flow motion model Archives | Monika Volkmar Bodywork and Movement Education

The Foot-Jaw Connection in Gait

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? 😉

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)
Big toe decompresses
Occipital atlantal joint (neck-skull joint) decompresses
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!

This is the flow:

Foot pronation –> Knee flexion –> Pelvis anterior tilt –> Lumbar and thoracic spine extension –> Neck flexion –> Skull anterior tilt –> Jaw protrusion/decompression

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 🙂

Removing the System’s “Handbrake”

A tale of navigating pain, with me, Monika. Our special guest for today is L.

L is one of my personal training clients. She is a badass 59 year old lady who has been slowly unwinding her body from a state of chronic pain over the past two years.

Last week she came into our session with a neck pain flare up. It hurt to tilt and rotate her head to the left. L usually likes to train hard, bust out push-ups (she can do 6 now!), and get a sweat going, but on that day she just wanted to be able to move her neck, so that became our focus.

Image result for your inner physician and you Concurrently to this story about L, I was reading John Upledger’s The Inner Physician and You in preparation for taking the Upledger Institute’s craniosacral therapy level one course (stoked!). Reading this book was fortuitously timed, as I began to observe some of its main themes surface in my bodywork practice. In particular while working with L last week.

The aforementioned themes, fresh in my mind from reading Upledger’s book, that seemed to over-arc this session were:

The individual is his/her own healer
We all have an “inner physician” and “censor”
Until the “root cause” is identified, the same symptoms may keep returning

Nothing new, I know. But sometimes these truths don’t sink in until we’ve had enough experience of them. The timing of L’s neck pain was a gift to me in order to better explore these themes in real life.

How do you even shoulder-check?

L’s neck pain had been present for a long time at a low level as general stiffness, but last week when she came in it was bad enough that I wondered how she had even been able to shoulder check as she was driving over to see me.

As a side note, the thought occurred to me the other day: How many car accidents are caused by people with left side neck pain who can’t shoulder check?

I asked this same question to a client of mine a few years ago, “How did you even drive here if you can’t move your head to the left?” His answer, “I don’t need to, I drive fast…”. Please don’t be this guy. Take care of your body and be less of a danger on the streets.

Anyway, back to L. Her history.

When I first met L she had two bad knees (one had been operated on), thought she was going to need a cane to walk, couldn’t sit cross-legged because of her painful knees, and couldn’t lift her arms over her head due to shoulder pain. You could say she’d gotten her body into a bit of a messy spot.

Today, L can squat, lunge, sit cross-legged comfortably, lift her arms up and hang from a bar, and best yet, can do 6 full push-ups. She’s come a long way.

The main issue that initially brought L in to doing sessions with me was her right knee. She’d had surgery on it when she was 19 and, like any normal 19 year-old, she didn’t put a lot of thought into the recovery process.

A few weeks ago I asked her how she’d rate the care she received for her knee, and she said, “I was 19… So. Yeah. That.” Like most of us at that age (or at any age, let’s be honest), she had probably rested until the pain went down enough to start walking on it again without a lot of value placed on doing any sort of rehab exercises to regain full motion at the joint.

If the symptoms disappear and you can get around well enough, no more problem, right?

And then if you develop neck pain 40 years later, it’s probably not related, right?

I will admit now that I too am guilty of this way of thinking in my previous work with L.

I ignored a problem

Very shortly after L and I began working together, her knee pain stopped. It was that dang Anatomy in Motion stuff– It really simplifies how to work with knees (and the whole body, really).

After her pain disappeared I reassessed her knee and saw there was still a movement issue: Her knee was stuck in an externally rotated position (tibia pointing out farther than femur), and her knee seemed to not have any transverse plane movement when she bent or straightened it (which we should be able to see and feel in a healthy knee).

But because her symptoms were gone, and any time we tried to feed what I felt to be “appropriate” movement into her knee, it felt painful. So, like any trainer who doesn’t want to lose a client because we keep doing stuff that hurts, I decided to ignore it. And we did that for a year without her complaining about her knee again. I thought this was good, and that the problem had taken care of itself.

Until last week.

Time doesn’t heal, healing heals with time.

Can we experience healing without pain?

Here we see surface an intriguing point of learning from Upledger’s Your Inner Physician and You. Upledger described several phases of an acute healing process. He describes, in his hands-on work, a “therapeutic pulse”, a “release of heat”, a temporary increase in the pain, and then relief from it. He says that this increase in pain is a part of the process, and it always subsides if the work is brought to completion correctly.

This has me wondering, what if, in the moment of doing the appropriate healing work, the increase in symptoms is necessary? When I stopped moving L’s knee because she reported pain, was that something to move into or away from? Healing or dangerous?

If it is true that a temporary increase in pain is part of the healing process, yet many of us avoid moving into a problem because it temporarily hurts, it is no wonder that we get ourselves into increasingly messy spots. We choose comfort over truth and deny ourselves freedom and ease.

But of course, it is hard to know whether this is true. Upledger was describing craniosacral work which is a gentle manual therapy. Does the same apply for movement?

Of course I mean moving gently, patiently, mindfully an area of the body that is experiencing an issue produce the same healing effect as holding it and waiting, with the same patience, for the area to release itself? If I start to move an area and feel pain, should I stop right away? Or is this a cue that I am initiating a healing process and would be doing myself a disservice by not bringing it to completion, fully exploring it.

I suppose this is something Upledger might say the individual intuitively knows the answer to in the moment, if we take the time to inquire.

Whatever the answer may be, I think the experience of pain is always a nice opportunity to open a discussion about the change/comfort matrix.

Change and comfort matrix

I think that all movement (and life) experiences fall into one of these four quadrants (in which “unsafe”, in the body, generally equates with pain or doomy apprehension, and “safe” is the absence of pain and a sense of comfort).

Safe + different= Where you want to be exploring (no pain, but maybe unsteady, awkward, challenging, shaky due to it being a new experience)

Safe + same= Staying in the comfort zone (no pain, no challenge, no change)

Unsafe + different= A new may of moving that triggers a threat response (painful, unsteady, awkward, challenging, fear provoking, activates sympathetic nervous system, and no lasting change)

Unsafe + same= Staying in the (not so comfortable) comfort zone (painful but no more painful than what we’re used to so it feels “normal”, moving habitually, no change)

Perhaps we just need to stay with a new input (movement, manual therapy, idea) for long enough to make the transition from unsafe/different to safe/different, because any new input to our nervous system may initially be perceived as dangerous, whether it really is or not.

Just some thoughts on navigating pain that I’ve had lately…

Pattern recognition

So anyway, here I was with L, feeling like I had no idea what we were going to do, plan for today’s training session out the window.

We had tried a number of movements that usually help get her neck and spine moving as part of her warm-up, but everything hurt too much to do, so we aborted mission.

From Upledger’s book, another theme presented itself: Treat the body on each day as if you are assessing for the first time. Try not to be biased by how the individual was last week, what other people have “diagnosed”, or even what the individual says about it. These stories may not apply to today.

And in that moment when zoomed out I was able to recognize a pattern.

In Anatomy in Motion (AiM) we assess the whole body in terms of phases of gait- What each joint does and when it does it as we walk. Each phase has it’s own signature shape, or pattern which we can begin to recognize in ourselves and others.

In the AiM Finding Center 6 day immersion course we are trained to understand what should be happening within each pattern at each joint in the body at any given moment in time as we walk.

L’s head not being able to tilt or rotate to the left was part of the same pattern in which, at the same time, her right knee should be flexing (we call this pattern “suspension phase”, more commonly known as foot flat). Since I knew, historically, her right knee had movement limitations, I wondered if the position of her neck was the result of an exchange within that pattern over many years of adaptation around a problem.

If the pattern can’t be completed by one joint (the knee), we see this phenomenon called “exchange” in which another structure will try to accommodate for that.

Exchange: If we can’t fulfill a lack (missing knee motion in this case), we will look somewhere else to fulfill it (perhaps at the neck?). This happens at all levels in our lives. When something is missing, we find other ways to fill space, whether they are the healthiest for us or not, whether we are conscious of it or not.

Had her neck become a solution for her knee that became a problem of its own?

To test this knee/neck relationship, I had L simply stand with her right knee bent while testing her painful neck ranges- They immediately improved in range and felt less painful. Not perfect, but better.

You should have seen the look of L’s face when I said, “I think your neck issue is because of your right knee”. Like I’m a crazy person.

For those who have already taken AiM or are interested in the biomechanics of this, these are the mechanics I observed when I reassessed L’s right knee:

Tibia anteriorally tilted (top of tibia tilted forward under the femur)
Knee externally rotated (tibia rotated laterally of femur)
No further movement into external rotation as the knee flexed (we should see the knee externally rotate as it bends)

If you haven’t taken AiM or don’t give a shit about biomechanics (unlikely, if you are reading this…), what this means is her knee was stuck in a more “bent” position in both sagittal and transverse plane, and couldn’t access any more bend, it already being there, bent.

The strategy, in my mind, seemed to be that we ought to show the knee how to extend and internally rotate, or more specifically, get the tibia to posteriorally tilt and internally rotate under the femur. Doing this would help it find a more centered resting spot allowing it somewhere to go when she bends her knee, rather than hit a block, and in theory, this would relinquish her neck of its excessive role in the full body pattern.

Using two movements from the AiM toolkit we explored ways of getting her knee to experience the above movements it was missing, and then integrated that up through into her neck as best we could.

L was mindful that the sensation in her knee felt different, and vaguely unsafe. At that point, we had a nice discussion of the comfort/change matrix. Fortunately, L trusted in the thought process I had explained to her, and after a few more moments of gently feeding movement through her knee, she reported that she was in the safe/different quadrant (is trust the anathema for feeling unsafe?).

When we finished, she stated that something definitely felt different about her neck, though she wasn’t sure what. She tested out her painful neck ranges, and they had improved. Not perfect, but on the right track.

Someone’s elses’ limiting beliefs

After this exploration, L told me an interesting story.

Apparently, when she had gone back for a consultation from a sports medicine doctor about her knee years after the operation, she had been told that she would never have full function of her knee again. She wondered aloud, “Have I been unconsciously limiting my potential because of something a doctor told me years ago? Something that wasn’t true?”. She didn’t question this statement at the time, that her knee was doomed never to work again, because he was the doctor. She seemed genuinely fascinated to understand how lifting this limiting belief could liberate her body from pain.

Let go of the handbrake

At this point I brought up the idea of the “handbrake” to the system- That we can try to teach the body to move “better”, but if there is something getting in the way (usually something from an injury history), then nothing will change because the brake hasn’t been removed.

Part of our job, as explorative movement facilitators (I am going to put that job title on my business card), is to find what’s getting in the way of people moving well, and then trusting that the individual’s own, intelligent system will be able to do the healing itself.

Another theme that surfaced from Upledger’s book: We are not healers, we are holding space for the body to heal itself.

I cannot be so arrogant to presume that I know what is best for someone’s body, life, mind, whatever.

All I can hope to do, and perhaps what is the highest form of healing, is to have the intention simply to be with somebody through their process. To listen before asking. To be present with them. Explain my thought process so that they have the option to trust it.

This is not a relationship between the healer and the broken, but a relationship between equals.

Priming the system

I also explained to L that other movements and stretches she can do directly for her neck are still good. The are ways of priming her nervous system for healthy ways of moving once the handbrake is removed.

By priming her nervous system with general movements, we are making future options for neck movement more familiar, more recognizable for her body to perform, once she has dealt with the thing that got in the way of it all to begin with.

And that brings me to…

The things that get in the way

I am reminded of a talk I listened to recently by Brene Brown, titled The Power of Vulnerability (listened to it twice in a row, strongly recommend), that mirrors this discussion.

To introduce her talk, Brown tells a story about a speaking gig at which she was expected to present on fluffy things like, how to be happy, how to be successful, etc. But as a shame and vulnerability researcher, her area of focus was “the things that get in the way”. The things people don’t want to talk about because they are hard and raw and most of us don’t want to go there.

It’s well and good to tell people how to be happy and successful, but how many people can actually take action on “happy and successful” until they’ve dealt with their own handbrakes? Shame, fear, and vulnerability. The unsexy stuff.

In the movement, personal training, and rehab worlds, we have plenty of people showing us how to move well (happy and successful), but not enough people talking about the things that get in the way (the handbrakes to the system).

There are literally thousands of resources that can teach you how to squat, deadlift, handstand, improve your “bad” posture, do yoga, “fix” your flat feet, etc. but hardly anything that can show you how to navigate the roadblocks. I think this is because 1. it is such an individual thing that it is hard to make a guide on, and 2. Becaues most people don’t think about “what gets in the way”, they just want to jump right into “happy and successful”, and “happy and successful” sells a hell of a lot better.

One of my teachers, Gary Ward, founder of Anatomy in Motion, has created an online resource that I think is the closest yet to removing the handbrake without actually working with a practitioner in rea life. His movement exploration is called “Wake Your Body Up”. <—Check it out.

The inner physican

Upledger describes in one section of his book that we have inside us an “inner physician”, and a “censor”. The censor has good intentions (safety!) but is the one who is skeptical about everything, who calls bullshit and can put a block in the road of healing. The inner physician opens a dialogue for healing, for finding the root cause of an issue and exploring, and asks us to trust the process.

L is in touch with her inner physician. She left inteigued to explore the work we did, intrigued by the thought process behind it. To her, it made perfect sense. As Upledger wrote, our bodies have an intelligence of their own, and if we open that dialogue with our own inner physician, we will find that we intuitively know what the problem is. Just have to pay attention…

Conclusions?

L’s homework was to practice moving her knee (safe/different) a few times a day using the movements we explored- remove the handbrake (stuck knee) and give the body a chance to heal itself.

I am grateful to have had this experience with L, and look forward to continuing this process with her.

I am left thinking, we always get what we need from life. Did L experience a neck flare up because she needed to address her knee? We’ll see what happens.

A Case for Prioritizing Biomechanics

Before we start, no, this is not a post to put the B in BPS (bio-psycho-social) on a pedastle. The B could not exist without the PS, nor could we have a PS without a B. Such is the nature of all things that exist interdependently. I do not wish to engage in this debate. I also suck at debates…

Moving on!

Somewhere around year 2015 I’ve found myself in a bit of an existential crisis that I’m certain many other personal trainers have found themselves in at some point:

I LOVE WORKING WITH BODIES BUT I THINK THERE IS SOMETHING DEEPER I’D LIKE MY CLIENTS TO GET OUT OF EXERCISE AND THAT I’D LIKE TO ACCOMPLISH THAN COUNTING REPS.

Of course there’s more to being a trainer than leading mindless workouts and rep-counting. And I’ve never thought about my work to be limited to just that.

And as a personal trainer who does not claim to specialize in weight-loss or nutritional counselling or physique enhancement- typical things associated with my field, just what meaning does my work have?

WHY the heck am I doing this? Aren’t personal trainers supposed to help people lose weight and exercise and sweat and build muscles and all that stuff? And if I don’t place a priority on that stuff… Then what else do I bring to the table?

As I deepened my learning about the human body, began to observe what was really happening with the bodies of my clients, I began to see that strength training and “exercising” maybe wasn’t the thing they needed to prioritize.

When a client who had hip pain couldn’t do the usual “go-to” exercises, I found ways of working around the issue for as long as possible to deliver a pain-free workout, but this wasn’t enough. I wanted to have the information and abilities to address these issues with movement, not work around them with strengthening exercises that may end up more deeply ingraining their structural issues.

The more I learned and studied the human body and movement I began to view my work in a different light. Strength training and general “fitness” training lost it’s be-all-end-all power as the ultimate tool for helping people, and I realized that I needed to be doing more for the people who trusted me with their bodies than provide “exercise”.

I think other personal trainers have experienced a similar meaning-crisis, which may lead to 1) changing careers, 2) adding new skills to our arsenal and adapting the way we work and market ourselves, or 3) becoming disillusioned completely with our work and industry and lose all sense of meaning in it.

I am currently in the depths of situation #2 (only very briefly did I linger in #3….): Learning to integrate the skills I possess that go beyond strength and conditioning, re-positioning myself as a personal trainer who does more than lead “workouts”, into the realm of restoring optimal movement quality to support a wide variety of goals any client may have, from reducing pain symptoms, to optimizing physical and sports performance, to lifting heavy stuff because it feels empowering.

Today I would like to speak a bit more specifically about a fundamental piece of my operative philosophy that I find myself repeating as I learn to integrate the tools I possess: Investigating the bodies true priorities before deciding that strength will make things “better” (whatever our definition of “better” is).

As a personal trainer with understanding in both areas of strength training and biomechanics, how to balance these priorities? Is strength training with good technique enough to improve movement mechanics? Or will addressing biomechanics lead to improvements in strength that resistance training alone could not?

Obviously it’s not a “this over that” situation. It has to be both and all in any situation.

And HOW to achieve that balance is the tricky, variable bit, as no two people are the same.

Too, there is the issue of expectation and trust, when a client is looking for a type of training that validates what they perceive to be their specific limitations or goals, rather than seeking the truth of the issue, which may not be the same as how they perceive it. This is where client education, proper assessment are important, as is being able to meet the client where they’re at. If I give them something to do that is so far off the radar of their expectations, they will likely not appreciate it or see the value in it. This begs the question- do I give them what they need, or what they want?

Again, the answer is, BOTH! Always both. Finding the sweet spot for every individual. Meeting them where they’re at.

I think the art of “finding the sweet spot” is one I will be aiming to master for the rest of my life…

Finding the sweet spot

As we can all appreciate, in a holistic model of helping someone reach their goals, we have to take all aspects of “training” into consideration:

Restorative stuff: Yin (stuff having to do with homeostasis of all systems):

Possessing ideal joint mechanics*
Ideal breathing mechanics
Sleep, nutrition, stress management, hydration, blah blah blah, for healthy organs and systems function

Exercise based stuff: Yang (training you do to push your body to do stuff harder, faster, better, etc):

Strength and power training
Aerobic/anaerobic exercise
Skills/sports specific training

I would like to argue that biomechanics are like a mesh that surrounds and intertwines all aspects of the Yin and Yang of performance, health, and well-being.

For example, having ideal and efficient joint biomechanics (movement/posture) will help with breathing, reduce issues of compression on the organs, blood vessels, nerves, lymphatic system, etc, help the body stay pain free, enhance sleep, allows for proper digestion and elimination, and improves blood flow to distal body parts and the brain to enhance cognition and emotional regulation.

Having great biomechanics also spills over into all aspects of fitness and athletic development: the building blocks for producing force and power efficiently, and will impact on aerobic fitness by virtue of having mechanics in place for efficient breathing and economy of movement. Ideal biomechanics will lay the foundation for performing specific skills better, while also allowing an athlete to unwind from their repetitive specialized movements so they can get back to training the next day. Not to mention people with more efficient biomechanics will likely have less risk of injury and will take less time off training.

What do I mean by “better” biomechanics?

I’m talking about adult human gait mechanics of the Flow Motion Model as the “gold standard”.

Read more about that HERE. And HERE. And HERE.

Some may say that the “exercise stuff”- strength training with good technique, high quality technical skills work, will be enough to take care of the bio-mechanics bit in itself, and why spend time focusing on it?

“Squatting with ‘good’ form will keep you pain free”

“Animal Flow will fix your joint issues because it is ‘natural’, variable movement”

I agree to a certain extent, but disagree that people with real biomechanical anomalies will be “fixed” by good squat technique and simply getting “stronger”, or by pretending to be a monkey and crawling on the floor. (Note, I realllly love squats and crawling on the floor…)

Moving differently is great, but moving differently is still only a work-around for a specific issue or movement being avoided, whether conscious of it or not.

Yes, working specifically on changing the way people move and time their joint actions can be subtle, focus-demanding, tedious work, requiring daily practice, patience, and trust. Most meaningful work is…

That said, addressing biomechanics won’t automatically make you stronger. If coming from an untrained state, enhancing spine and shoulder mechanics, for example, will not miraculously bring you from zero push-ups to 5, just as if you are in pain, going from 0 to 5 push-ups may not reduce your symptoms.

Prioritizing…

Do you know your priorities? In your life? For your body?

Take a close look at what values, in the physical realm, are honestly important to you. Do you play a sport? Are you trying to maintain “fitness” as you age? Do you want to feel strong? Pain-free? For health enhancement and quality of life gainz?

Many people are unsure what they want out of a physical practice, and what they value in one. They may say they want one thing, like to be strong, or to be “in shape”, but don’t have a clear picture of what that means.

“Strength” might be a means to an end- Not the real value, but an expectation for a process.

Someone may perceive that exercise and strength training will make them pain free and perform better at their sport, and come in with an expectation that strength training, like they’ve read about on someone’s blog (not mine….), is what will get them to their REAL goal, which may have nothing to do with their level of strength.

I’ve been investigating what I truly value in a physical practice for the past several years, after my forced exit from the world of dance.

My primary value for my physical practice is to comfortably, confidently inhabit my body, at rest and in motion, and possess an awareness of it that allows me to heal myself when I get into trouble with it (which is inevitable).

What secondary values do I hold that bring my primary value to life?

Strength. When I feel strong I feel more confident and comfortable in my body. My definition of “strong enough” is probably different than that of others. I have no desire to compete in a powerlifting competition, or be an elite athlete, but I enjoy the experience of being in my body more when I can do push-ups, chin-ups, squats, and deadlifts.
Quality of movement. This is fundamental to strength development and so I prioritize my movement mechanics over getting strong. Can my joints do all the things their architecture was created for? I will not push my body in training beyond the point where my mechanics can take me.

Knowing my priorities now helps me to choose how to act according to my goals. As a dancer, my priorities were the inverse, and I was pretty depressed and in pain.

What if we don’t know what we really value? Or what if our perceived goals are not in alignment with what our bodies need? And what if our goals are not really our goals, but someone else’s goals for us? Then our approach to training will be off as well.

There has to be this sweet spot where our true values come together with where we’re currently at, and our method reflects and respects this. I think this space is met when we take the time to investigate what we really value, and is defined by acceptance, patience, and trust. A falling away of the ego and expectation for what we “should” be doing.

Maybe I’m getting a little philosophical now for a blog about biomechanics… But the method we follow matters little without investigation of the “why” behind it.

That’s what THIS tattoo is a reminder of…

So, that said, I want to share two stories from two different dancers and how they view their priorities, and their take on biomechanics vs. strength training.

Meet Sergio

I recently met up with a reader of my dance blog in real life- A dancer/musician visiting Toronto from Europe. I’ll call him Sergio.

We met up for coffee and he told me the story of his discovery of strength training and of how, inspired by Pavel Tsatsouline, the simple addition of squats and other basic strength training exercises into his gym routine boosted his dancing because he was able to move more efficiently. This is how he found my blog- searching for information on strength training for dance.

Image result for pavel tsatsouline — Comrad!

If basic strength training had these effects on his body, why couldn’t everyone have easy access to this simple performance enhancement method? A sentiment that resonates with me as well, and is why I got into this field in the first place, spending three years focused heavily on working with dancers. That’s why I wrote a book (<— available by donation right now!).

Sergio wondered why I care so much about getting into the nit picky details of movement mechanics when performance enhancement is so readily available to anyone who steps into a gym and picks up a weight and uses progressive overload.

Again, I don’t disagree with this. I’ve experienced this performance enhancement phenomenon it for myself, and many of my dance clients have, too. And, as my role as a personal trainer, people are neither expecting nor asking me to help them with specifics of joint biomechanics that they aren’t even aware are a thing to work on.

But to get someone to squat on their flat, pronated feet that don’t know how to supinate makes me feel ethically wrong, and sooner than later I feel obliged to shed light on the client’s limitation.

Yes, initially getting stronger will probably make that person feel better. But let’s go back to the squatting on pronated feet example.

25% of the bones in the body belong to your feet. If 25% of your bones are not moving in a full body loaded exercise, like a squat, for how long will squatting be the solution until it becomes a new problem? Something else is going to have to move to make up for 25% of your bones that aren’t moving. Will it show up in a few days? Maybe a few months? Years? I’m not willing to ignore that and wait with crossed fingers. (And yes, your foot bones should have some movement when you squat).

Image result for foot bones — 28 bones per foot. 56 bones total. 206 bones in the body. That’s 27.18% of your bones in your feet. Cool!

Where Sergio is at now, he is prioritizing strength training. Is that wrong? I don’t think so, because we don’t have enough information!

In Sergio’s credit, he is very body aware, and has a deep practice of inner investigation. He knows when something is not right for him and knows how to change when he’s stuck in a pattern that doesn’t serve him.

But while Sergio claims he has no current troubles with his body, what I think needs to be considered is what happens in 5 years if he keeps strengthening, reinforcing, his body with possible underlying movement issues that he is not aware of? After all, he IS a dancer, and I’ve never seen a dancer (or a human) who didn’t have some issues with their body.

I am a good example of how Sergio’s mindset started off great, and then went horribly wrong (or right… depending how you look at it).

I fucked up.

Here’s a story about me, because it’s my blog and I’ll write about myself when I please.

When I initially started strength training as a 20 years old dancer, I noticed right away that the extra work capacity that came from developing strength through squats, deadlifts, and push-ups had a dramatic change on my dancing. I felt like I’d struck gold. Found the “missing link”. My teachers noticed I was dancing “better” and I started getting all sorts of positive attention from them.

But what happened over the course of two years? I became over-trained (because I wasn’t planning my training schedule properly and was working out 4+ days per week on top of dancing everyday for hours), and I got injured (because no amount of squats or deadlifts in themselves could resolve the underlying postural and movement distortions my body had ingrained over the course of my life thus far).

What I needed was to address my movement mechanics to support my training, both in dance and at the gym, and in life (to get some healthy blood back into my brain, to be quite honest).

Applying myself to strength training was like fixing an atom bomb to my proximal hamstring- Using a potentially useful science in a destructive way.

This is a photo taken right after I injured my left hamstring. I was a pro at moving around my issues. (Photo cred to Heather Bedell)

Unfortunately, Google can’t assess your structure

Advice on how to address your specific movement mechanics is nearly impossible to search for online. (Maybe that’s why you’re reading this?)

This is because the same injury may manifest in X number of different outcomes and no two people will have the same experience of the same injury.

A fully “healed” ankle sprain may show up years later as a laterally flexed spine or a rotated pelvis or a knee that doesn’t extend. So one can’t just go online, type in “exercises to fix an ankle sprain“, or “exercises for my sore SIJ”, and find the solution. Because Google can’t assess that “why does my back hurt when I squat?” is a result of an ankle sprain five years ago that has now manifested itself as postural and movement distortions through the entire skeleton.

“I want to strengthen my ankles”

I will use another example of a young Highland dancer I did a few sessions with recently. We’ll call her Ally.

One of her primary goals was to improve her ankle strength to help her jumping. If you don’t know what Highland dancing is, it’s hardcore. You basically have to jump on one foot for 2 minutes straight without moving your upper body or putting your heels on the floor, all while looking pleasant.

Check it out:

I noted that one of the most important assets for a highland dancer would be the ability to create a rigid lever through the ankle, holding a supinated foot shape throughout the high volume of single leg hops they must do in their routines.

Image result for supinated foot rigid lever

The foot creates it’s most supinated, rigid structure in the toe off phase of the gait cycle, and so for a highland dancer, being able to access the mechanics of this phase- foot supination, ankle plantarflexion, is crucial to carry over into their sport.

Crucial to this is also the ability to create a mobile, adaptive foot that can leave the rigid state when they are not dancing to allow for “normal” gait mechanics for proper recovery from training and performing. Too, the muscles of supination will only get their chance to load during pronation, and so to not access pronation limits access to supination as well.

We need both!

Too, a highland dancer would need the ability to generate power from their hips, especially since dorsiflexing the ankle is going to be limited due to not being able to put the heels down during their jumps. That said, the hips are also going to be limited in how much they can load and explode as the dancer must stay perfectly upright, limiting how much they can actually flex from the hip to generate power (glutes load in hip flexion). Much of the strength is really coming from a partial range of motion in the ankle, from partially plantar-flexed, to fully plantar flexed.

Like I said, it’s a hardcore dance form.

Getting back to Ally.

Ally already lifts weights. She can squat and deadlift more than most teenagers, and so she already has a base of strength to support her dancing. But are her biomechanics in place for her dancing to benefit from the stregnth training she is already doing?

As it turned out in our assessment, Ally could not supinate her feet- both feet were stuck pronated, ankles dorsiflexed, especially her right foot. Remember, in highland dance, being able to supinate the feet and plantarflex the ankles is kind of really important.

Her hips also did not flex. Instead of flexing her hips, her ankles dump into dorsiflexion and pronation, she posteriorally tilts her pelvis, and flexes her spine. This means she does not load her glutes when she jumps- They stay locked short.

This also shows up in how she deadlifts- Hips unable to flex, so she massively dorsiflexes her ankles and pronates her feet. Is the way she is currently deadlifting helping her dancing? Or reinforcing inefficient movement patterns that will ultimately limit how much she can progress in her dancing? I am leaning more towards the latter.

In Ally’s case, I would prioritize her movement mechanics initially over adding “ankle strengthening exercises” to her training program.

When Ally asks for “stronger ankles”, what her body is craving is feet and ankles that can supinate and plantarflex to create a rigid lever to jump on, and hips that can experience flexion to help her load her glutes and generate more power in her jumps.

In her dance training and working with her technique coaches she would want to slow down to integrate the new mechanics. For example, as we’ve been working on helping her train her demi-pointe with REAL supination mechanics in place (as opposed to type 2 pronation- ankle plantar flexion on a pronated foot), she may need to take a few steps back in her dance training to make sure she can better use these mechanics. A few steps consciously, patiently, back can lead to monumental progress forward.

Gary Ward’s type 1/2 pronation and supination. The ankle can be in either dorsiflexion OR plantarflexion while the foot is pronated or supinated, but we want a particular relationship between the ankle and foot in pronation and supination (type 1), not type 2, in gait.

In her cross training with weights, she would want to focus on integrating the changes in movement mechanics into her lifts. As we’ve been working on helping her get REAL hip flexion (instead of the exchange that is taking place at her ankles and spine) she may need to take the intensity back in her strength training to make sure she can access a proper hip hinge. All the hours of cross training she is doing with her cross fit workouts may not be to her benefit unless they are reinforcing useful mechanics.

CONCLUSIONS?

There is a balance to find. A sweet spot in training for any goal.

Does their goal truly reflect their priorities?

Is there necessary work to be done on basic on joint/movement mechanics?

How much technical skills training can their body take with the mechanics it currently has to work with?

What volume and intensity of strength training will enhance their performance without reinforcing old movement habits that are not useful?

And how to package this in a way that inspires trust in the process?

These questions haunt my dreams.

But this sweet spot is not a perfect 50/50, or 25/25/25/25. Balance may mean 75/25, or 80/20, and this depends on where you are now, where you’re coming from, and where you’re going. And the purpose of one’s training will never be fixed, but always changing, day to day, week to week.

As in Ally’s case, as highly trained Highland dancer who already has a solid base of strength, it is my view that addressing her joint mechanics will likely have the biggest impact on her performance goal, and this point in her training. For now.

In Sergio’s case, as a highly trained dancer with no current injuries, adding in something he didn’t have in his training-Strength development, made a radical difference in how his dancing felt. Ain’t nothing wrong with that. For now….

But for both, neither solution will last the course of time. Things always need to be reassessed and adjusted based on where the body is now.

When I was a hypervigilant, chronically-in-pain person, low threshold, restorative work helped me find balance. But then after a few years of that, to restore balance, I needed to also explore the other spectrum (which I did through Hardstyle kettlebell training).

It’s more a question of constantly asking and evaluating “What’s missing that is preventing me from doing what I do better”? Where are you not supported in your training? Where are you not supported in your life?

Don’t Blame the Muscles…

I recently started a small group six week program that meets Sunday mornings. I unofficially call it “Church of Core”.

Its a program designed under the premise that, being that there is so much misinformation on the internet, in the media, and from people at the grocery store on what we should be doing to “train the core”, there should be a class to help people understand the truth of how the body moves so they can make their own informed choices on what to do at the gym.

And honestly, do whatever you want at the gym. It’s all good. Do what makes you happy. Just make sure your body possesses and understands the mechanics to cope with those choices.

I wanted to share a little case study from a participant in the program who was having some issues.

Twist and shout (ow)

Nancy (not real name) is a dancer in the program. We had just finished day two, in which we’d explored sagittal plane spine movement and stability, and she asked me if we were going to look at rotational movement next, because she was having some issues that and she had a big dance workshop weekend coming up. I said, yeah, come early to church next week and we’ll take a looksie.

Nancy’s primary complaint was that left ribcage rotation caused a straining painful feeling through her left side from her pelvis up to her ribcage. This is obviously an issue for a dancer because rotating is kind of a big deal in a lot of dance movements. She got the same symptoms with right pelvis rotation- Pain and tension through left obliques. So it’s not just a left spine rotation issue, its a transverse cog issue.

In AiM, “cogs” refers to the role in gait of structures moving in opposition against each other, like turning cogs. In gait, the pelvis and ribcage have a cog-like motion in that they should always oppose each other’s movement in all three planes of motion: In normal walking, when the the pelvis rotates right, the ribcage should rotate left.

In the case of Nancy’s symptoms, it was not just a ribcage rotating left issue, but an issue with any part of the gait cycle in which her left leg is forward (pelvis right) and her upper body is swinging to the left (ribcage left).

It’s nice when things make sense like this because they sure as hell don’t always do.

Her chiropractor identified that her issue was her left external obliques. Let’s look at why her obliques might be complaining about this rotational pattern.

Obliquing, long and short

If we’re going to blame a muscle, it stands to reason that we should know if its sore because of concentric shortness/compression, or it is locked long, under eccentric load.

Left ribcage + right pelvis rotation will lengthen the left external obliques, as the left EOs rotate the spine to the contralateral side

So, we could infer that the muscle is not happy with being loaded eccentrically to decelerate left spine rotation.

In the case of many muscles strains, the tissues have become locked long and because they are already loaded and lengthened they will have trouble decelerating joint movement because they’re already stuck doing that all the dang time.

In Nancy’s case we want to know WHY left spine rotation has become an issue to manage. Why are the obliques being lengthened all the time? Perhaps there is something NOT happening in this rotational pattern that the left obliques are picking up the slack for?

Time to stop thinking about muscles

I’m not telling you what to do, but muscles are confusing and chaotic. Looking at joint motions makes things much less noisy.

To quote Gary Ward, “Would you rather look at 13 muscles that connect to the knee or look at the 4 movements it can do?”.

I’d rather work on 4 things than 13, personally.

What stood out in interviewing her body was that her right talus was positioned internally rotated, everted, and could not externally rotate and invert. The chances of her right foot being able to supinate were pretty slim. This turned out to be key for helping her access left ribcage rotation with much less discomfort.

In the Flow Motion Model™, whenever the talus goes right, the ribs and spine go left, and when the talus rotates left, the ribs and spine go right.

This is because the rearfoot and pelvis always move in the same direction in transverse plane in gait (in all planes, actually), and recall that the ribcage and spine always oppose the pelvis.

So we could infer that the ribcage and spine should always oppose the talus*.

Therefore, if the talus can’t go right, another structure might have to go right MORE in order to accomplish every phase of gait in which the right foot supinates (and that’s most of the gait cycle, FYI).

In Nancy’s case it seemed to be the spine/ribs trying to rotate excessively to make up for a lazy right talus. And what might get tired of decelerating this motion over and over? The left external obliques.

Supinate the shit out of it

So we got Nancy’s foot to experience supination with her foot tripod grounded on the floor. With a little nudging and wedging, her right talus obliged and started inverting and externally rotating. Sweet.

We then integrated it into a pattern that required her to do left spine rotation and right pelvis rotation (we chose right propulsion phase). What was cool was that as long as her right foot was supinating, she could access left spine rotation with almost no discomfort.

When she retested her rotations there was significantly less discomfort than before. Her right talus was also sitting less everted and internally rotated at rest.

The entire process took about 20 minutes. Then we hugged and went to church.

*Talus and ribcage always oppose… Except for that fraction of a second in which gait is homolateral!

Conclusions?

Few things, I guess:

Learning to work with the FMM and AiM philosophy makes connections like this possible.
Blaming muscles for issues doesn’t provide enough useful information. I was not thinking about what muscles were tight or overworking of facilitated or inhibited while I was working with Nancy (which would have driven me crazy back when I used to do a ton of Neurokinetic Therapy® testing). Saying “it’s my oblique that’s the problem” doesn’t tell you why. Muscles react to joint movement. The answer will show in the structures, their position, and the movements they can and cannot do.
Thinking about her oblique pain in terms of concentric muscle action might not have led to the same resolution, but thinking eccentrically made a lot of sense in this case.
The “talus drives the bus”, and its useful to know how movement of the foot affects movement up the chain.
Knowing how to palpate the talus is a useful skill (that I didn’t have until very recently, thanks to “Foot Dating” on an AiM course).
It really is true that one of the most powerful experiences for the body is just to help the feet to experience true pronation and supination.

Go with the flow (motion model)

WHAT IS THE JAW?

The jaw is a DANGLER

OCCLUSION, PROPRIOCEPTION, AND THE RETICULAR ACTIVATION SYSTEM

“DEMONIZED” MOVEMENTS THAT COUPLE WITH JAW DECOMPRESSION

Let’s follow the flow (Motion Model)

Heel strike and away we go…

Can I email You when I write new stuff?

How do you even shoulder-check?

I ignored a problem

Can we experience healing without pain?

Change and comfort matrix

Pattern recognition

Someone’s elses’ limiting beliefs

Let go of the handbrake

Priming the system

The things that get in the way

The inner physican

Conclusions?

Finding the sweet spot

What do I mean by “better” biomechanics?

Prioritizing…

Meet Sergio

I fucked up.

Unfortunately, Google can’t assess your structure

“I want to strengthen my ankles”

CONCLUSIONS?

Twist and shout (ow)

Obliquing, long and short

Time to stop thinking about muscles

Supinate the shit out of it

Conclusions?