There’s a small confession I’m perfectly comfortable making publicly: chiropractors are not immune to the same problems our patients experience. Like many people today, I spend long hours sitting, writing, researching, and working at a computer.
Over the past few months I’ve been preparing articles and longer pieces of writing, and somewhere along the way I developed an irritating pinch near the shoulder blade—right around the lower angle of the scapula. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was persistent. The sort of nagging discomfort that many patients describe when they come into the clinic.
What struck me most was how familiar the story sounded. Patients often explain that their pain isn’t severe enough to stop them completely, but it lingers just enough to interfere with concentration, exercise, or sleep. That was exactly my experience. I could still train karate, still exercise, still work—but something in the mechanics wasn’t quite right.
Naturally, I approached the problem in the way most practitioners would. I had the area adjusted. I had massage work done. I stretched the surrounding muscles and strengthened them with some weight training. All of these things helped, at least temporarily. Each intervention seemed to reduce the irritation for a while, but after a few days the same tight, localised discomfort would quietly return.
When that happens, it usually tells us something important. It suggests that the underlying pattern—the way the body is moving or positioning itself throughout the day—hasn’t really changed. The treatment may ease the symptoms, but the mechanical environment that created the irritation is still present.
Modern life gives us plenty of opportunities for that pattern to develop. Sitting at desks for long periods encourages the rib cage to collapse forward, the thoracic spine to stiffen, and the shoulder blades to lose their natural rhythm over the rib cage. Even when we try to correct things—raising the monitor, adjusting the chair, improving posture—we can still drift back into positions that restrict movement and breathing.
That realization led me to start looking in a slightly different direction. Instead of focusing only on the sore spot, I began exploring movement patterns that humans performed naturally long before computers and office chairs existed. Many movement specialists today refer to these as primitive or primal patterns: deep squatting, crawling, hanging from the arms, and rotating through the spine. These are not complicated exercises. In fact, they’re remarkably simple. They are movements that the human body evolved to perform and that most of us practiced instinctively as children.
One idea that resonated with me immediately was the notion that the ground is our friend. Modern life encourages us to operate mostly in two positions—sitting in chairs or standing upright. Spending time moving on the ground, however, changes the mechanics entirely. Crawling patterns activate the core and shoulder stabilizers. Deep squatting restores hip mobility and spinal alignment. Rotational drills bring life back into the thoracic spine. Hanging from rings or bars allows the shoulders and rib cage to decompress in a way that is difficult to replicate with machines.
Interestingly, the more I explored these movements, the more I recognized how closely they resemble elements already present in traditional martial arts training. Karate practice includes deep stances, rotational power, controlled breathing, and coordinated movement through the whole body. These patterns encourage the shoulder blades to glide naturally over the rib cage rather than becoming locked into a single position.
That observation gave me an idea. Rather than simply applying treatments to the irritated area, I decided to treat this as a small personal experiment. Over the next few months I’ll be incorporating a series of natural movement drills into my own routine—deep squats, crawling patterns, ring exercises, thoracic mobility work, and breathing drills that expand the rib cage properly. In other words, I’ll be using my own body as a test laboratory.
The goal isn’t to chase a miracle cure. The goal is to observe how restoring natural movement patterns affects a persistent mechanical irritation. I’ll be paying attention to what changes, what improves, and what feels different during everyday activities like sitting, writing, training, and sailing.
What I find most interesting about this process is how often the simplest ideas prove to be the most powerful. Many aches and pains that linger in the background of modern life are not caused by injury or disease. They arise because the body gradually loses some of the movements it was designed to perform. When those movements are reintroduced—slowly and consistently—the body often responds remarkably well.
So if you’ve ever experienced that stubborn ache between the shoulder blades after long hours at a desk, you’re certainly not alone. Even chiropractors can fall into the same patterns as everyone else. The encouraging news is that the body has an impressive capacity to adapt when we give it the right kind of movement again.
Over the coming months I’ll share what I learn from this little experiment. Sometimes the best way to understand a problem is not just to treat it, but to experience it firsthand and explore how the body responds when we return to the simple, natural movements it was built for.
