Do You Clench Your Jaw or Curl Your Toes When You Lift? Here's What Your Body Is Doing

Curl your toes when you pick up something heavy? Clench your teeth, arch your back, tilt your head, or lock your eyes in one direction?

Most people assume these are just personal quirks. More likely they are compensation patterns: your nervous system has mistakenly created a motor control pathway, as a safety response, that only lets you fully engage a muscle or chain of muscles when you hold your breath, curl your toes, clench, and so on.

The movement still gets done. It just costs more than it should, and the load lands somewhere it wasn't designed to. For an athlete that shows up as a strength plateau, a nagging spot that keeps flaring, or a lift that stalls no matter how you program it. For everyone else it's pain that seems to have no cause and never quite goes away.

I see these patterns every day at my North Vancouver studio, and more importantly, I resolve them. One case last winter showed just how creative the nervous system can get.

The mystery of the flexed ankle

This client had been coming to me after a car accident, and we were working on restoring normal muscle function, which would likely reduce the post-concussion symptoms they were having. On a particularly rainy day they arrived saying their symptoms had spiked during the 40-minute drive in.

In an SMR session I test roughly 60 muscles while the client lies on the table, checking that each one is under proper motor control. Once the nervous system relearns those patterns lying down, we progress to standing. This client was ready for that step.

Testing their leg muscles standing, I noticed something odd: their ankle was flexing stiffly upward during the tests. With the foot in that position, the muscles tested strong. In a neutral or downward position, the same muscles tested weak.

I rechecked the legs, then the arms. Same pattern everywhere. With the right foot in dorsiflexion (toes pulled up toward the shin), everything was strong. Otherwise, nothing was.

That's a sign of global inhibition, where the nervous system dials down muscles across the whole body as a protective measure.

Why on earth would the body do that?

Your nervous system is constantly asking one question: are we safe right now?

For this client, the rainy drive was the trigger. The nervous system had linked acceleration with danger. A foot in the position you'd use to press an accelerator meant threat, so it shut things down. A foot pulled back, off the pedal, meant safe, so normal function returned instantly.

There's logic to it. During an impact, inhibited muscles let force transfer through the body rather than compounding at the nearest joint. It's a reasonable strategy in a crash and a terrible one in a treatment room, a gym, or a race.

Left alone, this pattern could have stuck around for hours, or days. Once we found it, it took minutes to resolve.

What that looked like

With SMR, I identify the faulty movement pattern and treat the associated proprioceptors or acupoints with light, specific tissue manipulation. This allows the functional part of the brain to become acutely aware of the outdated safety mechanism causing the dysfunction. Once it does, it corrects the error immediately, and in my experience the correction holds. This client's symptom spike began easing within minutes, and by the end of the session we'd found and corrected another 15 inhibited muscles related to the concussion.

Why I test standing up

Muscle inhibition is dynamic. Your position and your environment can change motor control patterns second to second, which is why testing only on the table isn't enough. I test lying down, seated, standing, and in more complex functional positions. I'll also introduce manageable stressors, like balance challenges, to see whether your nervous system stays functional or defaults to inhibition. (It can also cause overactivity, but inhibition is more common.)

The goal isn't a body that works perfectly in a quiet room. It's a nervous system robust enough to keep working properly under real-world stress.

So what should you do with this?

Next time you lift something heavy, notice what your jaw, your toes, your breath, and your eyes are doing. That's useful information about where your body is looking for help.

If you've been dealing with unexplained weakness, a plateau you can't train through, persistent pain, or lingering symptoms from an old injury, this is exactly what I look for.

Read some client stories, watch a few video demos of SMR in action, or book an assessment here.