Hello from Portman Square. If you’re a Marylebone desk professional, there’s a particular kind of drama that happens before coffee: you stand up, take your first step… and your heel behaves like it has a tiny opinionated nail in it. That sharp, “first-steps” pain is often linked to an irritated plantar fascia — the strong band of tissue under your foot that helps support your arch and manages load like a smart but slightly grumpy suspension bridge. Below is a practical, desk-

Dear reader, A client walked into my Marylebone clinic with the kind of forearms that make Instagram algorithms smile. He is an osteopath. A good one. Slightly overweight, busy, caring. But he almost ruined his hands-on career because he got addicted to weight lifting after watching social media videos about building strong forearms. For three months he trained like this: Monday biceps and wrist flexors Tuesday triceps and wrist extensors Wednesday repeat first round Thursday

Dear reader, A client came in with that classic complaint: “Paulius, it’s the outside of my elbow. It’s weird. Gripping hurts. Lifting a bag feels wrong. Sometimes even shaking hands feels like I’m negotiating with a stapler.” Outer elbow pain (lateral elbow) is usually blamed on the forearm — and fair enough, the forearm is often screaming. But in a JANMI Full Chain Reset , I always ask a different question: Why is the elbow working so hard that it needs to complain? The ass

Dear reader, In the JANMI clinic I recently saw a library worker in her early thirties with a complaint I hear surprisingly often: deep ache along the inner border of the shoulder blade  — classic rhomboid pain .Her left shoulder sat forward, her head drifted forward, and the left scapula looked slightly winged — like it had lost its “quiet grip” on the ribcage. Here’s the part many people don’t expect: Rhomboid pain is often the end of the story , not the start The rhomboids

Dear reader, Most people think knee alignment is a “knee problem”. Then they lie on my table, I check the inner thigh, and the story changes. Your adductors (inner-thigh muscle group) don’t just pull the legs together . They help decide whether your knee tracks straight, collapses in, or feels like it’s doing a tiny panic-dance every time you walk downstairs. In modern bodies, adductors are often overworked, under-understood, and permanently on call . What are the adductors,

Dear reader, A runner came in with a familiar story: right soleus pain that comes and goes. Sometimes it shows up during a run, sometimes after, sometimes it disappears for a week and returns like it forgot to say goodbye. On paper, it sounds simple. In real life, it is usually a pattern. This runner trains like a moving animal but works like an office statue. That contrast matters because the soleus is not a show muscle. It is a quiet endurance worker. It wants steady ankle

Dear reader, A client comes in with a familiar modern puzzle: Left knee : lateral-side ache/irritation for a few weeks, kneecap feels unstable , mild valgus  pattern. Posterior chain : medial hamstrings very tight  (especially that “gripping” sensation behind the knee). Whole-body pattern : a right-sided scoliosis bias , right shoulder lower , head forward, upper traps overcontracted , shoulder protracted, scapula mildly winged. In JANMI Premium, we don’t treat “a symptom on

Dear reader, If there’s one muscle I wish more modern humans trained (properly), it’s serratus anterior . Not because it’s trendy. Because it decides whether your shoulder feels light and organised … or heavy, tight, and slightly chaotic . Most people try to “fix posture” by stretching, cracking, pulling shoulders back, or hammering rows at the gym. And yet the same pattern returns. Why? Because you can release the brakes all day — but if the engine is asleep, the system goes

Dear reader, If shoulders could talk, most of them wouldn’t complain about the big muscles. They’d complain about the small ones  doing unpaid overtime. Two of the most overworked (and under-appreciated) are infraspinatus  and teres minor  — the back-of-shoulder rotator cuff pair whose main job is to keep the humeral head behaving like a well-trained guest in the shoulder socket: centred, calm, and not crashing the party. What they actually do (in human terms) They externally

Dear reader, If you’ve ever been minding your own business and your foot decides to twist into a medieval claw , welcome to the club. Cramps are common, dramatic, and — annoyingly — often mysterious . Let me translate them into normal human language, but with real musculoskeletal anatomy behind it. First: what a cramp actually is A cramp is an involuntary, sustained contraction  of a muscle (or part of it). In plain terms: the nervous system presses “ON”… and forgets where th

Dear reader, Every so often a client walks in and their body tells me a story before they do. Not with words. With patterns . A few months ago, one of my regulars arrived with a classic modern puzzle: Right shoulder : “I can’t externally rotate without pain.” Right piriformis : tight, guarded, a little paranoid. Left QL : tight like it’s holding the spine together with duct tape. Left rhomboid : gripping as if the shoulder blade might run away. If you’ve ever wondered why pai

Dear reader, If you’ve ever felt that sharp, nagging discomfort right at the front of the shoulder — the spot people often point to with one finger, as if they’re pressing a doorbell — there’s a common modern pattern behind it: Head forward. Shoulders forward. Chest collapsed. And then, quietly doing overtime: the biceps brachii and its tendons. Not because the biceps is evil. Because it’s loyal. And loyalty, in anatomy, often looks like compensation. --- Why the biceps gets

You know that moment: someone with rounded shoulders and a forward head  tries to externally rotate the shoulder  or horizontally abduct  (that “open the chest / pull the arm back” motion) — and the back of the arm suddenly shouts . Not a polite ache. A sharp, radiating, why-is-my-triceps-angry-at-me  kind of pain. And this is where I often tell people: “That pain is real — but it may be coming from elsewhere.” First: what the triceps actually is The triceps has three heads :

If the calf had a social life, gastrocnemius would be the loud friend who arrives first, soleus would be the reliable one who stays late, and plantaris  would be the introvert in the corner—small, polite, and somehow always involved when something mysterious happens. Most people never hear its name. Yet the plantaris has a habit of showing up in conversations about odd calf twinges , Achilles irritation , and that annoying “something’s not right” feeling behind the knee. What

Dear reader, If your neck and shoulders feel permanently “on duty” — tight, sore, heavy, and irritated by screens, stress, driving, gym, or sleep — you’re not broken. You’re adapted… to modern life. Chronic neck and shoulder pain is rarely one single “problem muscle.” It’s usually a system pattern : posture, breathing, workload, nervous system tone, and a few key soft tissues silently doing overtime. In this journal entry, you’ll get a clear map: the most common root causes,

My Dear Reader, If I had to name one muscle group that modern life quietly steals from us, it would be the glutes  — especially gluteus medius  and gluteus maximus . Not because they disappear.Because they stop doing their job. At JANMI Postural Pain Clinic in Marylebone, London , inhibited glutes are one of the most common sleepers  we see behind chronic postural pain — even in people who train regularly. What they are (and why they matter anatomically) Gluteus maximus  is y

My Dear Reader, If there is one region that keeps appearing behind modern postural pain, it is the pelvis . Not as a “tilt problem”, not as a mysterious bone that needs “realigning”, but as a load-transfer system  that has lost coordination. At JANMI Postural Pain Clinic in Marylebone, London , we’ve been studying a repeating clinical truth: when pelvic control becomes inconsistent, pain travels. What we mean by “pelvic misalignment” From an anatomical and biomechanical view,

My Dear Reader, There is a muscle I meet almost every day in clinic — and yet most people have never heard of it until something goes wrong. It’s the serratus anterior . When it works, nobody notices.When it doesn’t, the shoulder blade behaves like a shopping trolley with a dodgy wheel — noisy, unstable, and impossible to ignore. At JANMI Postural Pain Clinic in Marylebone , serratus anterior is one of our most consistent sleepers  in modern postural pain. What and where is s

My Dear Reader, Some muscles announce themselves loudly when they fail.Others disappear quietly — and let the damage travel upward. The tibialis posterior  belongs firmly to the second group. At JANMI Postural Pain Clinic in Marylebone , this muscle has become one of our most researched and consistently underperforming sleepers  in modern bodies. Not because it is weak by design — but because modern movement rarely asks it to do its real job. What and where is tibialis poster

My Dear Reader, There is a muscle I rarely need to point out on a chart, because most people feel its absence rather than its presence. It’s the transversus abdominis  — often called the deepest abdominal muscle — and at JANMI Postural Pain Clinic in Marylebone , it is one of the most common sleepers  we encounter in modern postural pain. What is the transversus abdominis? Anatomically, the transversus abdominis (TrA)  wraps around the abdomen like a wide belt.Its fibres run