The Hidden Spinal Connection to Pain & Injury - Why the Origin of Your Pain Isn't Where You Think

What if I was to tell you that the way that you look at pain, injury, and dysfunction is wrong, and that a slight change in perspective may help you better understand exactly why you have your symptoms and help you reframe what you may need to do to get those symptoms to go away and keep them away forever. My hope is that over the next 10 to 15 years, thanks to videos like this one, that this may become the way that we need to think about pain and injury if we're ever going to conquer this space. So let's dive into it. Good day. My name is Grant Frost and I'm an Australian musculoskeletal physiotherapist who is extremely passionate about trying to understand the root underlying causes of common aches, pains, injuries, tightnesses, and dysfunctions. And it's this quest to better understand what is the root cause of a person's issues that has often led me to feel that I'm living on an island by myself. That I'm looking at things a certain way that may be different to how a lot of other people in my industry tend to look at the same things. I'm constantly trying very hard to keep an open mind, to be research and evidence-based, but also to base everything that we do on results. So, when thinking about putting this into a video for you guys, I came to realize that this has the potential to be the most important video that I have ever put out or that I may ever put out in the future based on what we're about to go through. And as I always try and promote on this channel and in person with my patients is I don't want anyone to ever have to trust me with what I say. We need to base what we talk about and what we do on results so that we don't have to guess. And you don't have to trust someone that you haven't met before or maybe throws out some different concepts that you maybe haven't considered before. That is all irrelevant if this stuff doesn't work. But as a physiotherapist over the last 20 years who has invested all my time and energy into this kind of thinking, I'd like to talk to you about the results of what I have found. And to cut a long story short, what I find is when we look at pain, injury, and dysfunction is that collectively we tend to look at the wrong things. I'm sure you'll agree that if you've ever had an ache, pain, injury, or dysfunction, your focus, much like every other physical therapist, physiotherapist, chiropractor, doctor, health professional, medical professional may just focus solely on where your dysfunction is. If you have a sore knee, we look at your knee. We assess your knee. We treat your knee. We scan your knee. We operate on your knee. But what I see and what I find is that that is often the majority of what we do. And we don't pair it up with a conversation about why that part of your body, that specific part of your body has become injured, painful, sore, damaged, tight, or dysfunctional in the first place. And yes, there are a small percentage of people who will suffer acute trauma where somebody collides with your knee and damages it. You fall from something, you injure something, accidents happen. But as we'll hopefully explain over the course of this video, even in those moments, the quality of other parts of your body may be the deciding factor which dictates whether you bend or whether your tissue breaks. But for the most part, the aches, pains, injuries, tightnesses, dysfunctions that we're going to reference in this video are essentially the ones where you can't explain why they're there. Perhaps you wake up one day and something hurts. You do something innocuous, something hurts, you do something that you've done plenty of times before and suddenly you don't feel normal. You feel tight, you feel painful, you feel injured or dysfunctional. There has to be a reason why everything that is abnormal or dysfunctional is abnormal or dysfunctional. There's a lot of common misconceptions that we need to move past when trying to better understand why something is there. things like age related pain, overuse, sleeping, funny, growing pains, bad luck, moved the wrong way. All of these cliches have existed and persisted for so long for good reason because they make sense on the surface, but they fall down 100% of the time when we take a big enough step back and understand what we're about to go through. Aging is normal. Growing is normal. Moving your body is normal. Sleeping is normal. Using your body and using your tissue, especially repetitiously, is also normal. But often times, those situations are really good at exposing hidden underlying dysfunction that you may have taken into that moment. And again, if we're not taking the time to take a step back and realize that that wasn't the cause of your issue, it may have been the last straw. and then go looking for what has built up to the point where you've become dysfunctional and more importantly where that dysfunction is. Then we may never fully realize or understand or be able to solve that dysfunction. We may never be able to stop it from coming back again because we haven't picked on the thing that caused it in the first place. So in short, your knee pain is a consequence of something else. Your thumb pain is a consequence of something else. And the most important part of this video is that that something else is very likely to be a part of your spine. clinically as a physiotherapist, the single most important piece of information that I have understood that has helped me better understand why a person's dysfunction is there in the first place and what is necessary to make that go away and stay away forever is understanding the important albeit covert or hidden role of spinal dysfunction in creating peripheral dysfunction. And potentially the best way I can explain this is with a very simple analogy. So, a really simple way to explain what I find clinically is to use a car analogy. For example, if you were driving down the road at night and one of your headlights suddenly went out, we probably first want to establish whether you were in an accident. Was the reason why your headlight stopped working because it suffered a physical trauma. Did you drive into a post? Did you hit something? Did it break your headlight? Did your knee suffer any obvious damage? Often, we can breeze past that. It's just a simple no for most people. And much like your mechanic, the next thing that they would probably look for is they would want to assess the headlight itself. They may pull it apart, check the bulb, see what's going on with it. But here's where it becomes interesting. And I think as an industry, a medical industry, as a community, we need to evolve past just looking at the thing that isn't functioning normally. Because if you are a mechanic, or you're someone else, and you think, well, the bulb's fine, the headlight looks good. What would be the next thing that you would look for? And for most people, you'll probably understand that that headlight is connected by a bunch of wiring to a fuse that sits somewhere in the front of your car, somewhere in your dashboard. We know that in order to control that headlight, there's wiring that connects to the fuses that give that headlight life. And if the headlight looks good and functions normally, then there's a very good chance that something somewhere else was the cause of that. And this is what we tend to miss when looking at pain and injury is that we don't assess the fuse box to see if something is causing a problem somewhere else. Especially because that fuse box is essentially the spine. It is the exit point where all the nerves and neural tissue come from that then travel down to different parts of our body and supply the function and the sensation of that area. So in mechanical terms, if you've had someone assess your knee, you've run some scans, you've done all the local testing, but you haven't checked out the corresponding level of your spine that may influence the function of your knee, then you may genuinely be missing the entire picture that gives meaning to why one knee is sore randomly and not the other, or at least why one knee feels worse than the other. Because we have deliberately made and designed cars, we have all the parameters and all the understanding in front of us. we can just flick to a necessary page and troubleshoot with more accuracy and more efficiency. But what I hope a video like this can help you do is help fill out that human manual a little bit more and understand that our body functions from the core and the center outwards. So if you have any peripheral issues, any upper limb issues, any lower limb issues, any trunk issues, we desperately need to help you understand which part of your spine you may need to also look at for clues as to what may explain the presence of your dysfunction. And thankfully, we do have a few road maps we can explore. So, at this point, I absolutely need to talk less, but give you something to do because if you've kept an open mind and you're hopefully starting to appreciate where I'm coming from here, where the spine is potentially the hidden root cause of a lot of peripheral issues that we deal with, if you want to better understand which potential spinal level or levels may be connected to your dysfunction, we have a few different options to consider. The first is we want to check out your dermatomes. And what dermatomes are is they are leftover fetal connections that develop in the womb. And when we're dealing with things like pain and dysfunction, which are sensations, this can be a genuine road map to help you better understand where to look through your spine for clues as to what might be causing that dysfunction. As you may see, if you have developed random thumb pain, RSI, you may need to look at the base of your neck. If you've developed any chest pain that thankfully isn't heart related and you're thinking maybe costochondritis or something like that, then follow that all the way around to the corresponding levels at the back. If you're lying in bed at night and you can't sleep because the sides of your hips are sore. Interestingly, the cause of that may be coming from a part of your back at the base of your rib cage, the top of your lower back. So, take the area that you're having an issue with, consult your dermatome map, and see what part of your spine has become dysfunctional. And as always, one of the best ways to do that is with a lacrosse ball or a tennis ball, which we'll circle back to in a second. The second thing to consider are things called myotomes. Much like dermatomes, these are leftover fetal connections, but tend to associate more with muscle tissue. So, if your dysfunction is muscle weakness or muscle tightness, getting a general sense of which part of your body correlates to which part of your spine, again, can be a great place to look for clues of that hidden dysfunction that may help you better explain why that dysfunction is there. And the third thing to consider is we also want to consider which physical nerves and nerve roots supply the function of that area. For example, if you have knee pain and you know that the musculature around the knee are often supplied in part by the femoral nerve which runs all the way through your thigh and starts at your lower back, then we have something to consider. Not only can dysfunction in your lower back cause the nerve to act dysfunctionally, especially if one of your symptoms is cramping, muscle tightness, muscle weakness, but if the origin of that nerve at your spine is tight, and you've essentially pulled a bunch of mechanical slack out of the system, then anything along the course of that nerve can also become tight, potentially weak, and dysfunctional as well. But the moral of this story is that if you know exactly where your symptoms are, and again, it doesn't have to be painful. It can just be a tight muscle or a weak muscle if you're talking about glutes, for example. There will be a segment or segments of your spine that may ultimately be stiff and tight that you need to resolve to give permission for those things to feel and function better again. So once you have a general idea about which level of your spine you may need to look for, grab your lacrosse ball, tennis ball, you can lie down on the floor, whatever works best for you. You can also do it sitting or standing up against a wall. So, what you can do is if you take that ball and as we always do on the channel, we want the ball right in the middle, but literally rolling straight off to the side onto the fleshy part. What we're doing here is we're putting pressure through the joints of your spine. We don't want to be on the bumps down the middle, just the bony bits. Either side of that are the joints and the soft tissue, muscular tissue that runs either side of that. We want to be on those spots looking for things that feel stiff, taut, or restricted compared to the other side. And the tricky thing about this is that the dysfunction could be on either side of your spine. For example, if you find that you've got a bunch of stiffness through some joints in your back on the left hand side at the level that corresponds to gluteal function, then your left glute might be tight or your right glute may be weaker depending on how it's expressing itself in your body. But we don't need to preempt anything. We don't need to guess. All we want to do is that we want to do a movement or an activity that helps you appreciate how your symptoms feel to begin with. Do something that annoys your thumb. Stretch in a way that alerts you to how tight your hip feels. Bend and squat. Use your knee. Get a sense of how it feels. Then immediately go looking for the corresponding levels that you have identified through your dermatomes, your nerves and nerve roots. Look for anything that feels stiff, tight, or restricted on either side. Spend enough time physically letting the ball press in. Give it space and time for that soft tissue to give for the joint the joint capsule to release or to free up a little bit to the point where when you stand up and walk around again, you want to feel like as you've worked up and down those levels of your back or your neck or wherever it is that you physically feel looser than you did beforehand so that you know that you've seen change. We want to be results based. If you get up and you don't feel any looser through here, you probably haven't done anything. and then we can't progress to understanding whether that's impacting your symptoms in a meaningful way. Base everything on results. Loosen yourself up. Feel a sense of freedom through the area that you've worked on and immediately reassess the same exercise or activity that generated your thumb pain that alerted you to how tight your hip felt or how sore your knee felt. If these parts of your back are stiff, restricted, overloaded, and dysfunctional, and they are influencing your symptoms in a covert hidden way, you will see some form of an immediate change. Perhaps something feels looser, something feels stronger, perhaps something feels a little less tender or sore than it normally does. We're looking for something to feel different. The only caveat is is if the consequence that you're experiencing is that you've torn your quadricep muscle or you've broken or damaged a ligament or an injury, then clearly there's going to be a ceiling on how much improvement you can make by potentially treating that hidden cause. You may still need to do something that helps you heal. Time may be a factor. You may still need to strengthen and loosen the things that have become weaker and tighter. But at the very least, by treating a part of your body that isn't where you feel your symptoms, it can help you better understand the process that your body took over however many days, weeks, months, or years to set that tissue up to fail in the way that it has. And again, circling back to what we spoke about before, where even if you've suffered some acute trauma and that has broken or damaged something in that instance where the force that was applied just exceeded your tissue's ability to tolerate and buffer that, the mechanical stuff that we're talking about may be the thing that robbed you of your inherent ability to buffer that even more. Perhaps if things were different and your spine was functioning normally and your tissue was functioning optimally as well, perhaps you may bend in that moment rather than break. Again, there's still a level of trauma that will exceed even the healthiest and most optimally functioning tissue. But thankfully for most people, we aren't exposed to that. This has completely revolutionized my ability to help solve my patients dysfunction. It is amazing at taking away all the mystery because everything has to happen for a reason. If you can't explain to someone or can't have someone explain to you and make sense of everything that you feel has gone on with your symptoms, then you are missing something. We are all missing something. And that island that I feel like I'm existing on by myself a lot of the time is that island of making sure that we prioritize the health and function of your spine as well as the local health and function of the affected area. And in the spirit of results and the spirit of making sure that we can explain everything, if you have found that individual levels of your spine do correlate with the issues that you're having, then there also has to be a reason why those exact parts of your spine have become dysfunctional. So, let's quickly dive into why that might be for you. So, as always, if you've been a follower of the channel for a while or you've seen a video that I put out before, you're probably going to know exactly what we're going to talk about here. I don't think it's super fancy. It's not technically a secret, but like most things, it does take a slight shift in perspective to really understand everything in its entirety. And as I mentioned, if you do feel like there's specific parts of your spine that you have identified that do connect up to the issues that you're having, they do have to be there for a reason. If we take a person's day-to-day existence from the moment that they wake up to the moment that they fall asleep and we were to consider everything that they do the most throughout the day. And for most people, the reality is that the majority of people of all ages can have the potential to spend a lot of time sitting. Whether that's sitting down watching TV, sitting at a desk, sitting at school, sitting to travel, sitting to relax. The curse of the modern world is that so many of the things that we do day-to-day require us to sit at the same time. So logically, if we were to rank the things that you do the most often in terms of time spent, you would expect that the majority of the things at the top would revolve around sitting. Perhaps there's some exercise involved. But even still, if you're someone who doesn't identify as being a person who sits a lot, and for me as a physiotherapist, I'm one of those people. What we also need to consider is when you're not sitting, what are you still doing? And for me, if I'm bending over a bed a lot treating someone, then I also need to pay attention to the shapes and positions I'm doing that from. So, if you are a chef or you are a someone who works at a checkout or someone who does stand and bend over a lot, perhaps you work in the garden or you do some cleaning or whatever it may be for you, you'll know better than anyone. We need to pay close attention to the exact shapes and postures that you put your spine into the most throughout the day. Because what I've found over the years and what I think you will find as well is if you have identified that there's one specific part of your spine that connects up to your lower half symptoms or another part of your spine that connects up to your upper half symptoms, there is a very good chance that without you realizing it and without this being your fault that consistently enough, you are unknowingly creating a hinge through certain parts of your spine to isolate load. And you are doing that for minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and potentially decades again without having noticed. And it's this isolated hinging or this sort of specialized local loading that's going on that is abnormal for the body over time that is a movement away from an ideal posture. Essentially, it's just a less than ideal stationary isolated shape. Things become stiffer, things become tighter, things become overloaded, things become one step closer to themselves becoming sore and uncomfortable, but potentially never actually getting there for you to feel that expression somewhere else. So, you don't have to have pain in your spine to have spinal dysfunction. And for most people, this is one of the hidden secrets to solving people's problems is that we need to go looking for things that your body isn't telling you to look for, but we know may be connected through the channels that we spoke about before. Dermatomes, myotomes, and the nerves, the wiring that connects all of this together. So, what I urge you to do is if you can learn how to be in a good position, we're standing up nice and tall, shoulders comfortably back. When you sit down, again, ideally, you should be sitting in the exact same position or a variation of this than you would be if you were standing. If you are leaning over doing something, we need to make sure that the hinge is coming through your hips and your knees so that you can maintain that spinal integrity, that postural integrity without getting sucked into a position that is less than ideal over days, weeks, months, and years. And I want to make a big deal about this point because if you are in the industry or you have some interest in health and wellness, you will probably know that the research is very ambiguous in terms of the connection between poor postures and pain. And while I agree and I've talked about this previously in another video that it is really hard to make a distinct link between a bad posture and pain because posture can be different for so many different people. Everyone's tissue tolerance is different. Everyone's tissue quality is different. Everyone's circumstances is different. Which means that a person's pain and their painful threshold is also going to be different. That trying to capture this through research may be quite difficult. And I would expect that as we drill down on these points a little bit more, hopefully because of a video like this, we'll hopefully start to reestablish that connection between poor shapes and positions and dysfunction, which may eventually equal pain. We can't have a conversation about fixing people's problems and looking at things holistically in the right way without having a really boring, annoying conversation about the quality of the shapes and positions that you put your spine into the most throughout the day. If you can't appreciate that and hopefully improve upon that where possible, then if you have a persistent issue that's related to that, then you may not necessarily ever give permission for that to go away forever. So, if this resonates with you, please consider leaving a like on the video and subscribing to the channel. But more importantly, share this video to someone that you care about that may need to hear that broader perspective. I'm more than happy to try and explain myself consistently about this type of thing because the results that I find clinically 100% support this. It's not my opinion. It's not my preference. I try to be very agnostic with everything that I do. try and keep an open mind and let the results guide me as to what each person needs day-to-day. And thankfully, having done that for tens of thousands of people over decades, this is where I've ended up. So, with that being said, thank you for watching. Thank you for keeping an open mind and considering what I have to say on this matter. If you do want to help support me and the channel, please consider subscribing and also consider becoming a member. For a few dollars each month, you'll get access to exclusive content from me. You'll get better access to me as well. And if you have any aches and pains that you need some help with, please consider booking in an online consultation with me and we can try and apply this thinking to your issues to see what we can come up with. But again, thank you for watching. I hope that that was helpful and insightful and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.