Yeah, yeah bunions are a trendy topic and I’m cautiously hopping on the bandwagon to offer A perspective influenced by my training with Anatomy in Motion (fully disclosing my biases as an instructor).
Do I have anything new or groundbreaking to add to the bunion discussion? Nope.
Do I have any revolutionary evidence or new theories to prove the causative mechanism for bunion formation? Nope.
Do I really know anything? Not really.
Wish I knew who to credit this to…
In a perfect world, we’d want to understand what factors led to the bunion(s) forming in the first place… Shit footwear? “Genetics”? Repetitive poor movement of the body above? Previous injury? Probably a little bit of everything.
Regardless of the causal factors, it should be empowering to hear that there are some consistent mechanical findings that often go together with a bunion that you can start to address right away.
First, watch this:
As I describe in the above video, a common mechanical consistency with most buniony feet is that the joints posterior to the 1st MTPJ DO NOT GAP on the medial border of the foot and, instead, the big toe joint is doing allllll of the gapping (abduction). A good strategy would be to start to redistribute the gapping of the medial border across ALL joints, not just the one MTPJ.
I think some people call that load-sharing, a term most commonly used in reference to spine motion and can describe why some people have back pain.
Much like a spine with a hinge point at the thoracolumbar junction, through which all their extension is occurring, a foot with a “hinge point” at the 1st MTPJ, through which all their pronation is occurring can lead to a structural distortion over time that can become stiff and rigid and not super comfortable.
The intention of the exercise I demo in the video is to MINIMIZE the valgus/ABduction/ER/gapping (whatever you want to call it) motion of the big toe, and MAXIMIZE joint opening at the other joints on the medial border of your foot, encouraging healthy pronation mechanics with even joint motion distribution through the entire foot.
And if you understand that as a movement principle, you can get really creative with how you go about working with a bunion, or any part of the body.
What about toe spacers?
In the video, I am using the sock-between-the-toes technique in a way that is reminiscent of a toe spacer. But this is not meant to be a passive solution, like toe spacers often are portrayed as. The goal is use the sock as a tool to re-educate your foot to move differently. Not to hold all the toes apart 24/7 in hopes it will change foot mechanics. Like putting a book under your pillow hoping to learn passively in your sleep… I WISH it worked that way.
I’m sure there is a time and a place for toe spacers as a passive tool, but I’ve personally never recommended people to use them, nor have I ever used them myself (nor have I ever told anyone to STOP wearing toe spacers- Your feet, your choice). Except for a few times I painted my toe-nails…
I find the most repulsive thing about this photo to be the choice of polish colour. Bleh.
Here’s another creative set-up one of my clients came up with to redistribute her big toe’s excessive valgus to her forefoot and rearfoot:
The band is pulling her valgus big toe into ADduction (towards midline of the body), while she pronates her foot to encourage opening of the joints on the medial border of her foot without excessive big toe bunionization (that’s totally a word). The black AiM wedge is promoting inversion of her forefoot to further encourage healthy pronation mechanics.
Want to learn more?
If you are a manual therapy or movement practitioner and you’d like to learn more about foot mechanics in gait, I will be teaching an Anatomy in Motion Module 1 seminar on Sept 22-24 2023. If you are in the Greater Toronto Area, come nerd out!
This was a quick overview, not intended to be specific medical advice. If you are looking for help for your own body, it is important to receive individualized guidance for your body’s unique issues. Get a professional you trust to assess your unique needs, or get in touch if you’d like to work together to find movement-based solutions to help your body move and feel better.
You’ve probably heard about knee valgus, aka “knock knees“, i.e knees caving inward towards big toes.
I don’t like the word “normal”…
Valgus refers to the tibia (shin bone) leaning inward towards the big toe. See pic on the far right, above.
If you had my education, the thought of letting your knees go valgus makes you throw up in your mouth a bit. Even the word “valgus” kinda sounds gross, doesn’t it??
Most of us have been indoctrinated with the belief that valgus is bad, and causes knee pain, and you’re not going to biomechanical heaven if your knees go in (because biomechanics are a moral issue, didn’t you know?).
While there is truth that valgus knees may not be optimal for an individual, it is not an inherently “bad” movement, and there is a time and place we need it. Like, when our knees bend while we walk (more on that coming up).
But what about someone stuck in knee VARUS?
A knee that pushes out (varus) at the wrong time, place, and magnitude can be just as problematic as a knee that leans in. So this blog post is dedicated to my journey restoring healthy knee valgus into my life.
Why so much focus on preventing knee valgus?
When I was in my early twenties, a young and naiive personal trainer learning about exercise technique, I thought letting your knee go inward was BAD.
I remember consciously walking up stairs pushing my knees out. This made me feel morally superior to all the knee-valgusing, biomechanically not “woke” gym-goers who were obviously going to ruin their knees, and their lives.
Well… I’ve changed my mind about that.
Because I have a right knee stuck with a varus angle that is giving me trouble, and I’ve found some useful movements to *gasp* help it go into valgus.
But first…
What should your knees be doing, ideally, when you walk?
Here’s the ideal mechanical relationship we should see in gait (normal walking) at your knees:
Knee bends (flexion) = tibia rotates in towards big toe (goes toward valgus from upright)
Knee straightens (extension)= tibia returns back upright (moves toward varus from valgus)
Think of it like a pendulum going from one end of the spectrum to the other: Varus–> center –> valgus –> center–> varus, and on and on and on…
And if you have a minute, behold the fascinating phenomenon of pendulum synchronization
At the risk of going too far down a biomechanical rabbit-hole, if you just want to move and feel better without hurting your brain about it, here’s the kneed to know (see what I did there??):
If your knee bends and goes valgus, but then stays that way when you extend it again, no bueno.
However, a knee that doesn’t get into valgus when you bend it, i.e. stays in varus, is also no beuno.
Below is a video of me walking on June 8th, 2022. Watch my right tibia. Can you see how it stays more varus than my left? That’s the side I have hip, SIJ, and foot issues.
Now, in the spirit of movement detectivery, we ought to assess what actually happens when YOU bend and straighten your knees.
World’s simplest knee assessment
You can easily assess whether your knees are going into varus or valgus with a simple lunge test. Try it out, it will take you 1 min:
So… What did you observe about your lunge assesment?
Does one, or both knees push out over your pinky toe (varus)? Then you might like to show your knees an experience of valgus.
Does one, or both knees collapse wayyy inward, and you feel wobbly, and the outside edge of your foot lifts off the floor? That may be too much valgus, and that’s not the topic of today’s exploration.
In a perfect world, we’re looking to see the tip of your knee cap point in towards yoru big toe, but the tibia remain relatively vertical, not push out, not way in, when you bend your knee.
In fact, the knee tipping inward we want to see ought to be more by virtue of the ribia rotating inwards, like a barber pole, not like the leaning otwer of Pisa falling over.
If you had one or both knees pushing OUT into varus, check out the next three videos. They may help you explore some new, exciting valgusing.
Reclaim your valgus
DISCALIMER: The following three videos show what I’ve personally been working on to intentionally, and gently, give my right knee the experience of valgus again. They may or may not feel right for You. If anything feels unsafe or incorrect for you, please don’t force your body to do these movements.
STEP 1: Gently guide the knee into valgus and flexion, non-weightbearing
STEP 2: Start to weightbear into leg with valgus
STEP 3: Fully weightbearing on a healthy valgus knee
As always, we want to introduce new movement, like knee valgus, respectfully, not forcefuly pushing our knees in at 11/10 intensity. I’m using about 10% total body effort.
Give these assessments and movements a go if it feels right for your body, and let me know what you experience đ
I originally posted these videos on my Instagram page. I know… social media is the devil. But I sometimes post things there when I’ve discovered something useful in my biomechanical detectivery that I feel worth sharing, in the chance it may be of some small benefit to you as well đ Find me on IG @monvolkmar
Want to learn more about knees (and your whole body) in gait?
If you enjoy my style of biomechanical exploration, I invite you to dive in deeper in my online course Liberated Body.
This is a 4 lesson movement workshop that guides you through how your body moves, and helps you identify and restore the joint motions your body is missing from your gait cycle that could be keeping you from moving, performing and feeling your best.
On day 2 (foot day) we talk more about how the knees should ideally move in harmony with the feet, i.e.- The importance of being able to pronate and supinate well.
A few weeks ago I went on a canoe trip with my dad to the beautiful Kawartha Highlands Provincial Park.
View from our canoe-in campsite aka no trace of humanity… Take me back!
On the 2.5-hour drive, my dad told a story about “that time I had car trouble and blah, blah, blah…” (you know the kind your parents tell that you smile and nod through, but aren’t actually interested in?).
To my delight, his story contained an unwittingly wonderful insight from a Toyota dealership mechanic explaining why we get injured, and a simple heuristic for how not to.
Turns out listening to what your folks say is useful sometimes.
To get started, we need a basic primer on how the brakes work in hybrid/electric cars (trust me, this is going somewhere…).
The Problem With Regenerative Braking
My dad has a hybrid-electric car. A Toyota Corolla, to be specific.
Hybrid vehicles are built with mechanisms that make you morally superior save you fuel and battery life beyond all those other gas-guzzling, Earth-poisoning, death-mobiles.
One such mechanism is called regenerative braking.
What is regenerative braking?
Unlike conventional friction braking systems, which work by physically clamping the wheels to stop them from turning, regenerative brakes work by running the wheels “in reverse” to slow the car down. Simply taking your foot off the gas pedal initiates the regenerative braking mechanism. Additionally, the resistance created by the motor charges the battery. Cool, right? I thought so!
But here’s the important part: This mechanism causes the car to slow down a lot faster than a non-hybrid/electric, and so you don’t need to step as hard or as frequently on the brakes.
Just a little tap, taparoo.
Apparently some regenerative braking systems as so highly sensitive that just taking your foot off the gas pedal is enough to trigger the brake lights.
Sounds like a win-win-win, right? Saves your brakes the wear and tear, preserves the battery life, and gives you more miles per gallon.
But… And this is an important but. There is an ironic darkside.
A lot of hybrid and electric car owners (such as my pop) find that their brakes are actully wearing out in spite of using them LESS. What the heck?
This is when my ears perked up in my dad’s boring car story. Wait, what? Why would brakes wear out if the system is set up so that you use them less??
Use it or lose it
The “use it or lose it” principle is usually discussed in the context of the brain, neuroplasticity (the brain’s capactiy to re-wire neural circuits based on new inputs) and body- If you consistenly stop exposing a particular set of neural circuits or body parts to stimuli, your system interprets there is no need for them, and you “lose” access.
Or remember Wolff’s law. Bone remodels and lays down new cells based on the forces imposed upon it. This is why after a bone fracture force needs to go through, i.e. bear weight on it, it to stimulate new tissue development and heal.
This is also how bone spurs develop- Muscles pulling excessively on a bone will stimulate it to grow.
Basically the same thing that happens when you wear a pair of pants that are too tight, and by the end of the day they stretch out a little and fit a bit looser, based on the forces of your body on the pants.
This is also part of why some folks get osteoporosis. Lack of weightbearing exercise with high enough forces to stimulate bone to grow. If you don’t use it, you lose it.
*NOTE: See a completely unrelated story about a 97-year-old-woman and her osteoporosis at the end of this post.
The remedy for use it or lose it is to start using it again (and this becomes harder and more daunting the longer you wait).
What does this have to do with brakes?
Apparently, the use it or lose it principle applies with regenerative braking. Because the system is set up for inherent disuse (ironically positioned as a key benefit), the brakes are prone to corrosion because they don’t get used often enough.
You’ve seen how a bike chain rusts and stiffens if you leave it out all winter. Use it or lose it.
If you don’t deliberately “exercise” the brakes frequently and forcefully enough, when the time comes you actually DO need to hit them hard, say, to avoid running over a kitten, those rusty rotors might fail under the new load.
Don’t run over kittens. I just started fostering this cat. Look into her eyes and solemnly swear you’ll take care of your brakes.
As the mechanic at the Toyota dealership told my dad’:
“If you have a hybrid car, you won’t be using the brakes as hard. You don’t really use them as much as you would in a regular car. So what you kind of have to do once in a while is deliberately brake really hard to make sure they aren’t getting stagnant from disuse and accumulating corrosion”.
All I could think was, well isn’t that just how bodies work…
Bodies get “corroded” from disuse, too, and then wear out “suddenly” when exposed to a demand they weren’t adequately prepared for.
Or, as Gary Ward expresses the equation: Injury = You + Rate of change
What do you think? See Gary’s IG account @garyward_aim for more nuggets like this.
Another example you might relate with…
Were you super excited to get back to working out after a year of lockdowns? Did you mayyybe go back to your prior routine full-force like no time had passed? But all year long you didn’t once “tap the brakes” to keep all your body parts moving? (as a bodyworker/trainer, I saw a lot of this in 2021…).
And how many other so-called “syndromes” and “diseases” might actually have roots in disuse? Some types of arthirits? “Frozen” shoulder? Ankylosing spondylitis? Is disease the reason for disuse? Or is disuse the cause of disease? How do we count our chickens and eggs??
I’m not a medical professional, just a lowly bodyworker, and what I observe is that many labels are nothing more than fancy ways of saying, “a thing that stopped moving and now hurts and we’re not sure why…”. (and I also recognize that many labels are genuinely useful and liberating).
So if the problem is that you just stopped moving it, maybe try… Moving it? Sensibly, of course (that’s where people like me come in to help ya).
And much like the regenerative brakes on your uber-efficient hybrid/electric car, nothing seemed wrong, until…
It just came out of nowhere!
It didn’t come out of nowhere. You just weren’t aware of how little that body part was actually moving prior to the issue.
Disuse is a perfect set up for corrosion, mechanical damage, and malfunction of the non-moving parts. For your body, and your brakes.
Ankle sprains are a good example. Lots of people have sprained at least one ankle.
If you spend most of your life never exposing your ankles to the demands of ankle-rolly bumpy terrain, the soft tissues supporting your ankles (muscles, tendons, ligaments) are just like your car’s disused brakes: Slowly “corroding” away from disuse, but you don’t even notice because it’s so gradual, and you never put yourself in situations in which you even need to know your ankles exist, let alone use them in a challenging situation.
And then, one fateful day, whilst out walking your beloved pooch, you randomly trip, roll over your ankle, sprain your deltoid ligament, and realize how cushy your life has been.
Did that injury really “just come out of nowhere?” Or were you setting yourself up for it for years because you didn’t ever deliberately use the structures that would have (should have) checked your ankle from rolling over and causing damage?
Look at all those amazing ligaments (ie “brakes) in your ankle and foot! Use ’em or lose ’em.
How many of our injuries that just came out of nowhere are the result of the “regenerative braking paradox”?
Joints act, muscles react
I am reminded of Gary Ward’s second big rule of motion: Joints act, muscles react.
And how are muscles reacting? To decelerate excessive joint motion away from center.
This is why his work centers around helping people discover the eccentric loading (the muscle contraction as it lengthens) of their muscles to manage (slow down) joint motion. This is akin to “tapping the brakes” at every joint in their body, to check excessive motion that could end up in an unsafe, potentially harmful range of motion. Like in our ankle sprain example.
If you can teach your body to move based on the joints act, muscles react thought process, then you are keeping your intrinsic regenerative braking system responsive, healthy, and on-point.
I encourage you to read more about this, and the other 5 big rules of motion in Gary’s book,What The Foot.
Conclusions?
I LOVE that what I anticipated would be another boring “that time the car broke down” story actually turned into an amazing analogy for how to keep our bodies resilient and healthy.
If you don’t deliberatedly use all the bits and pieces you are built of with enough frequency and force to keep them at peak function, you risk losing function of said bits and pieces. This has been my general movement practice philosophy for years, and I was tickled that it has a parallel in an area I know nothing about: Car brakes.
If you don’t use the brakes often enough to know if something’s not functioning well, you’ll never even know there’s potentially a problem.
Do you deliberately use your ankles often enough to know they can manage a roll?
Do you explore using your wrists often enough to know they can support you in a fall?
Do you purposefully flex your spine often enough to trust it can tolerate sneeze #55837? (apparently the average person sneezes ~70000 times in their life… Don’t ask me if that’s an accurate stat)
A car’s brakes manage it’s motion, just as our body’s soft tissues are like brakes that manage our skeletal motion. A movement practice based on “joints act, muscles react” trains the body to effectively decelerate potentially threatening wayward motion. This is NOT the same things as stretching and strengthening.
I am also reminded of how counterintuitive it can be to know how to care for ourselves…
Did the folks who built regenerative brakes intuit that they would create the disuse problem and lead to many cranky customers wondering why their brakes were shot even though they barely used them?
Did the folks who built the comfiest, thickest-soled, most ankle-supportive shoes ever intuit that it could cause a disuse problem and the plague of immobile ankles and feet? “But I never DO anything extreme to cause damage and I always wear my orthotics! Why are my ankles so shit?” (that’s exactly it, my dear…)
If only our bodies came with a user manual, and a well-informed, honest mechanic from the dealership…
Well, fortunately there are people in this world who are dedicated to helping you write your own body-owner’s manual.
People like me. And I am just one of many.
My aim is to empower people to learn about their bodies so they can rely less on therapists. And at the very least, be able to better communicate with them so they can get the collaborative care they need.
In fact, this is the most frequently reported benefit from my Liberated Body students: “I can communicate with my physio/massage therapist/chiropractor better now and it feels more like teamwork than blind faith”.
This is important, because advocating for our health is not easy when we don’t know anything about the thing needing fixing, leading us to naiively believe that we need to come back to the friendly chiropractor to get our neck adjusted every week for the rest of our lives… Don’t buy it.
If you’d like to learn more about how your body is built to move so you can systematically explore and prevent the disuse problem discussed in this blog post, I recommed checking out my online course Liberated Body.
Liberated Body is a series of four movement lessons based on the teachings of Gary Wards’ Anatomy in Motion. You’ll learn how your body is meant to move through the gait cycle (how you should be able to walk), and then compare whether or not YOUR body can access all those mechanics correctly.
Check out Liberated Body HERE. You can do it as a self-study, or look for the next live (online) workshop date.
Or whatever. Just make sure you keep tappin’ those brakes ahrd every once ina while to make sure they still exist.
*THE STORY:
If you have osteoporosis, can you improve your bone mass? Some people say that you can’t, you can only slow it’s wasting. I thought so, too. But then one of my clients told me a story about a 97 year old woman she knows with osteoporosis who made it her mission to build her bones back. Apparently she did exercises for 3 HOURS DAILY (I forget if it was for a year, or less), and when she went back to get her bone density tested again, it had gone up! I think only by a few percentage points. But how inspiring is that? And honestly, if you’re 97, you’ve definitely got the time and no excuses to commit 3 hours per day to rebuild your bones. And now the running joke when she says something can’t be done is, “Just put in 3 hours a day”. No excuses.
So, your trainer/physio just told you you have an anterior pelvic tilt that needs to be corrected because it’s bad. OMG. You’re doomed! Right? Or… Maybe not? Is an anterior pelvic tilt actually bad? And posterior tilt good?
On the left: Anterior pelvic tilt (tailbone lifts up) On the right: Posterior pelvic tilt (tailbone tucks down)
Repeat this as your mantra: There’s no such thing as an inherently good or bad movement.
Have you ever been told that you have the dreaded “anterior pelvic tilt”? And it’s the cause of all your body’s problems? I have. And I believed it, too.
Most of us have been taught that some movements are universally “bad” and we need to fix them. Anterior pelvic tilt is nothing more than three words describing a movement a healthy body should be able to do, not a life sentence to pain, misery, and moral judgement.
Don’t listen to Dr. Google
I did a Google search for the neutral term “anterior pelvic tilt” and the first result tells me it’s something I should care about correcting! WHAT??! What if I didn’t even know what a pelvis is, and now the first thing I’ve learned is that mine might be wrong…
Just check out these results from the frist page of Google:
If you’re a pilates teacher no doubt this was drilled into you
Just a sampling of fix-yer-dang-pelvis-AT fear-mongernig from first page of Google
Contrary to what you may read from Dr. Google about fixing your pelvis AT, any movement we avoid (deliberately or unconsciously) will limit us. Labelling movements as “bad” and avoiding them, our bodies will, ironically, become less free, less efficient, less flowing (and less fun!).
Pelvis anterior tilt is but one example. Another one is foot pronation. So is shoulder blade (scapula) protraction.
I, Monika (trust me, I’m a movement proefessional), hereby give you permission to do all of those things with your body, not that you need permission. In fact, I ask people to reclaim these “bad” movements in my Liberated Body Workshop.
Does an pelvis anterior tilt need correcting?
Now you know: No. Your body needs to be able to do an anterior tilt well, and do it with every step you take.
And there’s more to an anterior tilt of the pelvis is more than jamming your tailbone up to the ceiling. If it hurts your lower back to do an anterior tilt, you’re probably doing it wrong. Don’t avoid it, learn how to do one well.
Why?
You need an anterior tilt to load your extensor chain (glutes and hamstrings).
You need an anterior tilt to absorb shock through your hips and spine with each foot step.
And, you even need your pelvis to do an anterior tilt well if you want your jaw to be able to decompress. (Do you wear a night guard for bruxism? Hmm, maybe you’d like to assess your pelvic tilting as part of a hoistic strategy?)
The idea we need to “correct” a pelvis anterior tilt because it is bad and causes back pain is just an idea that is based on an incomplete, compartmentalized understanding of the body in motion. We can do better.
The truth? We need to be able to do an anterior tilt WELL just as we need to be able to do it’s opposite- posterior tilt, well. BOTH matter for the health of your hips, spine, and well, your whole body (and your life).
Think of it this way: If you could only choose to turn left or turn right for the rest of your life, which direction would you choose? Is one better than the other? Or would you like to do both? If Zoolander taught us one thing, it’s the pain of living a life with only the option to go right.
“I’m not an ambituner… I can’t turn left”
Case Study
A few days ago I worked with a client with lower back pain. He is a former high level curler đĽ. His back pain feels worse when he does a pelvis anterior tilt.
Traditional thinking would have us believe that we should avoid anterior tilting his pelvis like the plague and get him to squeeze his butt and tuck it under, right??
Not so fast…
As you’ll see in the video below, he actually has HUGE amounts of pelvis tuck-ability (posterior tilt). Wayyy too much. And you’ll hopefully see how it is dragging his spine backwards behind his feet and into a ton of flexion.
I’d also like you to observe how his pelvis anterior tilt pushes his whole torso forward, like a tree tipping over, putting his head well in front of his feet. This is the movement that is flagging up his back pain because he is shearing forward from one segment in his lumbar spine, instead of evenly articulating across all joints to make a healthy extension.
Check out the analysis I did below: Pelvis tilts BC (Before Cogs)
https://youtu.be/5rlDViqaTtM
If you’ve been studying the newly released Anatomy in Motion online course from Gary Ward and co.: Closed chain upper body biomechanics in motion, then in the first chpater you will have learned that for healthy spine motion in upright gait we’d like to see your head stacked on top of your pelvis when it moves into AT and PT. Not swaying you forward and back like bamboo in the wind.
We call that stacked up pelvis on ribcage on skull organization on-axis. I also like to call it a shishkabob. Your spine is the stick. Mmm… Kebab…
In my clients’ case, his entire torso is being pushed forward by a pelvis anterior tilt, which shows us a few important things:
a) This person is not able to access an actual pelvis anterior tilt (and therefore there’s nothing to “fix”, it’s a movement to re-discover!)
b) This person probably has a imitation in intervertebral articulation into spine extension, which is needed to keep his head over his pelvis (actual movement between each individual joint in the spine, instead of being a tree trunk) This is important for spine health. And for giving the abdominal muscles something to do. Want abs? Add being able to anterior tilt to your list.
Now check out THIS second video, which I took after doing 10 minutes of corrective exercise to help him and his body re-learn what both pelvis anterior and posterior tilts with proper spine articulation feel like.
Pelvis tilts AC (AFTER Cogs)
https://youtu.be/EbxkPxqsMmo
Can you observe the cleaner pelvis and spine articulation, and less forwards/backwards swaying of his whole torso? He also reports no more back discomfort. Booyah!
What did we do?
Cogs: Our favourite exercise in AiM world. Which I’ve written about before.
Check out THIS video of me doing some floor cogs for an example of what I took my client through (or learn more in day 1 of Liberated Body with me :)).
And I can’t say enough about the Upper Body Biomechanics in Motion course, which has an amazing section on cogs if you’re an uber nerd and want the technical details.
Such a good course! I’m biased and I strongly recommend đ
Now, what is important to understand is that in the AFTER video, my client is not consciously trying to do “good” pelvis tilts because he now knows what it should look like.
I’m not saying, “Hey Bob, based on what I told you about pelvis motion, can you make that happen with your mind-power?”
I’m asking, “Hey Bob, show me what happens if you ask your body to tilt your pelvis both ways without over-thinking how you’re doing it”.
Can you appreciate the difference?
This is a representation of his body having better unconscious access to a new way of moving that takes LESS control, less forcing, less micromanaging, and less energy. More likely to happen naturally in each step.
What are the take-aways?
If anyone tells you that a movement is bad, don’t believe them. BUT, sometimes movements can become unhealthy- asymmetrical, excessive, too small, too slow, too fast, unorganized with the whole, etc- then we need to re-train the bdoy how to perform it, coordinated with the rest of the body.
Whhile a pelvis anterior tilt was a trigger for my client’s back pain, the “fix” wasn’t to eliminate pelvis anterior tilt from his life. The problem was that he couldn’t do one at all, and was shearing from his spine too much, instead.
Too much posterior tilt can be just as much of an issue as too much anterior tilt. My client in this post is is case in point.
We need our bodies to be able to access both posterior AND anterior tilts of the pelvis. Remember Zoolander.
The better we become at observing movement, the better was can get at finding solutions that help us reclaim our options for moving better.
So… how well can your pelvis move? đ¤
Want to learn more?
Movement myths abound in the worlds of fitness and therapy.
Knowing what a human body should be able to do and having a safe, non-judgemental space to explore how your body moves so you can understand what healthy movement feels like for you is so important for getting out of pain and optimizing performance.
Want to learn more about optimizing how your body moves, based on gait and the teachings of Anatomy in Motion? This is the kind of things I help folks with in Movement Detective School .
If you’re ready to stop wasting time with generic exericses and stretches, and youâre serious about learning how to undo the patterns you have adopted over the years due to past activities, sports, repetitive postures, injuries, and accidents, I’d love to work together on that đŞ
I’ve dedicated the past 10 years of my life to learning how to get my body out of pain by exposing it to the truth of how our bodies move in gait, and I have so much about that process to share. Shoot me an email if you have any questions đ
Fancy a little movement detectivery you can do for free, from the comfort of your own home?
Well, not completely free… You need the internet (and I don’t know about you, but my rates just went UP!). And you’ll have to stand up and use your brain and your muscles a bit, so it might not be as comfortable as sitting on your butt.
Regardless, if you have jaw issues, hip issues, or both issues, I think you’ll appreciate this little piece of biomechanical investigation. The video below is a simple way to test if your jaw’s resting position (which may be a lil’ off center), is messing with how your hips and pelvis are able to move.
Can you see how when I shift my jaw one way it makes things looks really discombobulated? What’s up with that huh?
The Jaw vs. Hips Test Explanation
In this video I’m testing if the resting position of my lower jaw (mandible) is impacting on my ability to hike my pelvis on either side (and thus adduct/abduct my hips- which needs to happen with every step we take for efficient gait).
Ideally, our pelvis hikes and drops with each foot step we take. We also want our bodies to move as evenly as possible on the right and left sides: Pelvis hike on the right should be pretty dang close to the hike on the left.
In this assessment, we’re looking clean and clear (and under control…) frontal plane motion, meaning purely up and down motion. Not a pelvis rotation. Not a pelvis thrust. Pelvis bones ought to move like elevators, not a washing machine.
In this assessment, pelvis hiking is accomplished by gently bending one knee to allow the opposite side of the pelvis to hike up on it’s own. I’m not trying to use my side-abs to pull my pelvis up with a muscular contraction. This is an assessment of how your pelvis reacts to a knee bend, NOT trying to see how high you can jam your iliac crest into your ear like it’s a contest.
Start by evaluating how each side hikes with your jaw doing it’s natural thang. Note any differences. This is your baseline.
Next, slide your jaw to the RIGHT (like a type-writer). Repeat your pelvis hikes. Notice if that changes anything. Better, same, or worse?
Lastly, slide your jaw to the LEFT. Repeat your pelvis hikes. Notice if that changes anything. More even right and left? Less even? Any discomfort?
Did one of those three jaw positions make your pelvis hikes more even? More comfortable? Worse? Or no difference?
The Results
If you are perceptive, you can probably see which jaw position helps my pelvis and hips achieve more balanced, clean motion.
(FYI my right and left sides are reveresd. My tattoo leg is my right leg…One of my online students actually remarked that it was great to have my right leg so clearly denoted because it helps her keep track of the rights and lefts in class! Yes… I got that tat for exactly that reason… ;))
Here’s the video again, to save you some scrolling:
Round 1: Jaw in it’s default resting position. My pelvis hikes look pretty even right and left, eh?
Round 2: Jaw shifted LEFT. When I hike left side up, I shift off of that leg. And when I hike right, I rotate towards the right instead of hiking. This is NOT clean motion, meaning I have poor access to both pelvis hikes.
Round 3: Jaw shifted RIGHT. This looks very similar to round 1, but in my body it feels smoother and happier.
So, if I had to pick one jaw position that promotes optimal hip motion, jaw shifted right is the winner.
Interpretating the Results
Okay, so what’s the point of this, and what, if any, useful information can we glean from it in the name of better, pain-free movement?
Jaw position is kind of a big deal.
Interestingly, our mandible’s position in our skull dictates a lot about how we’re able to move our hips and pelvis in gait (among other things… THAT’S a rabbit hole of a lifetime that will make you very disappointed in humanity and yet empowered to pay attention to your oral-facial health and tell everyone to shut their dang mouth while they breathe. But don’t get too high on that soapbox…).
We can consider the jaw to be a “leveller” of the body- A mid-line structure with a significant impact on whole body mechanics. What if your body took part of it’s cue for where its center is, based on where your jaw is? What if this had an impact on which phases of gait you can and can’t access (it does)?
So when you notice your jaw is “tight” or clicky or you clench it, know that this is not just a jaw problem- It’s a whole body problem.
What I haven’t mentioned yet is that my jaw’s default resting position is already shifted to the left.
So in round 1 of the test, my jaw is actually sitting slightly left of center. I think it’s been that way since I was at least 3 years old. Why do I think that? Because I have a photo of me on my third birthday in which my jaw looks like it’s pushed farther back on the left side.
Like this:
Its subtle, but can you see the left side of my jaw shoved back farther than on the right? Happy bday to me!
In round 2 of the test, when I slide my jaw to the left, my pelvis and hips have no clue how to move in the frontal plane! What’s going on here?
As mentioned earlier, hiking the pelvis needs to happen with each footstep. It’s part of our bodies’ shock-absorption mechanics that happens when our foot pronates on the ground, loading the lateral glutes medius and minimus (this is suspension phase of gait for the AiM folks, loading phase for the rest of y’all).
So too does the jaw have it’s own coordinated movement with the whole body in gait for optimal efficiency.
In gait, when the pelvis hikes on one side, the jaw actually needs to slide over and gap (teeth come apart) on that side as part of a whole body pattern for efficient movement.
In another moment in gait, when the right heel hits the ground (heel strike), the jaw actually shifts to the left. Interestingly, right heel strike is a phase in which I experience right hip and SIJ pain sometimes. In fact, right hip pain was the first chronic pain symptom I ever remember having.
So this gets me thinking… How long has my jaw been messing with my hips? Has my resting-left jaw tendency predisposes me to having the hip problems that I did/still do? Have my hips really been on a path of destruction since I was three years old (or even earlier?). I don’t think this is random, or coincidence…
What do you do with this new data?
Let’s say you’re like me, and if you shift your jaw left your pelvis doesn’t know the meaning of “hike”.
Let’s look at the data:
Where’s my jaw at rest? Shifted left.
When I shift it MORE left (deeper into default) I can’t hike either side of my pelvis, when I shift it right, things improve.
Thus my jaw being positioned left is highly likely to be giving my hips and pelvis some grief
Solution? Getting my jaw to not be stuck to the left all the time and have a more centered default position would likely have a beneficial whole body effect.
The journey from here- what you decide to do, will vary based on the tools you have in your toolkit to reorganize your jaw. Manual therapy, movement re-training, goofy looking face stretches, all can be useful.
For the past 3 years I’ve been on a journey of levelling my jaw. It’s been a fascinating, enriching, and frustrating project.
Here are a few interesting things I’ve noted along the way that have helped me un-leftify my jaw, and significantly improve how my hips feel:
I prefer to unconsciously chew on the left side. It’s my happy place. I try not to always chew in my happy place.
When I am in social-anxiety-producing situations, I unconsiously clench my jaw and shift it to the left. It’s where my jaw goes when I’m trying to cope with stress. Now I’m at the point that I’m conscious of it happening. Sometimes I can even NOT DO IT.
Oral-facial integration techniques (a la MNRI) and craniosacral therapy have been super helpful for me. I can do these manual therapy techniques on myself because our faces are easily within hands-reach. Learning these two modalities have been game-changing.
Understanding how jaw motion couples with the rest of our bodies in gait, as per the Flow Motion Model taught by Gary Ward in his Anatomy in Motion courses has been crucial for me to use whole body movements to re-integrate my jaw with my body in a meaningful context, i.e. walking. Do you know what your jaw should be doing in three dimensions with a pelvis hike? Well mine isn’t doing the right thing! And reorganizing that has been key.
I used to get weird popping and ringing sensations in my left ear, especially under stress… Now they are almost gone, but come back when my jaw is more to the left (which happens when I’m under stress).
Making funny faces is an awesome and important part of changing the way you move đ I mean, this is serious business, but that doesn’ t mean we can’t have some serious fun with it.
My invitation to you
Are you feeling like a Movement Detective? This is the kind of stuff I like to share with my students in my secret Movement Detective School. Oops, not so secret anymore…
Give this test a try and see if your jaw could be impacting the motion of your pelvis and hips.
It is quite likely you have one position in which your jaw discombobulates your hips.
Is that the same side you have a clicky, poppy jaw? Is that the same side you chew on primarily? Is that the same side you got smoked in the face by some aggressive jerk in a hockey match? Is that the same side you had a traumatic experience getting your wisdom teeth removed?
Let me know what you find. What if you could free your jaw, free your hips, and free your life? (you can!)
PS I share little videos like this from time to time on my Instagram page. I think social media sucks 90% of the time, but I like to use it to share the nerdy movement things that I do. Feel free to follow me @monvolkmar
In my 3 Essential Tools resource (a must-read for budding Movement Detectives) I extolled the importance of continous learning. Education is truly one of the most valuable tools for helping our bodies move with more ease and less pain. If you don’t know what a healthy body should be able to move like, how are you going to get yours to move better??
Education comes in so many forms: Attending courses and workshops (online and in person), diploma and degree programs, working directly with mentors, doing independent research, and reading. If you’re me, lots and lots and lots of reading.
I confess… I have a reading problem.
Not that I can’t read well, but that I have a tendency to get so stuck into reading a book that I might shirk my more pressing life resonsibilities. This can get me into trouble when I actually have important shit that needs getting done. Adulting is hard sometimes…
That said, some books have literally changed the trajectory of my life.
Has that ever happened to you? After reading a book, something actually woke up in you that forever changed how you think and engage with life?
 It’s rare… Most of the time, embrrassingly, I struggle to summarize just three key take-aways after finishing one chapter. Reading a LOT of books clearly doesn’t equate in me actually absorbing the content.
And then there are some books after which the trajectory of your life shifts a few degrees.Â
Have you heard of the 1 in 60 rule in aviation? It states that a one degree change in direction can result in a disproportionately large shift in final destination: Each degree off over a distance of 60Â nautical miles translates to 1 nautical mile off course. Think about the crazy implication this has for where you might end up… A completely different city, or country, or even continent!
Some books push us that one degree (hopefully in a meaningful direction…). How amazing is that?
So I’ll stop blabbering now, and get to the point. I’d like to share five books that stand out in memory as having changed the trajectory of my life. I don’t expect that they’ll have the same life-changing effect on you, but one of these titles might lead you somewhere new that you wouldn’t have explored otherwise.
Well of course this is at the top of my list. I don’t know who or where I would be right now had I not read this book. Is has had the largest impact on both my professional and personal philosophies for working with human bodies in motion, including my own.
WTF is a mind opening read that made me question the conventional fitness and therapy paradigms around stability and core training, foot mechanics, and the utility of stretching. Like the tagline says, “A game changing philosophy…”. This book also led me to take the plunge and take the six day Anatomy in Motion immersion course (7 times…) which at the time was a big financial investment. Now, I am working with Gary and Chris of AiM as both a mentee and mentor to help other AiM students learn more deeply.
Here’s a story I’ve never told here before: When I was 21 and getting hamstring rehab, my physiotherapist lent this book to me, and it was the inspiration to create a program to help banged-up dancers with back (and other) problems build strength and prevent injuries (The Dance Training Project).
This is the book that first got me interested in learning about my own body. Up until then I’d never given much thought to the notion that I could have any effect on changing my reality. This book inspired hope in me that, with this new information about how the spine works, I could take responsibility for my back problems and get myself well. Honestly, I haven’t referenced this book since I was 21, though I’m sure there are some excellent golden nuggets to review. But the biggest thing I got from this book was the sense of empowerment that came from learning something new about my body that I previously had zero awareness of: It woke up my inner Movement Detective.
This book denotes a major pivot in my life: The moment I learned what it meant to feel “good” after moving my body. I was 19 or 20 at the time, and decided on a whim to take a yoga class. It was the first time I actually breathed while moving- What a concept. It challenged my body in a whole new way comapared to my dance training. And after the class, something felt very different. I was used to feeling broken down after dance and exercise, but that day I left the studio feeling clear headed, calm, aligned, and “good”. I didn’t know what good actually felt like until then!
Intrigued, I went to a local indie bookstore, and this book jumped off the shelf at me. The first section the author’s story, his journey into yoga and meditation. I had never considered trying meditation before, and I gave some of his exercises a try. It was a gradual shift, but this was my initiation into observing my own thoughts, and that movement could feel restorative, not punishing. I began willingly observing myself. Slowly, I started to value awareness and self-inquiry. I don’t know if this book is anything special compared to other yoga books (haven’t read other yoga books), but it was the exact book I needed at that moment in time.
This lovely book gave me practical tools that helped me reduce my neuroticism to a level that made my life much less sufferable. In her book, Katie outlines “The Work”: A four-question process for investigating the sneaky beliefs and thoughts that are keeping us stuck in the same old cycles of emotional reactivity, and holding us back from evolving in all areas of life.
I remember the first time I used her framework I immediately felt as if a weight had been lifted. I realized for the first time the depth to which my unconscious belief-systems were ruling my every thought and decision, repearing the same behaviours over and over. I can’t recommend this book enough for anyone looking for a structured, systematic way of compassionate self-inquiry.
Amanda Palmer is a musician who began her performance career as a “living statue” street-performer (and made more money than she did at her “real job”). Her story has nothing to do with the body, but it heart-warmingly covers important themes common to all humanity: Defning your personal version of success and marrching to the beat of your own authentic drum. The courage it takes to risk being vulnerable. The value of human connection, and nurturing relationships (which I often still take for granted). The magic that can unfold when you put your trust in people and life and your intuition, even when things are uncertain. That sneaky little “fraud police” character within that can sabotage us from taking action towards our dreams. And so much more (in fact, after reading this book I was inspired to start writing my book Dance Stronger).
Disclaimer: These books probably will not change your life. Don’t get your hopes up đ
I think books find their way into our hands at the exact time we need them, for eactly where we are in our lives at that moment, for the exact lessons we personally need to learn. Life works in mysterious, magical, and serendipitous ways.
It is 100% possible (more like, probable) that you could read one of the books and get absolutely nothing useful from it. Boring. A waste of time. And that’s ok đ
Anyway, I’d love to hear if you’ve read any of the books on my list, and then what the top five books are on YOUR life changer list đ Because I can always use more book recos.
*BE AWARE: Some of the book links are Amazon Affiliate links, which means that if you click through and happen to purchase one of the books, I get a microscopic % of the profits. I’m not doing this because I’m a greedy-pants person, but because every litte bit helps support me spending hours of my time writing this blog. I am ever so grateful if you do wish to purchase one of these books, that you choose to go through one of my links, and help support me writing more for this blog (and simultaneously divert some $$ from Amazon into my pocket). Thank you! đ
If you’re reading this, it’s probably because some part of your body hurts, and it don’t make no sense.
I get it. I had(ve) mysterious symptoms that baffled and frustrated me for years. And then I was introduced to the concept of mass management, and things finally started making sense.
No, I’m not talking about weight management…
The Simpsons was my babysitter growing up…
Center of mass (CoM) management. Physics. Not physiology đ Not that I’m an expert in either…
Your body has it’s own personal, unique, unconscious CoM management strategy. Understanding it is a powerful tool to help your body get well.
If you have a goal of moving with more ease and less pain, I hope today’s blog post will serve as a useful introduction to what CoM management is, and why it matters. Because whether you like it or not, you’re managing your mass right now, even if you’re sitting on your butt…
Further down in this post I have a video with a simple assessment you can follow along with to start making sense of your personal CoM management strategy in your own body. Or just skip ahead to it, whatever.
Ready?
What is center of mass?
Here’s the technical definition (which is not necessarily easy to grasp unless you enjoy physics, which I do NOT, thank you Mr. Smith for ruining it for me):
“The center of mass is the point on an object at which the weighted relative position of the distributed mass sums to zeroâthe point about which objects rotate.“
Translation…?
Consider a sphere- Its CoM would be right smack in the middle. As the sphere rolls along the ground, the middle point (CoM) of the sphere doesn’t actually move relative to the edges of the sphere, but remains constant as the axis of rotation.
But bodies are not spheres. They are little more complex.
Bodies are way more cool (and complex) than spheres
Imagine if someone were to tie a rope around your wrist and dangle you from the ceiling. Then (after being let down for a break), you were dangled from your ankle from the same ceiling rig. The center of mass of your body would be consistently in the same loaction no matter which limb you were dangled from.
You can also imagine it as the central axis through your body while doing a cartwheel- An axis of rotation through which no actual motion occurs relative to your limbs.
So where exactly is this central point located in our bodies?
The location of the human body’s CoM is slightly different for each individual, depending on proportions. Some say it is roughly 10cm below your navel. I’ve read it to be anywhere between L3 and S2 vertebral segments. There seems to be a lack of concensus, and probably requires exact measurement for each individual.
But ain’t nobody got time for that.
So as a general estimate, if you were to put your finger somewhere between your belly button and pubic bone, and imagine a point at the depth your spine, that ought to be good enough.
What is CoM Management?
When you walk, your body has to transfer its entire weight from one foot to the other. I tihnk its pretty increadible that we even can do it without falling down. Silly bipeds. But somewhere in our evolution standing upright and growing our brains became more useful than being on four legs, so here we are. Every step a leap of faith.
The reason we don’t fall down is becaues we have specifically sequenced and timed body mechanics that help us manage the chaotic journey we call walking. A journey in which our CoM bravely shifts from right foot to left.
In gait, the center of mass of your body needs to get all the way from one foot to rest over top of the center of mass of the other foot.
The center of mass of the foot is the 2nd (or intermediate) cunieform.
Full weight-bearing on one leg happens when the CoM of our body sits directly over top of the CoM of our foot (2nd cuneiform).
This ideally needs to happens in the loading phase of gait (or suspension phase, in AiM terms). This is when the highest amount of force will enter that limb, which makes it a critical moment in time to have our body mechanics set up in an organized way to absorb the shock.
Except a lot of the times our bodies are not so organized…
Disorganized, distorted, off-center, our CoM makes a different sort of journey.
Maybe it doesn’t quite get over 2nd cuneiform. Maybe we find a strategy that puts extra strain on different parts of our bodies to compensate for that. Maybe we spend a higher percentage of time with our weight on one foot. Or more total mass on one leg than the other.
That is the essence of CoM management: The particular way your skeleton organizes the journey of getting it’s CoM over to the opposite foot, and back again.
You could think of it as your unique “swagger”.
Why care about CoM management?
If it is true that there is a particular set of mechanics with which we’d ideally like the body to use for optimal, flowing, efficient gait (and I believe that there is), the million dollar question is: How close to that “ideal” is your body currently able to use?
This is why I think taking a presonal interest in learning about movement mechanics is a critical tool for anyone interested in actually getting well. Most of us get busy fixing things before taking the time to understand the problem.
But rather than rant about that…
Using the lens of CoM management we get different information than assessing joint range of motion, “functional” movement patterns, and strength testing alone, such as:
Can your CoM move equally onto either foot, or is there a leg you don’t trust to weight bear into fully?
Why don’t you weight-bear fully into one leg? Do you avoid it due to a past injury or accident?
Which past injuries or accidents might be part of that strategy(ies) and need help now? Ankle sprain?
What problem areas today might actually have began as solutions for a past problem?
What body parts are you using to shift your CoM from right to left instead of actually getting your CoM to travel through space? Ribcage? Arms? Head?
Do you stand evenly on both feet at rest? If no, how could this be putting extra pressure, compression, or tension on some parts of your body more than others?
Admittedly, this is a qualitative study, not quantitative. But that doesn’t mean it is not useful, or can’t be reasonably objective. It just requires a different way of thinking.
Like, using your whole brain.
A whole brain approach
Assessing individual body parts’ movement capabilities is synonymous with our left brain hemisphere’s limited observational style- Looking at facts in isolation and disregarding their relationship to the whole.
As Iain McGilchrist has written about in his book The Master and his Emissary, there is much evidence to suggest that we are biased to process the world around us predominantly via our brain’s left-hemisphere, which limits us to a narrow, incomplete perception of reality, dominated by hyperrationality, an affinity for the familiar, and a tendency to deny when it is wrong.
Bodies are complex systems. To appreciate their magnificence, and the impossibility that we could ever fully understand their complexity is a function only our right brain is wired for: The ability to contemplate the unknowable and find delight in paradox and contradiction.
Only via our right hemisphere can we view our bodies’ state, not as a state- one that is static, but as dynamic. How we move is not reduced to a mere utility (left brain’s view), but has an intention within a bigger context.
Our right hemisphere understands that our bodies are much more than the sum of its individual parts’ discrete abilties, in isolation from one another. Each individual body parts’ isolated performance matters, but only has meaning in context with the body as a whole.
Relationships between parts matter to the right brain, not to the left, which wants only to isolate, categorize, measure, and judge.
Our right brain can ask why THAT particular mass management strategy? How is that currently serving me? When did that begin? The left brain can only interpret individual, static moments in time, zooming in, getting the details, but missing the big picture.
Probing curiously into the unknown (asking “why”) is the realm of the right hemishphere. Fixating on what we think we aleady know (“my trainer said my iliopsoas is the problem!”) is what the left brain does best.
Understanding CoM management demands a whole brain approach.
Despite structural or functional distortions and imbalances, our bodies WILL find a way to get us from one foot to the other.
It may not be perfect, but…
…whether you like it or not, shift happens
That’s a saying we have in the AiM community. It means that your body WILL find a way to shift it’s mass from one foot to the other (if you have two feet…). How efficiently your body is able to make that leap of faith, is the question.
Has your body been forced to to distort itself in a way that protects an old site of pain, keeping it safe, but creating weird movement habits in the process?
If we aren’t considering CoM management, we are likely to be providing only a temporary solution because we truly haven’t taken the time to consider WHY the body has chosen the mechanics it is using.
Is there a leg YOU don’t trust?
Enough philosophizing… This information is only useful if you can put it into practice.
You probably trust one leg more than the other. Want to find out which one?
The short video below will help you start thinking in terms of mass management. The goal is to see if your center of mass unconsciously reacts, in the appropriate direction, to you moving your spine from right to left:
a) Moves towards front leg b) Moves away from front leg c) Does nothing
Note, for the sake of simplicity, we will correlate your CoM with your pelvis, even though I know that’s not entirely accurate.
(This is a snippet from the Movement Deep Dive my all-access members are studying this month- A study of their frontal plane, i.e. side to side, hip/pelvis motion).
So… What did you find out about yourself? Is there a leg you don’t fully trust?
Why would you not trust a leg?
This is the question I leave you with.
Why would one lose the ability to fully commit to one leg? Or to put pressure only in one particular part of their foot?
Injuries. Accicents. Repetitive movements and postural habits. Things your mom told you. Trained movement skills, sports, etc.
What has your body been through? What needs attention now?
What if, like me, your body avoids one leg because of incomplete healing of an old (hamstring) injury? Unconsciously, I avoid committing to that leg. With each footstep, I reinforce a less efficient protective strategy to get from one foot to the other, which ends up making my neck sore.
Could this be keeping you stuck with limitations and pain that “stretching” and “strengthening” won’t help? Can you stretch out a CoM management problem?
Does your movement practice consider CoM management in your exercise selection?
These are the questions that I think are more useful than: Which exercise should I do? Or, how many reps? Or “what muscle should I blame?”
These are questions for your right hemisphere đ
A final note: The goal of the video and the information in this post is not meant to “fix” your body. Simply provide an alternative way of thinking about why things feel the way they do. A tool to help you observe your body through the gestalt of your right hemisphere- More than the sum of it’s parts, but for the harmony with which those parts communicate.
All complaints the body makes stem from some kind of movement problem. Overuse, underuse, misuse, or disuse. And all movement problems will show up in gait. Gait won’t tell you what the problem is, but it will guide you where to look. And CoM management via gait analysis is an incredibly useful tool for making sense of it.
Oh, and if you’re not sure you can tell if there’s a leg you don’t trust, guess what… Sometimes it’s BOTH đ
To learn more about CoM management, you may like to check out Liberated Body (a self-guided online workshop, avec moi)
What if going for a walk could be an opportunity for your neck to naturally “stretch” itself? Could you “walk your neck well”?
Neck motion in the gait cycle is pretty cool. It arises out of our need to keep our eyes level (not walk with a bobblehead).
In the 0.6-0.8 second journey from one foot to the other, your neck should be able to access every motion available to it, in all three dimensions, from one end of the spectrum to the other. Unless it can’t…
That means, in the space of just one footstep, your neck will (hopefully) get a full spectrum experience from:
– Flexion all the way to extension – Lateral flexion right all the way to to lateral flexion left – Rotation right to rotation left
But not like a bobblehead…
VID
The cool thing is neck motion happens by virtue of the skull itself staying STILL (eyes stay level so you can walk straight), and the rest of the body articulating underneath.
This is true of animals too. Check out this owl:
The next two video clips are a brief demo of how this works in the frontal (head tilts) and transverse plane (head roation).
How did those two movements go for you? Are you able you separate your skull from your ribcage with your eyes level? (and yes I am aware I did not make a sagittal plane video…)
I call it a “whole body neck stretch”, because it emulates how the muscles on one side of the neck would naturally lengthen (and the other shorten) with each footstep. Or, in the case of the transverse plane neck rotations, more like a torquing motion, like a towel wringing out.
But its more than “stretching”- It’s specific, sequenced joint motion our bodies crave in efficient gait, obtained via coordinated whole body movement. The by-product of which is that your neck joints and tissues actually move in a healthy way with each step.
What if, by practicing gait-based movements like this, you could walk your neck well? What if you started to notice you no longer need to deliberately stretch your neck? (unless you actually wanted to)
Let me know if you find this quick video useful.
These two clips are from a Movement Deep Dive session I filmed in May 2021 for my Liberated Body all-access students. The complete 60 min session explores this idea in three planes, integrated with the whole body, down to the feet, based on the teachings of Gary Ward’s Anatomy in Motion.
PS can you tell how differently my head tilts from one side to the other?? đ
My body used to hurt a lot, every day, in a way that affected my basic daily life functions.
Simple things felt bad. Like wearing a backpack (arm goes numb). Walking (hips and spine hurt). Going up and down stairs (dreading the pain in my knee).
I consciously micromanaged every limb movement, carefully bracing my body in anticipation for the pain.
But when I was on stage, dancing, I didn’t feel anything (possibly due to the pain numbing effect of adrenaline and endorphins).
I thought that if I could just keep on ignoring the pain, life was ok. Tolerable. And I could probably keep this up for… ever??
But then things piled up and escalated. Fast.
My body started to hurt to the extent that I could no longer ignore it. Perhaps I had depleted my physiological ability to pump out the chemical stew of corticosteroids and other endogenous polypeptide analgesics I was relying on to keep myself numb.
Or maybe it was because I was so numb that when I finally sustained some actual soft tissue damage (a neck strain, then 3 back injuries, then a hamstring strain), it seemed to come out of nowhere.
Regardless of what tipping point Iâd violated to accelerate my descent from one injurious event to the next in the span of just a few months, one thing became very clear: The way that I am existing is hurting me.
I was 21 years old, and I realized…
I am my body’s biggest problem
My body wasn’t the problem. I was the problem my body was having.
If you’re asleep at the wheel and you drive your car into the ditch, do you blame the car for hurting you in the crash? Maybe you should apologize to the carâŚ
But thatâs how I’d been inhabiting my body, and then I was kicking it for getting busted.
Inhabiting is too generous a word… More accurately, I was ignoring it. And then punishing it when it spoke back too noisily. “Stupid, annoying body. Just shut up, do what I say, and let me carry on with my path of self-destruction, damnit”.
My body was an “it”, too repellant to claim as “mine”. And I’d learned only to value it for what others praised it for.
I was letting other people make decisions for it. Caring about what it looked like and what pretty shapes I could make it do were my only measures of success and worth. But my body could never comply adequately with my wishes. I hated it and wished I could trade it in for a different model.
Makin’ shapes, age 21. Now, “making shapes” with bodies has a very different intention.
I was nothing but an ego puppeteering a Monika-shaped mass of flesh and bone. Where was I…? How did I not realize what was happening?
Because I wasnât even there.
As a puppet- A surrogate body to play out the thoughts and opinions of others, I barely had a real existence.
I could blame the terrible “role models” from my dance training – teachers and peers- and their subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) forms of bullying. But I won’t. Because I went along with it. I let my puppet strings get pulled.
I could have said, “NO” (yes, all caps) when it was suggested that skipping meals was what smart dancers do to stay thin (and thinness was success). Had I drummed up the courage to protest, I could have stood up for every girl in my class who was in terror of being publicly fat-shamed (which was a real threat).
I could have refused to contort my body beyond its structural limits. But I chose to bend over backwards (literally).
And I might have questioned the statement, “To wake up every day in pain is what it means to be a dancer” (told to us by one ballet teacher with the intention to help us build character, I guess). So I developed a sense of pride in my muscle and joint pain, and didnât know it wasnât normal.
Again and again, puppet-me consented to things that went against my well-being.
Had my brain been working, I might have inquired: Is striving to be this flexible useful? Do I even like how this feels? Is a human body set up to do this long-term without consequence? Is pain really normal and noble?
And so, as a result of my failure to consciously question my reality, I became this under-nourished, overworked, un-thinking puppet-thing that simply went along with what everyone else was doing.
And I was praised for it.
Over and over I received the reinforcement that the thinner I was, the better I was. Everytime I dropped some weight I got compliments on how my technique was improving. They even gave me money (a coincidentally timed scholarship for being âmost improvedâ that year of university, directly following a period of weight loss). As if my dance technique was obscured by a thin layer of fat.
And in the process of trying to conform to their ideal of “success”, I stopped paying attention to Me.
My world was ruled by comparison and judgement. I was constantly seeking validation based on my body and my abilities, which became my sole identity. What more identity can a puppet have, other than it’s exterior, structural reality?
And then when I started getting hurt, I couldn’t fathom why…
Why am I getting injured?
WHY is different from HOW.
How has to do with the specific patterns of repetitive overuse and misuse leading to tissue damage. Why has to do with the manner in which I was existing that led to said repetitive patterns.
If one is completely conscious, aware, can one become injured? Unless by random accident?
Yes, I was a biomechanical mess, and I wasn’t eating much or sleeping much or drinking any water (I was on a mostly diet Coke diet). But who was doing that? Who was the one who could have been present to acknowledge the signs and signals (symptoms) that I wasn’t well?
There wasn’t even a witness for the car crash… No one else noticed, and I was asleep.
No option but to wake up
When I was 21 I finally drove my body into a ditch called hamstring strain. Metaphorically, it was like the last puppet string snapped, too. That injury ended my dance career, but it was a liberation from being a puppet, too.
That hamstring injury was like an invitation: “Monika, do you want to find a different way of Being? Do you want to dare to… exist? Do you want to remember who You are?”
A relief washed over me because I finally had permission to stop trying to prove to the world I was this thin, perfect, obedient body who could make pretty shapes.
One of the first thoughts post-puppet-Monika had was a confession: I never wanted to be a dancer anyway (to confess this out loud to another person took a few more years).
I knew this long before I turned into a puppet, but I’d forgotten. I knew it once when I was 14, and again when I was 18. Both times I pushed it down quickly before the thought became too uncomfortably alluring for my puppet master.
14-year old me (pre-puppet phase) had dared to question, “Are you still having fun dancing? Because you seem sad, Monika… Would you like to stop? Would you like to do something else?”
14ish is around the age one chooses whether a physical endeavour is something you want to dedicate your life to, or go the academic route. A dance career sounded like it would be fun… Ha. They (everyone I knew) believed in me and encouraged me. They told me I could make it. That I was talented and could be successful.
Isn’t it so great to be supported?
Not really. I was wrong to believe them instead of listening to Me.
I think I am 14 here. This smiley photo is deceiving. I was having a bad time.
The rationalizing animal
Robert A. Heinlein, American novelist and science fiction writer, once wrote, “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.â Meaning we tend to make a choice first, and then rationalize why we made it afterwards (instead of the other way around).
The following describes my 14-year-old brainâs, carefully rationalized justification for betraying myself and committing to puppetry:
First, I reasoned: “If I quit dancing now, I will let people down. People have invested a lot in me and believe in me. I have a duty to continue this path, because if I don’t, they will be hurt by my actions.”
Second, “The reason I’m not having fun is because I don’t fit in. If I can make myself fit in then I’ll be able to have fun”. (Unfortunately, “fitting in” meant worrying about my weight and caring about my looks, and being very, very judgemental to myself and everyone around me. It did not result in having more fun, only isolating myself.)
Third, and more unconsciously, I reasoned, “If I keep going this path, I don’t have to think for myself. I can pretend I have a destiny. Going along with the decisions and ideas of others is less effort than trying to figure out what I really want for myself”.
And now, the last puppet (ham)string cut loose, I set out to rescue my soul from corruption and heal my busted body. What else could I do?
Gait mechanics to the rescue
At first, I didn’t realize that I was my body’s problem, or that my injuries could be correlated to those three above rationalizations. So I went about trying to correct my body’s very wonky biomechanical foibles without considering anything beyond my meat-and-bones.
But at least I was no longer a puppet. I was giving bith to some kind of sovereign existence. A Me was born, and I was studying and thinking for myself for the first time.
In 2015, I found Anatomy in Motion (or it found me): A 6 day immersive course on gait mechanics taught by creator Gary Ward, and Chris (#Sritho) Sritharan. For the first time in my quest for a pain solution, I had a framework to understand the underlying mechanics for my injuries and symptoms. So naturally I took that 6 day course 7 times over the next 5 years.
November 2015, taking up the challenge of writing pronation and supination mechanics for the AiM class, with sweaty palms.
But the exercises and “better movement patterns” I learned werenât what “healed” me. As I remember Gary Ward stating on one course, engaging with his work is like âputting the BIO back in biomechanicsâŚâÂ
Bio = Life.
When you start working with your own biomechanics in a dedicated way, you’ll soon realize that you aren’t just working with joint mechanics, you’re working with the mechanics of your life, the aggragate of which are represented in your physical structure, as it stands (and moves) right now.
That’s a really hard thing for a lot of people to appreciate until they are ready to see it.
Woven into the AiM teaching was the exact “new way of Being” I’d speculated about years earlier when I stopped dancing. What I really learned studying AiM was the antithesis of my dance training:
You are not a puppet. You are a Being in a process, and this is a process of willingly exposing yourself to the truth of your anatomy, in motion. This process is not about blindly accepting someone else’s ideology or beliefs. This is a process of seeking to understand the truth of human movement, for You, by You. This process demands that you honestly observe how far off your system has strayed from that truth. This is a process of deeply studying the mechanics of how you’ve arrived here, as you are, and by that, seeing what more you can become. You are this process of liberation. May you find the grace to love this process of seeking truth.
In fact, I remember chatting with Chris after I had just discovered something about my lumbar spine, and I said something like, “Wow I really love this!”, to which he replied, “And by ‘This’, do you mean ‘You”?”.
And like that, with every new part of my body I discovered couldn’t move, then reclaimed, got moving, and integrated, I little bit more of Me came into existence. And I loved it.
Many times this process was frustrating, confusing, and seemed to take a lot of effort for very little gain in joint motion. Sometimes pain got worse, then better, then worse again. But it was always educational, and by keeping with the process even when it sucked, I learned the discipline I needed to rescue Me back into existence.
Process, not puppet
Who we are is a process. Hopefully we are blessed to stumble into a process we love and can share with fellow travellers. This process (Me) was what I’d given up to be a pretty puppet.
And I think biomechanical exploration was the process I needed because it demands embodiment by default. You can’t just learn joint mechanics by thinking and conceptualizing them. To actually learn biomechanics, you have to put your bio through those mechanics.
When you move your body through an experiential learning process, You have to wake up to do it, deliberately. You can’t zone out, You have to exist.
If you want to know what hip extension is, for example, You have to get up and do hip extension. Go through the messy process of figuring out why your body can’t do it. Practice. Tinker. Explore. Study. Don’t quit. Keep with the process.
It took me three years to feel my hips extend. How many people do you know who have spent three years trying to do just one thing? Not even do it well. Just⌠get one degree instead of 0.
Waking up the witness
Studying Anatomy in Motion showed me a way of experiencing my body that had nothing to do with aesthetics, recognition, and performance, but about witnessing my body, as objectively as possible.
I realized that re-learning movement required a gentler way than the aggressive manner I’d originally used to distort my skeleton (and life). One cannot learn anything in a state of stress. So I gradually learned to relax my system a little. And I saw how I needed to approach myself and my life in that gentler way, too.
The skills and characteristics I needed to develop to become a successful AiM student were the real benefit, not the biomechanical knowledge: How to pay deep attention to myself. How to inquire. How to learn. How to reason. How to appreciate that I am a process. How to trust that process. How to observe facts non-judgmentally.
The real knowledge I was after was: Who is this Being interacting with my body’s mechanics? Thatâs something worth dedicating a life to.
If you can relate with my struggle to evolve forwards from being a pain-stricken puppet, I have no advice, other than figure out a way to stop being your body’s problem. How you do that, is up to you.
My invitation is to get curious and study. And I’m not saying study AiM specifically. Just study anything that wakes You up.
Study movement, and notice how You have to come into existence to learn. Don’t force it. Expose yourself to the truth of human movement, and let that wake up your Witness- The part of you who can learn and evolve. Find a tool for this that You love. Studying gait mechanics is my tool. What will yours be?
What will you use to help you put the bio back into your biomechanics? đ
And like any other body part, it’s pain resolution is a process of restoring access to it’s complete set of options for joint motion, in correct sequencing with other body parts, in a way that feels safe.
AND… You don’t need to have an advanced understanding of joint biomechanics to do it (see the video below)
Your knee is a relatively simple, 2D joint (made complicated by biomechanists who’ve attempted to define what it does disparate of their own embodied understanding of it…)
To feel and move happily, a knee must have access to:
Flexion (bending) with femoral internal rotation, on a pronating foot.
Extension (straightening), with femoral external rotation, on a supinating foot.
All other combinations of knee, leg, and foot, will not feel happy, or be very efficient.
Here’s a quick demo you can try (this clip is an excerpt from a 60 min Movement Deep Dive I did last week on knee mechanics for my Liberated Body students):
If you don’t feel the above sequencing happening, it would not be surprising if your knees are unhappy with youÂ
I repeat: A healthy knee must be able to experience the following things:
1) Knee bends + femur rotates in + foot pronates
2) Knee straightens + femur rotates out + foot supinates
And, if you followed the video, you’ll have the basic, embodied understanding that:
A) A pronatED foot will prevent a knee from fully extending
B) A foot that CANNOT pronate will not allow a knee to bend
My intention is to clarify and make simple the complexities of learning biomechanics, so that anyone can benefit from healthier movement. This can only be done by actually experiencing your anatomy.
In the words of Gary Ward, of Anatomy in Motion: Expose yourself to the truth of human movement, then let that experience create the learning.
When we try to understand movement ONLY with our intellect, our body doesn’t learn.
But if the body learns first, no words or intellectualization is necessary for real knowing. Words can be added later to faciliate communication (which is useful, considering all the confusion!)Remember, learning is not the same thing as knowingÂ
I hope you enjoyed and found this mini biomechanics lesson useful! Let me know if it sparked any new understanding for you. Shoot me an email or leave a comment below.
(see the video below)
