To realize where my rheumatoid arthritis truly came from made the difference between treatment and healing

Now imagine that you are standing in front of that full bucket of water, knowing that you will lift and carry it shortly. Thinking of that doesn’t necessarily have to happen in the spotlight of your consciousness.

At lightning speed, our brain captures the challenge and passes on the necessary signals to our musculoskeletal system.

And even the first unconscious impulses of tension happen directly in our muscles and those tendons forming the connection between our joints and bones.

Where force is to be exerted, the corresponding tissue cells connected to our bones and joints contract while the antagonistic muscles relax. As a result, we can bend our arms to pull the bucket up. On the inside, muscles and tendons are shortened and taut; on the outside long and yielding. Contracting tendons and muscles transmit impulses to the involved joints and exert pressure and tension onto them. And that before we lift stretching our larger muscles visibly and tangibly. Even if all that together can take place within a fraction of a second.

Those who cannot relieve tension when it’s no longer needed and therefore carry too much stress around live in a body that is automatically constantly tense and on the go.

Harmful tension isn’t always obvious to us: it can also go unnoticed, be overlooked or underestimated, especially since the triggering situation can quickly be over or considered normal. In any case, it means unnecessary stress. The intensity of that stress and the quality of posture and movement induce each other alternately.

Some people visibly and palpably tense larger or more muscles when stressed. So much so that their fellow human beings can also see and feel the tensed muscles and realize: “You’re all tensed!”, and then usually go on by saying: “Come on, relax!”

To the extent that tension has become part of normal body sensation, we are blind to we do no longer feel it and therefore don’t perceive it as unpleasant – takes to mean- not worth changing to us. As a result, we consider ourselves healthy and neither see any need nor any opportunity for a change. When it came to rheumatoid arthritis, this was one of the crucial points for me. When I fell ill, I couldn’t feel what made me so sick. But I was able to learn how to sense and relieve my tension timely.

Stress and tension become a severe overload when they are:

Permanently consistent or

too strong in a particular situation.

When one doesn’t relax or only relaxes insufficiently, tension will remain. If tension is not sufficiently relieved in time, it accumulates, spreads, and has an overloading effect on our joints.

When overload due to tension becomes morbid our relieving moments of relaxation then are no longer sufficient; they can’t reach the deep sitting problem anymore.

To my body, the overload meant:

My tension exceeded the upper limit. 

Regarding diseases of the musculoskeletal system, two types of illness development due to overloading tension in muscles and tendons, which are also triggered and maintained by incorrect posture, are distinguished in the HeilÜben exercises:

1. Overloading tension first leads to strain

spreading throughout the body and being palpable and visible in poor posture and movement restrictions at the latest to a physiotherapist. Muscular pain then draws attention to impending destruction – including the risk to the joints. Excessive tension also affects the bones and joints to which they are connected via muscles and tendons, exposing them to unusual, harmful stress. The mechanical destruction of the bony substance begins and, as the disease progresses, also causes painful inflammation in the joint.

2. Overloading tension leads directly to inflammation in joints. 

Like every human being, I contract my muscles to hold or move stuff in many different everyday movements. My tense and contracted muscles are just as clearly visible and palpable as they would be on everybody else. But in order not to show stress, however, I used to let my larger muscles loosen up much more in movement and posture than many of my fellow human beings, without reducing my tension. But that didn’t make me any healthier. Because no matter how much looser I let my larger muscles, tension accumulated in me. When I was tense due to stress and poor posture, muscle and tendon cells in bones and joints were automatically tensed in an overloading way, which (at that time) in unpleasant situations passed on my need for both moving and freezing. This physical tension increasingly got habituated. In retrospect, before the onset of my rheumatoid arthritis, this would have been noticeable by the feeling of situational insecurity about my movements. My joints suffered from overloading stimuli such as the unusual pressure and pull from the tense and/or contracted tendon cells connected to them and muscle cells connected to the tendon cells, without any major muscles or tendons being noticeably tense. During my HeilÜben exercises, I found my RA to result from such overloads. My joints became inflamed “from within” without prior mechanical destruction of the bony structure.

The effect of the HeilÜben exercises showed me that depending on how far I reached, the actual relaxation of my previously so soft and relaxed appearing muscles and tendons and thereby also relieved some malposition, the inflammatory and thus destructive process in my joints vanished and with it the inflammatory pain. As a result, when I could stay permanently under my upper limit, my rheumatoid arthritis healed.

In the sense of the HeilÜben exercises, healing from stress-related RA means that the destructive chronic inflammatory process eventually comes to a standstill. I distinguish between the disease itself and its possible consequential damage.

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Manja and the HeilÜben team

Allg. Produktbild en Luis Quintero two women doing push ups 1671218

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