A question about cramp, spasm and tension.

[_brews]

Hi all,

This appeared to be the best place to post general questions, rather than course specific ones - I hope this is correct!

The first section of this post is to provide personal context, before diving into my question. A lot of this has been the result of self exploration/reflection so I apologise if any of the terminology is confusing. In lieu of any external framework of understanding what has been going on, I have sometimes ended up choosing my own words to capture the feeling of something.

I first ran into the Stretch Therapy system about 4 years ago. At the time I had been starting to accumulate a lot of nebulous body pain/issues in an around my back, neck and shoulders. These would manifest as hot, semi-sharp pains in response to certain movements. Some of them would be basically permanent (e.g. in the shoulder every time in response to pull-up like movements), others would have a sudden onset and then fade, often in response to seemingly arbitrary movements (e.g. I would twist my torso to pick something up and there would suddenly be intense heat and aching in say my middle back, associated by sharp pain with certain movements such as twisting my neck, which would slowly fade over days and weeks).

This started to happen more and more often, sometimes multiple times in a week, to the point where I would be pretty moderately debilitated. Things like putting a motorcycle helmet on, riding my bicycle etc would be intensely uncomfortable, and I would have underlying pain almost all the time. At the time I was not attuned to my body well, and was very much in a 'pushing my body for external goals/validation' mindset. I was doing a lot of calisthenics at the time, with a heavy focus on achieving impressive holds and looking good, rather than the internal sensations in my body.

Initially I attributed these sudden pains to 'clicking' my back out somehow, as they did come on almost immediately, and started getting chiropractic and physio treatment. This would provide some short term relief, but didn't seem to help much with reducing occurence. There was one experience I had where, after 2 weeks of very relaxing holiday sailing, swimming, reading etc I was lying down, and then did a crunch movement to sit up. There were three very solid, very deep almost 'thunks' in the middle of my back and I had an intense relieving heat spread across my back for almost 3 days and some of the more semi-permanent symptoms subsided. But this was an outlier I was unable to recreate in chiropractic treatment, and retrospectively would attribute to the relaxation rather than anything else.

I then became more and more interested in stretching and found that there were some stretches that would cause almost ecstatic relief (truly some of the most intense sensation I have felt in my life). These would vary over time, and often I would be unable to recreate the intensity of the first release. Some of the earliest were external rotator cuff, bicep and deltoid stretches, more recently chest, spinatus, trapezius and at present the central abdominal muscles, rectus abdominus and diaphragm. These were a distinctly different sensations I would get from stretching other muscles. Often one side would generate this feeling of relief, while the other would just feel as you would expect stretching to. I have also found that when these sudden pains come on, I can now partially diminish them by stretching them straight away.

Over the next few years I went on a long and slow journey (with plenty of dead ends) of learning to feel and understand my body better. Along the way I have experimented with:

• Stretching (sometimes amazing, often good, but sometimes made things worse) - primarily working from the Overcoming Neck and Back Pain book
• Limbering (almost always good) - walking, gentle movements, tapping, very unstructured typically
• Exercise (good, if done in a body-feeling-centred way, rather than a goal-driven-way) - things like surfing, squash, kitesurfing, running
• Meditation (mostly good, but seated position could make some pains worse)
• General relaxation (mostly good, but depends on how the relaxation interacts with my mental state (e.g. am I avoiding something else or truly relaxing)

And have come to the following understanding of what is causing a lot of this pain:

• I default to a lot of anxiety and worry, particularly under stress
• This anxiety/worry is manifested as chronic muscular tension
• The presence of this muscular tension predisposes me to cramp/spasm under innocuous movements (I have seen Kit mention cramp being the result of activation of contracted muscles)
• These cramps are the sources of these variable pains. This would explain why they occur in different places (e.g. it is not a recurring injury) and why they can be relieved immediately with stretching (again not a feature of an injury).
• I had a rib injury around 5 years (possibly a fractured/broken rib, or a cartilage injury of some kind, sustained while kitesurfing) which I suspect may have acted as the seed for a lot of this muscular tension to start to causing more severe issue, possibly by muscles around it tightened to protect it. I observed a year or two ago that the pattern of pain distribution seemed to be 'approaching' my left rib, as I have worked through different muscles (starting from the arm, moving into the shoulder, down the back and up the front). Some of the recent release I have had in and around the upper abdomine have had a very fundamental feeling to them.
• Some of these cramps have been semichronic, which is why they create such a huge sensation of release the first time, and then are diminished over time.
• When I have been 'stretching' and generating these releases, I have not been truly moving into new ROM, but simply release the muscle under cramp and restoring previous ROM.
• Stretching one muscle can put another into a contracted state, which is why sometimes stretching has made things work/caused a new pain. I have found this particularly difficult in and around the neck, where stretching on one side (scalenes) is difficult to do without the other side feeling uncomfortable.
• I also found that sometimes when releasing I would inadvertently 'move' the pain from one muscle to another (e.g. I would stretch the bicep and shift the pain to my deltoids).

I have been searching through the forums to find discussion on cramp/spasm but I have not been able to find too much and so thought I would pose the following questions here.

• What is the difference between muscular tension and cramp?
• Is it possible to have muscle undergo cramp for extremely long periods of time? (e.g. years) most of what I have read about cramp only discusses it as acute.
• I have seen Kit mention predisposition to cramp - could something like that be the cause of all this? Or do these patterns suggest an alternative source?
• Is it possible to 'shift' muscular spasm from one muscle to another?
• My current approach to dealing with this is heavily relaxation focused (meditation, dealing with stress, exercise etc) - are there any other possible solutions to explore?

Many thanks,

Bruce