The Domino Effect

Once we start to get a handle on tensegrity, we begin to better understand the domino effect- otherwise known as the dreaded compensatory pattern.

Many of you have experienced the domino effect without having had a name for it. First, your neck gets injured in a minor whiplash in that teeny tiny car accident that you had when you were sixteen years old. But you’re sixteen years old, so no biggie. You ignore it and it gets better, or at least is better enough for it to become a part of the background white noise of your physical existence.

But once you enter college suddenly you have this nagging shoulder pain with all the extra typing and sitting you’re doing. As the years go by you start to think of yourself as the “tight shouldered” person, and sometimes you have a pinching pain when you lift your arm. You also notice that when you drive it requires more effort to turn your head all the way to one side when you’re backing up or changing lanes. Again, not that big a deal.

More white noise.

More years go by and you are now not only a “tight shouldered person”, but you also suffer from occasional low back spasms and have developed plantar fasciitis, which you assume must be because you’re a runner and everyone says running is bad for you... it never occurs to you that the thing that started the dominoes falling may have been the car accident at age 16 because it feels like a million years ago (even when we’re only

talking about a span of 10 or 20 years). So how could it be contributing to your current plantar fasciitis, low back pain, and shoulder issues? And how to address it?

Pinpointing the exact cause of any domino effect pattern is not very important. It’s easy to obsess over the, “Why?”, but ultimately we are people living lives and moving around in the world. Unless you want to live in a bubble, things will happen. In other words, you can’t go back in time and undo the car accident at age 16.

Instead, find a practitioner who has the ability to view your body as a whole, and is not going to just work on your current problem locally. The reason for this is because any compensatory pattern, by its very nature, is always going to be global. And so working only on the bit that is currently bugging you turns into a game of symptom-chasing Whack-A-Mole.

*This chapter is an excerpt from the PDF download, Why Fascia Matters. You can get the entire PDF for free on the home page of

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