October 2009

If you were to look at an anatomy book, you would see the individual muscles beautifully described. What you’d miss though is that the body is a beautifully integrated structure. All the movements (even the most basic) are so complex that they require a perfect orchestration of groups of muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints and nerves.

This orchestration is called a kinetic chain. Kinetic means movement. The chain has many links and as with all chains, there may be a weak link. And problems will occur at the weak link in the chain.

So if we were to take basic a movement – sitting on a chair and reaching to pick up a cup of tea. This movement will involve a kinetic chain.

The kinetic chain starts at your sitting bones. There needs to be a firm column up to your shoulder blades. The shoulder blade (scapula) is the base of the long lever which is your arm. The kinetic chain travels down your arm to your hand, then to your finger that’s curling through the handle of the cup of tea.

Every part of that kinetic chain has to work properly so that you can coordinate the movement. Not only to coordinate the movement – you must have the strength and accuracy to complete the movement.

If there is a weak link somewhere on this chain, a trigger point will arise at that point on the kinetic chain. When you analyse this chain, there are certain areas which are more vulnerable than others.

The first vulnerable part of the chain is around the shoulder blade. The shoulder blades is just a thin bone floating on the rib cage and there needs to be a whole group of muscles around the shoulder blade supporting it. If these muscles are not strong enough, then trigger points turn on.

The next vulnerable point is in the shoulder joint itself. Here the head of your humerus [upper arm bone] needs to be perfectly balanced in the glenoid cup by the group of muscles called the rotator cuff. Because of the long lever of your arm there are a lot of forces at play here. The rotator cuff muscles often do not cope and so trigger points also occur.

The last place is in the relatively small muscles in the forearm. These small muscles are often asked to do either recurrent jobs or  lifting heavy objects. Again they may struggle to cope and trigger points start up within them.

Once you recognize each kinetic chain and analyse it, you can predict where trigger points are going to occur.

Therefore the particular muscles that are vulnerable in this chain are : the levator scapulae, rhomboids and the trapezius. These are all shoulder blade stabilizers.

The rotator cuff muscles (eg. The infraspinatus, teres etc) and the forearm extensor muscles [brachioradialis, extensor digitorum etc] are also vulnerable and likely to have trigger points.

So when you have a trigger point, think and analyse the action that makes the trigger point worse. Then you can look at the whole kinetic chain. You can then work out which muscles are affected and search these muscles for triggers.

It’s understanding the whole map of movement in your muscles that makes it possible to find and treat effectively your triggers.

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