Empty Your Bucket! Understanding Pain and Injury

Often times, individuals will not know how or why their pain began.  To help them understand, I explain using a simple analogy.  Imagine each body part as an empty bucket.  The empty bucket is the amount each structure (joint/muscle/ligament) of the body can hold.  When the bucket overflows, pain begins to appear.  Know that everything that we do on a day to day basis adds stress, or load on the body.  Each stress is different.  Some are good, and some are bad.

Stress from work, sitting at a desk all day, and a poor diet are just a few examples of bad stressors.  Imagine that these stressors add rocks into your buckets.  Therapy, exercise (to a certain extent), daily meditation, proper nutrition and supplementation are just a few examples of good stressors.  Good stressors will remove rocks from your bucket.  

Now pretend that each body part starts as an empty bucket.  Through our day-to-day lives, work, stress from relationships, or poor diet, these rocks will begin to build up.  The body will naturally start to remove some of them.  Unfortunately, in many cases the body just isn't able to keep up with every rock that we add. Our lives contain too many bad stressors for whatever reason.  And with that, it is only a very short time before the rocks begin to overflow from the bucket.  This is where we begin to find ourselves in pain.  The bucket overflowing may have been triggered by something as simple as picking up a pen on the ground, or sleeping wrong. In order to get out of pain we have to remove these rocks. Ideally, we want to remove all of the rocks.

By implementing proper diet, nutrition, and exercise these rocks will start to be removed.  Sometimes this is all you need to restore your empty bucket.  Unfortunately for some, many of the rocks will remain.  Sometimes, the bucket will still continue to overflow.  How do we remove these rocks?

Some form of therapy will often be necessary to remove the remaining rocks and restore our empty bucket.  This may include manual therapy to ensure proper movement and function of soft tissues like muscles and ligaments, or chiropractic adjustments to restore proper spinal mobility and nerve flow. Once those rocks are removed, therapeutic and rehabilitative exercises can be introduced to help make our buckets even bigger!  Making our buckets bigger help to increase the amount of rocks we can hold before it starts to overflow again.  With that in mind, routine rock removal through a combination of strategies is the best way to prevent your bucket from overflowing.

If you have any questions, or would like more information about how you can remove the rocks in your bucket, call our our office at 319-423-0925, or visit our website.