Aaron Rodgers Achilles Injury: A Postural Therapy Perspective

Recently, I've been working with a number of individuals who've experienced pain or injury in their lower leg (calf strains, Achilles tendon injuries, etc). The application of principles in the article below has been impactful in allowing each person to move more naturally, efficiently, and pain-free. The insights in the two-minute read might truly help you understand and address your musculoskeletal issues for better long-term health and function.

As a life-long Jets fan, the trade for Aaron Rodgers provided hope of finally having a Super Bowl run. This lasted all of four regular season plays. How might we make sense of his achilles tendon tear early into his first game? Let’s explore one possible reason for this injury from a Postural Therapy perspective by looking at how the body functions in terms of posture and movement.

As we've examined in two previous articles (‘The Posture of Stress’; “Military Posture’), rather than muscles working in isolation, we view posture and movement functioning within lines of muscles and connective tissues. These ‘moyfascial’ lines pull the body in various directions: slouching, military posture, side bends, and twists. Ideally, we want these lines to be mediated by a deep postural line of muscles, coined by my teacher, Dr. Andrew Buser, as the Anti-Gravity Kinetic Chain: AGKC. The easiest template for AGKC are the muscles that infants use when they’re crawling to maintain the shape of the spine in its newly correct position. The AGKC deeply protects and strengthens the body from the inside-out, stabilizing each segment (legs, pelvis, etc) of the body first, before the more superficial muscles can properly move the body through space. 

The Superficial Back Line (Thomas Myers; Anatomy Trains) engages the muscles in the back of the body, connecting the platarfascia (connective tissue on the bottom of the foot) all the way up the back, over the head, to the top of your scalp. Your calf and achilles tendon are part of the Superficial Back Line.  Where does the calf connect to that’s also part of this chain of movement? The Achilles Tendon! If there’s a muscle strain in the calf, the likelihood is that the deeper connective tissue in subsequent compartments in this line of muscles/connective tissue is also affected.

If one overuses these muscles, especially in relation to the deeper postural muscles fatiguing out, then you can be more apt to develop pain and injury. In Aaron Rodgers case, he was already dealing with a calf strain in the preseason. When the deeper postural muscles are no longer able to protect the more superficial muscles as they should, there’s often a risk to the body’s weakest link. A possible explanation for his injury is that the Tibiialis Posterior, the AGKC muscles in the lower leg compartment below the calf, didn’t engage as it should to stabilize the calf and the calf muscle gave out and strained. Subsequently, if his calf strain wasn’t adequately healed, then there’s was added risk to the tendon connecting the calf muscles to the heel bone, which is what Rodgers injury appears to be.

If you’ve ever experienced achilles tendonitis, you know how precarious an injury it is and how it feels like with the slightest misstep, that tendon will tear. 

Recently, I strained my biceps (inner upper arm) muscle swinging on the rings in Riverside Park. Within a few days, the mini-tears in my arm muscle seemed to have moved up into chest as well as down to my wrist. Though not fun by any means, it was interesting to experience as my strain and its movement directly followed one of the myofascial lines (Superficial Arm Line).

What can one do who is dealing with this type of strain/injury? 

• Firstly, while I often encourage healing through movement, there are instances in which rest in necessary. We want to reduce the inflammation in this tender area prior to engaging it in movement. I’ll suggest that if there’s inflammation in the calf muscle, there’s a certain amount of inflammation in the tendon (achilles) to which the calf inserts and in continuous in the myofascial line. 

• Next, we want to both mitigate too much compensation the body has created as a function of protecting the injury (might indeed need some to be able to move and not overload the injury). At the same time, we need to maximize the amount of blood flowing to the injured area, which helps to speed healing. There’s a passive postural therapy exercise in which you’re simply literally laying on the floor with one leg up on a chair the other leg straight; 15 minutes each side within the context of a Postural Therapy sequence. In addition to resetting which and how the muscles are holding the bones in their non-optimal position, this one exercise was a savior for me when developing achiles tendonitis while training for the marathon. 



• Once the inflammation is reduced, the injury is healing, and body in enough alignment to function, we can introduce light exercises in which that deeper postural muscles, especially in the AGKC compartment underlying the achiles, are recruited engage first and then stabilize the bones and superficial; muscles/tendons to function in an optimal and protected manner around a stable structural base. 

The most important things is to listen to your body. When you intuitively feel that doing a movement will be harmful or that your specific injury is not healed enough to perform within too much risk, then perhaps wait until it's further healed.....even if you're playing for a Super Bowl ring!

If you have any questions about your specific pain or injury in the context of moving forward with activity, by all means, always feel free to contact me and we can discuss it accordingly.