Struggling to Bend Over from Tight Hip Flexors?
A group of front leg muscles at the hips, the hip flexors provide certain leg motions at the hip. When you have trouble bending over at the waist, tight hip flexor muscles might be the problem.
Understanding the Active Release Technique
Chiropractic care has always been about optimizing your body’s balance to improve natural healing efficiency. The modalities we use at Active Care Chiropractic & Rehabilitation in Lafayette Hill, the Main Line, East Falls, Elkins Park, Manayunk, and Hatfield, Pennsylvania, are all geared at improving the recuperative abilities of your own body.
Active Release Technique (ART) is a soft tissue treatment that targets complications from overused muscles. Perhaps you’ll recognize some of these as muscle knots. You may also know that those can often be worked out. Essentially, ART is a formalized process to help encourage soft tissue healing.
The effects of soft tissue overuse
When you overuse ligaments, muscles, or tendons, three conditions may arise. These are:
- Hypoxia: the lack of oxygen arriving at the site of injury
- Micro trauma: small tears occurring from repetitive motion
- Acute injuries: such as pulls, strains, sprains, or tears
Scar tissue forms as a result of injury, perhaps as a support mechanism for damaged tissue. But without recovery, scar tissue can build to the point where it restricts movement, weakens muscles, and traps nerves. Pain and other symptoms begin to emerge.
The ART difference
Modalities like massage or ultrasound are passive. Tissue is at rest as you receive treatment. Active release requires movement of the affected area while our practitioner contacts or presses the injured tissue.
ART is a holistic, noninvasive, and drug-free therapy that complements other modalities for faster healing and recovery. Some of the soft tissue conditions that ART therapy can address include:
- Back pain
- Carpal tunnel syndrome
- Foot pain
- Joint pain
- Migraines
- Repetitive strain injuries
- Sciatica
- Shoulder pain
- Sprains
- Strains
- Temporomandibular joint disorders
ART targets adhesions, scar tissue that blocks normal movement and function. Releasing tissue like fascia, ligaments, muscles, and tendons restores motion and relieves pain.
What to expect during an ART session
We’ll start with an assessment, a review of your current symptoms as well as your relevant medical history. That’s followed by a series of manual pressure assessments of tissue in problem areas.
Next comes the guided movement part of the treatment, where you move or flex the joints in the problem areas and your practitioner maintains pressure over the problem tissue. The combination of motion and pressure breaks up adhesions, those muscle knots that interfere with function.
You’ll likely feel some “good ache” type of pain after these guided motions. It’s a form of deep stretching, and it’s the start of returning to normal. Be sure to communicate through your session when you feel pain that’s not therapeutic or reaching the limits of your tolerance.
A typical ART session usually lasts up to 30 minutes, but it can go longer, depending on the number of treatment areas you have.
To learn more about ART, contact the nearest location of Active Care Chiropractic & Rehabilitation. Call or click to book your consultation now.
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