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Exercise Addict: The Junky Society Applauds

When I was in my late teens/early 20s I started “exercising” and decided it was the cure for all my body’s (and life’s) problems.

I believed I was too fat (I wasn’t), and this major flaw needed correcting. In my narrow world view (inspired by the dance world) thin people were happier, more successful, and more popular: HSP.

So I created a problem (fatness) that didn’t need fixing (losing weight), and it felt very productive.

But I was unable to ever attain a size small enough that felt closer to HSP.

Where do you go after size 0? 00? 000? How many zeros does happiness have (and I suppose one could say the same about money…)? Every pound lost only led to disappointment that I wasn’t any more happier, succesfful, or popular than before.

My existence had become little more than the correction of my body’s size. My fulfillment was reduced to a hypothetical number. If I can control that number, I can control my life. If I can fix my body, I can fix my life.

As I already wrote about in this post, I’d developed a problem with eating (that is, not doing enough of it), which I can see now as a result of the subtle bullying I was exposed to in my dance training. However, deep down in my bones, I knew there would be terrible long term consequences to my extreme eating restrictions, like, actually dying of starvation. That realization smartened me up enough to change. Sort of…

However, like many eating disordered individuals, I cleverly reasoned that, at one end of the spectrum, if less calories IN was a solution to fatness, more calories OUT was another viable solution at the other extreme. So I turned my strategy 180 degrees: I decided to start using exercise to burn calories. HSP would be mine.

Then, to my dopamine-saturated (or deprived?) brain’s delight, I realized that exercise had an additional benefit starvation did not: I could present an image that the world would accept as “healthy”. I nearly convinced myself of it, too.

Addicted to control

Through exercise, I could control my body. Through my body, I could control peoples’ perception of me.

Jogging was my natural entry point for exercise: Low cost, and you can do it anywhere (even with no shoes, if you’re a little crazy). I adopted the noble persona of “jogger”, and this became my primary method to make myself suffer for my sins of fatness under the clever guise of health.

And people believed it, too. “Look at Monika being healthy and doing exercise! Exercise is good!” they said… I shudder and hope that no one was inspired to copy my “noble and disciplined” ways.

One summer (I must have been about 20) I started training for a triathlon and I fooled everyone, including myself, into thinking it was an authentic expression of a healthy lifestyle. No… It was a clever disguise.

As I reflect on my younger self, I see that I was little more than a living confabulation. A walking (jogging) pretension. And seeing this has taught me to never assume that someone’s motive for engaging in a “healthy” behaviour- diet, exercise, etc., is actually to attain greater health.

“Being healthy” is a great way to camoflauge a deep lack of well-being by pretending to want it, or to already have it.

Eventually, my jogging addiction started to hurt my joints (I was in the habit of going out for compulsive midnight jogs to make up for eating “bad” food).

Let me rephrase that. Jogging wasn’t hurting my joints. Jogging isn’t an inherently melevolant entity out for personal revenge. I was still Me, afterall. And this Me believed that my size was a moral issue requiring correction. I was hurting my joints.

Don’t blame the exercise, blame the exercisER.

But I was like a junkie, addicted to using exercise to manipulate my reality. Take the edge off. I felt powerless to change who I was. But I did have the power to change the drug. Bye bye jogging. I never understood that “runner’s high” thing, anyway.

What new drug did I choose? I’ll get back to that. But first, let’s talk about addiction.

The acceptable addict

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction: Mate, Gabor: 8601300368283: Psychopathology: Amazon Canada

In his book, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, author Dr. Gabor Mate shares stories from his time in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (an area notorious for it’s high levels of drug use/overdose, homelessness, and a range of other problems of social inequlity), working with individuals gripped by drug addiction.

Individuals that could be placed on the far end of an “addict-spectrum”- Physically destructive habits that are definitely not socially acceptable.

In his book, Mate also describes his own struggle with an addiction of a different kind- Compulsively buying classical music.

Benign as that may sound, he compares himself to the alcoholics and substance abusers he worked with. He makes the case that, in the biological sense of the word, he is just as much an addict, ruled by the exact same biochemical patterns in the brain.

The difference? We don’t judge the eccentric lover of classical music in the same way we do the eccentric lover of fentanyl. Maybe we even think it’s cute. Mayeb we even wish we had this quirky affinity for Bach, Tchaikosvky, and Chopin, because isn’t classical music something that smart, sophisticated, “well-adjusted” members of society enjoy?

But an addiction is an addiction is an addiction, at the level of our neuroanatomy

In THIS interview, Dr. Mate describes that addictive behaviour can manifest as anything “...that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves, suffers negative consequences from, and has trouble giving up”.

You may find it preposterous that an “extreme affinity” for classical music could be remotely comparable to a heroin addict’s plight… But I instantly connected with what he was saying: Holy shit. I’M an addict, too.

I am an addict that our cultural values system enables

Because exercise is healthy and good, right?

People perceived my exercise addiction as “good behaviour”, and I felt justified that I’d found the solution for my HSP problem. But I was merely an addict trapped in a compulsive dopamine-driven behavioural loop.

Behavioural addictions that are less biologically destructive and more societally acceptable than opiates, for example, like Dr. Mate’s classical music addiction, or my exercise addiction, are harder to spot, and have an impact of a different kind.

First, there is a wilting of the soul of an individual who knows that every time they “use” they are letting themselves down in a way that hurts like a punch in the gut. That gut-punch-feeling is the visceral sense of failing to take responsibility for onesself. It’s very natural to want to take the edge off it…

The visceral feeling of failure, and shame of failure, prompts further failure-esque behaviour, like the failure to show up for others- as a friend, partner, parent, employee, etc- because we don’t want others to see this sunken state. This increases the sense of distance from the all-important goal of HSP, and creates more “bad” feelings in the body, which can, again, be immediately relieved by “using” more (exercise, music, productivity… name your drug).

I was stuck in a loop like this, failing to see what gave my life real meaning and purpose beyond the illusive quest for HSP. Each day’s fulfillment was built around “When, where, and how will I get my next hit?”.

As one might predict, continuously sacrificing my well-being to fit in with an idea of who believed I needed to be, eventually manifested in physical symptoms. For me, joint pain, hyper-emotionality, and deep-to-the-bone fatigue.

Plus, a contsant fear that I’d be found out as a fraud that made me sick to my stomach (but at least I had exercise to numb those bad feelings out).

If you knew me at this time in my life, you weren’t really meeting Me. You were meeting my costume. I feel a deep need to apologize for the lack of awareness and destruction I inevitably brought to most of these relationships.

Such is the life of a junky…

What’s an addict with knee pain to do?

So to pick the story back up… Here I was, an exercise addict with knee pain. What do I do next?

I could change Me. I could look at why I felt so ruled by the constant need to be happy, successful, and popular. And where I’d learned that my body was the tool for this.

Or I could change drugs. Jogging isn’t doing it for me anymore. What else is out there?

Lacking the perspective, integrity, and support to learn how to go about changing Me (not to mention my incompletely developed pre-frontal cortex… I was only 20!) I chose a new drug.

What new drug could help me correct and forget my life’s (and body’s) problems without hurting my knees? Strength training.

Lifting weights, powerlifting, and all things gym, became my new persona. My new escape. My new costume. HSP will surely be mine…

But I’ll pick that story up in the next blog post. It’s rather long. There is a lot I learned in that new phase of my exercise addiction that I’d like to put into words, and a small chance it may be useful for somebody (you? maybe…) to read.

Would you inquire?

Until next time, perhaps you would like to inquire: Are you like me? Have you, are you, using exercise as a drug?

Could you accept the title of “addict”? Without shame, just as a fact with consequences that need to be observed.

What do you get as a side-effect of exercise? I wasn’t really exercising to be thin, I was seeking what I thought thinness would give me: Happiness. Success. Popularity.

Do you truly love to exercise, or are you using it to feel productive and in control? An escape? A distraction from investigating what’s really important to you? If you think about stopping, do you feel your skin crawling, anxiety building, identity crumbling (that’s withdrawal…)?

Are you fooling yourself, and everyone around you, that your motive for, and outcome of exercise is “health”?

Exercise and play

Am I still an addict? In some ways, yes. But there is a relief in being honest about it. I still use it out of compulsion at times. But now I see it for what it is, and that clarity has been a liberation.

And if I remember what I loved about my body, before I learned to think of it as too big, was that my body was my vessel for physical play.

Before exercise, my body was this awesome, capable, energetic vehicle through which I could play with my friends, and that’s what mattered most. Dig holes in the dirt. Play tag. Build snow forts. Play badminton, frisbee, and frollick in the ocean waves…

But after addiction, my body was a tool to manipulate others into believing I was somebody worthy of their friendship.

And that distinction takes courage to see. Courage I am still building.

It takes courage to inquire. Will you?

Walk Your Neck Well

What if going for a walk could be an opportunity for your neck to naturally “stretch” itself? Could you “walk your neck well”?

Neck motion in the gait cycle is pretty cool. It arises out of our need to keep our eyes level (not walk with a bobblehead).

In the 0.6-0.8 second journey from one foot to the other, your neck should be able to access every motion available to it, in all three dimensions, from one end of the spectrum to the other. Unless it can’t…

That means, in the space of just one footstep, your neck will (hopefully) get a full spectrum experience from:

– Flexion all the way to extension
– Lateral flexion right all the way to to lateral flexion left
– Rotation right to rotation left

But not like a bobblehead…

VID

The cool thing is neck motion happens by virtue of the skull itself staying STILL (eyes stay level so you can walk straight), and the rest of the body articulating underneath.

This is true of animals too. Check out this owl:

The next two video clips are a brief demo of how this works in the frontal (head tilts) and transverse plane (head roation).

How did those two movements go for you? Are you able you separate your skull from your ribcage with your eyes level? (and yes I am aware I did not make a sagittal plane video…)

I call it a “whole body neck stretch”, because it emulates how the muscles on one side of the neck would naturally lengthen (and the other shorten) with each footstep. Or, in the case of the transverse plane neck rotations, more like a torquing motion, like a towel wringing out.

But its more than “stretching”- It’s specific, sequenced joint motion our bodies crave in efficient gait, obtained via coordinated whole body movement. The by-product of which is that your neck joints and tissues actually move in a healthy way with each step.

What if, by practicing gait-based movements like this, you could walk your neck well? What if you started to notice you no longer need to deliberately stretch your neck? (unless you actually wanted to)

Let me know if you find this quick video useful.

These two clips are from a Movement Deep Dive session I filmed in May 2021 for my Liberated Body all-access students. The complete 60 min session explores this idea in three planes, integrated with the whole body, down to the feet, based on the teachings of Gary Ward’s Anatomy in Motion.

PS can you tell how differently my head tilts from one side to the other?? 😅

Putting the “Bio” Back in Biomechanics

My body used to hurt a lot, every day, in a way that affected my basic daily life functions.

Simple things felt bad. Like wearing a backpack (arm goes numb). Walking (hips and spine hurt). Going up and down stairs (dreading the pain in my knee).

I consciously micromanaged every limb movement, carefully bracing my body in anticipation for the pain.

But when I was on stage, dancing, I didn’t feel anything (possibly due to the pain numbing effect of adrenaline and endorphins).

I thought that if I could just keep on ignoring the pain, life was ok. Tolerable. And I could probably keep this up for… ever??

But then things piled up and escalated. Fast.

My body started to hurt to the extent that I could no longer ignore it. Perhaps I had depleted my physiological ability to pump out the chemical stew of corticosteroids and other endogenous polypeptide analgesics I was relying on to keep myself numb.

Or maybe it was because I was so numb that when I finally sustained some actual soft tissue damage (a neck strain, then 3 back injuries, then a hamstring strain), it seemed to come out of nowhere.

Regardless of what tipping point I’d violated to accelerate my descent from one injurious event to the next in the span of just a few months, one thing became very clear: The way that I am existing is hurting me.

I was 21 years old, and I realized…

I am my body’s biggest problem

My body wasn’t the problem. I was the problem my body was having.

If you’re asleep at the wheel and you drive your car into the ditch, do you blame the car for hurting you in the crash? Maybe you should apologize to the car…

But that’s how I’d been inhabiting my body, and then I was kicking it for getting busted.

Inhabiting is too generous a word… More accurately, I was ignoring it. And then punishing it when it spoke back too noisily. “Stupid, annoying body. Just shut up, do what I say, and let me carry on with my path of self-destruction, damnit”.

My body was an “it”, too repellant to claim as “mine”. And I’d learned only to value it for what others praised it for.

I was letting other people make decisions for it. Caring about what it looked like and what pretty shapes I could make it do were my only measures of success and worth. But my body could never comply adequately with my wishes. I hated it and wished I could trade it in for a different model.

*Makin’ shapes, age 21. Now, “making shapes” with bodies has a very different intention.*

I was nothing but an ego puppeteering a Monika-shaped mass of flesh and bone. Where was I…? How did I not realize what was happening?

Because I wasn’t even there.

As a puppet- A surrogate body to play out the thoughts and opinions of others, I barely had a real existence.

I could blame the terrible “role models” from my dance training – teachers and peers- and their subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) forms of bullying. But I won’t. Because I went along with it. I let my puppet strings get pulled.

I could have said, “NO” (yes, all caps) when it was suggested that skipping meals was what smart dancers do to stay thin (and thinness was success). Had I drummed up the courage to protest, I could have stood up for every girl in my class who was in terror of being publicly fat-shamed (which was a real threat).

I could have refused to contort my body beyond its structural limits. But I chose to bend over backwards (literally).

And I might have questioned the statement, “To wake up every day in pain is what it means to be a dancer” (told to us by one ballet teacher with the intention to help us build character, I guess). So I developed a sense of pride in my muscle and joint pain, and didn’t know it wasn’t normal.

Again and again, puppet-me consented to things that went against my well-being.

Had my brain been working, I might have inquired: Is striving to be this flexible useful? Do I even like how this feels? Is a human body set up to do this long-term without consequence? Is pain really normal and noble?

And so, as a result of my failure to consciously question my reality, I became this under-nourished, overworked, un-thinking puppet-thing that simply went along with what everyone else was doing.

And I was praised for it.

Over and over I received the reinforcement that the thinner I was, the better I was. Everytime I dropped some weight I got compliments on how my technique was improving. They even gave me money (a coincidentally timed scholarship for being “most improved” that year of university, directly following a period of weight loss). As if my dance technique was obscured by a thin layer of fat.

And in the process of trying to conform to their ideal of “success”, I stopped paying attention to Me.

My world was ruled by comparison and judgement. I was constantly seeking validation based on my body and my abilities, which became my sole identity. What more identity can a puppet have, other than it’s exterior, structural reality?

And then when I started getting hurt, I couldn’t fathom why…

Why am I getting injured?

WHY is different from HOW.

How has to do with the specific patterns of repetitive overuse and misuse leading to tissue damage. Why has to do with the manner in which I was existing that led to said repetitive patterns.

If one is completely conscious, aware, can one become injured? Unless by random accident?

Yes, I was a biomechanical mess, and I wasn’t eating much or sleeping much or drinking any water (I was on a mostly diet Coke diet). But who was doing that? Who was the one who could have been present to acknowledge the signs and signals (symptoms) that I wasn’t well?

There wasn’t even a witness for the car crash… No one else noticed, and I was asleep.

No option but to wake up

When I was 21 I finally drove my body into a ditch called hamstring strain. Metaphorically, it was like the last puppet string snapped, too. That injury ended my dance career, but it was a liberation from being a puppet, too.

That hamstring injury was like an invitation: “Monika, do you want to find a different way of Being? Do you want to dare to… exist? Do you want to remember who You are?”

A relief washed over me because I finally had permission to stop trying to prove to the world I was this thin, perfect, obedient body who could make pretty shapes.

One of the first thoughts post-puppet-Monika had was a confession: I never wanted to be a dancer anyway (to confess this out loud to another person took a few more years).

I knew this long before I turned into a puppet, but I’d forgotten. I knew it once when I was 14, and again when I was 18. Both times I pushed it down quickly before the thought became too uncomfortably alluring for my puppet master.

14-year old me (pre-puppet phase) had dared to question, “Are you still having fun dancing? Because you seem sad, Monika… Would you like to stop? Would you like to do something else?”

14ish is around the age one chooses whether a physical endeavour is something you want to dedicate your life to, or go the academic route. A dance career sounded like it would be fun… Ha. They (everyone I knew) believed in me and encouraged me. They told me I could make it. That I was talented and could be successful.

Isn’t it so great to be supported?

Not really. I was wrong to believe them instead of listening to Me.

*I think I am 14 here. This smiley photo is deceiving. I was having a bad time.*

The rationalizing animal

Robert A. Heinlein, American novelist and science fiction writer, once wrote, “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” Meaning we tend to make a choice first, and then rationalize why we made it afterwards (instead of the other way around).

The following describes my 14-year-old brain’s, carefully rationalized justification for betraying myself and committing to puppetry:

First, I reasoned: “If I quit dancing now, I will let people down. People have invested a lot in me and believe in me. I have a duty to continue this path, because if I don’t, they will be hurt by my actions.”

Second, “The reason I’m not having fun is because I don’t fit in. If I can make myself fit in then I’ll be able to have fun”. (Unfortunately, “fitting in” meant worrying about my weight and caring about my looks, and being very, very judgemental to myself and everyone around me. It did not result in having more fun, only isolating myself.)

Third, and more unconsciously, I reasoned, “If I keep going this path, I don’t have to think for myself. I can pretend I have a destiny. Going along with the decisions and ideas of others is less effort than trying to figure out what I really want for myself”.

And now, the last puppet (ham)string cut loose, I set out to rescue my soul from corruption and heal my busted body. What else could I do?

Gait mechanics to the rescue

At first, I didn’t realize that I was my body’s problem, or that my injuries could be correlated to those three above rationalizations. So I went about trying to correct my body’s very wonky biomechanical foibles without considering anything beyond my meat-and-bones.

But at least I was no longer a puppet. I was giving bith to some kind of sovereign existence. A Me was born, and I was studying and thinking for myself for the first time.

In 2015, I found Anatomy in Motion (or it found me): A 6 day immersive course on gait mechanics taught by creator Gary Ward, and Chris (#Sritho) Sritharan. For the first time in my quest for a pain solution, I had a framework to understand the underlying mechanics for my injuries and symptoms. So naturally I took that 6 day course 7 times over the next 5 years.

*November 2015, taking up the challenge of writing pronation and supination mechanics for the AiM class, with sweaty palms.*

But the exercises and “better movement patterns” I learned weren’t what “healed” me. As I remember Gary Ward stating on one course, engaging with his work is like “putting the BIO back in biomechanics…”

Bio = Life.

When you start working with your own biomechanics in a dedicated way, you’ll soon realize that you aren’t just working with joint mechanics, you’re working with the mechanics of your life, the aggragate of which are represented in your physical structure, as it stands (and moves) right now.

That’s a really hard thing for a lot of people to appreciate until they are ready to see it.

Woven into the AiM teaching was the exact “new way of Being” I’d speculated about years earlier when I stopped dancing. What I really learned studying AiM was the antithesis of my dance training:

You are not a puppet. You are a Being in a process, and this is a process of willingly exposing yourself to the truth of your anatomy, in motion. This process is not about blindly accepting someone else’s ideology or beliefs. This is a process of seeking to understand the truth of human movement, for You, by You. This process demands that you honestly observe how far off your system has strayed from that truth. This is a process of deeply studying the mechanics of how you’ve arrived here, as you are, and by that, seeing what more you can become. You are this process of liberation. May you find the grace to love this process of seeking truth.

In fact, I remember chatting with Chris after I had just discovered something about my lumbar spine, and I said something like, “Wow I really love this!”, to which he replied, “And by ‘This’, do you mean ‘You”?”.

And like that, with every new part of my body I discovered couldn’t move, then reclaimed, got moving, and integrated, I little bit more of Me came into existence. And I loved it.

Many times this process was frustrating, confusing, and seemed to take a lot of effort for very little gain in joint motion. Sometimes pain got worse, then better, then worse again. But it was always educational, and by keeping with the process even when it sucked, I learned the discipline I needed to rescue Me back into existence.

Process, not puppet

Who we are is a process. Hopefully we are blessed to stumble into a process we love and can share with fellow travellers. This process (Me) was what I’d given up to be a pretty puppet.

And I think biomechanical exploration was the process I needed because it demands embodiment by default. You can’t just learn joint mechanics by thinking and conceptualizing them. To actually learn biomechanics, you have to put your bio through those mechanics.

When you move your body through an experiential learning process, You have to wake up to do it, deliberately. You can’t zone out, You have to exist.

If you want to know what hip extension is, for example, You have to get up and do hip extension. Go through the messy process of figuring out why your body can’t do it. Practice. Tinker. Explore. Study. Don’t quit. Keep with the process.

It took me three years to feel my hips extend. How many people do you know who have spent three years trying to do just one thing? Not even do it well. Just… get one degree instead of 0.

Waking up the witness

Studying Anatomy in Motion showed me a way of experiencing my body that had nothing to do with aesthetics, recognition, and performance, but about witnessing my body, as objectively as possible.

I realized that re-learning movement required a gentler way than the aggressive manner I’d originally used to distort my skeleton (and life). One cannot learn anything in a state of stress. So I gradually learned to relax my system a little. And I saw how I needed to approach myself and my life in that gentler way, too.

The skills and characteristics I needed to develop to become a successful AiM student were the real benefit, not the biomechanical knowledge: How to pay deep attention to myself. How to inquire. How to learn. How to reason. How to appreciate that I am a process. How to trust that process. How to observe facts non-judgmentally.

The real knowledge I was after was: Who is this Being interacting with my body’s mechanics? That’s something worth dedicating a life to.

If you can relate with my struggle to evolve forwards from being a pain-stricken puppet, I have no advice, other than figure out a way to stop being your body’s problem. How you do that, is up to you.

My invitation is to get curious and study. And I’m not saying study AiM specifically. Just study anything that wakes You up.

Study movement, and notice how You have to come into existence to learn. Don’t force it. Expose yourself to the truth of human movement, and let that wake up your Witness- The part of you who can learn and evolve. Find a tool for this that You love. Studying gait mechanics is my tool. What will yours be?

What will you use to help you put the bio back into your biomechanics? 🙂

Why Do My Knees Hurt? A 2 Minute Lesson

Knee pain sucks.

And like any other body part, it’s pain resolution is a process of restoring access to it’s complete set of options for joint motion, in correct sequencing with other body parts, in a way that feels safe.

AND… You don’t need to have an advanced understanding of joint biomechanics to do it (see the video below)

Your knee is a relatively simple, 2D joint (made complicated by biomechanists who’ve attempted to define what it does disparate of their own embodied understanding of it…)

To feel and move happily, a knee must have access to:

Flexion (bending) with femoral internal rotation, on a pronating foot.
Extension (straightening), with femoral external rotation, on a supinating foot.

All other combinations of knee, leg, and foot, will not feel happy, or be very efficient.

Here’s a quick demo you can try (this clip is an excerpt from a 60 min Movement Deep Dive I did last week on knee mechanics for my Liberated Body students):

If you don’t feel the above sequencing happening, it would not be surprising if your knees are unhappy with you

I repeat: A healthy knee must be able to experience the following things:

1) Knee bends + femur rotates in + foot pronates

2) Knee straightens + femur rotates out + foot supinates

And, if you followed the video, you’ll have the basic, embodied understanding that:

A) A pronatED foot will prevent a knee from fully extending

B) A foot that CANNOT pronate will not allow a knee to bend

My intention is to clarify and make simple the complexities of learning biomechanics, so that anyone can benefit from healthier movement. This can only be done by actually experiencing your anatomy.

In the words of Gary Ward, of Anatomy in Motion: Expose yourself to the truth of human movement, then let that experience create the learning.

When we try to understand movement ONLY with our intellect, our body doesn’t learn.

But if the body learns first, no words or intellectualization is necessary for real knowing. Words can be added later to faciliate communication (which is useful, considering all the confusion!)Remember, learning is not the same thing as knowing

I hope you enjoyed and found this mini biomechanics lesson useful! Let me know if it sparked any new understanding for you. Shoot me an email or leave a comment below.

If you liked this little tidbit, you may enjoy the complete 4 day Liberated Body Workshop. More info about that here: monikavolkmar.com/liberated-body-workshop

PS I post stuff like this on my Instagram page sometimes. If you’d like to be my IG pal, I am @monvolkmar

Why Should You Stretch? (part 2)

Why should you stretch? I don’t know… Maybe you shouldn’t. But maybe you should! I can’t possibly tell you what you should do, because your body knows way more about itself, than I know about it 😉

Here’s a quick summary of the points made in Why Should You Stretch? (part 1) (give it a read if you haven’t yet):

Stretching and flexibility seem to be the universal go-to solutions for pain and tightness.
Sometimes, especially if you’re me, stretching makes things feel worse.
Being more flexible doesn’t make you a better person.
Most people (including me) could save their future-selves a lot of time and money and suffering by asking, “why is it tight??“, before scrolling through Instagram for fancy stretches (probably demonstrated by a very attractive-looking, half-naked person with thousands of followers and a free ebook)

After writing part one, the question I got stuck on was why do we silly humans stretch in the first place? This question took me to some interesting existential spaces which may not be useful for 80% of you. Whatever. For the other 20%…

…Why Do We Stretch?

Despite our incredible cortex, opposable thumbs, and abilities to think, reason, and create cool shit, at the base, we humans are wired just like any other animal- With massively over-riding instincts, beyond reason, for sex and survival.

So I got to wondering: Do animals stretch?

Apparently they do, and they do so involuntarily, typically accompanied by yawning in the transition from sleep to wakefulness.

When animals “stretch”, it is referred to as pandiculation, and, according to THIS serves as a way to:

“reset the central nervous system to the waking state after a period of sleep and prepare the animal to respond to environmental stimuli”…

and,

“to maintain the animal’s ability to express coordinated and integrated movement by regularly restoring and resetting the structural and functional equilibrium of the myofascial system...“

A fancy way of saying, “keep shit moving good, like it should”.

Now please enjoy these animal pandiculation videos:

And here is a very satisfying video of a lion yawning:

If you want to read more about pandiculation and how modern humans are using this “primal” wisdom to “reset” their systems, and develop “natural” mobility, go right ahead. I’ve got nothing new to add to that conversation.

My mind wants to know: At what point did humans stop instinctively, pandiculating, and start stretching deliberately? And why? Was this a useful and necessariy transition?

When did the yawny, morning system-reset, become a form of remedial therapy (one that many of us feel guilty about not doing)? Or a means of control? Or a show-offy thing to post about online and have competitions based around?

Yoga competitions still baffle me.

An amazing show of discipline… But I am perplexed by the existence of competitive yoga. Next we’ll have competitive meditation and I will lose all hope for humanity.

Is the move from casual, instinctive pandiculatory movements yet another sacrifice of our evolution from quadruped to biped?

We suppressed our pandiculatory instinct, but gained rocket ships. I’ll leave it to you to judge that however you like.

Did our technological prowess hit a tipping point at which we were able to live with less physical burden? A point at which, with less manual labor, stretching had to become a compartmentalized “thing” to make up for the lack of general movement?

Some people say stretching originated in ancient Greek and Roman times, as a means to train their soldiers.

Or do the origins of modern stretching date back to ancient India, before yoga turned commercial, when it was a means to prepare the body to sit more comfortably for extended periods of quiet meditation (non-competitively…)?

At some point, did stretching became a “thing” to do in addition to living, because we started setting lofty goals for living that were beyond the capacity our bodies currently had?

So could it be that we use stretching to serve the ambitions of our higher brain- the frontal coretex? Whether that be to sit for 12 hours per day to build a piece of life-changing software: Stretching as remediation for sedentarianism (not sure if that’s a real word).

Or whether that be to run a marathon: Physical preparation; preventative care.

Or to get out of the physical pain caused by either of the above: Damage control; emergency care.

I guess it doesn’t really matter. Because its not even about stretching per se, but consciouly noticing when you’re neglecting your body’s needs for healthy movement and responding with the right action. Which may or may not warrant stretching.

Let’s get personal

Let’s make this less about humans, generally, and more about you. Why do YOU personally stretch?

If you keep asking “why” enough times (usually 7 is enough), you can get to the root of any question. So I invite you to try this exercise with me:

Ask yourself, “Why do I stretch?“. And don’t think too hard. Just write the first things that come into your head (below are my answers, yours will hopefully be different, because you are not me):

Monika, why do you stretch? (and let’s just assume for now that I actually stretch)

Because it makes my body feel good. But why?
Because my body feels crusty on days that I don’t stretch, and I like not being crusty and in pain. But why?
Because I’ve had injuries and accidents that have distorted my posture and movement potential, and I need to do something daily to balance things out. But why?
My body is healthier and functions more efficiently when it is more balanced. But why?
Because I’m not in pain, and I can participate in my life without distraction or fear or frustration. But why?
Because life isn’t about being stuck at home shackled to my couch, or bed, passively watching TV, drained of energy. I’ve got stuff to learn, explore, and share, and I need my body to be able to cooperate. But why?
Because my body is a vessel for me to live life in a way that is meaningful to me, participating with my highest values, part of which is that I genuinely love the feeling of moving for moving’s sake.

Ahhh there it is at #7: I want to be free. Free from pain. Free from restricted movement. Free to explore. Free to learn. Free to enjoy moving. Free to participate with my life and what fulfills me in it. (I guess my workshop is called Liberated Body for a reason).

Is this the answer you came to as well? You want to set your body free? Not just because pain is annoying, and it sucks, or you want to be more flexible, but because your body is your vessel for participating in what is meaningful to you?

I think this could be a universal principle. Humans just want to feel free. Physically, existentially…

Note here that I’m not saying stretching will help you find meaning in life. If only it were that easy… Remember, I don’t really like stretching. But I know my reasons WHY I’m doing what I’m doing with my body, so now I can choose wisely what I do with it.

Stretching may or may not be part of your process, but let’s put stretching aside momentarily and look at the question: What does it actually mean to set your body free?

What if discipline is real freedom?

When people say things like, I want my body to feel “free” and “more open”, what does that mean? What are we trying to set our bodies free from? And what does a free body feel like?

Do you want to be free from restricted body movement? Do you want to be free from how you restrict your own body’s movement?

Is freedom to be able move the way you want to, when you want to, free from worry? (like, if you ever wanted to try a handstand without fear of breaking your money-maker…)

Do you want the freedom to NOT move the way you want to? (like, to sit on a plane for 10 hours, or sit to meditate, and not be crippled afterwards)

Does freedom mean the courage to take up a new, random sport, or go for a difficult hike, and trust your body has the basic body mechanics to perform it without injury?

Speaking of basics, is real freedom is having the discipline not to skip past the basics? To put in the tedious, not so enjoyable work now that you know will bear fruit later.

Maybe freedom is having more options for how to move because you put in the basic, foundational work. You can’t paint a masterpiece without doing the rough sketch, first.

Maybe you don’t have the goal to build a skyscraper, but if you limit yourself to building a foundation that will only support a bungalow, you only have that one option. And one option is really no option. And who knows if you might change your mind about wanting that skyscraper 10 years from now?

Image result for krishnamurti think on these things

My favourite definition of freedom so far is from Krishnamurti’s book Think on These Things. I feel that his definition applies particularly nicely to the body, too.

Per Krishnamurti, freedom means (his quoted words in bold):

Not to want to BE anything more than what is. To be free from ambition.

Acceptance of whatever our bodies are experiencing without needing to immediately fix it, or solve the problem. Freedom to sit with the problem long enough to understand it before trying to solve it. Not seeing the body’s limitations as a reason to condemn onesself, but as something to be curious about and explore.

A state in which we are are not acting out of fear or compulsion, not needing to cling to a sense of security or protection.

As it relates to stretching, sometimes we compulsively stretch tight muscles out of fear, because it makes us feel like we’re doing something useful when we don’t know what else to do, because we lack information. That’s what I did with my hamstring. It ended badly.

Not to operate based on traditions or do something just because other people are doing it.

Many sports/movement forms have a traditional way of doing things- Stretch a certain way, warm-up a certain way, not so much because it is useful, but because it’s how it has always been done. Beware tradition.

To be able to understand who you are, and what you are doing, moment to moment.

Being present with our bodies. Moving with awareness, not just mindlessly going through motions. And knowing why you’re doing it. If you understand who you are and what matters to you, you can link any movement practice to your highest values.

And, freedom is not just to be able to do or say whatever you want, or go wherever you wish, but to understand what is happening, and why.

Paradoxically, setting the body free isn’t about doing whatever you want to do with reckless abandon, ignoring the facts (yes, you are free to run that marathon, but what is your body saying about that, really?).

Freedom isn’t ignoring and outsourcing your responsibilites to your body, even though it might feel that way. It’s about disciplining yourself to understand the real demands your body has. Asking, is this right for me based on my body’s current state of affairs? Have I done my foundational work? Do I know why my knee hurts, and am I ignoring it? And putting in the time to do the work to get things moving well again.

Freedom might be taking ownership of our bodies needs- When taking responsibility becomes not what we feel we have to do, but what we actually want to do, and find delight in it, for it’s own sake.

But I don’t want to take responsibility, that sounds like no fun

I 100% relate. Every year at tax time I just want to ignore my responsibilities. I may have learned how to take responsibility for my body, but I’ve got other problems…

Taking responsibility of our body’s needs for healthy movement initially feels like no fun- even scary- because it means looks at how you’ve failed to pay attention to your body. It means seeing just how long you’ve been going in the wrong direction, and how much work it may take to correct that.

If that causes a feeling of overwhelm, you’re not alone. The overwhelm is just a sign you don’t have the information you need to make your first step in a new direction. Get to learnin’!

But its not easy… I had a client tell me that he spent 40 years of his life deliberately dissociating from how his body felt so that he could keep going, doing the things he loved to do, ignoring he was in pain, until one day, after starting to work with me, it became clear that this strategy was no longer going to work, and the reality of just how much work lay ahead of him set in.

OMG I’ve been a bad friend to my body.

Fortunately, I’m pretty good at making befriending-your-body-again process fun (or at least not awful). He is currently doing great. Learning new things about his body every day. In much less pain, able to do the activities he loves with more enjoyment and skill than a few years ago.

A less positive example is a personal training client I had a few years ago. She would ignore when her elbows hurt, yet continues to ask me to put exercises in her program that make her elbows hurt.

She’d say, “it’s fine, I can just work around it”. Even though this was keeping her stuck with sore elbows, she would rather pretend things are ok than understand the root of why her ebows hurt. Her biggest fear is that she’ll stop being able to workout, so she’s clinging to her pushups, and rows for dear life, while the pain is still only tolerable, and not crippling. Ironically, this is the fast track to not being able to workout.

We eventually stopped working together when it became clear that I was not going to enable her. In the end, she confessed that she didn’t believe there was hope that she could ever get out of pain because she was “too old”. She believed she was stuck the way she was, with hurtin’ joints, for life, and that was that. And what could one do or say to change her mind?

Maybe show this amazing video:

And on that inspiring note, perhaps you’d like to sit with these questions:

Why do you stretch? or if you don’t stretch…

Why do you feel like you should stretch?

What does taking responsibility for your body look like for you?

What are your excuses to not take responsibility? (and “I’m too old”, isn’t allowed)

Stay tuned for part 3, which will be a lot more practical, and less philosophical.

Rethinking the Pec Stretch Paragidm

Friday March 19th was the March edition of my monthly, free, Movement Nerd Hangout. Our topic: Make Pals With Your Pecs. (scroll to the bottom to watch the session recording).

*My finest work yet (see more of my face superimposed on anatomical images on my Instagram account: @monvolkmar)*

Those pernicious pecs get blamed for causing a lot of trouble for our posture and shoulder health. In therapy world, most of the solutions involve stretching pecs, digging into the pecs with a ball, and other “myofacial release” strategies.

Back in the day, I used to do a ton of pec stretching and ball rolling and it didn’t change one single thing about how my body felt. Nothing changed until I began to pay attention to the actual motion of the bones and joints that the pecs connect to and manage:

Clavicle (collar bone)
Scapula (shoulder blade)
Humerus (big ol’ arm bone)
Ribcage (and by virtue of that, the spine)

As per Gary Ward’s second rule of movement, joints act, muscles react, we need to show those above bones how to move across their entire spectrum, in all three dimensions, if we want the muscles to do something.

We need real articulation between bones to generate an actual lengthening of muscles. And by virtue of Gary’s first rule, muscles lengthen before they contract, we need a muscle to first lengthen in order to generate it’s best contraction.

Bones moving= muscles get to do something.

Muscles getting to do something= happy body.

It is with this paradigm- what I’ve learned from studying Anatomy in Motion, that I set out to guide a movement-based query into your ability to access three dimensional lengthening and shortening of the pectoral muscles, via actual motion of the structures of your shoulder girdle.

Since I began working with my body in this way, I haven’t done a traditional pec stretch. They usually make my hands go numb… Instead, I simply make sure all my joints can do what their articulating surfaces are set up for, and the muscles seem to take care of themselves.

Anyway, here’s the replay of the full session. Follow along and let me know how it goes 🙂

If you enjoy this style of movement session, you may also like to participate in my online workshop Liberated Body. Its a study of how the human body moves in gait, through 4 exploratory movement sessions, based on the teachings of Anatomy in Motion. I run it live every so often, but you can start learning now by doing it as a home-study, at your own pace.

10 Ways You’re Probably Screwing up Hip Extension

Forgive the click-baity title. But its true: You’re probably screwing up hip extension (and I’d wager in more than 10 ways).

It’s not an insult. Garbage hip extension is perfectly normal (trust me, I know). But that doesn’t make it ok to live with…

I’d like to use this blog post to help you reclaim your best hip extension ever. Even if that happens 5 years from now… Get cracking today.

To give you a movement orientation to hip extension, check out this short excerpt from week three of my workshop, Liberated Body. Follow along and see where your hip extension capabilities are at:

FYI my next Liberated Body workshop is coming up Feb 18th! If you liked this clip and found it useful, you’ll love the whole 4 week workshop.

The 10 most common hip extension errors you might be making

As you followed along with the hip extension movement in the video, were you able to feel lengthening of your hip flexor muscles? Or did you just feel your lower back getting cranky? Or your calf burning? Or or nothing at all…?

Check if you doing/not doing any of the following:

Not maintaining a supinated foot, Either by lifting your heel too high and losing forefoot contact on the 1st and 5th metatarsal heads, or rotating your leg internally, leaving you with a pronated foot.
Not getting a flat surface at the front of your hip (if it feels more slanted, it’s not extending)
Pelvis staying behind your head, instead of moving forward underneath it.
Stance is too split apart, pelvis cannnot travel enough onto front foot, and you may end up over-moving from your spine instead.
Back knee bends as you move your pelvis forward, which has the effect of flexing your hip instead of extending it.
Pelvis starts and stays in anterior tilt, which will also cause that hip to stay flexed.
Accessing hip extension with a massive glute contraction, which you shouldn’t need to do. This may indicate how much additional work it is for your body to get into hip extension.
Leaning ribcage backwards causing a hyper extension in the lumbar spine (swaybacking it).
Leaning torso forwards, thinking that you’re moving your pelvis forward.
Assuming that just because your leg is behind you your hip is extended!

And here’s the confusing part: Just becaues you feel a hip flexor “stretch” it doesn’t necessarily mean your hips are extending well.

But before we get to the nitty gritty technical details of how to get your hips extending like a boss, I’d like to tell you the story of my poor, abused, hips.

The story is called…

Why You Shouldn’t Stretch in Bed

In my less informed days, I remember a dance teacher telling us it was good to sit in the splits for 30 mins at a time. So I did that.

I think one teacher even said that if we were really serious, we’d sleep in the frog position at night. Which I obvisouldy tried, too.

Other silly things dance teachers have suggested include:

If you’re not in pain you’re not a real dancer.
Wearing padding in your pointe shoes makes you weak.
Never, ever, take time off or you’ll lose all your hard earned technique.
And, always stretch. Always. Stretch. ALWAYS the solution.

I could drop into a split cold. I thought it was a cool party trick. I did a ton of hip flexor stretching, and as such, I thought I had a PhD in hip mobility.

But my hips were still “tight” all the time. I had anterior hip pain. Stretching felt good in the moment, in a palliative way, but never seemed to get me any additional mobility or relieve my tightness.

So I just forced harder (remember, dance teacher said ALWAYS STRETCH and pain is good).

Looking back on my hip flexor stretching efforts, I had at least 10 different ways to make it feel like my hips were extending, all of which were clever ways to avoid moving my actual hips by moving every other part of my body instead.

*This is my go-to way to pretend to extend my hips: The Lean Back!* *aka spine smush*

So instead of extending my hips better, I was just compressing my lumbar spine with more resolve than ever before (see above photo). This is a factor in why I had so many lower back injuries (along with trying to show off in yoga classes).

The moral of the story is that stretching more and stretching harder didn’t help improve my hip tightness or range of motion. Quite the opposite: It reinforced all the other non-hip-motion strategies I’d unconsiously found in a naive attempt to stretch my tight hip flexors.

Promise me you will learn from my mistakes?

If you are like me- hip extension challenged- I hope this blog post helps you to find your truest, cleanest hip extension.

And guess what… It’s not all about stretching your hip flexors.

What is hip extension?

If you Google “hip extension”, this is the first image that pops up:

The 4 Best Hip Extension Exercises | Openfit — *I’m jealous! Wish my hips could extend in this exercise….*

More commonly appreciated in the guise of the all-mighty “hip flexor stretch”, hip extension is a joint motion that refers to the opening of the space at the front of the hip.

With each step we take our rear hip needs to extend well for efficient gait.

I can’t ever take for granted that all readers of this blog know what the hip is, or reference it in the same way. Not since I had a chat with a student who stated, “What are you talking about, Monika?? The hip IS the same thing as the pelvis.”

No it is not…

The hip joint is the space between which the femur (leg bone), and the pelvis meet.

Osteonecrosis of the Hip - OrthoInfo - AAOS — *Two bones, one space.*

The joke in my movement nerd fam is that the hip is actually nothing. As it is nothing, it does nothing.

The two bones- femur + pelvis- are the actual moving structures of the hip. How we name the motion of the hip is based on the relative motion of those two bones and the resultant change in space between them.

In hip extension, the bottom portion (foot end) of the femur moves behind (posterior to) the pelvis, with relatively little motion of the pelvis itself.

To name the bones’ motions, we could say the pelvis is doing a posterior tilt, and the femur is doing an anterior tilt, opening the space at the front of the hip.

So just tucking under your pelvis, squeezing your glutes, or getting into a deep lunge with your leg way behind you are not sufficient criteria to create an actual extension of the hip. We need the articulating surfaces of the two bones to experience real motion between them.

It sounds simple enough in theory. But in practice, oh man is it ever easy to screw up.

This leads us to another important techincal detail…

What’s the difference between a “hip flexor stretch” and accessing hip extension?

A hip flexor stretch is the lengthening of hip flexor muscles.

Hip extension is the joint motion that should result in hip flexor length when done correctly.

The two sound similar, but have different intentions, teach the body different things, and have very different outcomes.

The irony is that one can find a hip flexor stretch without actually moving the hip joint. But it doesn’t feel very good because it means that you are over-moving another part(s) of your body in an attempt to put length into those hip flexors! (ie everything desribed in my story at the beginning of this post)

For example, over-extending your lumbar spine, over tucking your pelvis, leaning your ribcage way back, splitting your legs really, really wide apart and squeezing your butt, or any of the 10 things I listed earlier.

Good hip extension allows the glut max to work and generate running power — *I really like this image from physioworkshsv.com showing in B a clean hip extension, and in C and D, strategies involving a forward lean, and lumbar extension to extend the hip.* *Much better than my drawing.*

Another piece of the irony is that our hips only have up to about 10 to 20 degrees of actual extension. Finding those elusive degrees isn’t about making the movement bigger, but making it more precise and accurate.

Size is not the problem 😉 Accuracy and specificity are.

Eccentric load vs. hip flexor stretching: What’s the diff?

Eccentric load (or eccentric muscle contraction) is when the two bones of a joint are moving away from each other, and the muscle that spans those two bones must contract in it’s lengthening state to decelerate them moving away from each other.

It's Eccentric! | Golf Performance Center — *The most commonest, easily understandablest visual of an eccentric contraction happening at the bicep. As the weight lowers, the bicep is contracting to decelerate it (slow it down*).

However, the force of the bones moving away is greater than the ability for the muscle to contract to pull them together. All the muscle can do is slow down how fast the bones are moving apart.

(This is why eccentric muscle training tends to cause a lot more DOMS than concentric contractions, FYI.)

So one could say that the ability for a muscle to load eccentrically ensures a certain feeling of safety for the body in motion, because it is preventing a joint from opening too far for comfort, into a potential danger zone.

Gait (walking) is a predominantly eccentric muscle experience- Muscles decelerating joint movement, then contracting back.

Most muscle strain injuries are a result of a muscle’s inability to load eccentrically in response the force of the movement being undertaken. In fact, that’s exactly how I strained my hamstring: Over-stretching forcefully while warming up for dance class. *POP* Careful with those splits, guys…

This is why in Anatomy in Motion we consider the ability for the body to experience eccentric tissue load with joint movement to be so crucial. Not as a “stretch”, but as an indicator of healthy management of joint motion and efficiency in gait.

Joints act, muscles react, and muscles lengthen before they contract.

With each step you take, joints move, muscles respond to decelerate movement, and then contract back to move the joint back in the opposite direction.

This is a very different intention for a muscle than what my dance teachers had in mind: Stretch it into submission.

In an eccentric load, we are asking the muscle to respond back with a contraction.

In a stretch, we are asking the muscle to do nothing.

This was one of my biggest paradigm shifts when I began my AiM studies: We are not simply stretching muscles to get more mobility or flexibility, but we are showing the body how to access a joint motion in it’s correct context in gait, which should result in the muscle experiencing an eccentric load.

We don’t just want to tug on a muscle and over-ride the stretch response, because the intention of the eccentric muscle action is to contract that muscle back again, not make it longer and stay there.

An eccentric load is an educational experience for the body.

If we are trying to access hip extension in the context of gait, we want to feel the hip flexors under eccentric load- not static stretch- which should give them no option but to contract back from their most lengthened position.

And where do they contract to take the hip? Into hip flexion!

So what are we trying to teach our body with an eccentric load of the hip flexors, by virtue of true hip extension? To flex the hip.

This answer adds even more irony: Practicing hip extension isn’t necessarily to give you more mobility, or longer hip flexors, but to show your body how to better flex your hips.

When does hip extension happen in gait?

Hip extension, as a position, is a snapshot in time of your leg behind your body.

But as a motion in gait, hip extension doesn’t start and end with your leg behind you with the hip already stretched open. Hip extension starts the milisecond after the hip is fully flexed.

Hip extension begins when your leg is in front of you, and continues building until it ends up behind you, the moment when your foot swings forward again.

Remember the rule: Muscles lengthen before they contract.

Just as hip flexion is reliant on hip extension to eccentrically load the hip flexors and contract the hip into flexion, hip extension is reliant on being able to flex the hip with the leg in front of you, eccentrically loading the hip extensors, which then receive the stimulus to contract and bring the hip into full extension.

(sorry, that paragraph was hard on my brain, too…)

So paradoxically, if you only have time to do one exercise to help your hips extend better, I personally would choose to work on my access to hip flexion instead of taking them directly into extension.

How can you tell if you’re actually extending your hip?

Your muscles are the best indicator for actual joint motion. Can you feel the hip flexors loading/lengthening?

Remember Gary Ward’s other rule: Joints act, muscles react.

You will feel a hip flexor “stretch” if the surfaces of the pelvis and femur are actually articulating against each other, generating length (eccentric load) in the tissues spanning that joint space.

What muscles? Anything that crosses the front of the space between the pelvis and femur, aka the hip flexors:

Psoas major
Iliacus
Tensor fascia latae
Adductors pectineus, longus, brevis, and the anterior portion of magnus
Rectus femoris
Sartorius

Here is an excellent video by Gary Ward, showing how the psoas, one of the most famous hip flexors, lengthens in three dimensions in gait to decelerate the forwards motion of the body through space.

Hip extension is just one dimension of the phases in which your leg is behind you in gait. Note how there are two other planes of motion to consider- Frontal and transverse plane, but that’s a topic for another time.

Also remember, hip extension STARTS from a flexed hip. What muscles do we consider to be the main extensors of the hip? Glutes and hamstrings. So we also want to be able to find eccentric load in those muscles to get our best hip extension.

I covered this in the November Movement Nerd Hangout: Wake Up Your Butt. It’s all about how to access hip flexion, which you now know is crucial for hip extension, too. Check out the full 60 minute session and technical write-up here.

Conclusions?

Clean, honest hip extension means the joint surfaces of the two bones- femur and pelvis- need to articulate with each other, not move as one clump.

A hip flexor stretch is not the same thing as accessing hip extension cleanly.

A hip flexor stretch is not the same thing as loading the hip flexors eccentrically.

Hip extension starts from the moment your hip finishes fully flexing, not as the snapshot of a stretched open hip.

In gait, hip extension must happen within a set of parameters that include foot supination, knee extension, pelvis posterior tilt, and center of mass moving forwards through space. Change one thing, and you change everything.

There are more than 10 ways to screw up hip extension, but if you remember one thing: Never assume that just because your leg is behind you your hip is extending.

That’s it for now! It always amazes me how much I can write about one thing… It’s not a talent, it’s a real problem.

Let me know what came up for you. How is your hip extension? Shoot me a message and let me know!

I hope this was interesting and useful for you, and aids you on your journey to inhabiting your body with more ease and joy 🙂

Why Isn’t My Core Getting Stronger? A Case for “Core Mobility”

December 18th was this month’s edition of the Movement Nerd Hangout: A free monthly session to welcome you into my wee community of self-professed movement detectives (aka movement nerds).

This month’s topic was Core Training From the Inside Out (part 1). I figured everyone’s thinking about their mid-section around this hedonic time of year, so yes I jumped on that marketing train. Sue me.

Over 100 lovely people signed up to explore some rather unconventional concepts and ways of experiencing their “core”, such as:

What is core mobility vs. core stability? (and why this may be the missing link to building a strong core)
How could ankle sprain rehab be considered “indirect” core training?
What’s your center of mass (CoM) awareness got to do with core training? And how is it more important than a “neutral” spine?
What the heck is “neutral spine” anyway? Should you work on it?
How does Gary Ward’s rule of motion: Muscles lengthen before they contract, come to life in a diaphragmatic breath, as it relates to training dem abz?
How does access to 3D spinal mobility actually improve core stability?

And more…

In case you missed the live session, here’s the complete recording:

Carve yourself out an hour to hang out with me and dive into my first two pillars of core training. Let me know how it goes for you!

And now, here’s the session breakdown, if you just want to read some words, or don’t have time to participate right now.

Core intentions

Here is what I set out to cover in the session:

Understand what is “the core”? And identify the key anatomy.
Understand and explore my first 2 (of four) pillars (that I made up) of core training: 1) Diaphragmatic breathing at rest, and 2) Accessing 3D spinal motion.
Apply Gary Ward’s two rules of motion: 1 ) Joints act, muscles react, and 2) Muscles lengthen before they contract, to core training, in contrast to “core stability”

Whoah what? A core training session that’s NOT about creating stability and engaging your abs?? But isn’t the core supposed to be stable??

We’ll get right into that, but let’s first look at some of the key anatomy.

Core anatomy

What is the core, anyway?

In the session, I asked participants: “Point to your core”.

Do it now… What are you actually pointing to?

Are you pointing to muscles? Are you pointing to your ribcage? Are you pointing to your intra-abdominal pressure? Are you poining to your center of mass? Are you pointing to your breath?

The core is all of that, and more than all that. It is how all of that interacts.

The core is more than a set of muscles.

More than a label of weak or strong. More than something to squeeze, tighten, and brace. It’s more than stabilizing your spine. More than something to tone and make look good. And not something we need to dedicate a whole gym day to.

But I digress… Let’s take a look at the key muscles, bones, and joints of the core.

Key muscles & structures

Bones and joints:

Pelvis
Ribcage
Spine

*Consider the muscles that attach from ribcage to pelvis, spanning the length of the spine*

Muscles (that connect directly to those bones and joints)

Rectus abdominis
Internal obliques
External obliques
Transversus abdominis
Diaphragm
Multifidus and other inter-vertebral muscles

*Note, however, we won’t be talking specifically about muscles today, because it’s actually not that useful experientially, and makes things way more complicated than necessary.

Inhale and exhale your pain away: the diaphragm muscle and how it relates to back pain! - Diversified Integrated Sports ClinicDiversified Integrated Sports Clinic — *And the diaphragm, attaching from ribcage to spine. Contracts with inhalation and relaxes wtih exhalation.*

These structures and muscles all have a specific role in gait.

What does the core do while you’re walking?

WHEN does it contract? HOW does it contract? Should you even think about contracting it while you walk? (No…)

The abdominal muscles are no different than any other muscle in motion: They go through phases of loading/contraction, lengthening/shortening, as the joints they attach to go through phases of opening/closing, compression/decompression.

This all happens multiple times per foot step, in all three planes of motion.

While I don’t say it explicitly, day one of my Liberated Body workshop (spine mechanics day) could be considered a “core training” session, because it’s all about experiencing spine, pelvis, and ribcage movements as they occur harmoniously in gait.

Within the fraction of a second it takes for each foot step, all the structures of the core lengthen then contract, compress then decompress, in all three planes.

Gait might be the best core “workout” you can get 😉

So… Can you appreciate that core training is about more than just stability, six packs, and neutral spine?

“Direct” and “indirect” core training

This is something I made up, so take it with a grain of salt. But I’d love to hear if it resonates with you as a concept.

I’d like to poropose two types of “core training” (neither of which involves stability, or romanticizing neutral spine):

Direct (or local)

– Working directly with the spine and trunk musculature, the position/movement of spine, pelvis, and ribcage, and the ability to breathe within all options for those positions/movements.

– The potential for the structures named above to alternate between demands for movement or creating stiffness, in a way that is effective for the current task.

Examples of direct core training: Working directly on spine mobility. Doing core stability exercises, like deadbugs. In real life, being able to brace the abdominal muscles, create a rigid spine, and maintain intra-abdominal pressure in order to push your car uphill.

Indirect (or global)

– Freedom for one’s center of mass (CoM) to move freely within the base of support of your feet, to all it’s edges. The ability to find your best “center”, having explored those edges, instead of forcing an idea of neutral spine on a structure lacking awareness of center.

– CoM mobility (or “core mobility”, a term Gary Ward coined in What the Foot) gives rise to the core musculature (and all musculature) reflexively responding, unconsciously, as the body moves.

– Indirect training is specific to the individual based on their unique history- Injuries, sports, habitual patterning and postures. Indirect work is to give the whole body back “what’s missing”, knowing it will impact on how the core functions.

Example of indirect core training: I’ll use an example of one of my clients. I’ll call him Lars.

Lars had a left ankle sprain, and now he can’t bend that knee very deeply, and he can’t get his body (CoM) over to his left foot.

He looks a little like this:

Lars has left side SI joint and lower back pain, and does a ton of core stability training, because shouldn’t stronger abs help with your SIJ and back?

Not if the problem is that you can’t put weight on your left foot, which is the case for Lars. He can’t shift his center of mass left without weird compensations in his spine and pelvis.

All the blue shading is where muscles are getting pulled long, which are the areas he feels “tight”.

He is very good at training his abs in his off-center place- He’s got a very “strong” core. But it is not helping him to liberate his mass to move freely from one foot to the other, only serving to further lock him into an off-center structure.

As we’ve been working on his left ankle and knee, his pelvis and spine are balancing out, helping him to use his abs better, from a more centered place, because he doesn’t need to lean away from his left leg so much.

So yes, core training is absolutely about the spine, and muscles (direct).

And its also about the whole body’s ability to move freely, not avoid motions that feel unsafe due to past injuries, accidents, or trained movement patterns.

Lars’ ankle and knee movement training was indirectly giving him better access to his core, as he began to inhabit a more centered structure.

Ok now finally onto pillar #1…

Core Training Pillar #1: Diaphragmatic breathing at rest

This is my first “pillar” of core because a good quality diaphragmatic breath:

Descends the diaphragm, smooshing down on your guts, which is necessary to generate intra-abdominal pressure so you can be strong AF when the demand arises (pillar 3)
Mobilizes the spine, pelvis and ribcage (pillar 2)
Lengthens all the abdominal muscles- A good indicator of their ability to then reflexively contract (Gary Ward’s rule: muscles lengthen before they contract)
Has implications for many, many physiological, neural, and esoteric things that are fascinating but beyond the scope of “core”

I really enjoy this animation of the biomechanics of the diaphragm, and the effect of diaphragmatic breathing on the whole body:

To make things very, very simple, in the session I demonstrated a 5 quadrant quick check for your quality of diaphragmtic breathing:

Sternum and belly anterior (aka apical) expansion
Lower pelvis anterior expansion
Upper chest (aka pump handle ) expansion
Lateral ribcage (aka bucket handle) expansion
Posterior ribcage expansion

Are you able to access all 5? Are you all belly and no pump handle? Or are you like me and your left ribcage bucket handle never moves?

All 5 quadrants expanding simultaneously, effortlessly, and unconsiously is a good indicator of a quality diaphragmatic breath.

Core Training Pillar #2: Access to 3D spinal motion

First remember: Core training isn’t just about stabilizing and neutralizing the spine.

Second remember: Your spine moves when you walk (well it should, but maybe yours doesn’t… yet!.)

Third remember: Muscles lengthen before they contract.

Fourth remember: Joints act, muscles react.

So as a prerequisite to having abs that can contract and create stability, we need access to the specific 3D spinal motions that occur with each foot step you take:

Sagittal plane: Flexion and extension.

Frontal plane: Lateral flexions left and right.

Transverse plane: Rotations left and right.

In the session we covered a few exercises to experience the sagittal plane motions: Flexion and extension of the spine. And as a bonus we layered on the 5 quadrant breathing.

Greater access to the whole spine’s movement potential acctually gives you greater ability to stabilize it, too.

To help participants experience this, I had them test out a plank (holding for ~5 breaths), and gauge how “stable” they felt.

Then after exploring some spine motions, I had them re-test their plank. Here are some of their reactions:

“2nd time felt much stronger, more stable and able to access my breath more fully”

“Foot pressure balanced out – started really far on the left foot – more balanced. Also much more stable plank :)”

Pretty cool, eh?

Conclusions?

“Core” can mean a lot of things. What does core mean to you?

Many folks start core strengthening and stability training from the “outside in”, before considering the “inside” part: Breathing, spine motion, and center of mass mobility.

Ankle sprain rehab can be considered “indirect” core training, because it can give you greater access to move evenly between your two feet, aka “core mobility”, or “finding center”.

Neutral spine only lasts a fraction of a second when we walk- A fleeting moment in time.

Diaphragmatic breathing is not belly breathing- There are four other quadrants that need to expand with the belly with every inhalation. How’s yours doing?

Giving the abominal muscles the experience of how they actually lengthen and contract as we walk, by accessing three dimensional spine motion, should be the first poriority for core training, before training for stability.

Want to tune in live for part 2?

Save the date: Wed Jan 27th 2021 @ 10:30am EST (Torono)

In Core Training From the Inside Out )Part 2) we’ll review the first two pillars, and dive into 3 and 4:

Creating intra-abdominal pressure
Creating spine stiffness with limb movement

>>Sign up HERE<<

Can Your Feet Supinate? How to Check it and Why it Matters

The general vibe I get lately is that a lot more folks are open to the idea that pronation of the foot is actually useful. This is fantastic. In much thanks to the work of Gary Ward and all the amazing Anatomy in Motion peeps around the globe.

anatomy in motion wedges — *Some of you might even own the ubiquitous AiM wedges to help your feet pronate more happily*

I even got a delightful message last week from a lady asking how to help her daughter pronate her feet better.

Wow!

A few years ago nobody was asking how to pronate better. They (me included…) were condemning it and asking how to strengthen their collapsed arches. Preaching to push knees out over 5th toe. Walking on the outsides of their feet as a solution for over-pronation.

Times are changing, and I’m optimistic for humanity… Well, mostly.

*But in all fairness, in Canada we have a “May 24 weekend”, that doesn’t always land on May 24, but we still call it that… I don’t get the logic.*

With pronation coming out of purgatory, embraced by the masses, let’s not forget that it is just one of two complimentary extremes on a spectrum. Just because one is trending and useful, not to forget the other.

Like when someone says “too many carbs are bad, go low carb!”, what do we do? EAT NO CARBS EVER because they are bad.

Or when someone says “you should eat more fibre because it keeps you regular”, what do you do? EAT 5LBS OF BRUSSEL SPROUTS EVERY DAY, because more is better.

Not that I’ve ever had problems with nuance, extremism, and carb-confusion. Not me. No way.

All that to say, let’s embrace pronation but…

DON’T FORGET THERE’S THAT OTHER THING THE FOOT DOES

Supination is still important. Always will be.

Pronation and supination are a both/and combo, not an either/or.

Doing something in an extreme, one-sided way should be practiced deliberately, like a medicine to restore balance. And an extreme medical intervention should not be permanent…

The goal isn’t to only work on pronation forever, but to be constantly re-evaluating what balance means, and choose foot exercises with a clear intent.

So please, at the risk of pronating the crap out of our feet becoming the next “trendy” thing to do that gets grossly misinterpreted, people get hurt from it, and pronation becoming demonized yet again, remember that the main benefit of pronation is actually to help better supinate the foot.

This blog post is to offer a bit more info on supination of the foot:

What it is.
What is isn’t.
Can you do it well?
And what’s its relationship with pronation?

TWO FOOT SHAPES REVIEW

There are two main shapes the foot can make: Pronation, and supination.

What is Pronation? - Definition, Causes & Treatment | Study.com

If you’d like, you can go back and review my blog post about pronation.

Here’s a slide from day two (foot day) of my workshop, Liberated Body, to describe what to look for in an embodied experience of pronation and supination. Notice how they are the opposites:

Every movement the body can do takes place on top of either a pronating or supinating of foot, depending on the moment in time in the gait cycle.

Some movements of the body happen only on a pronated foot, some happen on only a supinated foot, some happen on both, and some can happen on both but we don’t want to ever move that way if we value our joints…

For example, a hip can flex while the foot is pronating or supinating. Both happen in gait and are healthy, useful options.

*Here is me flexing my left hip and *trying* to pronate my foot: Two motions which happen together in the loading phase of gait*.

*Here is me trying to flexi my left hip with a supinated foot (which happens in heel strike in gait)*

However, hip extension should only happen on top of a supinating foot in gait.

This is helpful to know so that when you’re doing exercises to work on hip flexion and extension you can accurately sync up your body with your feet.

If we’re not moving in consideration of the hip’s relationship with the foot, then we’re not actually teaching the body to do anything new. We’re just moving a hip in isolation from its role with the rest of the body.

(There are many more examples of this, and if you’d like to learn more about foot/hip things, I recommend Gary Ward’s online course, Closed Chain Biomechanics of the Lower Limb).

MORE THAN JUST SHAPES…

Pronation and supination are best considered as verbs, not nouns.

They are words to describe very specific patterns of movement that all 26 moving bones and 33 joints of the foot do, in three planes of motion.

foot | Description, Drawings, Bones, & Facts | Britannica — *Lots of bones down there folks!*

Anything other than these specific patterns must be called something other than pronation and supination. If even one bone is going the wrong direction, it’s in foot purgatory. This degree of specificity is important.

(and if you have slightly OCD tendencies, you will love studying AiM.)

As verbs, the body should have dynamic access to both options end of the foot motion spectrum, never stuck in one or the other.

Now let’s dial in on supination.

WHAT IS FOOT SUPINATION?

First, follow along with this demo, which is the supination self- check from day 2 of Liberated Body:

So… Do your feet supinate well?

Here’s what we’re looking for as a felt experience of supination:

All arches of the foot rising
Foot shortening and narrowing
Foot pressure distribution travelling to posterior lateral heel
Joints on dorsal (top) and lateral (outside) of foot opening
Muscles under the arch shortening
Muscles on dorsal, lateral foot and ankle lengthening
THREE POINTS OF FOOT TRIPOD ON THE GROUND (otherwise it’s not a real supination)

Could you feel all of that happening?

WHAT IS SUPINATION NOT?

Supination is NOT “arch strengthening”.

Supination refers to motion between the bones of the feet. Actual moving joints. Not just contracting foot muscles to strengthen them.

You can strengthen a muscle without actually articulating the bones in a new way. You can only strengthen muscles within the constraints of your current options for joint movement.

Interestingly, arch strengthening drills like towel scrunching and practicing “short foot” may even block your ability to supinate well.

Whilst towel srcunching, you may be inadvertently pressing your big toe into the ground to grip the towel. Alas… Big toe flexion is actually part of the collection of motions that happen in foot pronation. Oops!

Pin on PreHab Exercises — *If you’re squeeezing with your big toe, it ain’t supination anymore*

I appreciate the valiant goal of the short foot exercise, however the foot is still being treated in isolation from the rest of the body, inconsiderate of the specifc pattern of triplanar motion that is supination. In particular, the rotational component of supination (transverse plane) is lost, which you can see (rather, not see…) in the video below.

I have no doubt you can strengthen your foot muscles and get better at short-footy, towel-scrunchies, but does that equate to moving those feet differently, unconsiously, whilst walking? And consider them in relation to the rest of the body?

Supination is NOT the same as rolling to the outside of your feet.

That is just losing the tripod, which means you’re log-rolling the foot as a whole chunk, versus being able to articulate all joints with each other.

Remember, if you lose the tripod- 1st metatarsal contact, it is no longer supination. It’s inversion (aka how many ankle sprains happen).

ankle inversion — *Loss of 1st met head contact= inversion: Aka oh shit there goes my ankle again!*

It’s the difference between moving a collection of bones as a unit, through space, and moving the bones against each other, in one place, articulating on the ground.

Supination is NOT the same as having high arches.

You can have high arches but ankles that are actually internally rotated!

Remember, as I hope you experienced in the supination check-in video above, we want the ankle to externally rotate with a supinating foot. But many folks with high arches actually have internally rotated ankles!

Foot purgatory. Neither here nor there…

AN INTERDEPENDENT RELATIONSHIP

Pronation and supination together can be considered as a spectrum of movement we perpetually move through as we walk.

They are Yin and yang. They are the opposite and complimentary movement of the other. They are interdependent, not independent.

Pronation relies on supination. Supination relies on pronation. Mess with one, and you impact the other.

In pronation, all the muscles that supinate the foot (primarily muscles attaching under the arch) get loaded eccentrically (stretched like an elastic band), providing the necessary stimulus to contract them, pick up the arch, and generate a healthy supination.

This includes some lovely muscles like:

Flexor hallucis longus
Tibialis posterior
Peroneus longus
Tibialis anterior
Soleus
Gastrocnemius
Et al.

Loading up these muscles generates the stimulus for supination.

Then the foot can start pronating again from it’s fully supinated position, instead of still being half-way (or all the way) pronated. This gives the foot more time before the arch completely lowers on the ground, preventing us from “over-pronating”, the foot crashing into the floor too quickly.

As a bad analogy, imagine if Johnny starts the 100m dash from the 50m line… He’s going to get to the finish line a lot faster than everyone else. But if your foot is like Johnny, starting to pronate from an already 50% pronated place, it will hit its full range a lot faster.

Johnny is like an over-pronating foot.

Healthy pronation sets up an environment for a healthy supination by virtue of muscular contraction.

Healthy supination sets up an environment for healthy pronation by virtue of allowing more time for pronation to take place within.

CONCLUSIONS?

Don’t forget, in your excitement about pronation, that supination is important, too.

A main goal of pronation is actually to help your foot supinate.

A high arched foot is not the same thing as a supinated foot.

If you lose 1st metatarsal head contact (tripod), it is no longer supination.

Pronation and supination are interdependent, wholly reliant on one another.

Eating 5lbs of fibre every day might make your guts hurt… Take it from me.

I’d love to hear if this blog post was useful for you. Did you try the foot supination check in? How did it go?

Again, helpful links if you’d like to learn more about your feet (and your body mechanics):

Closed Chain Biomechanics of the Lower Limb. The next best thing to do while you’re waiting to get into a real live Anatomy in Motion class again

Liberated Body Workshop. If you want to learn to understand these mechanics better in your body, over 4 weeks of movement explorations.

Wake Up Your Butt

Every month I do a free movement session to help you understand a part of your body better.

Friday Nov 20th the topic of the monthly Movement Nerd Hangout was Wake Up Your Butt.

Before I go on and on in typical long-winded Monika fashion, check out the full 75ish minute session on Youtube:

SIDE NOTE: Interestingly, despite doing very little to promote it, this hangout, and being very, very tired on go-day, this session got the most positive response and highest attendance to date. Must be the magical allure of the glutes. After all, who can resist the promise of a stronger butt, more functional butt, and less irritating pain in the butt.

The rest of this blog post will be the technical/conceptual summary of the session.

Let’s begin with some basic functional anatomy…

Anatomy of your butt 101

(excluding sphincters, pelvic floor muscles, and your butt’s role in elimination…)

You have three glute muscles: Glute maximus, glute medius, and glute minimus.

Weak Gluteus Muscles and Lower Back Pain - Restore Health & Wellness — *The gluteal muscles*

Not to be confused with this silly depiction of the glutes show below.

*Internet, please burn this photo. I feel a little ehtically awful for contributing to the mass distribution of abominable anatomical atrocities of the likes of this.*

The glute muscles cross the hip joint, managing the motion of the pelvis and the femur.

The hip joint has lots of triplanar motion, which the glutes respond to by either shortening or lengthening. Here’s what the glute max does during each hip motion:

SAGITTAL PLANE	GLUTE MAX STATUS
Flexion	Long
Extension	Short
FRONTAL PLANE
Adduction	Long
Abduction	Short
TRANSVERSE PLANE
Internal rotation	Long
External rotation	Short

However, glutes become tricky when we look at what they actually do in gait. During some phases the glutes can be long in two planes, and yet short in another! Muscles can be confusing…

For example, in the loading phase of gait- when the front foot pronates and our entire bodyweight is on it (aka suspension phase, in AiM) we have the following:

SAGITTAL PLANE	GLUTE MAX STATUS
Flexion	Long
FRONTAL PLANE
Adduction	Long
TRANSVERSE PLANE
External rotation	Short

And so at this point we shall switch gears from the traditional “what does that muscle do?” conversation…

Gary Ward’s First Two Rules of Motion

If you haven’t already read What The Foot, this is a good place to start to learn more about Gary’s 5 rules of motion.

What the Foot?: A Game-Changing Philosophy in Human Movement to Eliminate Pain and Maximise Human Potential: Gary Ward: 9781907261084: Books - Amazon.ca

The first two rules are very important for our glute discussion:

Rule 1: Joints act, muscles react

Rule 2: Muscles lengthen before they contract.

In gait, our muscles react to the movement of our bones and joints as we journey forward through space, from one foot to the next.

Walking is a predominantly momentum-based activity in which the role muscles contribute most strongly is to decelerate joint movement- Load up muscles like a slingshot, which then contract to move the bones in the opposite direction, then go on slack to let momentum do the rest.

From this perspective, the solution to a sleepy butt is not just to squeeze it.

In gait, we do NOT want our muscles to only be concentrically contracting (shortening) to pick up our limbs and ambulate, which is a more energetically costly walking strategy. And we definitely don’t want to micro-manage every muscle contraction consciously.

Just think about the last time you had to walk in knee-high snow, and the feeling of having to contract your hip flexors more than necessary with each step. Tiring!

Unless you have a pair of snowshoes…

“You just can’t go anyplace without snowshoes”. I could listen this man talk all day! So soothing.

Think of muscles as managers of joint motion.

In gait, joints act, muscles react: Muscles manage the joint they cross by decelerating the motion of the bones that just moved into them, and sending them back the opposite direction, which generates our forwards locomotion.

In efficient gait, glutes come alive, unconsiously, when the hip moves in such a way that lengthens them, providing the stimulus to contract back in the other direction.

This is important because each footstep you take contains all the building block joint motions that underlie every other movement pattern a human can do. If your hips can move with all their innate options, and glutes can load unconsciously while you walk, trust that your body has a much better chance of accessing them in all other activities.

Like deep-snow country snowshoeing

Now let’s apply this to the glutes, which manage the motion available at the hip.

What motions of the hip do the glutes manage?

In any textbook or anatomy app, you’ll get the list of concentric joint actions a muscle does- What happens to the joint when that muscle shortens.

But you’ll probably never get the list of joint actions that muscle decelerates.

Key point: In gait, a muscle’s most important role is what it does eccentrically- A contraction while the muscle is lengthening.

Key question: What joint actions causes eccentric loading of the glutes?

Concentrically, the textbooks tell us that, at the hip joint, glute max will do:

Extension
Abduction
External rotation

Which means that to eccentrically load the glute max (in accordance with the rules joints act, muscles react, and muscles lengthen before they contract), we need the hip to do the opposite:

Flex
Adduct
Internally rotate

These three motions would lengthen glutes, which would then stimulate them to contract and create extension, abduction, external rotation, pushing us along our merry way.

So…

Flexing the hip gives no option but for glute max to generate hip extension

Adducting the hip gives no option but for the glute max to generate hip abduction

Internally rotating the hip blah blah blah hip external rotation.

So the question is not, “how many reps of side-lying clamshells should I do to activate my glutes?”, but rather “Can both of my hip joints access flexion, adduction, and internall rotation?”

Because if the hip joint can do those three motions, the glutes should have no option but to contract!

Now of course there are many more muscles that cross the hip, which means we have a choice: Try to micromanage individual muscles OR, move the one hip joint in such a way it stimulates all said muscles to perform their role.

In Gary Ward’s words (from the Closed Chain Biomechanics of the Lower Limb course):

Looking at a single joint- the hip, will give us movement in every single muscles that is attached to it. So rather than thkning of working with 10 different muscles, we can still just focus on quality of movement in one joint.

It’s a great course FYI. And you can get continuing education credits at last!

Why do butts go to sleep?

The million dollar question: Why did your butts go “asleep” in the first place?

“Sleepy glutes” is a popular buzz term, and I am now guilty of propagating it (#marketing, yo). Calling any muscle “asleep” is a bit of an over-simplification.

Muscles don’t “sleep” exactly. They don’t have a REM cycle 😉 But they do adhere to the “use it or lose it” principle, and “joints act” is the “use it” that keeps us from losing our glute reaction.

Muscles “fall asleep” when we stop moving the joints they cross! Stop giving them anything to do, and they stop doing anything.

Most people’s technical solution to “waking up” a muscle is to repetitively contract it. Endless glute-squeezy activation drills. Thank you Jane Fonda.

However, you can squeeze your butt all day and it might not result in any actual new joint motion.

Try it: You can squeeze your butt without moving your hips. But if you move your hip, you give your glutes no option but to respond.

Give the glutes no option but to contract

Imagine you’re 8 years old again, and it’s Christmas morning.

You’re wide awake and ready to open the presents under the tree, but Dad’s still half asleep because it’s at 5am on a Sunday and he just came back from working in the coal mines to buy you said presents (you ingrateful punk).

But you don’t care about Dad’s back-breaking manual labour, so you poke Dad over and over hoping he’ll wake up so you can open presents and eat candy for breakfast.

Well, poking Dad more won’t make him want to wake up, he’ll just get pissed off and want to stay in bed. Poking doesn’t provide the right incentive to change Dad’s behaviour.

However you can give him no option but to wake up, by setting the Christmas tree on fire.

That’s the action that will stimulate sleepy ol’ Pops to move!

Maybe this is a bad analogy, but what we want to do is stop poking Dad incessantly (squeezing glutes over and over), and instead create an environment in which he is given no choice but to wake up. Cruel… But does the job 😉

So how do we light that Christmas tree fire for your glutes? Create an environment that gives your glutes no option but to contract.

Hip joint acts, glutes react.

If the hip joint isn’t actually moving, the glutes won’t respond. This has nothing to do with how flexible or stiff you are. No actual motion of the hip= no glute reaction.

Stop blaming your muscles

Far too often we blame muscles as the primary cause of our problems. But(t) unless there was direct trauma generating scar tissue (like sitting on a nail, a surgery, etc) it’s probably not orignally the muscle’s fault.

Even a muscle strain might not originally be the muscle’s fault. After all, it was only doing what the joint’s access to it’s own motion permitted it to do.

Remember, in gait, the muscle’s role is to simply react to what the skeleton is capable of doing.

So don’t blame your glutes, they’re doing the best they can given their environment (aka the joint’s movement potential). Ask instead, “What might be preveniting my hip from moving?”

Well I don’t know what might be preventing YOUR hip joint from accessing it’s movement potential.

It could be a learned movement patterning based on a sport or skill.

Maybe an ankle sprain that makes you not want to put weight on that leg- and if you can’t put weight on a leg when you walk the hip joint isn’t going to move.

Or maybe you just sit a lot and literally just don’t move your hips.

Whatever the case may be, I hope this inspires you to to think and work with your hips and glutes in a new way.

Conclusions?

Muscles can be confusing, but if you can get your hip to move in all three planes, your glutes will have no option but to contract.

In gait, we are more interested in eccentric muscle action, because this is what most effectively stimulates a muscle to contract and move us forward.

Gait contains all the building block joint motions. Accessing glute function in the context of gait, by virtue of quality hip movement, opens the door of opportunity to use dem glutes in all other activities and exercises, unconsciously.

Ask not, how mnay reps of X-Magical-Glute-Exercise I should I do, and instead, seek to understand what could be preventing your hips from accessing tri-planar motion?

Now go any do all the glute things your heart desires 🙂 Do your squats, and glute bridges, barbell hip thrusts, clamshells, and side-lying leg raises, and trust you actually got glutes to squeeze.

Did you do the full movement session? Did you find it useful?

Did you find your glutes in all of the exercises? Was there one plane of motion that was harder than the other? Easier on one leg than the other? Shoot me an email or leave a comment below to share your experience 🙂

Let me know how it went 🙂