Tag: back pain

Is your back issue coming from your foot? Or is your foot issue coming from your back? Ain’t no way to know until we assess! This blog post is dedicated to investigating this chicken-or-egg question.

This blog post is for you if you currently have a stiff spine, stiff foot, long time back issue, old foot injury, all of the above, or are just curious about how to get your body moving more efficiently by learning about the movement relationship between your feet and spine.

You are more than the sum of your parts

I know you know this already, but it cannot be repeated enough: The body is a beautifully connected whole system, and should be considered for the whole that it is, not reduced to individual parts operating in isolation from each other. 

One of my online students (a musician) recently wrote to me about how useful it has been, through doing my sessions regularly, to become more aware of all the various connections between her body parts in motion.

Like understanding that if you can’t move your big toe THIS way, then your hip is going to be restricted going THAT way, and maybe that’s why your left shoulder feels janky. 

Janky: Junk + cranky. Technical term (which I stole from a client of mine, in reference to her janky shoulder). 

I love discovering connections in the body, too. It really lights me up because it always leads to better flowing movement and less pain. This is the magic we tap into in studying Anatomy in Motion: How everything needs to coordinate with everything else for ideal gait.

But its not magic. Its biomechanics.

In the words of my wonderful mentor Gary Ward, creator of Anatomy in Motion: “Look for things that don’t move that give permission for other things to.”

That adds an additional layer of nuance to the stretch and strengthen conversation, doesn’t it??

And on this note, I’d like to share with you a series of video clips from my most recent Movement Deep Dive session: Foot-Spine Connections. 

As the name alludes to, this session’s investigative mission is to learn if there is a discombobulated relationship between the movement of your feet and spine that could be keeping your body stuck moving inefficeintly through each footstep, with discomfort or whatever jankiness you’re aware of in your body.

Understanding this foot-spine connection is extremely useful when we are working on helping our bodies move and feel better with less pain, because it helps us to become aware of how the causative root of a foot issue could be your spine, or visa versa.

This helps us to make better informed choices about what we can focus on in our movement practices, instead of just trying random stuff and hoping for the best.

And so on that note, please enjoy these 4 snippets from the Foot-Jaw Connections Movement Deep Dive. 

I hope you’ll be able to learn a little about how your feet and spine are moving, and how to restore ideal mechanics between the two structures to put more flow in each footstep. 

Foot-Jaw Connections

So, how did stuff go? Did you discover anything new and useful? I’d love to hear how this little bit of movement detectivery went for you. Please write me a comment below if you’d like to share.

Obviously there is more to explore than this… But I hope to inspire you to use this way of thinking in all your movement endeavours. Think outside the box. Think of your body as more than the sum of it’s parts. Just… Think ;).

In the full session, we also explore new ways of moving that connect your feet and spine with each other to restore a more harmonious, flowing relationship. But I can’t share EVERYTHING for free, because this is capitalist America. 

If you’d like to see the full 50ish minute movement deep dive session and participate along, you can find it listed HERE, along with some other faves, for $20 each.