... No, seriously, since when is this leg trustworthy?
I'm having to spend less concentrated time focused on the hip stuff--I can spend five minutes stretching and moving around and the hip sort of . . . unknots. Which is all kinds of interesting. And very weird.
IMS 8 was good to me? O.o;;;;;
I mean, I knew it was managing the arm stuff better than acupuncture did, and that I was making much better, much faster progress on the hip for *cough* reasons.
But since when can I do lunges and one-legged shit and I'm better on the right than I am on the left?
Anyway. For those who haven't already cracked and thrown the acronym at a search engine yet,
IMS is IntraMuscular Stimulation.
It's a dry needling technique* aimed at muscle tension; the idea is you find a muscle that is tense and tight and bitchy, and you stick a clean needle in a trigger point on that muscle. It freaks out, going from resting tension to as-tense-as-it-can-be, and then you take the needle out.
Since the immediate trauma's been removed, theoretically this allows the muscle to drop down to a more normal resting tension: it's reset the muscle's 'memory' about how tense it should be.
*: like acupuncture, nothing is injected through this needle. It's just a microtrauma to the body.
It can hurt like the blazes. You're deliberately targeting everything that is tense and grumpy and you're making it more tense and grumpy as a therapeutic technique. If you try sticking a needle into a muscle that's already pretty much in full spasm/wound-tight, it's not going to do much except hurt. I couldn't have tried IMS two years ago, and maybe even last year. Not enough space between 'resting level tension' and 'as tense as possible' to properly hit the reset button.
That said? My right hip (the bad one) can now allow my right leg to extend sideways without automatically taking my pelvis with it; you can tell where bone stops and adductor muscle starts; the obterator nerve component of the Knot of Doom has backed off considerably; my sitz bones move (previously their setting was 'tense and pulled towards one another, or tenser and more pulled towards one another'), which allows my glute and thigh muscles to work in a more coherent pattern than they did. It hurts less to sit and to drive.
Way less. Also that section of my hip, which has been an obvious long-term problem child on mobility and strength, doesn't hurt very much anymore.
Other people's babbling on the subject: slightly random website and wikipedia.
This entry also available at Dreamwidth and has
comments there.
IMS 8 was good to me? O.o;;;;;
I mean, I knew it was managing the arm stuff better than acupuncture did, and that I was making much better, much faster progress on the hip for *cough* reasons.
But since when can I do lunges and one-legged shit and I'm better on the right than I am on the left?
Anyway. For those who haven't already cracked and thrown the acronym at a search engine yet,
IMS is IntraMuscular Stimulation.
It's a dry needling technique* aimed at muscle tension; the idea is you find a muscle that is tense and tight and bitchy, and you stick a clean needle in a trigger point on that muscle. It freaks out, going from resting tension to as-tense-as-it-can-be, and then you take the needle out.
Since the immediate trauma's been removed, theoretically this allows the muscle to drop down to a more normal resting tension: it's reset the muscle's 'memory' about how tense it should be.
*: like acupuncture, nothing is injected through this needle. It's just a microtrauma to the body.
It can hurt like the blazes. You're deliberately targeting everything that is tense and grumpy and you're making it more tense and grumpy as a therapeutic technique. If you try sticking a needle into a muscle that's already pretty much in full spasm/wound-tight, it's not going to do much except hurt. I couldn't have tried IMS two years ago, and maybe even last year. Not enough space between 'resting level tension' and 'as tense as possible' to properly hit the reset button.
That said? My right hip (the bad one) can now allow my right leg to extend sideways without automatically taking my pelvis with it; you can tell where bone stops and adductor muscle starts; the obterator nerve component of the Knot of Doom has backed off considerably; my sitz bones move (previously their setting was 'tense and pulled towards one another, or tenser and more pulled towards one another'), which allows my glute and thigh muscles to work in a more coherent pattern than they did. It hurts less to sit and to drive.
Way less. Also that section of my hip, which has been an obvious long-term problem child on mobility and strength, doesn't hurt very much anymore.
Other people's babbling on the subject: slightly random website and wikipedia.
This entry also available at Dreamwidth and has
comments there.