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You stretch your hips every day, but they still feel tight. You do squats to strengthen your legs, but your knees ache. You roll out your back, yet it still feels stiff by mid-afternoon.
Sound familiar?
If you've been battling recurring pain, tension or weakness — especially in your knees, hips, shoulders or lower back — chances are you're dealing with muscle imbalances. And no, it’s not just a problem for athletes. Muscle imbalances are one of the most common root causes of joint pain in everyday people.
The good news? You can rebalance your body, reduce wear and tear, and restore pain-free movement. But first, you need to understand what muscle imbalances are and why they cause so much trouble.
Your body is designed for balance. Each joint, muscle and movement pattern is meant to be supported by equal and opposite forces. But when some muscles become tight or overactive while others become weak or underused, that balance breaks down.
This creates imbalanced tension across your joints, like pulling a rubber band harder on one side than the other. Over time, this asymmetry creates compensation patterns that stress your joints, leading to:
When muscles on one side of a joint are tighter or stronger than the other, they pull the joint slightly out of place. It might be small at first — but with thousands of steps or reps per week, those little deviations add up to big stress over time.
Misaligned joints don’t move smoothly. Cartilage wears unevenly. Tendons and ligaments work harder than they should. And eventually, your brain says, “enough,” and sends pain signals.
If your glutes are weak, your lower back will take over. If your core can’t stabilise your spine, your shoulders and neck will tighten to help. The body is smart — it finds a way to move no matter what.
But when the wrong muscles are doing the work, they become overloaded. That’s how compensation leads to injury.
Tight or shortened muscles limit how far your joints can move. When you push into those restrictions during exercise or daily life, the surrounding tissues have to work harder to compensate, which often leads to joint inflammation or pinching pain — especially in the hips, shoulders and knees.
When certain muscles become dominant, the brain starts favouring those movement patterns. The smaller, stabilising muscles get ignored. Over time, your motor control system becomes less responsive, which increases the risk of awkward movement, joint strain and falls — especially as we age.
Most people are. And often, they’ve adapted so well that they don’t even realise it’s happening. Here are a few signs:
These are all subtle cues that your body isn’t evenly balanced.
The first step is bringing awareness to how your body currently moves. From there, you can retrain it to restore symmetry, strength and balance. Here’s how I guide my 1:1 clients through that process in my West Hollywood facility.
You can’t fix what you don’t understand.
The first thing we do in a session is assess how you stand, move, breathe and stabilise. We look at:
This helps us uncover the underlying compensation patterns contributing to your pain or tightness.
Before jumping into strength training, we need to create the right foundation. That means releasing dominant muscles and activating the ones that have been ignored.
Simple techniques like:
These low-impact drills help reorganise your posture from the inside out.
Once your body is more aligned, we start retraining your brain and muscles to move in better patterns.
That includes:
This helps you build strength in balance, so you don’t fall back into old habits.
As you improve alignment and movement, we progress to full-body strength training using balanced, functional movements.
But we also constantly check back in to prevent imbalances from creeping back in.
That’s why ongoing 1:1 training is so powerful — we’re not just treating symptoms, we’re rewiring your movement system from the ground up.
A well-balanced body doesn’t just feel better — it performs better, ages better, and recovers faster.
And when your body feels stable and supported, your mind does too.
You don’t need intense workouts or complicated routines. You need a trainer who sees the full picture, understands how your body compensates, and helps you correct it at the source.
If you’re in West Hollywood and ready to move better, feel stronger, and stay pain-free long-term — I’d love to help.
Enter your details below to book a 1:1 personal training session with me in my facility in West Hollywood and let’s rebalance your body together.