For those of you who have never heard of Seth Godin, he is a marketing genius who has written a dozen best sellers that are fairly short, information packed and extremely thought provoking books.  He has a great blog that you should check out as well here.  

A recent post of his was very insightful and I related it to something very different than what he intended.  His post on How Big Is Your Red Zone details the discrepancy in the amount of effort we need to put into anything that is new to us relative to what we get out of it.  We spend a lot of time learning, trying and practicing something with very little to show for our efforts.  As we get better and more efficient, we start to reap the rewards with much less effort.  He calls this the Red Zone (he has some graphs to show this and the extra effort in the beginning is in 'red').  I think of this as 'Inertia'...the hump we need to get ourselves over to start doing something.

I think we all have this little internal computer that calculates a cost-to-benefit ratio for most things we do.  If something requires effort and energy but there is no immediate benefit to us then the cost-to-benefit is high.  If something takes little effort but there is a benefit (even if the benefit is not immediate or not easily measured) then the cost-to-benefit ratio is low and we are apt to go ahead and do it.

I see this all the time.  People who are in pain have a reason to seek out relief.  Relief is a big benefit to them.  They seek the biggest 'bang for their buck' and want the quick fix...the pill or the shot...that will take care of the pain and inflammation.  Short term, this may or may not help but in the long run, they have missed the bigger problem of what is causing the pain.  Usually addressing tightness, weakness or mechanics doesn't take that much time of energy but it does take some effort and you do have to CHANGE your normal routine to incorporate a few exercises each day.  I believe that is where the problem lies.  We are human and humans don't usually like CHANGE.  It takes a lot of energy to overcome the big pile of inertia that CHANGE carries.

Understanding our situation and being able to ask questions minimizes that big pile of inertia.  All of sudden, you can see that the CHANGE isn't quite as bad as you thought and having the information you need at your fingertips will make the whole process easier.  Your Red Zone won't seem quite as large and not only will you feel better by addressing the cause of your pain but your results will be longer lasting because of it.

Applying a little bit of force in the right way yields far better results than applying lots of force in the wrong way!