When you are involved in an accident or sports injury there is an obvious reason as to why certain tissues are then painful; the knee twists in a tackle or you get whiplash from a crash.  However, the vast majority of aches and pains that we experience just creep up on us gradually and are not associated with a primary traumatic event.  In these cases the injury process is a gradual one where the tissues involved are place under undue stress and strain that they cannot cope with over long periods of time.  Tissues do adapt to increased stress but only very slowly so if we change our movement or exercise habits relatively quickly the body often finds it cannot cope.  We refer to this as someone’s load history.

As well as “too much too soon” there are lots of biomechanical and skeletal factors that predispose us to injury.  Our skeletons are not always an exact mirror image from side to side; often people have one leg longer than the other, a shin that twists slightly or one hip socket orientated differently from the other.  Our joints are designed to tolerate stress and strain in certain planes of movement and when this deviates from “ideal” on a habitually basis these joint tissues can easily start to degenerate or become worn often resulting in pain.