Lower Back Pain Can Be A Result Of Muscle Entanglement, Knotting and Shortening

It’s worthwhile to understand that these muscles will entangle and knot up in the same way that wires do!

What are the chances that someone hasn’t seen a mess of tangled wires before?

They don’t have to be certified electricians or IT guys working on the tangle of cables that run rampant in just about every server room to see it. Even the wires that we have at home can happily get tangled up on their own. The wires on my headphones will happily get themselves all tangled up - even when they’re not in contact with any other wires at all.

It’s the second law of thermodynamics at work right there, and a good mass of wires, when left on their own, will eventually tangle up on their own as they seek out a new state of disorder that we know as entropy. It’s not surprising to see how knots can form on their own, either.

Hence we do have things such as duct tape and cable ties, which help to prevent entanglement by keeping them wires bound to a specific position. Such as in the image above.

So you may wonder… how does this apply to our health?

We do have many long muscles and tissues running throughout our body.

The iliotibial (IT) band, for instance, is a large mass of fibres that run from our hip down to our knee. It is said that:

The IT band stabilizes the knee both in extension and in partial flexion, and is therefore used constantly during walking and running. When a person is leaning forwards with a slightly flexed knee, the tract is the knee's main support against gravity.

So we need to use it for knee stabilisation when we’re walking or running…

Which means that people who do engage in lots of walking or running do have to take care of it properly.

Because if it isn’t taken care of properly, one might develop IT band syndrome, which may result in symptoms of knee pain.

And where there is pain, we’d be cautious at overworking it. Meaning we’d end up doing less work that we’re actually supposed to be doing.

One of the problems that we’d find in IT band syndrome?

Knots, of course.