Why matrix?

By Carolyn Rankin, LMT

We do things differently here at MATRIX. 

We train more than your muscles. We also train your brain and sensory systems.

Our training methods are based on the Neuromatrix Pain Theory. This theory was first introduced by Dr. Ronald Melzack in 2001. Dr. Melzack’s neuromatrix pain theory (NPT) is an advancement on the Gate Control Pain Theory, which he and Patrick D. Wall first introduced in 1965.

The application of the NPT to physical movement training:

• reduces chronic pain.

• helps prevent future injuries.

• improves your ability to move better, faster, stronger, and with less pain.

• allows you to break through plateaus

The (really, really, really, really) short version of this is that we don’t, as more outdated pain theories teach, have nerve endings that specifically sense pain and then tell our brain when we are hurt. 

We have nerve endings of course. But they don’t decide when something is painful. They gather information from the world around us and send that information to our brains, no judgment. Just information.

It is your brain that decides what to do with that information. If your brain feels that something is happening that could inhibit our ability to move and function properly (from a paper cut to a broken bone), it creates the sensation we know as “pain.”  This sensation is how your brain tells you that something is wrong and that you need to take action to address it. 

This all happens in a fraction of a second and without any conscious effort on your part. 

Ok, let’s dive in!

Foundational Concepts

“You” are not “your brain”

You’ll notice that “you” and “your brain” are treated as separate entities throughout this blog. Your brain has two parts: your subconscious and conscious. Your subconscious brain handles everything that needs to happen to keep you alive and well without you having to think about it. For example, it keeps your heart beating and maintains your body temperature. Its primary purpose is survival. 

When we talk about “your brain,” we are referring to your subconscious. When we say “you,” we mean your conscious brain.

What do we mean by “Pain?” 

“Pain” includes the sensations we are all familiar with such as sharp, burning, achey, throbbing, etc. It also encompasses things like limited range of motion and weakness. Pain in this sense is a broad term that includes anything that limits your ability to move and function properly. 

There are two primary categories of pain: Acute and Chronic. The distinction between acute and chronic pain is critically important to understanding NPT. 

Acute Pain

For our purposes, acute pain is what you experience when there is physical damage to your body that needs to be addressed/treated. The tissue is torn, the ligament is pulled, you stepped on a bee, etc. 

Imagine you are running, and you tear your ACL. The pain you feel is acute, and it is your brain’s way of telling you that your body has sustained damage and you need to stop running. Your brain wants you to fix the damage and not make it worse.

Acute pain can be essential to our very survival.  It is a critically important message and should never be ignored or masked. 

With acute pain, you know or can identify the damage. When you are experiencing acute pain, you know why, and you can take steps to help it. 

Chronic Pain

For our purposes, chronic pain refers to aches, soreness, limited range of motion, and muscle weakness that seem to come and go for no apparent reason. Chronic pain is typically felt at the sight of past injuries (more on this farther down). 

The difference between acute and chronic is that with chronic pain there is no identifiable damage to your body anymore. Every professional you see tells you there is nothing wrong. Nothing is broken, nothing is torn, all the damage from the original injury has healed. But you still have pain there.

Imagine that your torn ACL happened 15 years ago. According to every test and x-ray, it has completely healed. But sometimes when you run, it still hurts.

With chronic pain, no one can identify the damage. You don’t know why you’re experiencing chronic pain.

Threats 

Your body is a well-balanced, finely tuned ecosystem and needs to maintain very specific conditions to function properly. Anything that has the potential to disturb that balance is a threat. 

Remember, your brain is all about survival. It could interpret anything that puts your basic survival at risk as a threat, even on a very small scale. A stubbed toe might not seem like a big deal to you now, but if you were a caveperson who needed to be able to move quickly to avoid predators, that stubbed toe could make you run slower, which would make you much easier prey.

Physical injuries are threats, but they are not the only things that threaten your brain. There are many kinds of threats. They can be emotional, psychological, environmental, nutritional, unhealthy lifestyle, etc. 

In addition to everything listed above, your brain will feel threatened if it is not receiving clear, accurate, reliable data about the world around you through your sensory systems. 

Your auditory, visual, vestibular, gustatory, olfactory, and proprioceptive systems provide your brain with context about the world around you. 

This isn’t just about humans by the way. Cats have special proprioceptors in their whiskers that sense air current and vibration to help them know where they are in space. This is one of the reasons cats always land on all fours! (P.S. Because whiskers are so important to a cat’s survival, they can experience pain if you play with them!) 

Theories on Pain

The traditional theories that we are most familiar with are based on the premise that your peripheral nerves feel pain at the sight of an injury and then send those signals up to let your brain know there is a problem.

Under these theories, the peripheral nerves decide that something is painful and then send signals to your brain to let it know. Your brain is basically waiting to be told about damage to your body.

While these theories offered hypotheses about why we feel acute pain, they don’t account for why we feel chronic pain. 

The basic premise of the Neuromatrix Pain Theory is that it is your Central Nervous System, not your peripheral nervous system, that decides whether or not the feeling of pain is warranted in any given situation.  

Your brain is constantly monitoring everything around you and everything that happens to you through your sensory systems. These systems send information to your brain. Your brain then takes that information and decides if it is something that could potentially pose a threat to you. 

If your brain determines there is a threat, it needs to let you know about it. Your brain creates the sensation of pain as a way to alert you to the fact that there is a threat and that you need to do (or stop doing) something to help reduce or alleviate the threat. 

Unlike traditional theories, the NPT explains why we experience chronic pain (it is also the only theory that explains phantom limb syndrome).

 Your Threat Bucket and Chronic Pain

Your “Threat Bucket” is essentially your brain’s capacity to cope with threats. Think of your brain as a bucket and threats as water. Your brain can cope with a lot of different kinds of threats.

As you go around living your daily life, your brain is constantly identifying all different kinds of threats (physical pain, stress, poor diet, environmental hazards, etc.) and throwing them in the bucket. This bucket can handle a lot of threats without bothering to let you know about them, meaning without creating pain.

But your threat bucket has its limit. Once that limit is reached, your bucket overflows. When your threat bucket overflows, whether it’s because of a physical injury or some other threat, your brain is going to create pain. 

When your bucket overflows because of a physical injury, you always experience what we’ve been calling acute pain.  An injury that needs attention automatically overflows your bucket because this kind of pain is important to your survival.  Acute pain will linger until your body is healed.  

Chronic pain is the more interesting and important example. Imagine you are working to meet an important deadline at work. You are not eating or sleeping well. You are stressed out. Maybe you’re not staying hydrated. You’re not exercising. But you’re plugging along. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, your low back begins to ache in the same spot you had a bulging disc 10 years ago. The ache is so bad that you have to get up from your computer and lay down, take a walk, or get a massage. 

Your threat bucket just couldn’t handle everything going on in your life, so it overflowed. Your brain said, “You know what? That’s it. I can’t take it anymore. I’m now going to create pain to force you to stop, slow down, rest.”

Your brain will often create chronic pain in the same location as past injuries. This is because when you sustained and were recovering from that injury, your brain was constantly signaling acute pain in that area so you knew there was a problem and that you had to treat it. By doing this, your brain created neural pathways to get better at feeling that pain. It’s like your brain laid down a nice direct, smooth highway to help you feel that pain.

Without lots of targeted rehab, these pathways don’t disappear when your injury is healed. So when your bucket overflows because of a whole slew of reasons, rather than physical trauma to a specific spot, your brain defaults to using highways it has already made. They are the fastest, easiest way for your brain to get your attention. 

Why does this all matter?

One of the most effective ways to help your brain feel less threatened is to provide it with clearer, more accurate information about the world around you.

And here’s where we come in 😊

Chronic Pain reduction

(NOTE: chronic pain, we are not talking about reducing or masking acute pain!)

When you experience chronic pain, it means that your threat bucket is overflowing, and your brain wants you to do something to reduce the threats. It does this by creating chronic pain. But because your bucket is filled with all kinds of different kinds of threats, none of which are as easily identifiable as a stubbed toe or torn ACL, there isn’t one specific thing you can do to reduce them and make the pain stop.

When you train your sensory systems, you provide your brain with clearer information about the world around it.

Providing your brain with clearer information removes a huge threat to your brain. This means that your bucket has a greater capacity to deal with stress, work, family problems, and sensory mismatch (wondering what the heck that is?  Shoot us an email and we’ll explain more!). More room in your bucket means you can better cope with your life and the world around you without your brain being overloaded and creating pain.

It’s important to note that training your sensory systems is one of many steps you can take to help your brain cope with threats. Mental health counseling, stress reduction techniques such as yoga and massage therapy (also offered at MATRIX), setting professional boundaries, substance abuse treatment, dietary changes, etc., are all important avenues to explore when addressing brain health.

Better, faster, more efficient movement 

Quick reminder: pain is more than just the sensation. It is anything that limits your ability to move and function. So, when your brain creates pain, it is probably also inhibiting movement, limiting your range of motion, causing muscle weakness, and making you move slower.

Improving and training your sensory systems will provide the brain with better information about the world around you. This means your brain feels safe enough that it won’t create chronic pain, and it will also allow you to move faster, be stronger, train harder, and improve your overall athletic performance and health.

When your brain allows you to move faster and train harder: 

• You burn more calories.

• You get stronger.

• You run farther.

• You lift heavier.

• Your cardiovascular and respiratory functioning improves.

• Your stress levels decrease.

• Your metabolism increases.

Think about what happens if you are walking through an unfamiliar room and someone turns the lights off. You immediately start walking slower. Your brain is not receiving good information from your eyes, so it is slowing you down to keep you safe. It isn’t creating pain, because it doesn’t need you to stop doing what you’re doing. But it needs you to be more cautious. 

But if in that same situation you have night vision goggles, then the dark doesn’t faze you, and your brain doesn’t slow you down. The lights are still turned off. But you are better equipped to handle the situation.

At MATRIX, we use all this information to create personal training programs specifically designed for you. 

This means that no two personal training programs are alike. Our clients range from people recovering from brain injuries to athletes working towards peak performance to people who just want to stay active and independent as they age. 

No matter where you fall on the spectrum, you get more than just muscular, respiratory and cardiovascular workouts (but don’t worry, you’ll get plenty of those!). You also get sensory training. 

We will test your senses to see which, if any, are not functioning optimally. We will perform tests to identify any issues with your sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. For example, if Shane touches both of your forearms, you might feel the left one more than the right. That actually means something to Shane. He then performs drills and exercises to assess what can help any issues he identifies.

When he finds drills or exercises that make your brain work better, he will incorporate those into your physical fitness or injury recovery and prevention training. For example, rather than just doing squats, he might have you doing squats while he holds a vibration tool against your right thigh and asks you to look in a specific part of the room.

BOTTOM LINE

If you are not training your sensory systems and brain along with your muscles, you are not performing at full capacity. 

Whether it is chronic pain holding you back, or you’ve hit a plateau in athletic performance, you have to train more than just your muscles to move forward.

Ok, so there you have the very tip of the MATRIX iceberg. If you got this far, thank you. If you want to know more, have burning questions, are totally confused, or all of the above, don’t hesitate to reach out!