Tag: gait mechanics

Are You Trying to Out-Train a Poor Foundation?

Have you heard of the “Leaning Tower of South Padre”?

Leaning South Padre tower turned into 55,000 tons of debris
Ocean Tower. It’s not a happy story.

Officially named Ocean Tower, the unfortunate story of this premium condo building can teach us a lot about having a sustainable movement practice. Like, one that doesn’t lead to self-destruction and cost millions of dollars.

Ocean Tower was supposed to be awesome. 31 stories high. A sweet view of the Gulf of Mexico. Complete with gym, pool, and spa. Each unit would sell for ~$2 million USD. Except for one teenie tniy issue…

The foundation was shite.

In 2008, two years after constructions began, the building started to sink and lean. The whole thing shifted more than a foot. The official explanation was that the parking garage and the tower were mistakenly built connected, forcing the weight down upon the garage instead of on the tower’s core walls. There was also something not quite right with the soil quality.

In 2009, Ocean Tower was demolished because fixing the foundation would have been too costly.  

Many of us are like Ocean Tower.

How’s YOUR foundation?

Hello, I am the Leaning Tower of Monika (by Lake Ontario). Built in 1989 on a shoddy foundation that began to sink and shift significantly enough to require a massive, costly overhaul by 2012.

Fortunately unlike Ocean Tower, I don’t have to abandon the project and self-destruct. I can focus on rebuilding the foundation I never had.

And so can you. And I will argue that this is where most of us don’t spend enough time when we have problems with pain and performance.

What do I mean by foundation?

Check out this quick excerpt from my latest Liberated Body (part 2!) workshop:

Your foundation is made up of the most basic building blocks of movement we humans can do- must be able to do, for higher level activities. The individual joint motions that, when combined correctly, become the raw material for all other movement patterns.

How well-built is your foundation? Are you missing any building blocks?

I had some foundational issues from the start:

  • I didn’t crawl (mom says I just wiggled “like a seal”)
  • I stood up and walked before 12 months
  • I hit my head a few times when I was very young

And those are only the things I KNOW about.

No crawling means my hip joints didn’t get to properly develop. In my infant body’s perception, I had a clump of feet-legs-pelvis-spine that couldn’t differentiate (kind of like Ocean Tower’s garage, mistakenly connected to the building’s core).

Standing up before 12 months isn’t an achievement. I didn’t “beat” the other babies in the standing race. Standing early is like ignoring Ocean Tower’s foundation problem, but saying, “fuck it, we can skip a few steps and get this tower up on time, it’ll probably be ok”.

Wrong.

And interestingly, skipping steps to get things done as fast as possible is kind of how I’ve lived my whole life. But that’s a tangent I won’t go down.

Are you searching for solutions for body problems, but feel like something’s missing? It might be something in your foundation, so basic it’s been overlooked.

Functional movement, strength training, and other modalities to educate our bodies how to “move better” and get out of pain might initially feel good. But for life-long sustainability, we need to know if we are missing any of our fundamental movement building blocks.

We all are. It’s just a matter of which ones.

Your Most Basic Movement Building Blocks

Do you like this drawing I made?

Excellent art by me 🙂 I drew this for my Liberated Body workshop participants last week

The lower two tiers are where I LOVE to play.

The building blocks: Primary motor responses (infant reflexes) and adult joint mechanics (upright gait).

When we get the foundation set right, everything above can fall into place with minimal effort.

Foundation level 1: Primary motor responses in utero

We start building our foundation from the moment we are a wee blob of cells implanted to mom’s uterine wall. Possibly even before that. And we don’t get much say in how this plays out.

In our cozy watery environment, we spend 9 months moving and developing our most basic joint motions. And it’s not random.

These building-blocks of movement are reflexive, pre-installed in our genetic code, and they serve to awaken the higher level “motor programming” needed for us to perform more advanced (but still basic) movements as infants, immediately after we are rudely evacuated into the “real”, air-based, gravity-ruled world.

But things can go wrong in utero.

You can be stuck onto the uterine wall weirdly.

Maybe there was a “kink” in your notochord.

Notochord vacuoles absorb compressive bone growth during zebrafish spine formation | eLife
Another rabbit-hole…

Mom could have been really stressed, or sick, and it affected you.

Maybe you had a twin and one of you crowded the other, and maybe your right arm didn’t get to move as freely as your beloved sibling’s did because it was smushed against mom’s liver. That jerk. He became a baseball pro, and you failed gym class.

And then perhaps when you made your grand entrance into air-world it didn’t go so smoothly.

Maybe you were flipped upside-down. Your head got stuck under mom’s ribcage. They had to do a C-section. They tried to pull you out by your butt, but your head was reallllly stuck under there. So they had to pull harder and harder. Then you came out with a loud POP as your skull finally was liberated. How stressful! Good thing you can’t remember (imagine that happening to you as an adult…).

The above two stories are actually clients I’ve worked with. But their stories were unconsidered as being relevant to their problems with pain, posture, and performance.

Consider the movements we do in utero as building the first layer of our foundation. We have little control of this, so don’t dwell on it too much.

Just be aware that these foundational movements matter because they prepare us for the next phase: The primary motor responses we develop as infants for the next 3 years of life that helps us to develop our brains and bodies in tandem.

Foundation level 2: Infant reflexes

Between 0-3 years of age we develop the building-blocks for upright biomechanics: Walking. These are our primary, or infant reflexes.

There is a reflex hard-wired in our DNA to help us wiggle and bend and twist our spines to get down the birth canal (assuming we had that luxury).

To unfurl our spine from the comfort of the fetal position (assuming we spent enough time in fetal position in the first place).

To turn our heads, extend our arms and legs, discover we have a right and left side of our bodies.

To turn over on our bellies and learn to extend our spine and head up against gravity. What IS this gravity thing and why is it so damn heavy??

To push and pull with our arms and legs against the floor and develop our wee little hip joints (unless you’re me).

To discover we have this awesome things called a big toe, and we can push it into the floor to propel ourselves forward through space.

These events happen in a stereotypical way based on genetic programming that is similar for all humans.

And eventually we get enough building blocks in place, stacked together in the correct order, to stand up and start to walk.

But not all of us are so lucky, and going back to this level to give back the movements we are missing can be incredibly powerful.

Foundation level three: Upright gait mechanics.

This is where, with gravity, we shape our muscles and bones by standing upright and bearing weight on two ludicrously tiny balancing blobs called feet.

In the gravitational field, we learn to flex and extend, rotate, and side-bend our hips, spine, arms, etc. And its not about strength- Its about discovering how our joints articulate when upright, loaded by our bodyweight, intending to move forward through space.

This is what Gary Ward has been mapping out in his Flow Motion Model and teaching in his Anatomy in Motion courses.

Its not a conscious process. Its more like a discovery of our musculoskeletal system and exploring what it can do.

However, even if we’re missing foundational building blocks, most of us still stand up and walk, and play, and exercise. And then we have accidents, injuries, and do things that distort how we’re able to move. As we age, entrpopy increases, and more building blocks go missing or put in the wrong place.

Where are the gaps in your movement foundation?

Our foundation for all movement is built on unconscious motor programming. And each level contributes to the next. And we shouldn’t skip any steps, but most of us do.

And good thing its an unconsious process. Imagine having to decide for yourself at one year old the “best” way to develop your body to walk? Imagine a one year old with the blueprint for Ocean Tower… Yikes.

You are probably missing a few important building blocks. How do we find which ones are missing and get them back? It will be super specific to your unique experience. This is why I am always hesitatnt to give specific exercises in these blog posts. Get assessed, don’t guess.

But you can consider questions like:

Did you crawl?

Did you stand up before 12 months old?

Did you have an interesting or challenging birth experience? (as the birther, or the birthee)

Did you have a stay in the NICU, pinned down with machines and tubes that kept you alive, but prevented movement?

Did you start a highly skilled movement form before 3 years old? (like all you dancers who started ballet when you were 2, I’m looking at YOU)

Did you have an injury or accident, especially before age 7, but at any age, that caused you to be immobilized, or altered how you moved, for a period of time? Like a broken arm or ankle, head accident, or illness.

Every insult to the body will cause a change somewhere. And if you change one thing, everything else has to change to accommdate that. That’s balance. Its not ideal, but it is “functional”.

We can get our foundation back by re-educating our bodies and moving with awareness, with a little guidance from someone you trust.

Awareness is hard

Knowing what your body can’t do is hard, but cause you don’t know about it yet… If you were already conscious of what you can’t do you probably wouldn’t have any problems.

The more I explore movement, the more I realize that the most value comes from re-visting the basics in more depth. Smaller, softer, subtler, more refined. Not bigger, harder, with more muscular effort and control.

When we move big and effortfully, we only reinforce what we can already do. This is why skipping ahead to strength training when things feel “off” or painful doesn’t solve an issue long term. It will not be sustainable unless your foundation is addressed.

Don’t be Ocean Tower.

Heavy deadlifts didn’t restore my shaky foundation. That only perpetuated my structure to lean and shift, like Ocean Tower, the taller it got, the shiftier it got.

When you can identify what’s missing from your foundation, and give those elements back, all your favourite higher level movements and activities become more natural and effortless, because more of your body is accessible to you.

And then, like me, you might realize that you don’t actually want to powerlift, because that “solution” was a lot of effort and kind of boring anyway. We get to ask the question, “Now that I have a foundation, what do I actually want to do with it?“. Your journey will be your own, and it may not be what you think.

And if any of that resonates with you, and you’re trying to “fix” your basic movement limitations with higher level activities, I encourage you to take a few steps back and see what could be missing from your foundation.

How to start rebuilding your foundation

Curious about what exactly I mean by “building blocks” of movement?

As I already mentioned, this will be a unique journey. You may wish to find a movement/therapy professional to assess and guide you through it.

As a general jumping off point, Gary Ward has created a few excellent online courses that may be of interest to investigate your upright joint mechanics and find what’s missing: Wake Your Body Up, and Wake Your Feet Up.

My workshop, Liberated Body, also helps you identify missing joint motions and coordinations that we need for upright gait (I teach it both online and in-person).

LB Part one is all about the level of gait mechanics: How should our bodies ideally organize for effortless, efficient gait?

LB Part two is a level deeper: How to explore the building blocks that preceeded upright gait- the primary motor responses, and then put those together in a meaningful way for effortless, efficient gait?

Liberated Body is available anytime as a home-study workshop. Part two must be done live, because I customize it to the individuals in the group, and work with you one on one to restore your foundation.

CONCLUSIONS?

Don’t be like Ocean Tower.

Its never too late to build your foundation.

I didn’t get mine right the first time, and exploring my missing building blocks continues to be an enriching part of my daily movement practice, and my life.

Reach out if you have any questions 🙂

Putting the “Bio” Back in Biomechanics

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

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

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

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

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

But then things piled up and escalated. Fast.

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

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

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

I was 21 years old, and I realized…

I am my body’s biggest problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I wasn’t even there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I was praised for it.

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

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

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

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

Why am I getting injured?

WHY is different from HOW.

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

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

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

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

No option but to wake up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t it so great to be supported?

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

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

The rationalizing animal

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gait mechanics to the rescue

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

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

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

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

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

Bio = Life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Process, not puppet

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

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

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

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

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

Waking up the witness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supination is still important. Always will be. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO FOOT SHAPES REVIEW

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

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

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

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

anatomy in motion

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

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

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

Here is me flexing my left hip and *trying* to pronate my foot: Two motions which happen together in the loading phase of gait.
Here is me trying to flexi my left hip with a supinated foot (which happens in heel strike in gait)

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

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

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

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

MORE THAN JUST SHAPES…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now let’s dial in on supination. 

WHAT IS FOOT SUPINATION?

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

So… Do your feet supinate well?

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

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

Could you feel all of that happening? 

WHAT IS SUPINATION NOT? 

Supination is NOT “arch strengthening”. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supination is NOT the same as having high arches. 

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

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

Foot purgatory. Neither here nor there…

AN INTERDEPENDENT RELATIONSHIP

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

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

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

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

This includes some lovely muscles like:

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

Loading up these muscles generates the stimulus for supination.

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

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

Johnny is like an over-pronating foot. 

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

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

CONCLUSIONS?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can get CPD credits 🙂

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

anatomy in motion
I can’t give you CPD credits, but you get to hang out with me on Zoom 😉 Just as good, right??

Here’s How Dancers Can Optimize Their Turnout Using Gait Mechanics

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:

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:

  1. Self-assessment: What’s your functional turnout? Where’s your turnout coming from? Can your hips perform the basic joint interactions that we want to see in the gait cycle?
  2. 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.
  3. Re-assessment: Did anything improve?

Speaking of which, check out MY before and after photo of the functional turnout assessment: 

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Before… Behold my amazing functional turnout.
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After! Can you guess which leg I workked on in the workhop?? And yes, my slippers are awesome. 

Apparently I needed this workshop 😉 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.

​​​I 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…

liberated body workshop
Back in the day…

I remember doing everything possible to improve my hip external rotation, at the expense of my body’s 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 up…)
  • Torquing my knees out to give the illusion of better turnout (why are my knees sore now??).
  • Saying “Screw using functional turnout! I’m just gonna force my feet out, and I’ll deal with the consequences after!”

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 🙂 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…)

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.

improve turnout
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 Should You Stretch? (part 1)

I used to be very flexible. These days, it’s a slow grind to get my hands to the floor in a forward bend.

I’ve lost the ability I had as a dancer to bust out a middle split, cold,  anytime or place, provided I’m wearing stretchy pants (and I’m ALWAYS wearing stretchy pants because I made excellent career choices).

May be an image of 1 person and smiling
A spontaneous JCVD splits-off moment with my step-nephew-in-law, back in the day when I could splits anytime…

I don’t consider myself to be flexible anymore, and you know what? I’ve never felt better.

Ironically, most people think they need to stretch more to get out of pain. Or that being flexible is a universal goal. But the stiffer I get, the less pain I have.

So what’s that about, huh??

Flexibility doesn’t make you a better person

I’ve spent months and years worth of hours of my life stretching to get more flexible, and all I got was injured, tight, and fragile (that should be on a T-shirt.)

But it wouldn’t be completely accurate to blame my problems on stretching. The fact is I made pretty bad life choices. Excessive, mindless stretching just happened to be a symptom of my complete lack of respect for and awareness of my body.

I pushed through pain, performed through injuries, and I lived in fear that if I ever stopped stretching my dance career would end. Which was again ironic, because I wanted to quit dance when I was 15 but just couldn’t seem to let go…

Anyway, flexible as I was, I was trapped in my body. Shackled by the constant tightness you know probably all too well if you are as obsessed with stretching as I was. A tightness that only seems to be relieved by stretching more. A tightness which, ironically, is your body’s way of asking you to stop stretching it.

I’ve learned that my body feels much better when I don’t stretch it when I’m less flexible. So I don’t stretch anymore because I like to think I’m not a complete idiot.

This is part one of a blog series about why stretching and flexibility are not the ultimate pain panacea. Part one is a bit of a rambly, ranty thing about the traditional paradigm: “If it hurts, if it’s tight, stretch it”.

Beyond mobility and stability: Harmony

In 2015, I decided to try elimitating the words “mobility” and “stability” from my vocabulary to see if I could define everything the body did in terms of actual anatomical motion. It was an awkward, challenging year (probably for my clients, too…).

How is that body part moving? In what direction? Is it moving too much? Too little? Too fast? Too slow? I wasn’t focused on muscles, I was looking only at joint motion, which was a big paradigm shift after taking the Anatomy in Motion 6 day immersion course in 2015.

The reason why I started this vocab change was because the words no longer seemed useful to describe an experience the body is having.

Stability implies no motion. Mobility implies movement. But in the body, nothing is ever not moving. Everything is always moving, just in different ratios, relationships, and timings with other body parts.

When something is actually NOT able to move- true stability- there is problem. For example if your knee actually can’t bend and is stuck straight. That’s a stable knee. But that’s a problem.

Knees have to be able bend for us to walk. But we want to get it to bend in a way that is meaningful for the rest of the body. With the right timing, and ratios of motion in relation to the other body parts, not just by doing a mindless leg curl, inconsiderate of what every other joint in the body should be doing when the knee bends.

So is stability a good goal? Not in the true sense of the word. Is mobility a good goal? It depends on how the thing is moving, in relation to the entire system.

To me, a better word is harmony. Or order.

I don’t want my body to be mobile just for the sake of mobility, because Kelly Starrett said you should want to be a supple leopard.

Becoming a Supple Leopard 2nd Edition: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance: Starrett, Kelly, Cordoza, Glen: 9781628600834: Books - Amazon.ca

I want my body to move harmoniously, in an orderly way. This goes beyond mobility and stability. Beyond flexibility. This is a unique state for each one of us.

Am I over-thinking? I don’t think I’m thinking enough…

Flexibility is not a universal pain solution

One of my mentors, Chris Sritharan (Anatomy in Motion instructor) once said that there are 4 ways we can use a body part:

  • Overuse
  • Underuse
  • Misuse
  • Disuse

Do stretching address any of these? Not really… (but over-stretching a muscle that doesn’t need to be stretched falls into the “misuse” category).

I hear people say stuff like this constantly:

“I should stretch more.”

“I never stretch, that’s probably why my body feels so tight all the time.”

“I do always do hip stretches, by they just keep tightening back up.”

“My neck hurts *goes on Youtube to look for neck stretches*”

Sound familiar?

Back in my pre-thinking days (I consider age 22 to be when I officially started trying to use my frontal cortex for inquisitive thought), my left hamstring felt really “tight”, so I stretched it daily, really hard.

A few months later I strained my left hamstring while I was stretching in jazz class warm-up one day. Injured while warming up… The irony. Well, I was only doing what I thought was right based on the information I had.

I thought stretching would set me free. Make me a better dancer. Make my tightness go away. Make me a better person, even (if only I could do deeper splits, everyone will admire me and I’ll be a big success! Nope…).

Can we stretch my shoulder?

A few years ago, a client came in saying that his shoulder felt “tight”, and, “can we do some stretching for it?”.

I had to take a breath and collect myself. A part of me wanted to say, “No we cannot stretch your GD shoulder because the problem isn’t your shoulder, it’s that ankle sprain you keep denying is a problem!!”.

But I didn’t… Because I like having clients that support my ability to pay my rent.

His shoulder didn’t  actually need to be stretched per se, because the muscles were already in a lengthened state in the area he had discomfort- That spot actually needed to be shortened to take the tension out, not put more tension in by tugging on it more.

But, because I try to be diplomatic, we did a thing that I told him was a “stretch”, and afterwards, when the sore spot felt better, I explained to him how it wasn’t actually a stretch and why it worked (it was a whole body lunge-type-movement to get his foot to pronate, disguised as a shoulder stretch).

How the traditional stretching-makes-everything-better paradigm fails

A client I used to see many years ago would come in every week with low-grade back pain that she describes as tightness. In her words, “it’s fine because I just stretch it out with yoga.”

To which I wanted to ask if yoga “works”, then why do you show up every week with the same old back pain? But I didn’t… Because it was a time in my life that I was financially insecure and was terrified of losing a client by asking potentially provocative questions like this.

My point is that stretching a muscle doesn’t necessarily teach that muscle anything. To again quote Chris Sritharan (aka #sritho):

“We’re not trying to stretch a muscle, we’re trying to give it something to do.”

What do muscles do? Manage joint motion: Joints act, muscles react.

If flexibility and stretching were the solution to the body’s problems, then contortionists, dancers, and circus performers would never have issues. Ever. But they do. Lots of ’em. Explain that for me with stretching logic.

I think a big problem is that most of us look for a solution too quickly when we should take the time to ask better questions.

Asking questions like, “why is it tight?”, instead of “what stretches should I do?”.

In fact, this blog post was born from my feeling completely insufficient at the art and science of asking questions.

Questions help us see facts. “My neck feels tight”, isn’t a fact, it’s a subjective experience.

“Tightness means I should stretch”, isn’t a fact. It’s a belief.

Well, that’s enough of a ranty primer for part one. In part two (and probably three) we’ll go deeper….

What are the questions we need to ask to get the facts we need to go beyond stretching?

What ARE the facts we need?

What do I mean by harmony and order? (hint: gait mechanics)

If not stretching, what SHOULD we do?

How is stretching different than eccentric loading? (hint: center of mass management)

“But Monika, I hear you talking about feeling stretches all the time in your classes… I’m confused.” Me too! It’s a good way to be. It means there’s something to learn 🙂

Stay tuned!

Until then, may you have the courage to stop compulsively stretching your tight spots, and the curiosity to wonder, “why is it tight?” in the first place.