3 Questions About Arms
Apr 05, 2024Previously, I made a distinction between our personal and evolutionary narratives. I claimed that many of the problems you have with your arms are not personal to you – instead, they are part of an evolutionary narrative you share with other human beings.
When it comes to considering the problems you experience with your arms - such as stiff neck, sore shoulders and the like - we can unravel this evolutionary narrative by asking three questions:
1. Why did the arms go wrong?
2. How did the arms go wrong?
3. Where did the arms go wrong?
1. Why did the arms go wrong?
They didn’t.
If your arms hurt - in Japan it’s called “KATAKORI”, which means stiff shoulders – it is because they should hurt. The fact that you have pain in your shoulder, elbow or wrist is part of what is right about them. Our evolutionary design reports misuse to us.
What is misuse?
Misuse is using your arms in a way they were not designed to be used.
It’s like wearing a shoe on the wrong foot. You can put your left shoe on your right foot and still walk – but your feet won’t like it. They will start hurting. You get blisters. If you keep doing it, eventually both the shoe and your foot change shape to accommodate each other.
For example, both my parents had their little toes crossing over the top of the toe next to it because, during the Second World War, they were forced to continue wearing shoes that were too small for their feet.
Pain is there to tell us ‘something’ is wrong – pain is what is right about us, treat it respectfully.
So what is the ‘something’ that is wrong?
2. How did the arms go wrong?
The better question is: what changed to cause us to use our arms differently?
We are mammals, and most mammals have both arms and legs on the ground. We are in a special class of mammals who - along with other primates, kangaroos, penguins, meerkats and occasionally bears - can balance on two limbs. But no animal lives perpetually on two legs except us. After crawling as babies, we rarely use our arms on the ground or swing from trees to get around anymore.
Which, of course, leaves our arms free to do what we want.
This presents us with a unique evolutionary narrative—our arms were released from having weight-bearing. This is a new stage of the 500 million years of continuous chordatic evolution of moving systems. Everyone knows this meant we could use our arms to make tools, but who is asking about the evolutionary consequences of having a limb designed to bear weight that no longer fulfils that function?
Well, today I am.
When weight-bearing limbs must:
1. Maintain constant high tone so the limb can support & assist the movement of the torso.
But arms don’t need to have this level of tone anymore!
Why? Because the arm is not weight-bearing.
2. Work at the front of the body i.e from tummy to ground.
With no ‘ground’ under them, your arms are free to move backwards—which they would never otherwise do. Can you imagine a dog, cow, or horse with a front leg up behind its back?
But you can imagine a human doing this. They do it often. Which leads to the next question:
3. Why did the arms go wrong?
That will take longer explore, so…
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