuck in the Left AIC/Right BC pattern in the first place ? The answer to that is human asymmetery. Consider how many major internal organs are asymmetrical or orineted one way. Your heart is in the left side of your chest cavity. There are two lobes for your left lung vs three for your right lobe. The stomach is in the left side of your abdominal cavity. Your liver is on the right side of your abdominal cavity. And most importantly your diaphragm is asymmetrical in the same way your lungs are, where the right side of your diaphragm is significantly larger than the left side of your diaphragm (as shown).
See, in Postural Restoration everything revolves around breathing and walking. The fact is that you probably walk between 4,000 and 6,000 (on the low end) steps per day while breathing 20,000 to 23,000 times per day (depending on your fitness level). Your physically asymmetrical diaphragm and functionally asymmetrical brain bias favouritism to the right side of our bodies. Due to it's difference in size, the left hemisphere (half) of the diaphragm tends to work as a postural stabilizer while the right hemisphere tends to coordinate respiration and by extension shift neurgological control (and by extension better stability) to the right side of our bodies. This reinforces a positive feedback keeping the left side of our brain overactive (which controls the right side of bodies/limbs and eyesight while the right side of the brain does the exact opposite). This is a part of the reason we have to view solutions to your chronic pain from the perspective of neurology and not just biomechanics.
But while these asymmetries are a part of us, there are ways we can learn to work with them and simultaneously get us into the opposite pattern (the Right AIC/Left BC pattern) when necessary. And now that I've fully established context behind the potential cause for your chronic pain, in the next blog post I'll discuss exactly what the Left AIC/Right BC pattern is.