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Confessions of a flatworm
Dec. 4th, 2005 10:41 amYesterday I went to see a deep tissue massage practitioner (basically, a Rolfer) about my very stiff right hand that won't bend backwards. I was very happy with the whole experience -- not only do I have a rational-sounding plan to fix the hand, which means I may soon be able to do backbends in yoga without pain, but it was almost like taking an anatomy class because the guy chattered the whole way through. It was all very structural and engineer-friendly.
The first thing he did was point out the little wrist-bone that's on the top of the forearm on the pinky-finger side. This is more prominent on my right (problem) side than on the left. Apparently this is because my strong inner-forearm muscles are winning the tug-of-war with the weaker top-of-forearm muscles, and the entire hand and wrist assembly is being pulled down and in as a result. Kind of creepy, yes. But it makes a lot of sense. As he pointed out, there's not much holding the wrist and hand to the arm, so you don't want that muscle balance to be out of whack.
Here's what I'm supposed to do about it. ( PT routine )
One bit of the guy's chatter that I especially enjoyed was about muscle differentiation. Apparently (he says) all our muscles are connected to one another, more than the anatomy books ever show you. In early fetal development when we are basically all flatworms, there's only one muscle system in front and one in back (or maybe two in front and two in back, I'm not sure which). All the muscles of a human being develop from those early muscle systems, which never entirely separate... so you really do have muscle fibers running all the way up and down your body, not to mention muscle fibers growing in with connective tissue where the books show only connective tissue, and so forth. Again, I wouldn't know the ground truth of this, but it is appealing and sounds reasonable. I have every belief that things are messy in there. And it would help explain why a massage person can do something with my fingers that I feel up in my armpit.
The first thing he did was point out the little wrist-bone that's on the top of the forearm on the pinky-finger side. This is more prominent on my right (problem) side than on the left. Apparently this is because my strong inner-forearm muscles are winning the tug-of-war with the weaker top-of-forearm muscles, and the entire hand and wrist assembly is being pulled down and in as a result. Kind of creepy, yes. But it makes a lot of sense. As he pointed out, there's not much holding the wrist and hand to the arm, so you don't want that muscle balance to be out of whack.
Here's what I'm supposed to do about it. ( PT routine )
One bit of the guy's chatter that I especially enjoyed was about muscle differentiation. Apparently (he says) all our muscles are connected to one another, more than the anatomy books ever show you. In early fetal development when we are basically all flatworms, there's only one muscle system in front and one in back (or maybe two in front and two in back, I'm not sure which). All the muscles of a human being develop from those early muscle systems, which never entirely separate... so you really do have muscle fibers running all the way up and down your body, not to mention muscle fibers growing in with connective tissue where the books show only connective tissue, and so forth. Again, I wouldn't know the ground truth of this, but it is appealing and sounds reasonable. I have every belief that things are messy in there. And it would help explain why a massage person can do something with my fingers that I feel up in my armpit.
