Understanding Motor Control: When Your Body’s Movement Patterns Cause Pain
Does this sound familiar? You’ve tried massage, physiotherapy, maybe even regular exercise for your persistent pain. Each new treatment brings hope, but somehow the relief never quite lasts. You might feel like you’re doing everything right – stretching, strengthening, maintaining good posture – yet something still feels “off” in how your body moves.
You’re not alone. Many people struggling with ongoing pain are missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: motor control. It’s not about how strong or flexible you are – it’s about how well your body coordinates its movements.
At our clinic, we use a unique framework called Quadrant Analysis (QA) to uncover often-missed causes of persistent pain. This comprehensive approach examines four key areas that can contribute to chronic pain: motor control issues, hypermobility, mechanical dysfunction, and abdominal issues. Today, we’re focusing on perhaps the most commonly overlooked yet crucial element – motor control.

Understanding Motor Control in the Context of Chronic Pain
At our clinic, we use a unique framework called Quadrant Analysis (QA) to uncover often-missed causes of persistent pain. This comprehensive approach examines four key areas that can contribute to chronic pain: Motor Control issues, Hypermobility, Pattern Breaks, and Systemic Inflammation. Today, we’re focusing on perhaps the most commonly overlooked yet crucial element – motor control.
Think of motor control as your body’s movement operating system. When it’s working well, your movements are smooth, efficient, and pain-free. But when this system isn’t functioning optimally, even simple activities can become challenging and painful. You might notice:
- Certain movements feel awkward or require extra effort
- Pain that returns despite regular treatment or exercise
- A persistent sense that something’s “not quite right” with your body
- Difficulty performing activities that used to be easy
For many people struggling with chronic pain, motor control issues are the hidden factor that prevents full recovery – even when they’re doing “all the right things.” If you’ve been diligently following exercise programs, seeing various practitioners, and still not achieving lasting relief, motor control might be the missing piece of your puzzle.

What Are Motor Control Issues?
Motor control is the sophisticated dialogue between your brain and muscles that orchestrates every movement you make. Think of it like a well-conducted orchestra – when all musicians (your muscles) follow the conductor (your brain), the result is harmonious movement. But when this coordination falters, the performance suffers.

How Motor Control Problems Develop
Motor control issues typically develop through:
- Injury or Trauma: When you experience an injury, your body naturally develops protective movement patterns. Even after the initial injury heals, these compensations can become habitual, creating an entirely new set of problems.
- Prolonged Poor Posture: Modern lifestyles, particularly desk work and smartphone use, can gradually weaken crucial stabilizing muscles. In response, your body adapts by recruiting larger muscle groups for stability, leading to inefficient and potentially harmful movement patterns.
- Incomplete Recovery: Many people rush back to their normal activities after injury without proper rehabilitation, or receive treatment that doesn’t fully address the underlying movement patterns. This incomplete recovery often sets the stage for ongoing issues.

The Hidden Nature of Motor Control Issues
What makes motor control problems particularly challenging is that they often:
- Develop gradually over time
- Don’t show up on standard medical or orthopaedic tests
- Can exist even when you feel strong and flexible
- Might persist after pain subsides
This is why many people continue to experience discomfort despite maintaining regular exercise routines or receiving ongoing treatment. Their underlying motor control issues remain unaddressed, creating a frustrating cycle of temporary improvement followed by recurring problems.

Is This You? Common Signs of Motor Control Issues
Living with motor control issues can feel like your body isn’t quite cooperating, even when you’re doing everything “right.” Some of our patients describe feeling like something’s “just off,” often after trying multiple treatments without lasting success. Others feel like their previous attempts “never got to the bottom of things” and only provided partial / temporary solutions.
Tell-Tale Signs You Might Have Motor Control Issues
That nagging feeling in your shoulder when reaching overhead? The low back tension that returns no matter how much you stretch? These could be signs of motor control problems. Most people we see experience some combination of these symptoms:
During Movement
Your body might feel uncoordinated or unreliable during everyday activities. You may notice catching, clicking, or a sense that movements aren’t as smooth as they should be. Simple tasks like reaching for something on a high shelf or getting up from the floor might require extra thought or effort.

After Activity
Even light exercise might leave you feeling disproportionately sore or fatigued. You might experience pain or stiffness in areas that seem unrelated to the activity you were doing. These symptoms often show up hours later or the next day, making it hard to connect cause and effect.

During Treatment
Perhaps the most frustrating sign is when treatments provide only temporary relief. You might feel great immediately after a massage or adjustment, only to have your symptoms return within weeks, days or even hours. This pattern is particularly common when motor control issues are present but haven’t been identified and addressed.

In Daily Life
Many people with motor control issues report:
- Feeling strong in some activities but surprisingly weak or unsteady in others
- Noticing that one side of their body feels different from the other
- Having good flexibility but still feeling “tight” or restricted
- Finding that their pain or discomfort moves around rather than staying in one place
- Experiencing symptoms that seem to come and go without clear triggers
The key difference between motor control issues and other causes of pain is their persistent and variable nature. While traditional treatments might temporarily ease your symptoms, they often return because the underlying coordination problem hasn’t been addressed.
How Motor Control Issues Trigger Pain
Understanding how motor control problems lead to pain helps explain why traditional treatments often provide only temporary relief. Let’s break down this complex process in a way that makes sense of your experience.
The Orchestra of Movement
Imagine your body’s movement system as an orchestra. When motor control is working perfectly, every section plays in harmony – like a well-conducted symphony. But what happens when one section starts to falter?
Let’s say the drums begin beating slightly off-rhythm. The brass section, which relies on that rhythm, becomes disjointed. Soon, the strings are struggling to stay in time, and the woodwinds are compensating by playing louder. Even though all the musicians are talented and playing the same piece, the result is discordant and strained. This is exactly what happens in your body when motor control issues develop. Even worse, by the time you notice something’s wrong, it can be very hard to hear through the “noise” and work out the original cause.
The Movement-Pain Connection
Just as an orchestra needs perfect timing, your muscles need precise coordination. When motor control is optimal, your muscles work together seamlessly – some providing stability while others create movement. But when this coordination breaks down, the ‘symphony’ of movement becomes awkward and inefficient.
The Cycle of Compensation
Over time, these compensations create a problematic cycle:

- Your body recruits the wrong muscles for stability
- These muscles become overworked and tight, causing stiffness in surrounding joints
- This combination of fatigued muscles and joint stiffness leads to even poorer movement patterns
- The original stability problem worsens
- Pain develops as tissues become increasingly irritated and strained over time
Why Pain Can Be Misleading
Here’s what makes motor control issues particularly tricky: the pain you feel often doesn’t appear at the source of the problem. For example:
- Your neck might hurt because your shoulder blade isn’t moving properly
- Your lower back might ache because your hip stabilizers are weak
- Your knee pain might actually stem from poor ankle control
This is why treating the painful area alone often fails to provide lasting relief. Without addressing the underlying motor control issue, you’re essentially treating the smoke while ignoring the fire.
The Impact on Daily Life
The effects of poor motor control ripple through every aspect of daily living. Simple tasks that should be effortless begin to require conscious thought and extra energy. Your body might feel unreliable or unpredictable, leading you to second-guess movements you once performed without thinking. Many people find themselves gradually avoiding certain activities out of fear or discomfort, and activities that once brought joy become sources of anxiety. This gradual limitation of movement and activity can have profound effects on both physical and emotional well-being.

Understanding this connection between motor control and pain helps explain why traditional approaches – such as focusing solely on the painful area, or just weak muscles or stiff joints in isolation – often fall short of providing lasting relief.
Why Traditional Treatments Fall Short
When you’re dealing with motor control issues, traditional treatments often provide temporary relief without addressing the root cause. Understanding why these approaches are only partial solutions can help explain your journey of frustration – and more importantly, point the way toward lasting solutions.
The Limitation of Symptom-Focus
Many practitioners focus on where you feel pain rather than why it developed. Think of it like having a car that pulls to one side while driving. Simply straightening the steering wheel (treating the symptom) might help temporarily, but until you fix the wheel alignment (the underlying cause), the problem will keep returning.

Many practitioners typically follow this pattern:
- Identify the painful area
- Treat the immediate symptoms
- Provide temporary relief
- Watch as symptoms gradually return
- Repeat the cycle
The Missing Pieces
Even well-intentioned practitioners often miss crucial elements of motor control problems. Many excellent massage therapists, chiropractors, and physiotherapists are skilled at identifying and treating muscle tension, joint restrictions, and weak muscles. However, without specifically addressing motor control, their treatments often provide only temporary relief.

This explains why you might feel great immediately after treatment, only to have your symptoms return within days or even hours. Your body quickly reverts to its old habits of movement because the underlying coordination problem remains unaddressed.
The Exercise Conundrum
Perhaps you’ve been given exercises to strengthen weak muscles or stretch tight ones. While exercise is crucial for recovery, traditional programs can fail because they focus on building strength or flexibility without first establishing proper movement patterns. It’s like trying to build a house on a shaky foundation – no matter how solid the materials, the structure remains unstable.

The Isolated Treatment Problem
One of the biggest challenges in treating motor control issues is that they rarely exist in isolation. Your body’s movement patterns are interconnected – a problem in your ankle can affect your hip, which influences your spine, which impacts your shoulder. When practitioners work in isolation, focusing only on their specialty area without considering these connections, they miss opportunities to address the complete picture.
This is why a comprehensive, collaborative approach that considers all aspects of your movement patterns is essential for lasting relief. By understanding these limitations of traditional treatments, you can make more informed decisions about your care and seek solutions that address the root cause of your pain.

How QA Provides Lasting Solutions
Quadrant Analysis takes a fundamentally different approach to treating motor control issues. Instead of just addressing where you hurt, we map out how your entire body works together, identifying the root causes of your pain and the connections between different areas of dysfunction.
A Different Kind of Assessment
Traditional examinations often focus solely on the painful area. In contrast, QA looks at your body’s movement as an integrated whole. Remember our orchestra metaphor? Instead of just listening to the out-of-tune instrument, we study how every section plays together to identify where the harmony breaks down.
During a QA assessment, we evaluate:
- How your stabilizing muscles activate and coordinate
- Where compensations have developed
- How different areas of your body influence each other
- Which movement patterns need retraining
- What combination of treatments will provide lasting relief
The Power of Collaboration
One of the most unique aspects of our approach is our truly integrated collaboration with other specialists. This goes far beyond simply referring you to different practitioners. Many patients have tried seeing multiple practitioners on their own, but found that each specialist worked independently, often with conflicting approaches or competing goals.

In contrast, our collaborative approach means working with specialists who understand your specific movement patterns and their role in your overall recovery plan. Your Pilates instructor isn’t just teaching generic exercises – they’re reinforcing the same specific movement patterns we’re developing in the clinic. Your massage therapist isn’t just addressing tension – they’re supporting your body’s adaptation to new movement strategies. Each practitioner works as part of a coordinated team, understanding how their piece fits into your larger recovery puzzle.
Building a Strong Foundation
Think of recovering from motor control issues like learning to write with your non-dominant hand. You can’t just jump into writing quickly – you need to start with basic letter formation, gradually building up to fluid writing. Similarly, we begin by retraining fundamental movement patterns before progressing to more complex activities.
A Personalized Recovery Journey
Your treatment plan is tailored to your specific needs and lifestyle goals. We consider not just your pain patterns, but your daily activities, work demands, and recreational interests. This comprehensive approach helps ensure that improvements in motor control translate into real-world benefits, allowing you to return to activities you love with confidence.

This systematic, collaborative approach explains why many of our patients finally find lasting relief after years of trying other treatments. By addressing both the symptoms and their underlying causes, we help you break free from the cycle of recurring pain and build a foundation for long-term movement health.
Real-Life Transformations: Success Stories
Understanding motor control issues in theory is one thing, but seeing how proper treatment transforms lives makes it real. Let’s look at two real patient stories that illustrate how identifying and addressing motor control issues can break the cycle of chronic pain.
Samantha’s Story: From Frustration to Freedom
Samantha, an active mother of two, started experiencing pain and tingling in her hands whenever she tried to pick up any kind of weight. She’d had previous chiropractic treatments and massages for her stiff neck, which helped for a day or so, but her symptoms always came back. Recently, the pain was starting to wake her at night.
Through QA, we discovered that, in addition to her stiff neck, her motor control on one side of her body was significantly worse. We collaborated with one of our local expert Pilates specialists to create a comprehensive treatment plan. The hands-on treatment addressed her immediate symptoms while specialized exercises retrained her movement patterns. Today, Samantha is pain-free, her tingling is gone, and she’s back in the gym feeling stronger than ever.

Anna’s Story: Back in the Game
Anna, a 17-year-old international athlete, came to us struggling with persistent hip and knee pain that had plagued her for three months. Despite seeing several physiotherapists and an orthopedic consultant, she was still forced to take breaks from training as the pain would return whenever she pushed herself.
While her current physiotherapist was doing valuable work strengthening her hip and leg muscles, this was only addressing part of the problem. Through QA, we identified that her issues stemmed from a motor control problem between her spine, hips, and pelvis. Addressing the lumbar spine and pelvis mobility allowed her to move more normally again, and correct the motor control dysfunction that was getting in the way of her rehab exercises with her physio. By coordinating with her physiotherapist to ensure our treatment complemented her strengthening program, Anna’s pain resolved completely. She returned to full training with no limitations and has remained pain-free and competing at an elite level.

Elements of Success
These stories highlight several important elements we often see in successful treatment of motor control issues:
- Previous treatments helped partially but couldn’t provide complete relief
- The root cause wasn’t limited to where the pain was felt
- Recovery required a combination of hands-on treatment and movement retraining
- Success came through coordinated care with specialists who understood motor control
- Improvements extended beyond pain relief to enhanced overall function
These stories represent just two of the many patients who’ve found lasting relief through our comprehensive approach to motor control issues. They demonstrate that with proper assessment and treatment, chronic pain doesn’t have to be a permanent part of your life.
Your Next Steps: Taking Control of Your Pain
If you’ve recognized your own experience in what you’ve read, you might be wondering what to do next. Living with motor control issues can feel overwhelming, but there is a clear path forward.

Questions to Consider
Take a moment to reflect on your movement patterns and pain experience:
Do you feel like your body isn’t moving as smoothly or efficiently as it should? Are you getting temporary relief from treatments but finding your symptoms keep returning? Have you been doing exercises or stretches that just don’t seem to make a lasting difference? These could all be signs that motor control issues are affecting your recovery.
Beyond Traditional Treatment
Understanding that motor control issues might be contributing to your pain is an important first step. But it’s equally important to understand that addressing these issues requires a different approach than you might have tried before. Simply continuing with the same treatments and hoping for different results won’t lead to lasting change.

The Value of Comprehensive Assessment
Real improvement starts with proper assessment – one that goes beyond traditional static posture analysis and X-rays. While these tools have their place, they only provide a snapshot of your body in a fixed position. What’s needed is a dynamic evaluation that looks at how your entire body moves in 360 degrees. This comprehensive approach helps identify not just what hurts, but why it hurts – and more importantly, what needs to change for lasting relief.
The Importance of Coordinated Care
Remember, motor control issues rarely exist in isolation. While some patients may only need the right combination of hands-on treatment and specific exercises from a skilled practitioner, others benefit from a team approach. The key is having a practitioner who can both provide comprehensive care themselves and, when needed, coordinate effectively with other specialists. At our clinic, we’re equipped to deliver both the hands-on treatment and movement training many patients need, while also maintaining strong relationships with trusted specialists for cases that require additional expertise.

Taking the First Step
If you’re tired of temporary solutions and ready for lasting change, it’s time to consider a different approach. A comprehensive assessment using the Quadrant Analysis framework can help identify if motor control issues are contributing to your pain and create a clear path forward to lasting relief.
Don’t let motor control issues continue to limit your life and activities. With the right approach and support, you can break free from the cycle of recurring pain and return to doing what you love.
Conclusion: Your Path to Lasting Relief
Throughout this article, we’ve explored how motor control issues can be the hidden cause behind persistent pain and why traditional approaches often fall short. We’ve seen how treating symptoms alone – whether through massage, adjustments, or generic exercises – rarely provides lasting relief when motor control issues are present. Real, lasting change comes from understanding and addressing how your body moves as a whole system.
Quadrant Analysis represents a fundamental shift in how we think about and treat chronic pain. Rather than focusing solely on where it hurts, we examine how your body moves, identify dysfunctional patterns, and create a comprehensive plan to restore proper movement control. Whether you’re an athlete like Anna struggling to maintain peak performance, or someone like Samantha dealing with everyday pain, motor control issues don’t have to limit your life.
If you keep getting treatment for your painful area but find the pain returns, it might be time to try a different approach. Look for a practitioner who assesses both movement patterns and joint/muscle tension, and who works with other local professionals when needed. The key is finding someone who looks beyond just where it hurts to understand how your whole body moves together.
In our final article in this series, we’ll explore another crucial aspect of chronic pain – Pattern Breaks. We’ll examine how these disruptions in your body’s natural movement can contribute to ongoing pain and how understanding them can help unlock lasting relief.
Think you might be struggling with Motor Control Issues?
If you’re uncertain about whether our practice could help—or simply want an expert opinion—consider scheduling a free, 15-minute screening appointment with one of our expert chiropractors. In this no-obligation consultation, we’ll:
- Listen to your concerns and discuss your situation
- Help you understand if our approach might be a good option
- Refer you to a specialist in our local network if we’re not the right fit
Our goal is to guide you toward the best solution for your health. To schedule your free screening, click the link below or or call us on 01732 742120. We look forward to helping you take the next step toward better well-being.