Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Living: A Practical Approach to Eliminating Chronic Back Pain, Tendonitis, Neck and Shoulder Tension, and Repetitive

By Craig Williamson

Book Overview

Here's an innovative and practical approach to eliminating chronic muscle pain, written by a popular occupational therapist with thirty years of experience freeing people from the discomfort of tendonitis, lower back pain, and neck and shoulder tension. These types of chronic pain can be caused by a number of factors, including old injuries, habitual movement patterns, problems with body alignment, psychological causes, and inability to sense your own body movements accurately. Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Living clearly and concisely explains the causes of persistent muscle pain and offers a therapeutic exercise program to address these problems and end pain. This book explains the basic principles behind Williamson Muscular Retraining, a pain-relief discipline, in a way that is practical and easy to understand. The problems of poor posture, muscle tension, and stress-caused pain are corrected by seeing them through the lens of kinesthetic awareness. Normal kinesthetic awareness is lacking in much of the population and typically overlooked by health care practitioners. Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Living presents case examples of how people have used kinesthetic awareness and exercises to change how they think of their bodies and to end pain.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590303679
• ISBN13: 9781590303672
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Trumpeter
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Living by Craig Williamson

For anyone who is trying to deal with physical pain, long or short term, this book is a truly powerful tool. I've been in the field for decades, and Mr. Williamson's clarity and precision outshine most of what's available. Written in simple language, he makes a deep and complex subject easily accessible. The best thing about this book is that it is gives you a way to actually put its transformative information into immediate use. I experienced considerable pain relief after just a few hours of playing with the exercises. It's now required reading for all my clients! Thank you Mr. Williamson.

Practical and Interesting

This book is well-balanced in practical and theoretical advice regarding how to manage chronic muscle pain, tension, repetitive stress injuries, tendonitis, etc. The basic principle rests on what Williamson calls "kinesthetic awareness," a quality most of us lack. Learning to develop our kinesthesia is the key to pain-free living. Williamson includes "explorations" in each chapter in order to develop this awareness. Part II of the book includes exercises tailored toward problem areas and based on the prior explorations. Williamson presents the information in a logical and engaging way, encouraging the reader to the exercises daily. I have seen great improvement in my own lower back pain and would recommend this book to anyone who struggles with muscular pain.

The best book of its kind

Craig Williamson's book is the best of its kind I've ever read. It is well written and easy to understand. He has made intelligible, the workings of the human body's muscles, tendons, joints and has explained so many of the reasons that we have body pain. If you've been suffering for years this book will turn on the light. When I finished it I wanted to make an appointment immediately but the author who practices his art of retraining lives in another State. I am doing the exercises and wish that there was a companion dvd so that I could be sure I am doing them right. I have written to the author and he is desirous of getting one out as well. Until then I am going to reread the book and continue to learn the exercises with great hopes of one day being free or at least more free than I am now of discomfort.

Really interesting book!!!

I got a copy of this from the library and have got so much out of it that I came online to buy my own copy. I have been having treatment through acupuncture and cranial sacral therapy to get my hip back into alignment after falling down the stairs, and this explains a lot of what the therapist tries to explain to me during the sessions! I absolutely recommend this book..

Great addition to my library

As a massage therapist, I found Craig Williamson's book to be both absorbing and enlightening. Williamson's book reads like a novel but explains clearly how chronic pain frequently has a neuromuscular rather than a mechanical root cause. He explains that muscle tone is influenced by the nervous system, coining the term "kinesthetic dysfunction" to describe people who are unable to tell whether or not their muscles are tense or relaxed. Williamson says that the neuromuscular system may maintain the cycle of pain long after an injury should have healed. He states, "If you think of a muscle as something that is being tightened, the implication is that someone is tightening it. That someone is you, even if you are not aware of it and do not wish to do so" (p. 62). He suggests that the reasons for musculoskeletal pain--other than structural damage--include reflexive muscular reaction from an injury, dysfunctional movement patterns, poor alignment and body use, kinesthetic dysfunction, and emotions. Although most of us who provide massage therapy do not work with clients dressed and walking about the room, as Williamson does, we can derive insights from his book to aid our understanding and treatment of chronic pain. Specifically, his book reinforces us to think of ways to help our clients become more aware - kinesthetically - of their bodies and habitual movement patterns. I highly recommend this book to LMTs and others who work with people who are in pain.