Do you know Louis CK’s shitty ankle skit?
1st it will make you laugh
2nd it will probably hit close to home for a lot of you
3rd (that’s where I come in) it doesn’t have to be that way!
So before we begin: watch it
“-Yeah your ankle, it’s just… worn out.
-What do you mean? I injured my ankle?
-No, it’s just shitty now.”
Even if you’re not 40 yet but have a body,
you are wearing it out.
Whether you use it a lot or not. It’s like a car. You need to maintain it. You get regular oil changes, new brakes, etc… If you get in a car accident, you do the repairs necessary. Same with your body. You need regular maintenance and if you get injured, you get help.
Let’s say you break your ankle. Doctors put you in a cast or a boot to let the bone heal, great. But while you’re not putting weight on that ankle the rest of your body has to work overtime to compensate and accommodate the weight shifting that happens. So maybe you’re leaning more on the healthy ankle, maybe more on the inside of it.
After the cast is removed your body may still be leaning more on the inside of the “good” ankle, because that’s what it was doing to protect the injury, and if you don’t clearly tell it to stop, it will keep doing it. For. Ever.
And when you hit 40, or 50, that healthy ankle starts hurting “out of nowhere”, you’ve worn it out.
You now have “an incurable shitty ankle”.
When you have any kind of injury, strain, sprain, surgery, don’t underestimate the long term effects on the rest of your body. Get help!
That’s one of the things Rolfing® is really good at!
We release the tension in the connective tissue, the web that gives shape to your body, the web that holds your body together.
One of my clients is still limping, 10 years after her knee surgery. She never noticed it. She doesn’t have to limp, she has no pain, it’s just a habit.
But a habit that is slowly affecting the way she moves her hips and her ankle. So we’re addressing it, we’re retraining her body to feel that it’s ok to move through the knee. We’re getting rid of the deep tension in her hip that is accommodating the limping.
Now if you’re well over 40 already, do not despair! First of all you might not have a worn out ankle, or knee. But I guarantee that you have tension pulling on some parts of your body, and as your body gets older and doesn’t regenerate as well, you might want to pay attention to those tensions before they start wrecking havoc! Because eventually, they will.
And if you’re over 40 and you’re one of us, with a shi**y ankle, shoulder, elbow… there is also hope!
By re-aligning your body we may reduce the pain, or help it not get worse. We can also work with chronic compensations.
If you do have a badly worn out joint, other places in your body are inevitably working harder to protect that joint. Relieving the strain on those other places can make a real difference in your quality of life and your pain level.
“-Well there’s things you can do. You can stretch. For a half hour a day you should stretch your ankle.
-How long will that take to fix it?
-No, you just do that now. That’s just a new thing you do until you and your shi**y ankle both die…”
Or there’s Rolfing®…
