Physical trauma aside, chronic muscle pain and joint pain can be attributed to many things, including pulled muscles, sprains, tears, trigger points, poor posture, sciatica and even herniated discs. What do all of these have in common? Muscle imbalances are likely at their root.

When the muscles of your body are not equally toned on left and right sides from front to back, they are said to be imbalanced. Muscle imbalances cause pain because they create postural dysfunctions, like slouching, hunched shoulders and tipped pelvis. Poor posture leads to abnormal curvature of the spine, which over times leads the joints to break down, muscle trigger points to form, ligaments to tighten and muscles to contract. This leads to chronic muscle and joint pain.

It is important to know that chronic pain resulting from muscle imbalances does not happen in a day. On the contrary, they occur little by little over the course of months and even years. But the result of those imbalances, the postural dysfunctions and then the pain itself, are often experienced as sudden onset. That is why people think they slept wrong or lifted something incorrectly and “threw out their back.” Actually, the process of the back being “thrown out” had been happening for quite a while; it just took one last incident to make it happen.

Muscle imbalances can cause both localized and referred pain. Tight muscles around the scapula can cause pain to radiate (or be felt) in the chest and above the eyes. Many headaches are cause by tight (imbalanced) scapular muscles. When the abdominal muscles are weak in relation to lower back muscles (thus existing in an imbalance), low back pain is often felt. The weak psoas muscles allow the abdomen to sag forward, which causes the low back to sway, which can pinch or irritate the sciatic nerve.

The reason pain becomes chronic and is difficult to treat with mainstream approaches, is because treatment is focused on the symptom: the pain. Analgesic drugs and anti-inflammatories like Advil, Aleve and Tylenol, can ease the pain, but not prevent it. It can relieve the symptom but not correct the cause. Therefore, the pain will return another day.

While not all cases of muscle and joint pain are the result of muscle imbalances, the most common are. The good news is that muscle imbalances are fairly easy to correct. You can meet with a physical trainer, physical therapist or other body-centered therapist, tell them where it hurts and they should be able to track the imbalance causing the pain. Once the imbalance is uncovered, a simple plan of stretching the tight area and toning its weak opposite area will do the trick.