Compensation vs. Overcompensation in Movement

There’s a growing conversation in yoga circles about the idea of compensation and how it relates to efficient and safe biomechanics in movement. Conversation is a great thing, but it can also lead to perspectives that may not include the full picture. So far, I’ve only heard one side of a much bigger story – that compensation is bad. I’d like to break that image down, and create a more complete picture of what compensation is. And I’d also like to create a distinction between some terms

Compensation in Movement:

Just for a moment, let’s view the body as a system of strings (very rudimentary, but easily visualized in the picture to the side). When one string moves, the rest have no choice, unless they want to work actively to resist that change. This is the only way that movement actually occurs – when the body passes that tension across joints and other muscles and tissues have to “absorb” some of that tension by moving. This is compensation. And in fact, our bodies are perhaps the matriarchs of compensation – they’re very good at it, and that’s for a very good reason.

Think about every single movement in your day-to-day life. Let’s take walking for example: notice how your arms just move by themselves? That’s compensation. Every single bit of effort you put into action causes a compensatory shifting of tension throughout the body. Compensation is actually a GOOD thing. It makes sure that forces are distributed through the tensional system of our body to ensure that no single area is placed under too much stress.

Injurious Compensation in Movement:

Taking a look at the other side of the coin: when we bend at the hips (instead of from the knees), pick up a box and our low back gets injured. That’s compensation of force being transferred through the body too. However, and this is a big note – like it or not, it’s not compensation that’s the “bad guy” here, it’s actually weak and unprepared musculature that are the “baddies”. In this case, it might seem like compensation is a bad idea of the body, but it’s actually still a good thing! Instead of blaming compensation, what we should be doing is going to train those muscles to prepare them better.

An important aspect to balancing this conversation lies in understanding the distinction between “compensation” and “overcompensation”.

OVERCompensation:

Compensation is functional, and it serves a basic biological purpose of allowing us to move efficiently and effectively. Then there’s overcompensation, which is almost like compensation on steroids. It tends to happen via the same process as compensation, though ends up creating dysfunction (and imbalanced strength, as clearly demonstrated in this photo).

Let’s take an example of an injured right knee. Naturally our inclination is to reduce the load on that joint by allowing other joints (usually on the left side of the body) to pick up some extra work. This is normal and is designed to avoid pain and further injury. It’s also useful to the healing of the body for a certain amount time (- and I’m not talking about complete rest here, I’m talking about a reduction in load). The thing is, new movement patterns and habits are forming all the time and unless we’re cautious about detraining the overcompensation when we’re done using it, it can stick around for the long-term and contribute negatively to our movement, creating dysfunction. In this scenario our effort needs to be placed in rewriting motor programs by walking “normally”.

Another example of overcompensation comes through habitual inactivity of particular muscles. Piriformis syndrome is a classic example of overcompensation, small muscle trying to take on the workload of many. There are at least 7 muscles that are meant to contribute to the action of lateral/external rotation of the femoroacetabular joint (when in anatomical position). If we take up weight training, or any new movement form that requires powerful lateral rotation without first moving through a range of motion that retrains the activity of all these muscles, we can often create a situation where not all these synergistic muscles are actually working.

This means that a couple of the structures tend to pick up the extra work, and as a result tend to become very upset. The piriformis, being the major contributor to lateral rotation, is often the one to pick up the extra work. Again, this happens for a reason (to allow us to move we rely on the muscles that actually work), yet this leads to dysfunction. In this scenario our effort as movement educators is to “reactivate” the synergistic muscles participating in external rotation of the hip. This again, requires a process of rewriting motor programs through movement to include the activation of the appropriate muscles.

Hopefully, as practitioners of movement we can start to see the important role that compensation plays in our movement as well as recognizing where the shift happens in overcompensation. There’s no avoiding compensation and so we need to understand that it’s not a bad thing. There is however, a need to detrain patterns of overcompensation by retraining more appropriate movement habits.

What examples of overcompensation do you regularly see in your practice?

Article last updated: June 29, 2018.