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?? đ
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 Iâd 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 carâŚ
But thatâs 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 wasnât 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 didnât know it wasnât 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 âmost improvedâ 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.â 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 brainâs, 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 werenât what “healed” me. As I remember Gary Ward stating on one course, engaging with his work is like âputting the BIO back in biomechanicsâŚâÂ
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? Thatâs 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? đ
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 youÂ
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 knowingÂ
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 I had only 15 minutes with someone to help them move and stand with more ease, but was not allowed to assess anything or ask about their injury history, I think the most impactful thing to do would be…
Teach them how to pronate their feet.
Pronation is not the devil, but the devil is in the details.
I’m here about the pronation!
Pronation is an important motion the foot must be able to do as we walk. Contrary to what your orthotics person may have told you.
With each step, the foot gets just one chance to pronate. Could you missing out on the important benefits of this moment in time? (more about that below, read on!).
At some point in my work with most clients, I know I’ll do eventually take them through an exercise to show them how to access a healthy pronation, its just a matter of when.
I think that the world of therapy and movement professionals is opening up to the idea that pronation is a healthy movement to promote, with much thanks to the work of Gary Ward. Which is awesome.
However…
Just rolling your foot IN is not the same as pronation.
Do you know the difference?
Eversion (rolling onto the inside of your foot… I know, it seems like it should be called INversion, just deal with the counterintuitive language), is the frontal plane component of pronation, not the whole shebang.
My intention with this blog post is to highlight the diffrences between pronation and eversion of the foot, so that you can liberate your feet and wake up their muscles instead of living with a problematic chunk at the end of your leg.
So before you read any further, stop what you’re doing (unless you’re saving your baby from being eaten by a dog or something) and follow along with the video below. Let’s see how well your feet move. Are you just everting, or are you actually pronating?
The clip is from day 2 of my Liberated Body workshop: Foot mechanics day, in which we explore healthy pronation and supination of the foot.
In fact, embracing pronation is often the biggest take-away for my students. One said: “I was convinced that pronation was a horrible thing until this class!”
Pronation is a tri-planar movement
Eversion describes only the frontal plane aspect of pronation
The main difference between pronation and eversion, in super simple terms (because my brain needs things to be simple):
Do you roll inwards on your foot, dump your knee wayyy inside of your big toe, and lose contact with the 5th metatarsal head on the floor? That’s eversion of the whole foot, not pronation.
Check out these images:
Accurately labelled. Notice the loss of 5th met contact in the eversion photo, and likewise, the loss of 1st met contact in the inversion photo. No tripod, no pronation.
Yes, these are also labelled accurately: Notice how the calcaneus (heel bone) is rolling into eversion, but it appears that the whole foot tripod is still in contact with the ground. Got tripod? That’s a pronation.
Notice how the labels in brackets underneath that say pronation and supination are not accurate, because the foot is clearly rolling off the floor, losing tripod contact.
Are you doing the right thing the wrong way?
As with anything, attention to nuance is the key for success. We could be doing the “right” thing the wrong way,
Like when I first tried a low carb, high fat diet in 2013ish because that’s what the whole internet was doing… No one told me how easy it was to eat 12483275939 calories of fat a day and gain weight on a “fat-loss” diet. Oops.
Could you be thinking you’re pronating, but just smashing the shit out of your first met by dumping all your weight onto it, with no muscles managing the situation?
Here’s one more nuanced pronation “DO” and “DON’T” that I hope you picked up from my video: We DO want the knee to go slightly inward to access foot pronation, but we DON’T want the knee to dump inward so far it generates eversion.
Check out this video by Gary Ward (which he created to illustrate the concept from his book What the Foot, that knee over second toe is not a thing we should get dogmatically locked into because it limits foot movement in gait):
Here’s your pronation vs. eversion check-list for success:
Eversion:
No articulation between foot bones
Foot “log-rolls” inward as one chunk
Loss of tripod (5th metatarsal head lifts from floor)
No change in muscles length or experience loading/stretching under foot
Joints remain in same position, nothing decompresses/compresses
Pronation:
Articulation between the foot bones with each other and the ground
Tri-planar motion of the foot (sagittal, frontal, and transverse plane components- eversion is just the frontal plane component of pronation)
All three points of the tripod in contact with the floor
Muscles on the bottom and inside surfaces of foot, and back of the ankle load and lengthen
Joints on the bottom and inside surface of the foot open and decompress.
Here’s a slide from my Liberated Body workshop day 2 presentation that outlines what we’re looking for in healthy pronation and supination:
Why is pronation actually useful?
Just to clarify: PronatING is great. Being stuck in pronaTION, the noun, is not so great.
Pronation is like going to Wal-Mart- Get in, get what you need, and get out as quickly as possible.
Here are a three amazing things our body gets from healthy pronation (but does not get from rolling in, aka eversion):
Natural lengthening and loading of the muscles under the foot with each step: Got tight feet? Stretching not really helping? Rolling fascia out feels good, but not changing anything? Foot pronation is the movement that naturally allows the muscles under your foot to lengthen with each step. Got plantar fasciitis? Letting your feet pronate could be a game changer for you.
Extensor chain (dem glutes) load: Looking for more ease and power with each stride? Or to explode up from a squat position? Or land from a jump with more control? At the same moment in time that we pronate our foot in gait, the entire extensor chain of the lower body loads up. Calves load to generate plantarflexion, distal quads load to generate knee extension, and proximal glutes and hamstrings load to generate hip extension. Want to jump better and run with more ease? Make sure your feet can pronate well.
Pronation and eversion (rolling in on the foot) are not the same. One is a useful experience for the whole body, the other just feels uncomfortable.
Eversion is just one component (frontal plane) of a healthy, three dimensional pronation.
Losing the foot tripod makes or breaks a pronation. And a tea towel might be your new best friend.
Pronation has important movement repercussions for the body, such as allowing us to mobilize our feet naturally with each step, helping us engage our glutes better, and even freeing our neck and jaw tension.
Wal-Mart sucks.
Want to learn more?
I think you’ll really love Wake Your Feet Up, an online course by Gary Ward that teaches foot mechanics in a way that even my simple brain can comprehend.
He designed this course for folks who want to learn more about their foot mechanics and explore exercises to give their tootsies back their full movement potential. This online course is appropriate for all humans with feet, not just movement and therapy professionals who can speak biomechanics.
Ok I realize this post makes me seem like a huge Gary Ward fan-girl. I kinda am. Deal with it. I think he was my dad in a past life.
That’s all for now, movemet pals. I’d love to hear if you discovered anything new about your feet: Are you pronating well, or just everting? And if you can get your feet pronating well, what does it feel like for your feet, and the rest of your body?
Leave a comment, or shoot me an email, and let me know đ
Do you have one of more of these problems with your current exercise routine?
You feel generally stuck in your exercise routine.
You don’t know what exercises to do for your goal so you default to the same shit even though you don’t particuarly love it.
You don’t really know what your goals are or should be so you’re just going through the motions
You’re just going through the motions but the spark, joy, and fulfillment are gone.
I’ve been there, too, my friend. Many times.
If you said YES to any of the bullet points above, then I invite you to do a Movement Practice Audit.
In the 30 min video I’m going to introduce the MESH framework I used to audit my own movement practice, to strip away the useless garbage, keep what was working, and reconnect with my “why” that keeps me moving (because, “exercise is good” isn’t a good enough reason…)
Need to audit your own movement practice? Follow along with the video:
Want to listen while you’re on the move? Here’s an audio version:
What is the MESH framekwork?
Does your movement practice MESH for you? MESH helps you audit four key areas of your movement practice to see what works, and what needs to change.
What works for you right now is not fixed. Auditing yourself every 6 months to a year is a good way to check in and make sure your movement practice is still serving you.
M= Meaningful
“Why am I doing this?”
Does your movement practice support your highest values? Or are you just moving because someone told you exercise is a thing you should do. Let’s discover what makes movement actually meaningful for you.
E= Enjoyable
“Do I even like doing this?”
Life’s too short to spend time doing shit you hate. And if you don’t enjoy it, you’re not going to be able to do it in a way that is sustainable. If you hate jogging, why are you forcing youself to do it? Could you find something comparable, that meeds your needs, and that you actually like?
Also note that you can learn to like something if you can connect it to your highest values. You might not love something in the moment, but you can start to connect with how it makes you feel, or that you like the feeling of mastery you get, or you like what it enables you to do as a result.
S= Sustainable
“As my movement practice is now, could I do it for the rest of my life?”
If the naswer is no, it’s not sustainable. Not that your practice should stay the same for ever. Sustainability takes into consideration that you will evolve and your practice will change, and that you are not getting locked into one paradigm for movement.
Also consider Dr. Peter Attia’s Centennarian Olympics thought experiment: What do you want to be able to do if you were to live to be 100, and how are you gonig to train for those, like they are Olympic events. Don’t just hope for the best.
Like my favourite shirt says… Train For Life.
Amazing shirt is by Toronto company Screaming Monkey Apparel
H= Healthy
“Am I meeting my body’s demands?”
Healthy means so many things to so many people. I like think of health as an act of meeting our bodies current demands.
Is your nervous system sympathetic dominant? Health might mean meeting that demand.
Do you have joint movement restrictions that are keeping you stuck in pain and lethargy: Health might mean meating that demand.
And many other factors that I couln’t possibly cover in a video.
So how did you do on your audit?
Understanding the MESH framework is a great place to start. From here, we can go deeper.
The MESH audit is just one tool of many that I’ve been developing for the past 2 years, and I’ll be putting it out slowly in a series of videos like this one over the next several months.
I’m going to be putting together an in depth program called Physical Mastery in which I’ll be taking a group of folks through all the steps of my movement practice audit. Not sure when it will be a fully actualized thing, but the gears are in motion.
Physical Mastery is for anyone feeling stuck with their body, uninspired, energetically depleted, and not sure what to do to get out of the physical and mental funk.
The Physical Mastery program will help you to connect more deeply with your body by understanding, healing, and deepening your relationship with it. You’ll discover what’s holding you back from inhabiting your body with more ease and joy through a series of practical and conceptual exercises. The end result is to have all the tools you need to build a movement practice that inspires you, and makes you feel energized, resilient, and grounded to take on the world.
Sounds pretty good, right? I think I created this program because it’s exactly what I needed when I was going thourgh a quarter life crisis and needed to get myself out of the hole I was digging for my body and my life: Eating disorder, compulsive exerciser, multiple back injuries, trying to meet everyone’s expecatations and dismissing my own needs.
Sound like you? I’m looking for a group of “beta” participants to give the Physical Mastery Program a test drive!
If you are looking for clarity in your movement practice so you can feel more energized, connected with your life’s purpose, and in better relationship with your body, shoot me an email to get in touch and be one of the beta participants.
This past Friday Sept 11th was my second free monthly Movement Nerd Hangout, and this one was specifically for the dancers: Troubleshooting Turnout.
This workshop is a little different… Why? Because we flipped the conventional “here’s how to improve your turnout” script upside down. Instead of just practicing more and more exercises focusing directly on mobilizing and strengthening hip external rotation, we looked at an overlooked, yet powerful tool….
Gait mechanics: The gaitway (haha see what I did there??) to better everything movement related.
Optimizing how our hips accesses external and internal rotation in the context of how we walk serves as the foundation upon which all other skills, like dance, can be layered.
Want to feel what I mean? Grab your notebook, pens, and fluffy socks (you’ll see… ;)), and follow along with the complete workshop replay:
Aand as a bonus, I made a free resource of top turnout #protips from some amazing dance educators around the world. Check it out:
I compiled this bonus resource after surveying 22 dance educators from around the world for their turnout #protips. Want to get the free PDF?
Plop in your best email address below and I'll send the free PDF to your inbox.Â
Hurraaahhh! My robot email monkeys have sent the PDF to your inbox. If you do not see the email with the PDF resource, please check spam/promotions folder in case it went there. And if you STILL can't find it, shoot me an email monika@monikavolkmar.com and I'll send it to you personally (those monekys sometimes slack off...)
Here’s what we covered in the workshop
There is a 35 ish minute lecture covering:
Hip mechanics 101: The most simple anatomy lesson ever. What is the hip joint? (hint, it’s nothing but empty space…)
The 5 ways to externally rotate a hip: Why the “hip dissociation” in turnout is just one way to access the hip, but not the complete picture.
Introduction to Gary Ward’s rule of motion “Muscles lengthen before they contract”: Why hip internal rotation is so important for optimizing turnout.
What is the diffrence between “accessing” a joint, vs. stretching or mobilizing it? Why stretching and eccentric load are two different things, with different goals and outcomes.
Why we should embrace our turnout compensations: Stop demonizing compensations, and instead find straategies to improve our buffer to tolerate them, and use them to our advantage.
The movement session includes:
Self-assessment: Whatâs your functional turnout? Whereâs your turnout coming from? Can your hips perform the basic joint interactions that we want to see in the gait cycle?
Movement exploration: I guided 5 exercises to feed in new movement potential to the hips, spine, pelvis, knees, feet, and ankles, based on gait mechanics.
Re-assessment: Did anything improve?
Speaking of which, check out MY before and after photo of the functional turnout assessment:
Before… Behold my amazing functional turnout.
After! Can you guess which leg I workked on in the workhop?? And yes, my slippers are awesome.
Apparently I needed this workshop đ Now I know what to do to prepare my return to the dance studio.
I’d love to see YOUR before and after. Please email to me if you want to share your results after the wrokshop.
âââI appreciate everyone who made it through to the end! Believe me when I say I really tried to keep it ~60 mins. I failed… The workshop is almost 2 hours long. I didn’t even get through all of the material I originally planned. AND we only did the exercises on one leg!
Smarten up, dancers
Seriously. Don’t be like old-Monika…
Back in the day…
I remember doing everything possible to improve my hip external rotation, at the expense of my bodyâs well-being, including:
Sitting in the splits for 30 mins straight, and then not being able to stand back up.
Getting people to sit on my butt while I was in a frog position (and not being able to stand back upâŚ)
Torquing my knees out to give the illusion of better turnout (why are my knees sore now??).
Saying âScrew using functional turnout! Iâm just gonna force my feet out, and Iâll deal with the consequences after!â
Do any of those sound like you?
Then you will get a lot out this workshop. You might not get more total range of hip rotation, but nearly all workshop participants reported more ease accessing the turnout they already had.
I hope you’ll give it a try đ Please share this workshop with your dance pals who could use some help with their hips.
Remember to pick up the free turnout resource that I compiled, too. You’ll get the top DO’s and DON’Ts from 22 amazing dance educators (I’ll admit, I am guilty of almost every single one of the DON’Ts…)
I compiled this bonus resource after surveying 22 dance educators from around the world for their turnout #protips. Want to get the free PDF?
Plop in your best email address below and I'll send the free PDF to your inbox.Â
Hurraaahhh! My robot email monkeys have sent the PDF to your inbox. If you do not see the email with the PDF resource, please check spam/promotions folder in case it went there. And if you STILL can't find it, shoot me an email monika@monikavolkmar.com and I'll send it to you personally (those monekys sometimes slack off...)
Who AM I?
Hey, I’m Monika.
I used to be a dancer until I got injured one time too many and had to quit.
But I found something I enjoy even more to do with my life: Learn about movement mechanics and teach people to become their own best expert on moving better and getting out of pain.
I embarked on what I call my “DIY journey to pain free living” (because I was too broke to afford a therapist, and had sabotaged my dance career, so the best hack seemed to be to start a new career in a field that forced me to learn to heal myself).
I like to say I’m a disciple of Gary Ward’s Anatomy in Motion (AiM) which is a framework for working with the body to enhance performance and releive strain on the body based on how it moves as we walk. What makes it so unique and effective is how the AiM model pays particular attention to the relationship the mechanics of the feet have with everything up the chain.
In 2015 I wrote a book called Dance Stronger to help spread the AiM philosophy to the dance world, and help dancers learn how to strength train and practice self-care.
Click the image to get a free copy the book (email me to ask about the strength training program)
Through exploring the AiM model of gait mechanics (what all your body’s joints should be doing at the rigt times while you walk), we can see where your body is missing the appropriate joint mechanics, and use specific exercises to give them back.
It’s cool stuff. And it’s been the most effective thing I’ve found so far on my movement learning journey.
I’ve been learning and sharing this work with my clients in person in my bodywork and movement therapy practice, and recently, since COVID, online in my Liberated Body Workshop.
Why do they form? What do you do about them? Can you do anything about them? Aren’t they genetic? Do you need to get surgery? What about those toe spacer things and splints?
So many questions!
I’m not claiming to have any conclusive answers (and I think the moment we conclude something is the moment we stop learning anything new).
But what I do know is that bunions can be understood and worked with from a movement perspective. That is, movement of the big toe created the bunion, why could movement not also be at least part of the remedy?
I believe movement is medicine. But too much medicince can be problematic too, can’t it?
Here’s a key thing to know: The movement of the big toe that leads to a bunion forming- toe abduction/valgus- happens at a specific moment in time in the gait cycle. Things get problematic when that movement becomes the only option your foot has and becomes a structural adaptation, ie, the actual shape of your foot changes.
The bunion itself is the solution your body found for a problem.
The video below is a clip from a Movement Deep Dive Session I did recently with some of my amazing Liberated Body students. The session was to help them understand big toe mechanics with foot pronation and supination as we walk.
I think knowledge is power… Wanna geek out?
In the video I cover:
What joint motions are possible at the big toe joint (aka 1st metatarsalphalangeal joint aka MTPJ)?
How is movement of the foot on the floor- closed chain- different than when it swings through the air- open chain?
What does the big toe do when the foot pronates and supinates?
What big toe/foot movement creates a bunion over time and when does that happen in gait?
How can a bunion be seen as an indicator to that we need to pronate that foot better?
How could this be affecting stuff above, like your neck?
When we understanding how the big toe moves in relationship with the foot and the rest of the body, we have powerful information to inform the decisions we make for our bodies everyday.
I hope the video demonstrates how the big toe movement that leads to a bunion forming- toe abduction- is a totally natural event with each step we take. We just want to have other options, too.
Interestingly, while bunions are association with a more pronated foot, the bunion may form because the foot doesn’t pronate well! The big toe abducting away from the foot was the last ditch attempt to do something that resembles pronation. I often find that if we show the foot how to pronate better without relying solely on the big toe deviating into excessive abduction, good things happen.
So if you have a bunion, maybe your big toe is just stuck in a moment in time because it only has one option for movement? What if you could show it a new option?
I think its safe to say that before electing for an invasive buinion procedure, or using a medieval-looking toe stretching devices, or shoving spacers between your toes, why not try some natural movement, first? Give that foot some of its movement potential back.
Best case scenario, you can get that toe moving again and things will feel better. Worst case, you mobilized your feet and got some extra bloodflow. Win win.
This is why I’m so passionate about the work Gary Ward teaches in his Anatomy in Motion courses. What if we could restore the movement potential inherent in our gait cycle, so that each step we take has the ability to reinforce healthy joint mehcanics? Walk ourselves well.
Want to learn more? I think you’ll really enjoy my four day workshop Liberated Body. We spend the whole of day two moving your feet đ I have a live workshop every few months, and it’s also available as a home-study you can start today đ
In fact, here’s a story from one of my students, a dancer and yogi, who embraced pronating her feet and was able to free up her bunion:
“My most enjoyable class and the biggest change I noticed was in the FEET! I feel that I have avoided pronation like the plague which stems from ballet training for sure – but my feet, achilles, calves and even knees felt SO GREAT after that class. I purposefully went for a walk afterwards and could really feel a difference in my foot pressures as I moved. Also as I mentioned at the end of the session, my bunion on the right side felt released and not as painful – coming up to demi-pointe on that side was a breeze.”
Super cool, right!?
What do you think? Do you have bunions? Have you had a bunion surgery? Have you had success using movement to relieve bunion pain? I’d love to hear from you.
Leave a comment here, shoot me an email, or find me on the social media things you do. I’m pretty much the only Monika Volkmar on the planet, so I’m easy to find đ
Alternative title: Foot pronation is not the devil.
If you don’t want to read this whole blog post (won’t take it personally, my posts can be long…) go to the bottom to watch an excerpt from an online movement session I did last week linking foot and jaw mechanics in gait.
Go with the flow (motion model)
About once a week I do a movement session with students who’ve completed my Liberated Body 4 day workshop. The intention is to help them deepen their understanding of how our bodies were designed to move based on the joint interactions taught in Gary Ward’s Anatomy in Motion, and his Flow Motion Model of the gait cycle.
I love this model (FMM) because it maps how any one part of the body is linked to all of others via their joint interactions through the gait cycle.
We can use the model as a map to identify the joint motions and interactions your body is having truoble accessing so we can give these sepcific things back to your system.
Peoples’ bodies tend to like feeling more complete.
I thought it would be nice to summarize one of my most recent online movement sessions in which we looked at the joint interactions that link movement of the foot with the jaw.
The very short story: Foot pronation couples with jaw decompression (mandible sliding forward and down from the temporal bones).
My invitation to you, if yo’re interested, is to come take this journey from your foot to your face. It’s fun. It’s logical. It will hopefully even be useful! (and check out the video at the end of this post to see a clip from the session to follow along with).
WHAT IS THE JAW?
Seems like an obvious question. However, I’ve made it my personal practice to never again take for granted that I understand what a joint is. Nor will I assume that the person I am talking to has the same understanding of a joint as mine.
I fondly recall the moment I actually understood what a shoulder was. It was just last year…
So when we say “jaw”, what’s the reference point? Are we talking about the mandible? The temporal mandibular joint (TMJ)? Where does the word jaw even come from?
I did a bit of etymological research and tfound that “jaw”, from mid 15th century old English referred to “holding and gripping part of an appliance”.
Holding and gripping… Sounds like what many of us do with our jaws today.
Your jaw is actually the “gripping” part of your face. Feels true, don’t it? đ
The jaw has two articulating bones: Mandible + temporal bone.
In desribing the motion of the jaw, we’ll refer to the mandible’s movement interaction with the temporal bone.And we’ll consider the temporal mandibular joint- TMJ- as simply the space between the mandible and temporal bone. There’s a articular condyle in there. And some synovial fluid, too.
We’ll use the words protrusion (forward) and retrusion (backwards) to refer to mandibular motion in relation to the rest of the skull. And we’ll use the words compression and decompression to refer to the TMJ’s state of more or less pressure respectively.
As you open your mouth the mandible protrudes (slides anteriorally and inferiorally) opening space in the TMJ, and we’ll call it a decompression. And visa versa.
For purposes of this blog post, we’ll talk mostly sagittal plane (forward and back movement), but know that the mandible and TMJ have movement capacity in frontal and transverse plane- lateral shifts and rotations right and left. Not a lot, but enough to be significant.
Now the fun part… Your jaw has a specific way of interacting wiht the rest of the body as you walk.
All joint motions the body can do show up in gait. Even the jaw’s motions, though it is so subtle and happens too quickly to pay attention to it unelss you really focus.
Every single joint in the body has the opportunity to articulate to both ends of it’s available movement spectrum, in all three planes, with each foot step. Every movment your body can do it does in the space of 0.6-0.8 seconds with each step.
Unless it can’t.
So if a joint doesn’t have access to a movement just standing and trying to isolate it, you can bet it won’t be happening when you walk either. This leads to new strategies that are more effortful, and may lead to new problems later.
How does lack of movement at the foot affect the jaw? How does lack of movement at the jaw affect the foot?
The jaw is a DANGLER
In AiM, Gary has taught us to think of several structures as “danglers”.
The mandible is a dangler.
Because it dangles, it doesn’t really do much on its own accord as we walk, it just comes along for the ride. It doesn’t actually have inherent motion that contributes to gait, but think of it as needing to sway in harmony with its surrounding structures as part of a global mass-management strategy.
When the jaw gets stuck in one position and only has that one option, it can impact on the movement options for the rest of the body.
OCCLUSION, PROPRIOCEPTION, AND THE RETICULAR ACTIVATION SYSTEM
Occlusion refers to where the surfaces of the teeth touch. This can have an impact on whole body on movement potential.
In my early AiM days, I recall that I couldn’t find my hamstring load in the heel strike (hamstring “stretch”) exercise on my left leg.
Then I randomly came accross a chart with the teeth and their association to different muscles. I’ve misplaced said chart and all I remember was the connection between molars and hamstring (and if anyone has this or a similar chart I would love to see it!).
Just for the fun of it, I tried doing the heel strike exercise while holding contact with my left molars. BOOM hello hamstrings. Freaky biomechanical magic.
(If you want to learn more about heel strike and how the hamstrings load in gait, I recommend Gary Ward’s Lower Limb Biomechanics course. So good!)
It is also said that the jaw is said to contain the highest number of proprioceptors compared to any other area of the body. Meaning we get a ton of information about our body’s orietation in space from our jaw. And because we can’t see our own jaw, we probably oreint our body’s center of mass based on our jaw’s perceived center to some degree. (I am going to make a little video soon for you to play with this concept… stay tuned!).
Lastly, its good to know that the muscles of the jaw are supplied by the trigeminal nerve, which is closely related to the reticular activation system, which helps us filter information from our environment into categories of safe vs. unsafe, and is linked to states of anxiety, stress, anger, etc.
A curious personal observation is that on days when my bite is more centered, I’m usually in a brighter, cheery mood, full of optimism, and my body has less of my usual annoying symptoms. When my bite is off (usually shfited, laterally flexed, and rotated left), I’m likely to be more irrtable and triggerable by silly bullshit, and more of my symptoms may be present. N=1, but its been useful to pay attention to this.
All this to say, TMJ mechanics and resting bite can have an effect on how we move and how we feel. So we want it to be able to dangle freely, in the right relationship with the rest of the body, which should happen in a particular way with each step we take.
“DEMONIZED” MOVEMENTS THAT COUPLE WITH JAW DECOMPRESSION
What happens when we start labelling one movement “good” and another bad”? We avoid the bad ones and do more of the good ones. This may be conscious or unconscious.
Either way, avoidance of a movement is problematic because no joint motion in the body happens in isolation, but in relationship with everything else.
In gait, if one joint moves, every joint moves.
So when I ask your foot to pronate, I’m actually asking your whole body to pronate with it- A foot pronation accompanied by all the other joint motions that should happen at the same snapshot in time at which the foot pronates in gait.
Have you been taught that pronating your feet was bad? I was. Like, hardcore by my ballet teachers. To the point that I thought that I was a bad person for pronating my feet. (we were also made to feel bad about having to go take a pee in the middle of class, so I held my bladder a lot back in tose days… I think I wrote about that in my book Dance Stronger)
Here’s the paradox: Can a movement deemed “bad” happen at the same time as another movement that is “good”? And if yes, then does this make the good movement more bad? Or the bad movement more good?
Neither. They both just happen. No need to place any meaning or judgement.
To give you an idea of the stuff we recognize as “good” that happens when the foot pronates:
Glutes load (leading to a glute contraction that then extends the hip)
Plantar fascia and all muscles under the foot load and stretch and then help your foot supinate
Vastus medialis gets to do something useful (decelerate knee flexion)
TMJ decompression (as we are focusing on today!)
And more.
On the flip side, there are many other joint mechanics that couple with foot pronation are generally deemed “bad” for the body. A few of such terrible movements are:
Pelvis anterior tilt
Knee valgus
Spine extension
Hip internal rotation (although perhaps only in the dance world… we love to hate on hip internal rotation)
But remember, please, none of these movements are inherently bad or good. They simply happen.
What makes a movement better or worse for us is if it is happening too much, too fast, at the wrong time, or we get stuck in it as our only option.
Pronation is a like visiting Walmart. You want to get in, get what you need, and get out.
When we lable a movement (or anything…) as bad its often because we don’t understand it in its proper context, so our solution is to try to minimize, avoid, or control it.
Real freedom isn’t reached by controlling and manipulating our bodies, selectively avoiding entire movement spectrums. Just a little perceptual recalibration is required.
Let’s follow the flow (Motion Model)
In theory, using the Flow Motion Model, one can look at any bone or joint and, based on its position and velocity on the space-time continuum (if one can really measure both simultaneously…), one could extrapolate what the rest of the body should also be doing at that time moment in time. I think that’s pretty cool. Useful, too.
This is how we are able to make the connection we’re interested in today: Foot pronation couples with TMJ decompression.
If you’re up for it, join me now for a delightfully logical adventure through the body, joint by joint, from your foot to your face, linking foot mechanics to jaw mechanics.
I hope to highlight how movements like pronation and pelvis anterior tilt, which somtimes get a bad rep, are coupled movements. “Coupled” meaning that we want to see them happening at the same moment in time in gait.
Heel strike and away we go…
Let’s start at the beginning…
Which isn’t always so easy, even for a president.
… with the moment your heel hits the ground, and follow your foot as it rolls into it’s most nicest, flattest position.
For simplicity, we’ll call this moment in time pronation, and we’ll defnine it as the one chance your foot gets to pronate on the ground in gait. Its the moment in time at which many mechanics of shock absorption spring into action (get it??).
Let’s keep things super simple and define our pronating foot in terms of pressure, shape, open vs. closed joints, and long vs. short muscles.
As your foot fully pronates in a healthy way, and hoping it can maintain three points of contact- on the 1st and 5th metatarsals and your heel- you should notice the following:
Pressure on the foot travelling anterior and medial towards the 1st metatarsal joint.
All foot arches lowering and spreading, foot shape is becoming wider and longer.
All joints opening on the plantar/medial foot, and closing on the dorsal/lateral surface.
Muscles lenghtening on the plantar/medial surface, and shortening on the dorsal lateral.
A slide from day 2 of my Liberated Body workshop
And all the reverse mechanics happen as the foot supinates.
Pronation of the foot should happen with knee flexion. Let’s check if that joint interaction is naturally present for you.
What’s happening at your knees? If you stand on your two feet and bend your knees, without trying to do what you envision the perfect version of a knee bend should be, do feel your feet naturally pronate, as described above? How do your feet naturally respond? Has your training, like mine, been to avoid pronating your feet? And whait happens if you suspend that belief about pronation being wrong?
If you had no prior information about what SHOULD happen what do you feel IS happening?
If your foot pressures are going the opposite way- lateral and posterior towards your heels, what does it feel like to allow the pronation to occur?
Yes, your knees may go slightly inward. A little bit is ok. A lot is not. Embrace your right to valgus in this moment. The real money is when you don’t need to use a knee valgus to pronate your feet.
What’s your pelvis doing? As you bend your knees and pronate your feet, are you doing a pelvis anterior or posterior tilt? We’d like to see an anterior pelvis tilt. Why?
Feel this out: As you anterior tilt your pelvis, notice how this internally rotates your femurs, tibias, talus(es), and all that internal rotation should contribute to both feet pronating (talus IR is part of foot pronation).
If you do a posterior tilt with your pelvis, you drive supination mechanics via an external rotation of all those leg joints. Maybe posterior tilting is a good way to avoid pronation. But also, maybe you don’t need to avoid pronation?
Also note there are two ways to anterior tilt the pelvis, and only one of them is useful in gait (watch the video below…)
What’s your lumbar spine doing? As you anterior tilt your pelvis, what is the natural, uncsonsioud response at your lumbar spine? We know that as the sacrum nutates with the whole pelvis anteriorally tilting, the lumbar spine will follow into extension. But what does YOURS actually do? Also consider, does it feel like you use your lumbar extension to anteriorally tilt your pelvis? Or does your pelvis anterior tilt lead to a nice extension of your lumbar spine?
What’s your thoracic spine and ribcage doing? As your lumbars extend, does that extension continue to flow up into your thoracic spine, tilting your ribcage up and back (posterior tilt)? Should do! Unless you have a restriction blocking that spine wave up.
What’s your cervical spine and skull doing? Keep your eyes on the horizon, stand on your happily pronating feet, and notice, with spine extension, what motion do you feel happening in your neck? Does your chin lift up and extend your neck? Or do you feel your chin drop and your neck flexing?
Hopefully you feel your kkull anteriorally tilting and your neck flexing. Occipital atlantal joint decompressing.
And finally…
What’s your jaw doing? Remembering that your mandible is a dangler, let it dangle as you tilt your entire skull anteriorally, with your spine extending underneath. Which way does your mandible slide? Forward and down (protrusion/decompression from temporal bone) and dangling further from your face? Does it retract back in towards your face? Or does it do nothing?
Ideally, what you’d like to feel is the jaw sliding forward. Decompressing. If you try to keep it retracted it will seriously block your ability to flex your cervical spine. Just try it!
Do you have all these links in the chain? Or are there some blocked interactions?
If that was too wordy, I invite you to follow this adventure guided by me! Here’s a clip from the session last week in which we did this exploration.
How’d that go for you? Got all the links in the chain? Would love to hear what yo uobserved.
And if that wasn’t so smooth and flowy for you, what do you do about it? Perhaps you’d enjoy my workshop, Liberated Body. which I am now teaching online via the ubiquitous Zoom. Liberated Body is all about finding the missing links in your own body, and restoring them to have a richer experience of your body.
The next workshop is coming up in a few weeks on June 27th. Tell yo’ friends.
Until next time, my fellow body mechanics detectives đ
Up until now we have been discussing peoplesâ common attitudes towards movement and exercise through the use of archetypes and by clarifying some commonly used (or dare I say, misused) terms pertaining to movement practice. Iâd like now to switch gears slightly to take a closer look at what I mean conceptually by movement practice, and then further along in this work, why it is important to investigate the form yours takes and your relationship with it.
Double-edged sword
We live in an interesting time in which the sharing and ingesting of information is ludicrously easy, probably to the point which it is making us less good learners (a topic for another sort of essay). With this ease of sharing of information- both of the practical and educational variety, but sometimes also the useless and intimate details of the personal lives of our distant acquaintances and what they had for #healthydinner last night- people are more health conscious than ever. In the time it takes to type in a sentence into Google, or your credit card number to Amazon Prime, you can have access to a plethora of websites, books, and other resources teaching how to be healthier. This heightened health-consciousness, however, comes with a double edge. On the one side, we have an increase in awareness of the benefits of making more time for movement and exercise in our lives. On the other side there risksbeing too much information, misinformation, and the lure to compare ourselves to the others.
As one of my favourite ballet teachers said countless times, “where your attention goes, energy flows”. For those of us who want to include more movement in our lives as part of a healthy lifestyle plan, this abundance of information makes this both an amazing, and yet confusing and challenging time in which we must choose where we want to focus our attention, and discipline ourselves to have a healthy, pragmatic relationship with the information we ingest (and this includes the words I write, too).Â
This idea of sifting through the rubbish, separating the wheat from the chaff, seems like as good a place as any to start to conceptualize a movement practice. Letâs bring our attention now to the mass of information that tells us what we should do, what is best for us, while remembering that âtheyâ canât possibly know what is best for you. I certainly donât. “The others” donât. Itâs only you who can know, and donât you know it already how difficult it is to interpret the information coming from your own body, let alone trust someone else to do it for you.Â
Movements and markets within movement
As I’ve mentioned, there is an abundance of information and a surging awareness of the world of health and fitness. Inspiration to move (or, more colloquially, âfit-spirationâ, another double-edged sword, which I feel, more often than not, serves to activate our body-image based shame-triggers than provide actual inspiration) exists just a click away. New vocabularies are developing around movement culture and people are latching onto identifiers for their movement and exercise philosophies. We are seeing the advent of “movements” in peoplesâ movement practices.
A movement âmovementâ is seen by us as a new paradigm for organizing how we perform movements and exercise. A system with its own sense of purpose, ideals, and goals. People are drawn to these movements because something about the look and feel of it seems to resonate with them. There is a perceived congruence in the underlying beliefs and goals that both the individual and the movement hold. Often, identifying with a movement (both in movement practices and in other areas of life, such as the intellectual, political, or spiritual) can bring a great sense of meaning and purpose, helping to create a sustainability effect that is necessary for a life-long, pleasurable relationship with the movement practice. If you hate it and don’t find fulfillment in your movement practice, you won’t stick with it long enough to reap its benefits, which is why “enjoyable” is one of the three tenets of a movement practice that I keep repeating (the other two being fulfilling and healthy).Â
Sometimes this relationship with a movement is not so healthy. Some movements can be cultish. Some movements are well-intentioned but poorly led, leading to misinformation and injury (Cross-Fit often gets flack for this). Sometimes there are movement wars and clashes, debating which one is better than the other: Marathon running vs high-intensity -interval training; powerlifting vs weightlifting (and youâll find some nasty, useless, and time-wasting exchanges in online forums, of which I personally have no interest in engaging with). Sometimes weâre drawn to movements for the wrong reasons, like that weâre physically attracted to one of its founding leaders, and confuse this for a congruence with our goals. Latching ignorantly onto a movement is another double edged sword of the movement practice exploration.
There is also the irresistible lure to the new and shiny. Ironically, while the advent of a ânewâ movement can seem like a groundbreaking, sophisticated, or “high-tech” (our interpretation: better) way of interacting with our bodies, many of these movements are only building upon or repackaging something intrinsic to us that already exists, and has always existed, but just that we forgot was there and needed to create a new way of experiencing it again. Some are more or less sensible than others, more or less in line with your individual goals than others, but what all these movements within movement have in common is something atavistic. Something sacred and primal.
As I see it, this is the need to connect with our bodies, use them in the various ways made possible to us by virtue of the miracle of our skeletal structure. Its to delight in the receiving of the inputs of the world around us through the sensory and motor receptors in our joints, and the skin on the soles of our feet and hands (and other body parts should we choose to accept the challenge to get down on the ground and roll around). And of utmost importance, a movement gives us the chance to be a part of a community of similarly minded individuals with whom we feel safe and accepted by. I say this is of utmost importance because the very part of our central nervous system that allows us to have safe, enjoyable social engagement (feelings of love and belonging) is the same aspect of it that also mediates the immune system, digestion, the heart, the respiratory system, our hearing, and everything else related to our systems’ homeostasis, health, growth, and restoration (parasympathetic nervous system function).
A good example of one such movement that has become well-known to the general public in the past decade is the barefoot movement, including the advent of those goofy looking Five Finger shoes (of which I admit I had a pair back in 2013), and barefoot running (which opens up a whole can of worms in the running world, asking the question, “which running technique is best? Forefoot or heel strike?”. And the answer is, in short, it depends. But for the long answer, I implore you to read the book Even With Your Shoes On, by the running coach and fellow Anatomy in Motion practitioner, Helen Hall). But to call the barefoot movement a ânewâ movement is not accurate. Before we had shoes all the human race knew was barefoot living. I can only theorize that some ancient part of us recognizes the value in feeling the sensitive skin on the bottoms of our feet interacting with the grass and dirt, in allowing the bones and muscles of the foot to adapt to the naturally soft ground with variable terrain and textures. It is unfortunate that, for city dwellers like me, the only readily available option is the hard, linear concrete walkways which are not so kind for barefoot walking.
What is good about the barefoot movement is that it is a reminder of how healthy it is for us to go out into the woods and be on natural terrain: It holds the ability to connect us both with ourselves and with nature, two things crucial for our health. What is not so good is how people misinterpret “barefoot good” as “barefoot everything, even stuff I’ve never done before but will now start to do for the first time with no shoes, is the best, and running barefoot on the concrete builds character even though it really hurts, but I have to do it because some guy online wrote about how great it was.”
In both movement and the human structure, there is nothing new, just depth and breadth to explore, and the addition of scientific evidence intellectualizing of the human experience of movement, which may or may not even be necessary for us to get out of it what we need: Health, fulfillment, enjoyment, and human connection (with ourselves and others).
The commoditization movement
While there are countless examples of movements like the barefoot movement, aiming to reconnect us with something primal and intrinsic to us that weâve forgotten was important, there is a shadow side that I do not see at all as a healthy revival of primal movement culture. This is the ever burgeoning trendy, niche, consumer fitness classes, which are primarily marketed towards women (for whom the research shows are particularly susceptible to feeling shame around their physical appearance, making them more likely to buy into such marketing).
Stay tuned…
In the next installment of this Movement Practice monster-essay Iâd like to further discuss the perils of commoditizing and marketing of movement we see today, and the consumer mentality that can cause the unaware to treat movement as an item to buy and own to show off, fit in, or as a band-aid solution to deeper, unexamined problems, rather than as a gift we already possess, waiting for us to unwrap.
Welcome to the first installment of my new writing project: Movement Practice. I’m examining the role movement plays in our lives and our relationship with it. Sound like your cup of tea? Let’s do this thing.
AiM University
In 2015 I attended a 6 day biomechanics course that changed the trajectory of my life. The course was called Anatomy in Motion and from the moment the instructor, Gary Ward, started talking I sensed my life would never be the same (I was right).
Up until that point, as an injured dancer turned personal trainer and bodyworker, I had been researching and exploring different continuing education courses with the aim of finding âthe thingâ that would give me the clarity and understanding of the human body that could help both myself and my clients more efficiently reach their goals and allow me to more easily work with the chronic pain clients that I tended to attract. Anatomy in Motion, as I later explained to Chris Sritharan, the other course instructor, was “the answer to the questions that I didnât know how to ask”. All I wanted to do was study their work for the rest of my life- I’d enroll in AiM University and do a Master’s, PhD and whatever else they’d offer until they got tired of me.
Through AiM I was introduced to a new way of seeing the human body in motion, and I havenât been able to go back. The clarity with which the complex structure of the human body was communicated struck a chord somewhere deep inside of me. The way the course was taught embodied how I learn best: Putting descriptive words to movements of bones and joints and feeling them in our bodies. From that point, my practices of movement shifted, both personally and professionally, in a way I couldnât articulate at the time.
Iâd like to speak a little more about this personal shift (and because my personal life is intertwined with my professional one, the trickle over effect in these two arenas is significant).
Then and Now
Chris, who I now consider an important mentor, made the distinction between movement practice and practicing movement. At the time, the two were inextricable to me, yet in hindsight I can see that this distinction is what I was starting to experience.Â
Chris said to us, âthereâs a lot of people practicing movement and not a lot of people with a movement practice. Thereâs a lot of people in the business of teaching movement, but not a lot of coaches aiming to remove the barriers that are preventing people from understanding how to moveâ. Iâve heard him repeat this line and variations on it at nearly every course Iâve attended (which at this time of writing is six).
Phil Donahue, the host of the American talk show, The Phil Donahue Show (a show that ran for 29 years ending in 1996) loved to ask the interview question, âwhat did somebody say to you at one point in your life that changed it?â. In that reflective space we can find that there are distinctive moments of âthen and nowâ in our lives. While I didn’t recognize it at the time, this thing that Chris had said was my âthen and nowâ pivot point.
I attribute the new trajectory to which I was unknowingly beginning to dedicate my life not only to the new way I was learning to see the body, but to a shift in values, unconsciously influenced by Chrisâ words: What is the difference between practicing movement and movement practice?
The subtleties of this distinction are elusive. So much so that in the years I explored them I had not idea that this was what I was in fact doing. I observed a shift in myself and how I approached exercise and movement and journalled on the experiences I was having. The general feeling throughout the process was of some atavistic revival taking place within me. A rewilding process weaving itself through all areas of my life. A rooting into something new yet familiar. Clumsy enough to make my professional practice a challenge as I attempted to adapt to a new way of thinking in a workplace that didn’t value it, yet inspiring enough to get back up at each falter and reprimand to continue forward through the fog.
Romanticism aside, as I write these words now, this question is defining of this point in my personal and professional life: Whatâs the difference between practicing movement and having a movement practice? Is this distinction even important (I feel that yes, it is). Is one better than the other (no, I donât think so). And for you, the reader, is it worth spending your precious, limited time with these words?Â
Youâll have to keep reading.Â
Transitions
I remember a then in which I only practiced movement, and a now in which I have a movement practice that defines parameters for how I practice movement.Â
I recall how then, I strived to fit an aesthetic. Now my practice includes and often prioritizes skill acquisition over how my body looks.
Then, I clenched and controlled my movements with maximum strength and stability as pinnacles, and numbers as landmarks at all cost. Now, I ask, how can I let go of the need to control and create more freedom for myself?
Then, I had rigid routines, protocols, and a schedule to adhere to, no matter how my body felt (dance performances, my Wendler 531 routineâŚ). Now, I allow for a flexibility, spontaneity in my practice reflected in how my body feels day to day.
Then, I neglected warming up to get exercise out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now, I enjoy and make time for my warm-ups and movement preparations- If I donât have time for them, I donât have time to train.
Then, I tried out any exercise that looked âcoolâ at the gym because someone âfitterâ than me was doing it. Now, I am aware of the intention behind any exercise I put into my movement practice.
Then, my goal was to burn as many calories as possible. Now, I donât consider the energy expenditure of an exercise at all in my decision to include it in my movement practice.
Then, I tried to be perfect. Now, I know to focus on the process, not the end goal.
Then, I was no pain no gain- I tuned out pain symptoms and signs of over-training because they got in the way. Now I tune in and respect what my body is asking of me on a given day and feel no guilt for taking rest when I need it.
Then, my relationship with my body was a metaphorical battle. Now, my body and I enjoy a relationship based on trust, honesty, listening, and respect.
Then, I was an exerciser and over-identified with my movement form. Now, I am a dedicated student of movement.
The list could go on. How many of these resonate with you?
If you have the idea that my âthenâ was describing practicing movement as something âbadâ, and my ânowâ as me having a movement practice that is âgoodâ, I want to make it clear that this is not the case. Simply, I want to illustrate the journey from then to now and the shift in priorities therein.
Imagine a spectrum on which to the far left we have things we define as exercise and activity, and to the far right we have this thing called a movement practice. Right now, you and I are sitting somewhere on that spectrum. This isnât a judgement, its a fact. Unfortunately, you can become stuck more to one side than the other on this spectrum with the lack of variability to slide around on it. In fact, both sides of spectrum are inextricable as our âlives in motionâ and we need to access all points along it depending on our current needs. Its the context that defines whether or not one should aim to slide more to one end or the other.
My âthenâ was not bad, and my ânowâ is not good, neither does thinking this way serve me. What did serve me was where I was at the time with the amount of information I had. Could I have found a less painful way of doing things if I had more information? Sure. Could I have suffered less if I had more objectivity? Of course. But I didnât, so I donât get too hung up on âshould-havesâ and âif-only-I-knew-thensâ. Neither should you.Â
What you can do as a useful, reflective exercise, is place yourself somewhere on our movement spectrum. Where do you feel you sit right now? Are you immovable in that space, or does your position vary day to day, week to week? Are you adaptable, or are you stuck in a moment in time? And importantly, are you ok with this?
STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 in which we will explore the differences between practicing movement and movement practice, and my three archetypes: The Indoorsman, The Exerciser, and the Over-Identifier. Will one of them describe you?Â
(see the video below)
