Tag: gary ward

Why Isn’t My Core Getting Stronger? A Case for “Core Mobility”

December 18th was this month’s edition of the Movement Nerd Hangout: A free monthly session to welcome you into my wee community of self-professed movement detectives (aka movement nerds).

This month’s topic was Core Training From the Inside Out (part 1). I figured everyone’s thinking about their mid-section around this hedonic time of year, so yes I jumped on that marketing train. Sue me.

Over 100 lovely people signed up to explore some rather unconventional concepts and ways of experiencing their “core”, such as:

  • What is core mobility vs. core stability? (and why this may be the missing link to building a strong core)
  • How could ankle sprain rehab be considered “indirect” core training?
  • What’s your center of mass (CoM) awareness got to do with core training? And how is it more important than a “neutral” spine?
  • What the heck is “neutral spine” anyway? Should you work on it?
  • How does Gary Ward’s rule of motion: Muscles lengthen before they contract, come to life in a diaphragmatic breath, as it relates to training dem abz?
  • How does access to 3D spinal mobility actually improve core stability? 

And more…

In case you missed the live session, here’s the complete recording:

Carve yourself out an hour to hang out with me and dive into my first two pillars of core training. Let me know how it goes for you!

And now, here’s the session breakdown, if you just want to read some words, or don’t have time to participate right now.

Core intentions

Here is what I set out to cover in the session:

  • Understand what is “the core”? And identify the key anatomy.
  • Understand and explore my first 2 (of four) pillars (that I made up) of core training: 1) Diaphragmatic breathing at rest, and 2) Accessing 3D spinal motion.
  • Apply Gary Ward’s two rules of motion: 1 ) Joints act, muscles react, and 2) Muscles lengthen before they contract, to core training, in contrast to “core stability”

Whoah what? A core training session that’s NOT about creating stability and engaging your abs?? But isn’t the core supposed to be stable??

We’ll get right into that, but let’s first look at some of the key anatomy.

Core anatomy

What is the core, anyway?

In the session, I asked participants: “Point to your core”.

Do it now… What are you actually pointing to?

Are you pointing to muscles? Are you pointing to your ribcage? Are you pointing to your intra-abdominal pressure? Are you poining to your center of mass? Are you pointing to your breath?

The core is all of that, and more than all that. It is how all of that interacts.

The core is more than a set of muscles.

More than a label of weak or strong. More than something to squeeze, tighten, and brace. It’s more than stabilizing your spine. More than something to tone and make look good. And not something we need to dedicate a whole gym day to.

But I digress… Let’s take a look at the key muscles, bones, and joints of the core.

Key muscles & structures

Bones and joints:

  • Pelvis
  • Ribcage
  • Spine
Consider the muscles that attach from ribcage to pelvis, spanning the length of the spine

Muscles (that connect directly to those bones and joints)

  • Rectus abdominis
  • Internal obliques
  • External obliques
  • Transversus abdominis
  • Diaphragm
  • Multifidus and other inter-vertebral muscles

    *Note, however, we won’t be talking specifically about muscles today, because it’s actually not that useful experientially, and makes things way more complicated than necessary.
Voila les muscles.
Inhale and exhale your pain away: the diaphragm muscle and how it relates to back pain! - Diversified Integrated Sports ClinicDiversified Integrated Sports Clinic
And the diaphragm, attaching from ribcage to spine. Contracts with inhalation and relaxes wtih exhalation.

These structures and muscles all have a specific role in gait.

What does the core do while you’re walking?

WHEN does it contract? HOW does it contract? Should you even think about contracting it while you walk? (No…)

The abdominal muscles are no different than any other muscle in motion: They go through phases of loading/contraction, lengthening/shortening, as the joints they attach to go through phases of opening/closing, compression/decompression.

This all happens multiple times per foot step, in all three planes of motion.

While I don’t say it explicitly, day one of my Liberated Body workshop (spine mechanics day) could be considered a “core training” session, because it’s all about experiencing spine, pelvis, and ribcage movements as they occur harmoniously in gait.

Within the fraction of a second it takes for each foot step, all the structures of the core lengthen then contract, compress then decompress, in all three planes.

Gait might be the best core “workout” you can get 😉

So… Can you appreciate that core training is about more than just stability, six packs, and neutral spine?

“Direct” and “indirect” core training

This is something I made up, so take it with a grain of salt. But I’d love to hear if it resonates with you as a concept.

I’d like to poropose two types of “core training” (neither of which involves stability, or romanticizing neutral spine):

Direct (or local)

– Working directly with the spine and trunk musculature, the position/movement of spine, pelvis, and ribcage, and the ability to breathe within all options for those positions/movements.

– The potential for the structures named above to alternate between demands for movement or creating stiffness, in a way that is effective for the current task.

Examples of direct core training: Working directly on spine mobility. Doing core stability exercises, like deadbugs. In real life, being able to brace the abdominal muscles, create a rigid spine, and maintain intra-abdominal pressure in order to push your car uphill.

Indirect (or global)

– Freedom for one’s center of mass (CoM) to move freely within the base of support of your feet, to all it’s edges. The ability to find your best “center”, having explored those edges, instead of forcing an idea of neutral spine on a structure lacking awareness of center.

– CoM mobility (or “core mobility”, a term Gary Ward coined in What the Foot) gives rise to the core musculature (and all musculature) reflexively responding, unconsciously, as the body moves.

– Indirect training is specific to the individual based on their unique history- Injuries, sports, habitual patterning and postures. Indirect work is to give the whole body back “what’s missing”, knowing it will impact on how the core functions.

Example of indirect core training: I’ll use an example of one of my clients. I’ll call him Lars.

Lars had a left ankle sprain, and now he can’t bend that knee very deeply, and he can’t get his body (CoM) over to his left foot.

He looks a little like this:

Another Monika Volkmar original

Lars has left side SI joint and lower back pain, and does a ton of core stability training, because shouldn’t stronger abs help with your SIJ and back?

Not if the problem is that you can’t put weight on your left foot, which is the case for Lars. He can’t shift his center of mass left without weird compensations in his spine and pelvis.

All the blue shading is where muscles are getting pulled long, which are the areas he feels “tight”.

He is very good at training his abs in his off-center place- He’s got a very “strong” core. But it is not helping him to liberate his mass to move freely from one foot to the other, only serving to further lock him into an off-center structure.

As we’ve been working on his left ankle and knee, his pelvis and spine are balancing out, helping him to use his abs better, from a more centered place, because he doesn’t need to lean away from his left leg so much.

So yes, core training is absolutely about the spine, and muscles (direct).

And its also about the whole body’s ability to move freely, not avoid motions that feel unsafe due to past injuries, accidents, or trained movement patterns.

Lars’ ankle and knee movement training was indirectly giving him better access to his core, as he began to inhabit a more centered structure.

Ok now finally onto pillar #1…

Core Training Pillar #1: Diaphragmatic breathing at rest

This is my first “pillar” of core because a good quality diaphragmatic breath:

  • Descends the diaphragm, smooshing down on your guts, which is necessary to generate intra-abdominal pressure so you can be strong AF when the demand arises (pillar 3)
  • Mobilizes the spine, pelvis and ribcage (pillar 2)
  • Lengthens all the abdominal muscles- A good indicator of their ability to then reflexively contract (Gary Ward’s rule: muscles lengthen before they contract)
  • Has implications for many, many physiological, neural, and esoteric things that are fascinating but beyond the scope of “core”

I really enjoy this animation of the biomechanics of the diaphragm, and the effect of diaphragmatic breathing on the whole body:

To make things very, very simple, in the session I demonstrated a 5 quadrant quick check for your quality of diaphragmtic breathing:

  1. Sternum and belly anterior (aka apical) expansion
  2. Lower pelvis anterior expansion
  3. Upper chest (aka pump handle ) expansion
  4. Lateral ribcage (aka bucket handle) expansion
  5. Posterior ribcage expansion

Are you able to access all 5? Are you all belly and no pump handle? Or are you like me and your left ribcage bucket handle never moves?

All 5 quadrants expanding simultaneously, effortlessly, and unconsiously is a good indicator of a quality diaphragmatic breath.

Core Training Pillar #2: Access to 3D spinal motion

First remember: Core training isn’t just about stabilizing and neutralizing the spine.

Second remember: Your spine moves when you walk (well it should, but maybe yours doesn’t… yet!.)

Third remember: Muscles lengthen before they contract.

Fourth remember: Joints act, muscles react.

So as a prerequisite to having abs that can contract and create stability, we need access to the specific 3D spinal motions that occur with each foot step you take:

Sagittal plane: Flexion and extension.

Frontal plane: Lateral flexions left and right.

Transverse plane: Rotations left and right.

In the session we covered a few exercises to experience the sagittal plane motions: Flexion and extension of the spine. And as a bonus we layered on the 5 quadrant breathing.

Greater access to the whole spine’s movement potential acctually gives you greater ability to stabilize it, too.

To help participants experience this, I had them test out a plank (holding for ~5 breaths), and gauge how “stable” they felt.

Then after exploring some spine motions, I had them re-test their plank. Here are some of their reactions:

“2nd time felt much stronger, more stable and able to access my breath more fully”

“Foot pressure balanced out – started really far on the left foot – more balanced. Also much more stable plank :)”

Pretty cool, eh?

Conclusions?

“Core” can mean a lot of things. What does core mean to you?

Many folks start core strengthening and stability training from the “outside in”, before considering the “inside” part: Breathing, spine motion, and center of mass mobility.

Ankle sprain rehab can be considered “indirect” core training, because it can give you greater access to move evenly between your two feet, aka “core mobility”, or “finding center”.

Neutral spine only lasts a fraction of a second when we walk- A fleeting moment in time.

Diaphragmatic breathing is not belly breathing- There are four other quadrants that need to expand with the belly with every inhalation. How’s yours doing?

Giving the abominal muscles the experience of how they actually lengthen and contract as we walk, by accessing three dimensional spine motion, should be the first poriority for core training, before training for stability.

Want to tune in live for part 2?

Save the date: Wed Jan 27th 2021 @ 10:30am EST (Torono)

In Core Training From the Inside Out )Part 2) we’ll review the first two pillars, and dive into 3 and 4:

  • Creating intra-abdominal pressure
  • Creating spine stiffness with limb movement

>>Sign up HERE<<

So You Finally Embraced Foot Pronation, But Are You Doing it Wrong?

If I had only 15 minutes with someone to help them move and stand with more ease, but was not allowed to assess anything or ask about their injury history, I think the most impactful thing to do would be…

Teach them how to pronate their feet.

Pronation is not the devil, but the devil is in the details.

The Devil Is In the Details - Small Business Trends
I’m here about the pronation!

Pronation is an important motion the foot must be able to do as we walk. Contrary to what your orthotics person may have told you.

With each step, the foot gets just one chance to pronate. Could you missing out on the important benefits of this moment in time? (more about that below, read on!).

At some point in my work with most clients, I know I’ll do eventually take them through an exercise to show them how to access a healthy pronation, its just a matter of when.

I think that the world of therapy and movement professionals is opening up to the idea that pronation is a healthy movement to promote, with much thanks to the work of Gary Ward. Which is awesome.

However…

Just rolling your foot IN is not the same as pronation.

Do you know the difference?

Eversion (rolling onto the inside of your foot… I know, it seems like it should be called INversion, just deal with the counterintuitive language), is the frontal plane component of pronation, not the whole shebang.

My intention with this blog post is to highlight the diffrences between pronation and eversion of the foot, so that you can liberate your feet and wake up their muscles instead of living with a problematic chunk at the end of your leg.

So before you read any further, stop what you’re doing (unless you’re saving your baby from being eaten by a dog or something) and follow along with the video below. Let’s see how well your feet move. Are you just everting, or are you actually pronating?

The clip is from day 2 of my Liberated Body workshop: Foot mechanics day, in which we explore healthy pronation and supination of the foot.

In fact, embracing pronation is often the biggest take-away for my students. One said: “I was convinced that pronation was a horrible thing until this class!”

Pronation is a tri-planar movement

Eversion describes only the frontal plane aspect of pronation

The main difference between pronation and eversion, in super simple terms (because my brain needs things to be simple):

Do you roll inwards on your foot, dump your knee wayyy inside of your big toe, and lose contact with the 5th metatarsal head on the floor? That’s eversion of the whole foot, not pronation.

Check out these images:

ankle inversion eversion foot | b-reddy.org
Accurately labelled. Notice the loss of 5th met contact in the eversion photo, and likewise, the loss of 1st met contact in the inversion photo. No tripod, no pronation.
BSMSanatomy on Twitter: "Foot pronation/supination.Pron++=flat feet,Sup++=high arches.Its midtarsal jt mvt vs in/eversion=SubTjt #m204anatomy… "
Yes, these are also labelled accurately: Notice how the calcaneus (heel bone) is rolling into eversion, but it appears that the whole foot tripod is still in contact with the ground. Got tripod? That’s a pronation.
Improving Turnout for Irish Dance - Part 2: Foot Alignment
Notice how the labels in brackets underneath that say pronation and supination are not accurate, because the foot is clearly rolling off the floor, losing tripod contact.

Are you doing the right thing the wrong way?

As with anything, attention to nuance is the key for success. We could be doing the “right” thing the wrong way,

Like when I first tried a low carb, high fat diet in 2013ish because that’s what the whole internet was doing… No one told me how easy it was to eat 12483275939 calories of fat a day and gain weight on a “fat-loss” diet. Oops.

Could you be thinking you’re pronating, but just smashing the shit out of your first met by dumping all your weight onto it, with no muscles managing the situation?

Here’s one more nuanced pronation “DO” and “DON’T” that I hope you picked up from my video: We DO want the knee to go slightly inward to access foot pronation, but we DON’T want the knee to dump inward so far it generates eversion.

Check out this video by Gary Ward (which he created to illustrate the concept from his book What the Foot, that knee over second toe is not a thing we should get dogmatically locked into because it limits foot movement in gait):

Here’s your pronation vs. eversion check-list for success:

Eversion:

  • No articulation between foot bones
  • Foot “log-rolls” inward as one chunk
  • Loss of tripod (5th metatarsal head lifts from floor)
  • No change in muscles length or experience loading/stretching under foot
  • Joints remain in same position, nothing decompresses/compresses

Pronation:

  • Articulation between the foot bones with each other and the ground
  • Tri-planar motion of the foot (sagittal, frontal, and transverse plane components- eversion is just the frontal plane component of pronation)
  • All three points of the tripod in contact with the floor
  • Muscles on the bottom and inside surfaces of foot, and back of the ankle load and lengthen
  • Joints on the bottom and inside surface of the foot open and decompress.

Here’s a slide from my Liberated Body workshop day 2 presentation that outlines what we’re looking for in healthy pronation and supination:

Why is pronation actually useful?

Just to clarify: PronatING is great. Being stuck in pronaTION, the noun, is not so great.

Pronation is like going to Wal-Mart- Get in, get what you need, and get out as quickly as possible.

Here are a three amazing things our body gets from healthy pronation (but does not get from rolling in, aka eversion):

Natural lengthening and loading of the muscles under the foot with each step: Got tight feet? Stretching not really helping? Rolling fascia out feels good, but not changing anything? Foot pronation is the movement that naturally allows the muscles under your foot to lengthen with each step. Got plantar fasciitis? Letting your feet pronate could be a game changer for you.

Extensor chain (dem glutes) load: Looking for more ease and power with each stride? Or to explode up from a squat position? Or land from a jump with more control? At the same moment in time that we pronate our foot in gait, the entire extensor chain of the lower body loads up. Calves load to generate plantarflexion, distal quads load to generate knee extension, and proximal glutes and hamstrings load to generate hip extension. Want to jump better and run with more ease? Make sure your feet can pronate well.

Free your neck and jaw: Got jaw tension, TMJ issues, and a stiff neck? At the same moment in time that your foot pronates in gait your jaw and cervical spine decompress. Could lack of pronation be one piece of your cranky neck puzzle? I wrote a little thing/made a little video about this so you can self-asess this for yourself.

And more…

Conclusions?

Pronation and eversion (rolling in on the foot) are not the same. One is a useful experience for the whole body, the other just feels uncomfortable.

Eversion is just one component (frontal plane) of a healthy, three dimensional pronation.

Losing the foot tripod makes or breaks a pronation. And a tea towel might be your new best friend.

Pronation has important movement repercussions for the body, such as allowing us to mobilize our feet naturally with each step, helping us engage our glutes better, and even freeing our neck and jaw tension.

Wal-Mart sucks.

Want to learn more?

I think you’ll really love Wake Your Feet Up, an online course by Gary Ward that teaches foot mechanics in a way that even my simple brain can comprehend.

He designed this course for folks who want to learn more about their foot mechanics and explore exercises to give their tootsies back their full movement potential. This online course is appropriate for all humans with feet, not just movement and therapy professionals who can speak biomechanics.

Ok I realize this post makes me seem like a huge Gary Ward fan-girl. I kinda am. Deal with it. I think he was my dad in a past life.

That’s all for now, movemet pals. I’d love to hear if you discovered anything new about your feet: Are you pronating well, or just everting? And if you can get your feet pronating well, what does it feel like for your feet, and the rest of your body?

Leave a comment, or shoot me an email, and let me know 🙂

Bunion Solutions: A Movement Perspective

Bunions are a hot issue for a lot of people.

Why do they form? What do you do about them? Can you do anything about them? Aren’t they genetic? Do you need to get surgery? What about those toe spacer things and splints?

So many questions!

I’m not claiming to have any conclusive answers (and I think the moment we conclude something is the moment we stop learning anything new).

But what I do know is that bunions can be understood and worked with from a movement perspective. That is, movement of the big toe created the bunion, why could movement not also be at least part of the remedy?

I believe movement is medicine. But too much medicince can be problematic too, can’t it?

Here’s a key thing to know: The movement of the big toe that leads to a bunion forming- toe abduction/valgus- happens at a specific moment in time in the gait cycle. Things get problematic when that movement becomes the only option your foot has and becomes a structural adaptation, ie, the actual shape of your foot changes.

The bunion itself is the solution your body found for a problem.

The video below is a clip from a Movement Deep Dive Session I did recently with some of my amazing Liberated Body students. The session was to help them understand big toe mechanics with foot pronation and supination as we walk.

I think knowledge is power… Wanna geek out?

In the video I cover:

  • What joint motions are possible at the big toe joint (aka 1st metatarsalphalangeal joint aka MTPJ)?
  • How is movement of the foot on the floor- closed chain- different than when it swings through the air- open chain?
  • What does the big toe do when the foot pronates and supinates?
  • What big toe/foot movement creates a bunion over time and when does that happen in gait?
  • How can a bunion be seen as an indicator to that we need to pronate that foot better?
  • How could this be affecting stuff above, like your neck?

When we understanding how the big toe moves in relationship with the foot and the rest of the body, we have powerful information to inform the decisions we make for our bodies everyday.

I hope the video demonstrates how the big toe movement that leads to a bunion forming- toe abduction- is a totally natural event with each step we take. We just want to have other options, too.

Interestingly, while bunions are association with a more pronated foot, the bunion may form because the foot doesn’t pronate well! The big toe abducting away from the foot was the last ditch attempt to do something that resembles pronation. I often find that if we show the foot how to pronate better without relying solely on the big toe deviating into excessive abduction, good things happen.

So if you have a bunion, maybe your big toe is just stuck in a moment in time because it only has one option for movement? What if you could show it a new option?

I think its safe to say that before electing for an invasive buinion procedure, or using a medieval-looking toe stretching devices, or shoving spacers between your toes, why not try some natural movement, first? Give that foot some of its movement potential back.

Best case scenario, you can get that toe moving again and things will feel better. Worst case, you mobilized your feet and got some extra bloodflow. Win win.

This is why I’m so passionate about the work Gary Ward teaches in his Anatomy in Motion courses. What if we could restore the movement potential inherent in our gait cycle, so that each step we take has the ability to reinforce healthy joint mehcanics? Walk ourselves well.

Want to learn more? I think you’ll really enjoy my four day workshop Liberated Body. We spend the whole of day two moving your feet 🙂 I have a live workshop every few months, and it’s also available as a home-study you can start today 🙂

In fact, here’s a story from one of my students, a dancer and yogi, who embraced pronating her feet and was able to free up her bunion:

“My most enjoyable class and the biggest change I noticed was in the FEET! I feel that I have avoided pronation like the plague which stems from ballet training for sure – but my feet, achilles, calves and even knees felt SO GREAT after that class.  I purposefully went for a walk afterwards and could really feel a difference in my foot pressures as I moved.  Also as I mentioned at the end of the session, my bunion on the right side felt released and not as painful – coming up to demi-pointe on that side was a breeze.”

Super cool, right!?

What do you think? Do you have bunions? Have you had a bunion surgery? Have you had success using movement to relieve bunion pain? I’d love to hear from you.

Leave a comment here, shoot me an email, or find me on the social media things you do. I’m pretty much the only Monika Volkmar on the planet, so I’m easy to find 😉

The Foot-Jaw Connection in Gait

Alternative title: Foot pronation is not the devil.

If you don’t want to read this whole blog post (won’t take it personally, my posts can be long…) go to the bottom to watch an excerpt from an online movement session I did last week linking foot and jaw mechanics in gait.

Go with the flow (motion model)

About once a week I do a movement session with students who’ve completed my Liberated Body 4 day workshop. The intention is to help them deepen their understanding of how our bodies were designed to move based on the joint interactions taught in Gary Ward’s Anatomy in Motion, and his Flow Motion Model of the gait cycle.

I love this model (FMM) because it maps how any one part of the body is linked to all of others via their joint interactions through the gait cycle.

We can use the model as a map to identify the joint motions and interactions your body is having truoble accessing so we can give these sepcific things back to your system.

Peoples’ bodies tend to like feeling more complete.

I thought it would be nice to summarize one of my most recent online movement sessions in which we looked at the joint interactions that link movement of the foot with the jaw.

The very short story: Foot pronation couples with jaw decompression (mandible sliding forward and down from the temporal bones).

My invitation to you, if yo’re interested, is to come take this journey from your foot to your face. It’s fun. It’s logical. It will hopefully even be useful! (and check out the video at the end of this post to see a clip from the session to follow along with).

WHAT IS THE JAW?

Seems like an obvious question. However, I’ve made it my personal practice to never again take for granted that I understand what a joint is. Nor will I assume that the person I am talking to has the same understanding of a joint as mine.

I fondly recall the moment I actually understood what a shoulder was. It was just last year…

So when we say “jaw”, what’s the reference point? Are we talking about the mandible? The temporal mandibular joint (TMJ)? Where does the word jaw even come from?

I did a bit of etymological research and tfound that “jaw”, from mid 15th century old English referred to “holding and gripping part of an appliance”.

Holding and gripping… Sounds like what many of us do with our jaws today.

Your jaw is actually the “gripping” part of your face. Feels true, don’t it? 😉

The jaw has two articulating bones: Mandible + temporal bone.

In desribing the motion of the jaw, we’ll refer to the mandible’s movement interaction with the temporal bone.And we’ll consider the temporal mandibular joint- TMJ- as simply the space between the mandible and temporal bone. There’s a articular condyle in there. And some synovial fluid, too.

We’ll use the words protrusion (forward) and retrusion (backwards) to refer to mandibular motion in relation to the rest of the skull. And we’ll use the words compression and decompression to refer to the TMJ’s state of more or less pressure respectively.

As you open your mouth the mandible protrudes (slides anteriorally and inferiorally) opening space in the TMJ, and we’ll call it a decompression. And visa versa.

For purposes of this blog post, we’ll talk mostly sagittal plane (forward and back movement), but know that the mandible and TMJ have movement capacity in frontal and transverse plane- lateral shifts and rotations right and left. Not a lot, but enough to be significant.

Now the fun part… Your jaw has a specific way of interacting wiht the rest of the body as you walk.

All joint motions the body can do show up in gait. Even the jaw’s motions, though it is so subtle and happens too quickly to pay attention to it unelss you really focus.

Every single joint in the body has the opportunity to articulate to both ends of it’s available movement spectrum, in all three planes, with each foot step. Every movment your body can do it does in the space of 0.6-0.8 seconds with each step.

Unless it can’t.

So if a joint doesn’t have access to a movement just standing and trying to isolate it, you can bet it won’t be happening when you walk either. This leads to new strategies that are more effortful, and may lead to new problems later.

How does lack of movement at the foot affect the jaw? How does lack of movement at the jaw affect the foot?

The jaw is a DANGLER

In AiM, Gary has taught us to think of several structures as “danglers”.

The mandible is a dangler.

Because it dangles, it doesn’t really do much on its own accord as we walk, it just comes along for the ride. It doesn’t actually have inherent motion that contributes to gait, but think of it as needing to sway in harmony with its surrounding structures as part of a global mass-management strategy.

When the jaw gets stuck in one position and only has that one option, it can impact on the movement options for the rest of the body.

OCCLUSION, PROPRIOCEPTION, AND THE RETICULAR ACTIVATION SYSTEM

Occlusion refers to where the surfaces of the teeth touch. This can have an impact on whole body on movement potential.

In my early AiM days, I recall that I couldn’t find my hamstring load in the heel strike (hamstring “stretch”) exercise on my left leg.

Then I randomly came accross a chart with the teeth and their association to different muscles. I’ve misplaced said chart and all I remember was the connection between molars and hamstring (and if anyone has this or a similar chart I would love to see it!).

Just for the fun of it, I tried doing the heel strike exercise while holding contact with my left molars. BOOM hello hamstrings. Freaky biomechanical magic.

(If you want to learn more about heel strike and how the hamstrings load in gait, I recommend Gary Ward’s Lower Limb Biomechanics course. So good!)

It is also said that the jaw is said to contain the highest number of proprioceptors compared to any other area of the body. Meaning we get a ton of information about our body’s orietation in space from our jaw. And because we can’t see our own jaw, we probably oreint our body’s center of mass based on our jaw’s perceived center to some degree. (I am going to make a little video soon for you to play with this concept… stay tuned!).

Lastly, its good to know that the muscles of the jaw are supplied by the trigeminal nerve, which is closely related to the reticular activation system, which helps us filter information from our environment into categories of safe vs. unsafe, and is linked to states of anxiety, stress, anger, etc.

A curious personal observation is that on days when my bite is more centered, I’m usually in a brighter, cheery mood, full of optimism, and my body has less of my usual annoying symptoms. When my bite is off (usually shfited, laterally flexed, and rotated left), I’m likely to be more irrtable and triggerable by silly bullshit, and more of my symptoms may be present. N=1, but its been useful to pay attention to this.

All this to say, TMJ mechanics and resting bite can have an effect on how we move and how we feel. So we want it to be able to dangle freely, in the right relationship with the rest of the body, which should happen in a particular way with each step we take.

“DEMONIZED” MOVEMENTS THAT COUPLE WITH JAW DECOMPRESSION

What happens when we start labelling one movement “good” and another bad”? We avoid the bad ones and do more of the good ones. This may be conscious or unconscious.

Either way, avoidance of a movement is problematic because no joint motion in the body happens in isolation, but in relationship with everything else.

In gait, if one joint moves, every joint moves.

So when I ask your foot to pronate, I’m actually asking your whole body to pronate with it- A foot pronation accompanied by all the other joint motions that should happen at the same snapshot in time at which the foot pronates in gait.

Have you been taught that pronating your feet was bad? I was. Like, hardcore by my ballet teachers. To the point that I thought that I was a bad person for pronating my feet. (we were also made to feel bad about having to go take a pee in the middle of class, so I held my bladder a lot back in tose days… I think I wrote about that in my book Dance Stronger)

Here’s the paradox: Can a movement deemed “bad” happen at the same time as another movement that is “good”? And if yes, then does this make the good movement more bad? Or the bad movement more good?

Neither. They both just happen. No need to place any meaning or judgement.

To give you an idea of the stuff we recognize as “good” that happens when the foot pronates:

  • Glutes load (leading to a glute contraction that then extends the hip)
  • Big toe decompresses
  • Occipital atlantal joint (neck-skull joint) decompresses
  • Plantar fascia and all muscles under the foot load and stretch and then help your foot supinate
  • Vastus medialis gets to do something useful (decelerate knee flexion)
  • TMJ decompression (as we are focusing on today!)

And more.

On the flip side, there are many other joint mechanics that couple with foot pronation are generally deemed “bad” for the body. A few of such terrible movements are:

  • Pelvis anterior tilt
  • Knee valgus
  • Spine extension
  • Hip internal rotation (although perhaps only in the dance world… we love to hate on hip internal rotation)

But remember, please, none of these movements are inherently bad or good. They simply happen.

What makes a movement better or worse for us is if it is happening too much, too fast, at the wrong time, or we get stuck in it as our only option.

Pronation is a like visiting Walmart. You want to get in, get what you need, and get out.

When we lable a movement (or anything…) as bad its often because we don’t understand it in its proper context, so our solution is to try to minimize, avoid, or control it.

Real freedom isn’t reached by controlling and manipulating our bodies, selectively avoiding entire movement spectrums. Just a little perceptual recalibration is required.

Let’s follow the flow (Motion Model)

In theory, using the Flow Motion Model, one can look at any bone or joint and, based on its position and velocity on the space-time continuum (if one can really measure both simultaneously…), one could extrapolate what the rest of the body should also be doing at that time moment in time. I think that’s pretty cool. Useful, too.

This is how we are able to make the connection we’re interested in today: Foot pronation couples with TMJ decompression.

If you’re up for it, join me now for a delightfully logical adventure through the body, joint by joint, from your foot to your face, linking foot mechanics to jaw mechanics.

I hope to highlight how movements like pronation and pelvis anterior tilt, which somtimes get a bad rep, are coupled movements. “Coupled” meaning that we want to see them happening at the same moment in time in gait.

Heel strike and away we go…

Let’s start at the beginning…

Which isn’t always so easy, even for a president.

… with the moment your heel hits the ground, and follow your foot as it rolls into it’s most nicest, flattest position.

For simplicity, we’ll call this moment in time pronation, and we’ll defnine it as the one chance your foot gets to pronate on the ground in gait. Its the moment in time at which many mechanics of shock absorption spring into action (get it??).

Let’s keep things super simple and define our pronating foot in terms of pressure, shape, open vs. closed joints, and long vs. short muscles.

As your foot fully pronates in a healthy way, and hoping it can maintain three points of contact- on the 1st and 5th metatarsals and your heel- you should notice the following:

  1. Pressure on the foot travelling anterior and medial towards the 1st metatarsal joint.
  2. All foot arches lowering and spreading, foot shape is becoming wider and longer.
  3. All joints opening on the plantar/medial foot, and closing on the dorsal/lateral surface.
  4. Muscles lenghtening on the plantar/medial surface, and shortening on the dorsal lateral.
A slide from day 2 of my Liberated Body workshop

And all the reverse mechanics happen as the foot supinates.

Pronation of the foot should happen with knee flexion. Let’s check if that joint interaction is naturally present for you.

What’s happening at your knees? If you stand on your two feet and bend your knees, without trying to do what you envision the perfect version of a knee bend should be, do feel your feet naturally pronate, as described above? How do your feet naturally respond? Has your training, like mine, been to avoid pronating your feet? And whait happens if you suspend that belief about pronation being wrong?

If you had no prior information about what SHOULD happen what do you feel IS happening?

If your foot pressures are going the opposite way- lateral and posterior towards your heels, what does it feel like to allow the pronation to occur?

Yes, your knees may go slightly inward. A little bit is ok. A lot is not. Embrace your right to valgus in this moment. The real money is when you don’t need to use a knee valgus to pronate your feet.

What’s your pelvis doing? As you bend your knees and pronate your feet, are you doing a pelvis anterior or posterior tilt? We’d like to see an anterior pelvis tilt. Why?

Feel this out: As you anterior tilt your pelvis, notice how this internally rotates your femurs, tibias, talus(es), and all that internal rotation should contribute to both feet pronating (talus IR is part of foot pronation).

If you do a posterior tilt with your pelvis, you drive supination mechanics via an external rotation of all those leg joints. Maybe posterior tilting is a good way to avoid pronation. But also, maybe you don’t need to avoid pronation?

Also note there are two ways to anterior tilt the pelvis, and only one of them is useful in gait (watch the video below…)

What’s your lumbar spine doing? As you anterior tilt your pelvis, what is the natural, uncsonsioud response at your lumbar spine? We know that as the sacrum nutates with the whole pelvis anteriorally tilting, the lumbar spine will follow into extension. But what does YOURS actually do? Also consider, does it feel like you use your lumbar extension to anteriorally tilt your pelvis? Or does your pelvis anterior tilt lead to a nice extension of your lumbar spine?

What’s your thoracic spine and ribcage doing? As your lumbars extend, does that extension continue to flow up into your thoracic spine, tilting your ribcage up and back (posterior tilt)? Should do! Unless you have a restriction blocking that spine wave up.

What’s your cervical spine and skull doing? Keep your eyes on the horizon, stand on your happily pronating feet, and notice, with spine extension, what motion do you feel happening in your neck? Does your chin lift up and extend your neck? Or do you feel your chin drop and your neck flexing?

Hopefully you feel your kkull anteriorally tilting and your neck flexing. Occipital atlantal joint decompressing.

And finally…

What’s your jaw doing? Remembering that your mandible is a dangler, let it dangle as you tilt your entire skull anteriorally, with your spine extending underneath. Which way does your mandible slide? Forward and down (protrusion/decompression from temporal bone) and dangling further from your face? Does it retract back in towards your face? Or does it do nothing?

Ideally, what you’d like to feel is the jaw sliding forward. Decompressing. If you try to keep it retracted it will seriously block your ability to flex your cervical spine. Just try it!

This is the flow:

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

Do you have all these links in the chain? Or are there some blocked interactions?

If that was too wordy, I invite you to follow this adventure guided by me! Here’s a clip from the session last week in which we did this exploration.

How’d that go for you? Got all the links in the chain? Would love to hear what yo uobserved.

And if that wasn’t so smooth and flowy for you, what do you do about it? Perhaps you’d enjoy my workshop, Liberated Body. which I am now teaching online via the ubiquitous Zoom. Liberated Body is all about finding the missing links in your own body, and restoring them to have a richer experience of your body.

The next workshop is coming up in a few weeks on June 27th. Tell yo’ friends.

Until next time, my fellow body mechanics detectives 🙂

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Movement Practice (part 1): Then and Now

Welcome to the first installment of my new writing project: Movement Practice. I’m examining the role movement plays in our lives and our relationship with it.  Sound like your cup of tea? Let’s do this thing.

AiM University

In 2015 I attended a 6 day biomechanics course that changed the trajectory of my life. The course was called Anatomy in Motion and from the moment the instructor, Gary Ward, started talking I sensed my life would never be the same (I was right).

Up until that point, as an injured dancer turned personal trainer and bodyworker, I had been researching and exploring different continuing education courses with the aim of finding “the thing” that would give me the clarity and understanding of the human body that could help both myself and my clients more efficiently reach their goals and allow me to more easily work with the chronic pain clients that I tended to attract. Anatomy in Motion, as I later explained to Chris Sritharan, the other course instructor, was “the answer to the questions that I didn’t know how to ask”. All I wanted to do was study their work for the rest of my life- I’d enroll in AiM University and do a Master’s, PhD and whatever else they’d offer until they got tired of me.

Through AiM I was introduced to a new way of seeing the human body in motion, and I haven’t been able to go back. The clarity with which the complex structure of the human body was communicated struck a chord somewhere deep inside of me. The way the course was taught embodied how I learn best: Putting descriptive words to movements of bones and joints and feeling them in our bodies. From that point, my practices of movement shifted, both personally and professionally, in a way I couldn’t articulate at the time.

I’d like to speak a little more about this personal shift (and because my personal life is intertwined with my professional one, the trickle over effect in these two arenas is significant).

Then and Now

Chris, who I now consider an important mentor, made the distinction between movement practice and practicing movement. At the time, the two were inextricable to me, yet in hindsight I can see that this distinction is what I was starting to experience. 

Chris said to us, “there’s a lot of people practicing movement and not a lot of people with a movement practice. There’s a lot of people in the business of teaching movement, but not a lot of coaches aiming to remove the barriers that are preventing people from understanding how to move”.  I’ve heard him repeat this line and variations on it at nearly every course I’ve attended (which at this time of writing is six).

Phil Donahue, the host of the American talk show, The Phil Donahue Show (a show that ran for 29 years ending in 1996) loved to ask the interview question, “what did somebody say to you at one point in your life that changed it?”. In that reflective space we can find that there are distinctive moments of “then and now” in our lives. While I didn’t recognize it at the time, this thing that Chris had said was my “then and now” pivot point.

I attribute the new trajectory to which I was unknowingly beginning to dedicate my life not only to the new way I was learning to see the body, but to a shift in values, unconsciously influenced by Chris’ words: What is the difference between practicing movement and movement practice?

The subtleties of this distinction are elusive. So much so that in the years I explored them I had not idea that this was what I was in fact doing. I observed a shift in myself and how I approached exercise and movement and journalled on the experiences I was having. The general feeling throughout the process was of some atavistic revival taking place within me. A rewilding process weaving itself through all areas of my life. A rooting into something new yet familiar. Clumsy enough to make my professional practice a challenge as I attempted to adapt to a new way of thinking in a workplace that didn’t value it, yet inspiring enough to get back up at each falter and reprimand to continue forward through the fog.

Romanticism aside, as I write these words now, this question is defining of this point in my personal and professional life: What’s the difference between practicing movement and having a movement practice? Is this distinction even important (I feel that yes, it is). Is one better than the other (no, I don’t think so). And for you, the reader, is it worth spending your precious, limited time with these words? 

You’ll have to keep reading. 

Transitions

I remember a then in which I only practiced movement, and a now in which I have a movement practice that defines parameters for how I practice movement. 

I recall how then, I strived to fit an aesthetic. Now my practice includes and often prioritizes skill acquisition over how my body looks.

Then, I clenched and controlled my movements with maximum strength and stability as pinnacles, and numbers as landmarks at all cost. Now, I ask, how can I let go of the need to control and create more freedom for myself?

Then, I had rigid routines, protocols, and a schedule to adhere to, no matter how my body felt (dance performances, my Wendler 531 routine…). Now, I allow for a flexibility, spontaneity in my practice reflected in how my body feels day to day.

Then, I neglected warming up to get exercise out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now, I enjoy and make time for my warm-ups and movement preparations- If I don’t have time for them, I don’t have time to train.

Then, I tried out any exercise that looked “cool” at the gym because someone “fitter” than me was doing it. Now, I am aware of the intention behind any exercise I put into my movement practice.

Then, my goal was to burn as many calories as possible. Now, I don’t consider the energy expenditure of an exercise at all in my decision to include it in my movement practice.

Then, I tried to be perfect. Now, I know to focus on the process, not the end goal.

Then, I was no pain no gain- I tuned out pain symptoms and signs of over-training because they got in the way. Now I tune in and respect what my body is asking of me on a given day and feel no guilt for taking rest when I need it.

Then, my relationship with my body was a metaphorical battle. Now, my body and I enjoy a relationship based on trust, honesty, listening, and respect.

Then, I was an exerciser and over-identified with my movement form. Now, I am a dedicated student of movement.

The list could go on.  How many of these resonate with you?

If you have the idea that my “then” was describing practicing movement as something “bad”, and my “now” as me having a movement practice that is “good”, I want to make it clear that this is not the case. Simply, I want to illustrate the journey from then to now and the shift in priorities therein.

Imagine a spectrum on which to the far left we have things we define as exercise and activity, and to the far right we have this thing called a movement practice. Right now, you and I are sitting somewhere on that spectrum. This isn’t a judgement, its a fact. Unfortunately, you can become stuck more to one side than the other on this spectrum with the lack of variability to slide around on it. In fact, both sides of spectrum are inextricable as our “lives in motion” and we need to access all points along it depending on our current needs. Its the context that defines whether or not one should aim to slide more to one end or the other.

My “then” was not bad, and my “now” is not good, neither does thinking this way serve me. What did serve me was where I was at the time with the amount of information I had. Could I have found a less painful way of doing things if I had more information? Sure. Could I have suffered less if I had more objectivity? Of course. But I didn’t, so I don’t get too hung up on “should-haves” and “if-only-I-knew-thens”. Neither should you. 

What you can do as a useful, reflective exercise, is place yourself somewhere on our movement spectrum. Where do you feel you sit right now? Are you immovable in that space, or does your position vary day to day, week to week? Are you adaptable, or are you stuck in a moment in time? And importantly, are you ok with this?

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 in which we will explore  the differences between practicing movement and movement practice, and my three archetypes: The Indoorsman, The Exerciser, and the Over-Identifier. Will one of them describe you? 

 

Removing the System’s “Handbrake”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you even shoulder-check?

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

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

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

Anyway, back to L. Her history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I ignored a problem

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

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

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

Until last week.

Time doesn’t heal, healing heals with time.

Can we experience healing without pain?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Change and comfort matrix

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

Expert drawing by Monika Volkmar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pattern recognition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone’s elses’ limiting beliefs

After this exploration, L told me an interesting story.

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

Let go of the handbrake

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

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

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

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

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

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

Priming the system

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

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

And that brings me to…

The things that get in the way

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

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

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

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

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

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

The inner physican

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

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

Conclusions?

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

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

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

 

 

The Mindset for Healing

“Overall, these exercises are much harder work than the physio I was doing before, in that I have to really concentrate on small things. Can’t just put myself through them. Have to be present. It’s good. It’s why I sought you out rather than doing more straight up physio as I kinda knew this was what was missing, what needed to come next.”

This is an from an email sent to me by a lady that I am working with after, our second session.

We’ll call her Jean (not real name).

Jean is the epitome of the perfect student of exploratory movement, and I think the quote above sums up nicely just what that means.

When the body is in pain, generally there are three main systems we are working with:

  1. Muscles, joints, structure, biomechanics (MSK stuff)
  2. Mindset and emotions (perception of experiences, chronic negative emotional states etc.)
  3. Organ and systems health (digestive, immune, etc)

Of course, these three become an inseparable web called a “life”.

Image result for biopsychosocial

As a body-worker, some things I can help with, and some things I can’t. For the individuals themselves, one thing they can start to work with that doesn’t cost a thing is the mindset bit.

Jean’s mindset is on point with where one would want it to be to make changes and heal other systems, and I want to use this blog post to explain a little more about what I mean by that- having a mindset to change and heal.

Because “healing mindset”  isn’t this woo woo, think positive, manifest good health and meditate on being better you’ll be ok… It’s about engaging with the work.

When the standard approach fails…

Jean found me through my dance blog that I’ve since taken a break from writing on (danceproject.ca), but she is not a dancer. She is a pianist and also participates in horse riding and dog sledding.

Jean  is in her 50s and has been experiencing pain for many years but had stopped seeing her physiotherapist because it wasn’t doing anything. When I first met her she expressed that she was frustrated with the care she was receiving from physio because they were only looking at the parts of her body that hurt: Her right knee and hip primarily. But they weren’t looking at the rest of her body, and Jean  had a strong intuition that this was the reason things were going nowhere. She felt very distinctly that there was something going on with her upper body that was related to her knee and hip issues, but no one was looking there. 

Smart lady to listen and act on her intuition.

Looking at the location of symptoms as “the problem” and stopping there is the standard approach. The approach that says, “treat the symptom”.

Luckily (I think…) for me, I never learned the standard approach because a) I went to school for dance, not for whatever it is I do now*, and b) all my most influential teachers are out of the box thinkers, who don’t ascribe to the standard approach and aren’t afraid to go against the norm, old-school movement paradigm. Maybe I’m missing out? I’m ok with that.

Jean  was pleased that our initial assessment looked at her whole body, from her toes to her skull. Isn’t it nice to be treated like an entire person? Don’t you hate it when people only see you for one aspect of who you are? 

*What do I even do? I dunno. I work with bodies and movement. I get people to move their joints in specific ways. I sometimes massage them, Thai style. I sometimes have people deadlifting heavy things if they want to. But the end game is always for them to have a different experience of their bodies, push their comfort zones, and access the movements their bodies are currently missing. What’s my job title? You tell me…

Ready for an AiM-style geek out?

For the Anatomy in Motion (AiM) students like me 🙂

Here is how Jean showed up (some interesting distortions):

Pelvis: Right hike, left rotation (stuck in right suspension)

Spine: Right lateral flexion, right rotation (stuck in right suspension)

Right knee: Can’t externally rotate (can’t access right suspension)

Right foot: Can’t pronate (can’t access right suspension)

The story her body was telling me was that nothing from the hip down knew how to pronate, and her pelvis, spine, and ribcage were trying to make this happen for her. Or, maybe her pelvis, spine, and ribcage were trying to stop her foot and knee from needing to pronate because it felt unsafe? 

Regardless of the story I choose to attach to her structure, what I was witnessing was an exchange (something I wrote about HERE).

We can consider that in the phase of gait in which the foot pronates, that the entire skeleton is organizing itself to allow pronation. It’s not just a foot pronation, it’s a whole body pronation. In AiM this whole body pronation phase is called suspension. 

As mentioned above, while Jean ‘s pelvis and spine are pronating, she is missing some very important pronation mechanics below: Foot pressure not getting onto the anterior medial calcaneous, foot bones not spreading and opening on the plantar and medial surfaces, and femur not rotating internally over the tibia.

If things aren’t happening below, something up top may need to do this for her. In her case, I believe this is why I was seeing the type two spine mechanics (same direction lateral flexion and rotation),  right pelvis hike, and left pelvis rotation. If you can’t pronate below, something must make up for it above, or next door. A useful strategy to help her make up for a hip, knee, ankle, and foot that don’t pronate, but not an efficient way for the body to move that will stand the course of time.

Want to try this for yourself? Stand with your feet side by side and:

  • Put your weight primarily on the outside of your right foot
  • Hike the right side of your pelvis
  • Twist your pelvis to the left
  • Twist your ribcage to the right
  • Laterally flex your spine to the right

Not an effortless posture to hold! Feels pretty terrible for the right hip doesn’t it? No wonder Jean  was having some issues, eh? But somehow this was the most efficient way her system knew to hold herself based on that tangly web of “life”. 

So, we have really one of two options for how to sync her joints back up. We can:

  1. Teach her foot and knee to pronate to match the rest of her body.
  2. Get her spine and pelvis to experience the other end of the spectrum (left lateral flexion and rotation) to free up the opportunity for her right foot and knee to safely experience pronation.

Or, more realistically, probably do both (and we did both).

Anyway, that’s just a little bit of background on what she was dealing with to provide some context. 

The mindset for healing

What I really think is beautiful to share about Jean ‘s journey so far is her mindset and attitude embracing the process that I suggested we follow. 

If we come back to the quote at the top of this post, from the email she sent me, I’d like to break down what is so lovely to take from it, particularly if you are someone who has been in pain for a while, like her.

“These exercises are much harder work than the physio I was doing before”

In AiM, we try not to call the movements we do “exercises”.

This is partially because of the connotation the word exercise has for many of us.

“Exercise” brings up images of a gym, performing a set number of repetitions of a movement with the end goal of getting stronger, or more flexible, or sweating, or punishing ourselves for eating cake, or burning a particular amount of calories, or making ourselves vomit from effort, or escaping from reality, or for mental health, or cardiovascular health, or whatever our notion of what exercise is for may be.

And so the word “exercise” comes with undertones of needing to get something out of it, which is not what we’re trying to teach with the AiM philosophy. The goal, instead, is the process itself: Exploration and learning; investigative movement. To show the body a new way of doing things. Give it an experience.

How often do we go into an experience expecting to get something out of it, and missing the meat of the experience itself? Like going to a concert, and watching most of it through your phone to get that perfect video memory of it (done that…).

 

Image result for people on their phones at a concert
Wouldn’t you rather watch the show directly with your eyes?

The movements are simply to immerse the body in an experience it doesn’t usually get to have. To access joint motions that are currently being avoided. To move into new airspace and dark zones where learning can happen. To open up new options for movement that had been denied. To reorganize the skeleton and resultant muscle tensions.

Per Gary Ward’s big rule of movement #2, joints act, muscles react (from What the Foot). We want to give the muscles something different to do by moving the structures they attach to, not by trying to strengthen and stretch the muscles in an attempt to control the skeleton.

To quote something Gary said on an immersion course:

“The presence of muscles that contract first before lengthening will always be present in a system that doesn’t flow.”

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You shoujld follow Gary on instagram @garyward_aim. He posts useful stuff like this and photos of his kids climbing that will make you jealous.

Some people report they feel “stronger”, or they are getting more “flexible”, or they have more energy, as a result of practicing the AiM movements, but these are only secondary to showing the body a more efficient way of moving.

How many of us have truly investigated our relationship with exercise? I did this in 2015 as an experiment and I would encourage anyone to do the same. I stopped anything that felt like exercise. I wrote two blog posts about it and the ensuing existential crisis here PART 1, and here PART 2.

Many of us are forced to investigate our relationship with exercise only when exercise has no longer become possible- after injury in particular, as was my particular case. 

At this point we have a choice. To go back to the way of doing things before injury, or to try to understand that how things were being done “before” is what led to being in this state now. 

“I have to be present. I can’t just put myself through [the motions]”

Not to go mindlessly, counting down the reps of the homework exercises until they’re done, but to be fully immersed in the experience.

In fact, I rarely give a specific number of reps to do. Why? Because the goal is not to get to 10 reps. The goal is to be immersed in the experience of the movement. Its not what happens when you get to rep 10, its what is learned in the space of reps 1-9.

There will be a distinct sense of “knowing” when you’re done with a “set”. You’ll feel something has shifted. You’ll feel things working that haven’t worked in a long time. Your brain and body will simultaneously say “enough!”. But to know when you’ve reached this point means you must pay attention to what you are feeling. It could happen in 3 reps, or it could happen in 12, but you have to tune in to this feeling.

In Jean ‘s case, the foundation of our process was to tidy up the coordination of the joints that were out of sync: Change the ratios and timing of pronation through her entire system, from her foot up through her spine.

It took a lot of focus and energy on her part. She had to tune into parts of her body that she had no prior awareness of and the movements they were capable of performing.

Just being able to feel where the weight in her feet honestly was through all the noise in her system proved to be a challenge. 

“Where am I, and where am I not”.

Had Jean  simply counted to 10 and gone through the reps without awareness, she would be moving too quickly and automatically to learn a new pattern or to feel whether she was moving the parts that we were actually aiming to move.

In the book Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, Daniel Everett tells a story of how the remote Amazonian tribe he is living with, the Pirahã, do not use numbers or math. He tried to teach them simple addition, but they didn’t have any prior experience with the concept of numbers or adding and would not learn. What if for some people, areas of their bodies feel like math did to the Pirahã? They could learn math if they wanted to, they have the same brains as every other human, after all. But they have survived so long without it, found a way of living without math, why start now?

“I have to concentrate on small things”

We weren’t going for big sexy movements, but small, precise ones. She needed to tune into how things felt rather than just perform the motion.

For example:

  • Can you get your weight onto the anterior medial part of your heel?
  • Can you drop your right pelvis lower than your left?
  • Can you feel your spine bend to the left when you reach your right arm up?

As a closed system, changing one thing about the body must cause an adaptation from everything else. One degree can throw the entire system off.

If the pelvis isn’t level by one degree, everything else will be off by at least that much, probably more. If you draw two lines originating from the same point, one degree apart, how far apart will the two lines be after 2 inches? One foot? 100 feet? One degree matters, especially if there is pain present.

So for Jean  to accomplish just several degrees of movement from a joint she doesn’t normally even have awareness of, or feel a change in where she is weight-bearing on her feet, while subtle, feels like an entirely different place to put the body. Off balance. It’s only a matter of degrees, but the brain starts to freak out because it doesn’t know where it is, and this is where the learning happens.

It takes so much more energy to focus on and feel the subtle differences I am describing than it does to squeeze your butt 10 times while thinking about what’s for lunch, and so for Jean, our work is hard not necessarily for the physical effort required, but for the ability to tune in, cope with change, and integrate it.

Not a “fire this muscle” approach, but a “move your structures into new spaces” one.

“I knew that this was what was missing”

“What’s missing”. In AiM philosophy, it always comes back to finding what’s missing, and claiming it back. 

In Jean’s case, what’s missing was all of the above: Having her whole structure addressed, being asked to tune into her body, feel the parts she wasn’t aware of, move in ways she normally does not, access joint movements she has not felt for years, and do this subtle work in a completely present way.

I think Jean’s experience rings true for many people, certainly for myself in the past: Get hurt and go about getting treated in a way that has no expectation for us to engage with the work and be a part of our own healing process. Lie on the table and get worked on, without an expectation to do any work. 

People are rarely presented an experience that allows them to heal themselves, and many people will rarely look for one because they don’t know what they don’t know.

In fact, in our first session Jean  said:

“I’ve experienced  body work of different sorts. But body work is something being done to me. It helps to get things to let go, to wake up things that are shut down. It does not  teach my body what to do when I get up off the table.  I feel like as soon as I move I’m going right back to whatever caused the problem in the first place.  I need someone to teach me  how I myself can  get  my body to swap out dysfunctional for better, consistently, and long term.”

I knew right then that we were going to get along great.

Conclusions?

If things are not changing in your body, ask:

Are you treating it as a whole system, or as separate parts?

Are you being present with it, or just going through the motions?

Are you checking in with it daily, or ignoring it’s signals?

Are you moving with awareness?

Are you moving out of your comfort zone, accessing ranges that you don’t usually move into, or sticking to what you know and normally do?

Are you determined, trusting, and committed to the process, or feel doomed to be stuck forever?

The real healing happens in the space of engaging fully in the process. Like Jean’s  begun to do.

Realizing that the process is the goal.

“It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top” ~Robert Pirsig. 

Jean always mentions how because she is “old”, she is having a hard time at making changes. But I don’t think this is true. I think she is doing incredibly well at making changes because of the attitude she has towards her journey. Its not a race after all, and it will take the time it’s going to take. 

Time doesn’t heal, but what you do with the time you have to heal, will.

 

Don’t Blame the Muscles…

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

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

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


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

Twist and shout (ow)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obliquing, long and short

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

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

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

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

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

Time to stop thinking about muscles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supinate the shit out of it

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions?

Few things, I guess:

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

 

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.