The sore spot is rarely where it started

Most people book a session because something hurts, and they book it for the thing that hurts. The knee. The lower back. The shoulder that will not settle. That is completely reasonable, and it is also the reason the same problem keeps coming back six weeks after it was treated.

Nothing in the body works on its own

Put a foot on the ground and the movement does not stop at the ankle. It carries on: ankle to knee, knee to hip, hip through the trunk to the opposite shoulder. Each link drives the next one, and none of them gets to opt out.

So when one link stops doing its share, the work does not disappear. It moves. Something above or below picks it up, and it keeps picking it up, every step, for as long as it takes to become sore. By the time you notice, the part that is complaining is usually the part that has been covering for something else.

What that looks like in practice

• An ankle that will not bend far enough forward often shows up as a knee that aches on stairs, or a lower back that tightens on a run.
• A hip that has lost rotation gets borrowed from somewhere. Usually the lower back, which has far less rotation to give.
• A shoulder that cannot get overhead cleanly will get there anyway, by arching the back instead.

In each case, treating the sore part will help. It will usually help quite a lot, for a while. Then you go back to doing the thing that caused it, with the same link still missing, and the same part starts carrying the same extra work again.

What to do about it

This is not an argument against treating pain. Settling things down is the first job, and it is not wasted work — you cannot assess much through a flare-up, and you certainly cannot load it.

It is an argument for asking a second question once the pain has settled: why was this part doing more than its share in the first place? That question is answered by looking at the whole chain, in all three directions it has to work in, rather than at the twenty centimetres that hurt.

If the answer turns out to be a stiff ankle, you can do all the lower back rehabilitation you like. The back will keep lending the ankle what it is short of.