For our body to function optimally, all structures must be in balance. This means that muscles – teammates and opponents – must be of equal length and approximately equal strength. Only then are joints, bone structures and all other facilities in symmetry.
However, since we rarely perform exactly balanced movements in everyday life, this balance can quickly become imbalanced. This begins, for example, at a very early stage when each person uses a preferred hand. Right-handed people strain and demand their right side much more than their left.
Tennis players usually only play with their preferred side. Soccer players train almost exclusively their legs to be able to run and shoot quickly, but hardly their trunk and arms. Office workers who sit in front of the computer all day long adopt comfortable postures, for example, hitting the left leg over the right, twisting the pelvis and then the spine.
All these are only small examples of how we bring our body and its structures out of balance through repeated one-sided movements, asymmetrical training, unphysiological postures. Result: the body adapts to everything – if something is used more, it builds it up, if it is used less, it breaks it down, becomes a little overstrained, tenses it up. A muscular imbalance develops. Basically a collective term for all shortenings/uneven lengths, tensions, weaknesses, unequal strength of muscles or muscle groups in our body.
What are the consequences of muscular imbalance?
What are the consequences of a so-called muscular imbalance? As explained above, individual muscles initially shorten or tense. This is unpleasant and certainly known to every reader.
However, if the problem persists for a longer period of time and the causal behavior continues, this will eventually have an effect on joints, bone positions, our posture and finally also on our functions. Take the office worker, for example. Day in, day out, he sits in front of the computer, hours in the same position.
Shoulders slump forward and down, the back forms a hump, the pelvis tilts backwards and is twisted by the legs being bent over. Due to the constant sinking, the entire front shortens at first: chest muscles, abdominal muscles, hip flexors. The long back extensors, on the other hand, have to counteract the unphysiological lengthening and tense up continuously.
Now the office worker goes home and sits relaxed in front of the TV – same posture. The body adapts more and more to this trained posture until the hump can be seen even when standing, the shoulders only hang forward and plaguing back pain becomes noticeable. What was initially just a comfortable posture develops into a muscular imbalance with a change in joint and bone positions and far more effects when these have manifested themselves. In our case, once the spine is bent, the intervertebral discs suffer, the movement function, passive structures, to name just a few examples. If at some point the body can no longer compensate for this, disease patterns such as arthrosis and herniated discs develop.
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