Why Does Something Hurt When Something Else Is Weak?

What if the place that hurts isn't actually the place that's weak? Your body is incredibly good at adapting—but those adaptations can eventually lead to pain. In this episode, learn why understanding muscle compensation is one of the most important steps toward preventing injuries and moving with confidence after 50.

In this episode of Making Muscle Memories, Lauren Eirk explains one of the most misunderstood concepts in movement and pain: the body works as a connected system.

If you've ever wondered why your knee, shoulder, back, or neck keeps hurting even though you've treated the painful area, this episode may change the way you think about your body.

With over 40 years of experience helping adults over 50 improve muscle health and movement, Lauren shares why pain is often the result of compensation—when stronger muscles take over because weaker muscles are no longer doing their job.

You'll learn:
• Why pain isn't always located where the real problem begins.
• How muscle weakness can change the way your body moves.
• Why compensation can eventually overload joints and tissues.
• A smarter way to build strength that supports long-term injury prevention.
• How rebuilding muscle support can help you move with greater confidence.

If your goal is to stay active, protect your joints, and continue doing the things you love, this episode will help you better understand how your muscles work together to create healthy movement.

Timestamps:
00:00   What if the pain isn't where the problem begins?
03:02  The intelligence of our CNS
04:49  Compensation: Your body's backup plan
05:43  Muscles never work alone
06:58  Compensation is never a mistake
12:14  You cannot chase Pain
12:36  The hairdresser's Shoulder
16:08  Resources from FIS OnDemand
19:12  The Moral 
19:44  Conclusion

If you’re ready to build strength in a way that supports your joints, reduces pain, and helps you stay active as you age…

You can explore my full training platform, FIS OnDemand, at www.fisondemand.com

WHO IS LAUREN EIRK?
Lauren is a 40-year fitness veteran, MAT-Rx Full-Body Specialist,  specialist,  Certified Yoga Therapist  C-IAYT, and Certified Yoga Instructor E-RYT 500.   She is the founder of FIS OnDemand™, The 5-Step Isometric Method™, and Fitness Integrated Science. She focuses on joint longevity for adults 50+ through science-backed resistance training to help you pinpoint your weak areas, correct strength imbalances, reduce pain and inflammation, and restore mobility.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Have you ever wondered why when one thing hurts, it means that something else could potentially be weak? In this episode, I'm going to give you three distinct examples where this has played out with real interactions I've had with students and clients and also explain to you how I deal with this problem in my program FIS on Demand. After 40 years of work in the fitness industry, I have learned that real strength isn't just built through exercise, but through experience. I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work. We are all building muscle memories. One rep, one story, and one day at a time. Welcome to Making Muscle Memories. My name is Lauren Irk and I will be your host. In this episode, I want to talk with you about why the body masks weakness by making it show somewhere else in the body as compensated motion, pain, or tightness. Now, in my profession, being an MAT specialist, muscle activation techniques, and yoga therapist, as well as personal trainer, I've seen this happen with one-on-one clients and I've also seen this happen with group fitness situations. And this is where somebody comes in or someone's talking to me and they say, you know, this hurts, my shoulder hurts, or my knee hurts when I do this, or my ankle hurts when I do this. And many times they they want you to deal with that area. So I'll just give you an example of being an MAT, a muscle activation technique specialist. So many times, especially if you have a brand new client and they come in to see you and they're having shoulder pain, if that client has paid for the session, they want you to go to the shoulder. And I've had this lesson handed me on numerous occasions that many times when I've done that because I felt the client pressure to go into that area, it never works out the way it's supposed to. This has made me really think a lot about the intelligence of our central nervous system. You know, I think a lot of times that when we look at pain or we look at tightness or we look at compensated motion, that we wish that our body would have a better solution and we're we're mad that our body is doing it. If you look at all the commercials on television, we have you know abilities to take pills to mask the pain. We can put braces on so we can continue to perform our activity. We can go to a certain person that helps us to rub something out, like rub pain out, or put a laser on us or give us an adjustment of somehow of some way so that we can undo what the thing that our body is doing deliberately. Even though many times those clients come back to the appointments again and they're having those same things reoccurring. Well, the body doesn't make mistakes. I had a teacher tell me this once a long time ago, and that phrase has really stuck with me. The idea that no matter what supercomputer in the world could ever be made, what AI intelligence, whatever, is never going to be as sophisticated as the human brain in our central nervous system. If you think about it, our central nervous system knows everything that's going on at any given time. It knows how much sleep you got the night before. It knows what food you're taking in, how much liquid that you're taking in, the people that you're around, the activities that you're involved in, your genetic code, your injury history, your level of oxygen intake, how high your heart rate is going, your age, your energy consumption during the day, all of these things. Your central nervous system is just juggling all of these. And so when we go to do something, we think that our body is maybe attacking us, like, oh man, my back went out again, or I'm having spasms again, whatever it is. When in reality, your body is doing things perfectly given everything that your body is currently experiencing. Now, being a group fitness instructor for many, many years, I was taught that if we see someone compensating, I'll just take when I used to teach yoga all the time, and if I see somebody when every time they go into the pose, their knee would collapse in. We were taught that this was the pose. And so if their knee was collapsing in, you need to manually go over to that student, take your hand on their knee, and teach them to move their knee back to where it was. Now, if this is a muscular problem, a strength problem, and I set up the right scenario, this can make them stronger as long as they're pushing into me and I'm not pushing into them. But what if this thing that I'm doing, this sort of adjustment that I'm making to this client continues to take place and we never seem to get out of needing that adjustment. As a health practitioner, I have to start asking myself, well, maybe their body wants to do this. And you have to ask yourself this too. If you've been going to a chiropractor for year after year after year to get this thing put back in, like my back went out, but your back keeps going out, did you ever start to think that there needs to be a new solution? Because your back obviously doesn't want to be in this other position that your chiropractor is putting that into. If you think about it, when we have a stress and we have a trauma, we're overuse, underuse, aging, all of these things, our body does specific things to combat these stresses. So it might be that let's say you go outside and you twist your ankle on the sidewalk. You've been walking along, you hit a rock, and you twist your ankle. The first thing your body might do is add a lot of swelling and pain and compensation. So you walk in and now you got a limp. And so initially your body may shut off the muscles in the foot. So you can't put weight on it, right? If you do, there's too much pain anyway. So those muscles start to not be recruited. So there's no electrical impulses going to those muscles. So what happens? The other side may take over. So like when we're walking, we go the little step step, step, step. And so the other side they're getting pressed on, we take a lot of pressure on it and we take on that stress. Well, and that can go along for a while. And we can maybe even be able to do this for years. And then eventually, what happens, those tissues they get mad too. Because now they're doing their job, plus the job of the side that quit doing their job. And so what happens is they get too much stress and the joint becomes irritated, and the body can actually shift the stress somewhere else. And this can continue to happen throughout someone's lifetime until the point where you've got this perfect storm of all of these things taking place at one time, and we have nowhere to begin. We don't even know where to begin with this person. And any any sort of entry point that we make into this person's body opens up Pandora's box, and we have to deal with anything. And if you're a health practitioner listening to this podcast, I bet you're nodding right now. You're like, yep, pretty much. That's what we deal with every single day. Sometimes it's all you know, clients would rather just be in pain than actually take the necessary steps to get better or be weaker in taking the steps to become stronger. But I'm gonna tell you, there is definitely hope. But I want to talk with you about this idea of compensation. Compensation is never a mistake. And I had an instructor once tell me this. He said that in you know, compensation, although it's something that we always want to fix, it's never a mistake. So if I'm going back to my yoga class and I'm trying to adjust the student that continuously has their knee fall in whenever they're doing parjwakanasana, which is the side angle pose, their knee just falls in. I have to think to myself, well, if their knee keeps falling in, their body obviously wants that to happen. So I'm gonna allow that compensation to happen. And the only way that I can make that better is to give it a new scenario. That might mean that maybe I need to widen her stance from side to side instead of just front to back. Or maybe that might be I'm gonna put a prop under their hand so that I'm to reach for the floor so that that knee doesn't have to collapse, or that knee or hip doesn't have to collapse. Whatever it is, compensation is something that our body does all the time on purpose. Now we think about this, and if this is all making sense, and you're like, yep, I get it, this only makes sense, I'm gonna tell you some interactions that I've had with clients to tell you how this played out in that person's health and what a lesson it was, not only for the client, but was what it was for me. So the first story I'm gonna tell you about is a construction worker. This guy was in his late 50s and he complained of knee pain. Now, when I saw him for the first time, this was an in-person client. When I saw him for the first time, you could tell that the knee that was bothering him was much bigger than the other knee. So there was some arthritic changes and some swelling that had taken place in the knee, but still he didn't really know why. When he came to see me, he wanted me to look at his knee. I mean, he had paid me, he wanted me to look at his knee, he had a very large business and he wanted to get moving on it. So, of course, what did I do? I felt the need to go into his knee. So I started looking at his knee, and certainly because the knee was more enlarged, it didn't flex, it didn't bend as much as the other side, nor did it extend or straighten as much as the other side. But as I started, as I started to look through his body, because I'm trained to take more of a full-body approach, the knee ended up not being a bigger problem. What I started to notice is that when I started looking at his hip joints, it was very different. As a matter of fact, it was not even in the knee side, it was in the other side. As I was looking at his hip range of motion, it was specifically in internal rotation. What I started to notice is that the knee that was really feeling problematic was nowhere near as limited as the opposite side hip that couldn't actually bend or flex and it couldn't internally rotate. So, because of the way that I'm trained from MAT, that's what I ended up starting to work on. We started working on hip flexion exercises, we started working on his inner thigh muscles, we started looking at his hamstrings, looking at any muscle that could potentially internally rotate his hip. And guess what happened? His knee ended up getting better over time. Now it's a hard sell for a client because they again they want to they want to go in, they want to experience pressure or work on their knee, and I was somewhere else clearly. So this was a great example to me as well as to the client that sometimes when we're not managing our body very well, we may notice pain in a joint when it doesn't have anything to do with that joint. Now, the second example, this is when I was very first started doing in manual therapy. This was with an oral uh an orthopedic surgeon's son. No pressure. He comes in to me with knee uh like neck pain, and he was like a student from some upper, like an ivory um an what what up one of those um high-level schools up north. It was like Harvard or Yale or I I don't know, but it was it was one of those upper schools. And so Ivy League, that's the word I'm trying to think of, was an Ivy League school. Anyway, I digress. So he's going to school, he's home for Christmas, and he's got really horrible neck pain. And of course, I wanted to impress him, you know, because I had all this knowledge, and so I started immediately doing upper trap exercises. I started looking at his neck, we started doing like movements with his neck and all this, and I didn't have as much knowledge as I do now. Guess what happened? The next day they called me, and his neck and his shoulder was completely mad. He had so much pain, and I realized I had made a huge mistake. I felt such pressure to impress this doctor that I felt like I should go right into this kid's neck when I knew that when I was looking at him, it was actually in his core that I noticed he couldn't rotate to one side very well. But I didn't want to spend all my time doing core training when they had brought him into me to do a personal training session and he needed to, you know, get his neck worked on. And so for him, his neck was doing all the work. Because we can move so much in the neck, we have, you know, over 50% of our rotation in our in our spir our cervical spine happens in the first two vertebrae, and the spine itself, we move more in the neck than anywhere else in the body. The neck was picking on all the stress, picking up all the stress, and I was neglecting the bigger issue was that he had a lot of issues around his lumbar spine. Now, what happened there? I lost the client, they never came back, and that was always like a big uh gut punch. But I realized I was like, you know, you can't just treat something because it hurts. You can't chase pain. My mentor Greg Roscoff from MAT always says, never chase pain. It will lead you to places that you never potentially need to be. Pain is just a symptom that something is wrong. Now, the last client that I have was actually an online client who was meeting me. We were doing some online coaching. Now, this client was a hairdresser, and so you can imagine that, and she was in, I should say this, she was in her mid-40s. So she was having to, you know, raise her arm up and do all kinds of cutting and blow drying, and she had all this kinesio tape on. And so she would come into the sessions with me. She would just kind of see her studio, and we would meet one-on-one, and we would talk about things, and I would coach her through exercises, and we weren't meeting, she was moved, she was working inside of my app. We again another one of these stories where she really wanted to rehab her shoulder because she was very sure that she had torn a muscle and she was gonna have to have surgery, and that's what we were trying to prepare her for. Well, guess what? It was very similar to the the the orthopedic surgeon's son. What had happened was I decided that, well, I'm gonna have to help her with her shoulder. We started doing a lot of upper trapezius work, some you know, upward rotation. We started looking at a lot of her rotator cuff muscles and trying to get those stronger, but it wasn't really changing. She was continuing to have a lot of uh shoulder pain, and she was like, Well, I think I'm gonna have to have surgery. And then one time we were together and I was just sort of, you know, waiting, and I watched her come into her space and come up in front of her camera, and she was really tall. And so I was looking at her and I sort of saw a full body shot, and she was wearing these shoes, and these shoes looked they looked curious at best. And I was asking her, What are you wearing? And she was wearing these shoes that rocked her from front to back. I don't know what the brand was, sketchers, something like that, MBTs. She goes, Oh, I love them. I wear them all the time. I wear them to all my personal training or my my uh physical therapy appointments, I wear them when I exercise, I wear them when I walk my dog, and I start going, huh? So you're wearing these shoes that rock you from front to back, and you think this has nothing related, nothing to do with your shoulder. So from then I decided we need to look at other things. We started having her look at her hip joints, her trunk and spine, her knees, her ankles, her feet, and what we noticed was that there were huge imbalances. We were looking, we could see them right online when we were watching her move. Her hip on the opposite side of that shoulder was completely locked. And then when you look down her foot, we had her take off her shoes and her toes would barely move. I said, curl your toes, this is about as much as they could curl. Just very little at all. If you're not watching this, I'm just barely curling my fingers. And so we had to have a conversation about her shoes. Her shoes were thick, they were rocking her from front to back, they were forcing ankle dorsi flexion, they were snapping her knee backwards as she rolled back through planter flexion, and by the fact that she couldn't feel ground forces because the the bottom of the shoe were like literally that thick in the middle, we decided that we would progressively move her out of those shoes. So the first thing she did is went to a thicker, you know, like cross-training type shoe, going into like a running shoe, and eventually she worked her way down to a minimalist shoe, and she ended up, guess what? Never having shoulder surgery, never had shoulder pain. It was all stemming from her footwear that was causing her trunk not to be able to move very well, and that was translating all the way up into her trunk and spine, through her neck, and through her upper extremities and shoulders. So this is a very important example. All of those three things are very important examples of how the body can learn to compensate, how the body can learn to cover up our weaknesses. Now, in my program FIS on Demand, when I very first started transitioning from one, I used to be on a different platform and I've just rebranded and put it into UScreen, which I love. I'm really happy with what everything that is done, but there was like an effort to, you know, get more of a more of a launch, if you will, when we started moving programs. And I remember they all put pressure on me. They were like, you need to do like seven-day or someone's gonna get out of pain. And I thought, seven days get out of pain. And that's some of the icky things about creating products. I think as someone myself that's more of a thinker, um, there's never a seven-day anything, first of all. All I can really promise people is that they're gonna have a little maybe quick win, but it's gonna be a long process and it's gonna be a head-to-toe process. But at the time, I was getting a lot of pressure to put together some seven-day things. And so they now exist on my platform as seven-day kickstarts, and I give them to new people that are just just joining, and they can go through one of these, and I always claim these are just the precursor to give you a quick win, and then I lead them through the platform of what to do next. So if they have a step-by-step version, but there's the they sit up there so that and some of my older members they'll go back up there and use them because they're just a nice little sequence. But imagine someone coming to my platform for the first time and they're in pain. Like, oh my gosh, pain can be so deep. It can be so many layers. And for me to say, do these exercises and you're gonna be out of pain, that is something I never say on my platform. I always say, hey, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a PT, but I am an MAT, I am a certified yoga therapist, and I've been in this industry for 40 plus years, and I know what works for a lot of clients. But I always give them a process. It's all about a process, and I call it the five-step isometric method. It is adding one little thing at a time. And you can't understand what it is that's wrong with you unless you start. Like you can't say, I'm gonna exercise when I get out of pain. You'll never start exercising. You will figure out what's wrong when you start moving. You tweak things, you try working on your foot. That may make it flare up, it may make it not. Maybe I'm gonna move to a different area, maybe I'm gonna lower the intensity, maybe I'm gonna change the position. But I want to have lots of options as to how to work. And what I've done in all of my longevity programs, my challenges, and those seven-day kickstarts, as well as the fitness plans that I use at that I give out every week to my members, I always give a full body approach. We do a little core, we do a little lower body, we do a little upper body, we do a little bit of a full body. And we do multiple planes of motion, we use multiple types of equipment, and I encourage members to continuously listen to the needs of their body on a given basis. Because as one area might resolve, another area might come up. And this is why sometimes you may feel pain over here, but you might actually have the weakness over here. So the moral to this episode is don't focus so much about pain. Pain is just there. It's information, it's telling you something's out of balance. It doesn't mean treat that, doesn't mean inject that, doesn't mean rub that, doesn't mean brace that. It means let's figure out why your body is choosing to put a lot of stress there. There are lots of joints in your body. There's lots of different ways that we can move. But I encourage you to take things one step at a time from the least invasive form of exercise and over the years moving towards the highest level of exercise. So if this uh episode helped you, I'd love it if you would forward it to somebody that is in need, somebody that might feel lost about how to resolve their pain. And also, I would definitely recommend that you take a deep dive in your own health history, your own fitness plans, and figure out where some of these things may have come from. If you like this episode, make sure to give me a thumbs up if you're on YouTube, and I would love to have um you to rate this podcast if you like it. And most of all, I thank you for being here. I thank you for watching, and I thank you for showing up for yourself. I will see you next time. Take care.