You’ve probably heard about knee valgus, aka “knock knees“, i.e knees caving inward towards big toes.
I don’t like the word “normal”…
Valgus refers to the tibia (shin bone) leaning inward towards the big toe. See pic on the far right, above.
If you had my education, the thought of letting your knees go valgus makes you throw up in your mouth a bit. Even the word “valgus” kinda sounds gross, doesn’t it??
Most of us have been indoctrinated with the belief that valgus is bad, and causes knee pain, and you’re not going to biomechanical heaven if your knees go in (because biomechanics are a moral issue, didn’t you know?).
While there is truth that valgus knees may not be optimal for an individual, it is not an inherently “bad” movement, and there is a time and place we need it. Like, when our knees bend while we walk (more on that coming up).
But what about someone stuck in knee VARUS?
A knee that pushes out (varus) at the wrong time, place, and magnitude can be just as problematic as a knee that leans in. So this blog post is dedicated to my journey restoring healthy knee valgus into my life.
Why so much focus on preventing knee valgus?
When I was in my early twenties, a young and naiive personal trainer learning about exercise technique, I thought letting your knee go inward was BAD.
I remember consciously walking up stairs pushing my knees out. This made me feel morally superior to all the knee-valgusing, biomechanically not “woke” gym-goers who were obviously going to ruin their knees, and their lives.
Well… I’ve changed my mind about that.
Because I have a right knee stuck with a varus angle that is giving me trouble, and I’ve found some useful movements to *gasp* help it go into valgus.
But first…
What should your knees be doing, ideally, when you walk?
Here’s the ideal mechanical relationship we should see in gait (normal walking) at your knees:
Knee bends (flexion) = tibia rotates in towards big toe (goes toward valgus from upright)
Knee straightens (extension)= tibia returns back upright (moves toward varus from valgus)
Think of it like a pendulum going from one end of the spectrum to the other: Varus–> center –> valgus –> center–> varus, and on and on and on…
And if you have a minute, behold the fascinating phenomenon of pendulum synchronization
At the risk of going too far down a biomechanical rabbit-hole, if you just want to move and feel better without hurting your brain about it, here’s the kneed to know (see what I did there??):
If your knee bends and goes valgus, but then stays that way when you extend it again, no bueno.
However, a knee that doesn’t get into valgus when you bend it, i.e. stays in varus, is also no beuno.
Below is a video of me walking on June 8th, 2022. Watch my right tibia. Can you see how it stays more varus than my left? That’s the side I have hip, SIJ, and foot issues.
Now, in the spirit of movement detectivery, we ought to assess what actually happens when YOU bend and straighten your knees.
World’s simplest knee assessment
You can easily assess whether your knees are going into varus or valgus with a simple lunge test. Try it out, it will take you 1 min:
So… What did you observe about your lunge assesment?
Does one, or both knees push out over your pinky toe (varus)? Then you might like to show your knees an experience of valgus.
Does one, or both knees collapse wayyy inward, and you feel wobbly, and the outside edge of your foot lifts off the floor? That may be too much valgus, and that’s not the topic of today’s exploration.
In a perfect world, we’re looking to see the tip of your knee cap point in towards yoru big toe, but the tibia remain relatively vertical, not push out, not way in, when you bend your knee.
In fact, the knee tipping inward we want to see ought to be more by virtue of the ribia rotating inwards, like a barber pole, not like the leaning otwer of Pisa falling over.
If you had one or both knees pushing OUT into varus, check out the next three videos. They may help you explore some new, exciting valgusing.
Reclaim your valgus
DISCALIMER: The following three videos show what I’ve personally been working on to intentionally, and gently, give my right knee the experience of valgus again. They may or may not feel right for You. If anything feels unsafe or incorrect for you, please don’t force your body to do these movements.
STEP 1: Gently guide the knee into valgus and flexion, non-weightbearing
STEP 2: Start to weightbear into leg with valgus
STEP 3: Fully weightbearing on a healthy valgus knee
As always, we want to introduce new movement, like knee valgus, respectfully, not forcefuly pushing our knees in at 11/10 intensity. I’m using about 10% total body effort.
Give these assessments and movements a go if it feels right for your body, and let me know what you experience 🙂
I originally posted these videos on my Instagram page. I know… social media is the devil. But I sometimes post things there when I’ve discovered something useful in my biomechanical detectivery that I feel worth sharing, in the chance it may be of some small benefit to you as well 🙂 Find me on IG @monvolkmar
Want to learn more about knees (and your whole body) in gait?
If you enjoy my style of biomechanical exploration, I invite you to dive in deeper in my online course Liberated Body.
This is a 4 lesson movement workshop that guides you through how your body moves, and helps you identify and restore the joint motions your body is missing from your gait cycle that could be keeping you from moving, performing and feeling your best.
On day 2 (foot day) we talk more about how the knees should ideally move in harmony with the feet, i.e.- The importance of being able to pronate and supinate well.
Have you heard of the “Leaning Tower of South Padre”?
Ocean Tower.It’s not a happy story.
Officially named Ocean Tower, the unfortunate story of this premium condo building can teach us a lot about having a sustainable movement practice. Like, one that doesn’t lead to self-destruction and cost millions of dollars.
Ocean Tower was supposed to be awesome. 31 stories high. A sweet view of the Gulf of Mexico. Complete with gym, pool, and spa. Each unit would sell for ~$2 million USD. Except for one teenie tniy issue…
The foundation was shite.
In 2008, two years after constructions began, the building started to sink and lean. The whole thing shifted more than a foot. The official explanation was that the parking garage and the tower were mistakenly built connected, forcing the weight down upon the garage instead of on the tower’s core walls. There was also something not quite right with the soil quality.
In 2009, Ocean Tower was demolished because fixing the foundation would have been too costly.
Many of us are like Ocean Tower.
How’s YOUR foundation?
Hello, I am the Leaning Tower of Monika (by Lake Ontario). Built in 1989 on a shoddy foundation that began to sink and shift significantly enough to require a massive, costly overhaul by 2012.
Fortunately unlike Ocean Tower, I don’t have to abandon the project and self-destruct. I can focus on rebuilding the foundation I never had.
And so can you. And I will argue that this is where most of us don’t spend enough timewhen we have problems with pain and performance.
What do I mean by foundation?
Check out this quick excerpt from my latest Liberated Body (part 2!) workshop:
Your foundation is made up of the most basic building blocks of movement we humans can do- must be able to do, for higher level activities. The individual joint motions that, when combined correctly, become the raw material for all other movement patterns.
How well-built is your foundation? Are you missing any building blocks?
I had some foundational issues from the start:
I didn’t crawl (mom says I just wiggled “like a seal”)
I stood up and walked before 12 months
I hit my head a few times when I was very young
And those are only the things I KNOW about.
No crawling means my hip joints didn’t get to properly develop. In my infant body’s perception, I had a clump of feet-legs-pelvis-spine that couldn’t differentiate (kind of like Ocean Tower’s garage, mistakenly connected to the building’s core).
Standing up before 12 months isn’t an achievement. I didn’t “beat” the other babies in the standing race. Standing early is like ignoring Ocean Tower’s foundation problem, but saying, “fuck it, we can skip a few steps and get this tower up on time, it’ll probably be ok”.
Wrong.
And interestingly, skipping steps to get things done as fast as possible is kind of how I’ve lived my whole life. But that’s a tangent I won’t go down.
Are you searching for solutions for body problems, but feel like something’s missing? It might be something in your foundation, so basic it’s been overlooked.
Functional movement, strength training, and other modalities to educate our bodies how to “move better” and get out of pain might initially feel good. But for life-long sustainability, we need to know if we are missing any of our fundamental movement building blocks.
We all are. It’s just a matter of which ones.
Your Most Basic Movement Building Blocks
Do you like this drawing I made?
Excellent art by me 🙂 I drew this for my Liberated Body workshop participants last week
The lower two tiers are where I LOVE to play.
The building blocks: Primary motor responses (infant reflexes) and adult joint mechanics (upright gait).
When we get the foundation set right, everything above can fall into place with minimal effort.
Foundation level 1: Primary motor responses in utero
We start building our foundation from the moment we are a wee blob of cells implanted to mom’s uterine wall. Possibly even before that. And we don’t get much say in how this plays out.
In our cozy watery environment, we spend 9 months moving and developing our most basic joint motions. And it’s not random.
These building-blocks of movement are reflexive, pre-installed in our genetic code, and they serve to awaken the higher level “motor programming” needed for us to perform more advanced (but still basic) movements as infants, immediately after we are rudely evacuated into the “real”, air-based, gravity-ruled world.
But things can go wrong in utero.
You can be stuck onto the uterine wall weirdly.
Maybe there was a “kink” in your notochord.
Another rabbit-hole…
Mom could have been really stressed, or sick, and it affected you.
Maybe you had a twin and one of you crowded the other, and maybe your right arm didn’t get to move as freely as your beloved sibling’s did because it was smushed against mom’s liver. That jerk. He became a baseball pro, and you failed gym class.
And then perhaps when you made your grand entrance into air-world it didn’t go so smoothly.
Maybe you were flipped upside-down. Your head got stuck under mom’s ribcage. They had to do a C-section. They tried to pull you out by your butt, but your head was reallllly stuck under there. So they had to pull harder and harder. Then you came out with a loud POP as your skull finally was liberated. How stressful! Good thing you can’t remember (imagine that happening to you as an adult…).
The above two stories are actually clients I’ve worked with. But their stories were unconsidered as being relevant to their problems with pain, posture, and performance.
Consider the movements we do in utero as building the first layer of our foundation. We have little control of this, so don’t dwell on it too much.
Just be aware that these foundational movements matter because they prepare us for the next phase: The primary motor responses we develop as infants for the next 3 years of life that helps us to develop our brains and bodies in tandem.
Foundation level 2: Infant reflexes
Between 0-3 years of age we develop the building-blocks for upright biomechanics: Walking. These are our primary, or infant reflexes.
There is a reflex hard-wired in our DNA to help us wiggle and bend and twist our spines to get down the birth canal (assuming we had that luxury).
To unfurl our spine from the comfort of the fetal position (assuming we spent enough time in fetal position in the first place).
To turn our heads, extend our arms and legs, discover we have a right and left side of our bodies.
To turn over on our bellies and learn to extend our spine and head up against gravity. What IS this gravity thing and why is it so damn heavy??
To push and pull with our arms and legs against the floor and develop our wee little hip joints (unless you’re me).
To discover we have this awesome things called a big toe, and we can push it into the floor to propel ourselves forward through space.
These events happen in a stereotypical way based on genetic programming that is similar for all humans.
And eventually we get enough building blocks in place, stacked together in the correct order, to stand up and start to walk.
But not all of us are so lucky, and going back to this level to give back the movements we are missing can be incredibly powerful.
Foundation level three: Upright gait mechanics.
This is where, with gravity, we shape our muscles and bones by standing upright and bearing weight on two ludicrously tiny balancing blobs called feet.
In the gravitational field, we learn to flex and extend, rotate, and side-bend our hips, spine, arms, etc. And its not about strength- Its about discovering how our joints articulate when upright, loaded by our bodyweight, intending to move forward through space.
Its not a conscious process. Its more like a discovery of our musculoskeletal system and exploring what it can do.
However, even if we’re missing foundational building blocks, most of us still stand up and walk, and play, and exercise. And then we have accidents, injuries, and do things that distort how we’re able to move. As we age, entrpopy increases, and more building blocks go missing or put in the wrong place.
Where are the gaps in your movement foundation?
Our foundation for all movement is built on unconscious motor programming. And each level contributes to the next. And we shouldn’t skip any steps, but most of us do.
And good thing its an unconsious process. Imagine having to decide for yourself at one year old the “best” way to develop your body to walk? Imagine a one year old with the blueprint for Ocean Tower… Yikes.
You are probably missing a few important building blocks. How do we find which ones are missing and get them back? It will be super specific to your unique experience. This is why I am always hesitatnt to give specific exercises in these blog posts. Get assessed, don’t guess.
But you can consider questions like:
Did you crawl?
Did you stand up before 12 months old?
Did you have an interesting or challenging birth experience? (as the birther, or the birthee)
Did you have a stay in the NICU, pinned down with machines and tubes that kept you alive, but prevented movement?
Did you start a highly skilled movement form before 3 years old? (like all you dancers who started ballet when you were 2, I’m looking at YOU)
Did you have an injury or accident, especially before age 7, but at any age, that caused you to be immobilized, or altered how you moved, for a period of time? Like a broken arm or ankle, head accident, or illness.
Every insult to the body will cause a change somewhere. And if you change one thing, everything else has to change to accommdate that. That’s balance. Its not ideal, but it is “functional”.
We can get our foundation back by re-educating our bodies and moving with awareness, with a little guidance from someone you trust.
Awareness is hard
Knowing what your body can’t do is hard, but cause you don’t know about it yet… If you were already conscious of what you can’t do you probably wouldn’t have any problems.
The more I explore movement, the more I realize that the most value comes from re-visting the basics in more depth. Smaller, softer, subtler, more refined. Not bigger, harder, with more muscular effort and control.
When we move big and effortfully, we only reinforce what we can already do. This is why skipping ahead to strength training when things feel “off” or painful doesn’t solve an issue long term. It will not be sustainable unless your foundation is addressed.
Don’t be Ocean Tower.
Heavy deadlifts didn’t restore my shaky foundation. That only perpetuated my structure to lean and shift, like Ocean Tower, the taller it got, the shiftier it got.
When you can identify what’s missing from your foundation, and give those elements back, all your favourite higher level movements and activities become more natural and effortless, because more of your body is accessible to you.
And then, like me, you might realize that you don’t actually want to powerlift, because that “solution” was a lot of effort and kind of boring anyway. We get to ask the question, “Now that I have a foundation, what do I actually want to do with it?“. Your journey will be your own, and it may not be what you think.
And if any of that resonates with you, and you’re trying to “fix” your basic movement limitations with higher level activities, I encourage you to take a few steps back and see what could be missing from your foundation.
How to start rebuilding your foundation
Curious about what exactly I mean by “building blocks” of movement?
As I already mentioned, this will be a unique journey. You may wish to find a movement/therapy professional to assess and guide you through it.
As a general jumping off point, Gary Ward has created a few excellent online courses that may be of interest to investigate your upright joint mechanics and find what’s missing: Wake Your Body Up, and Wake Your Feet Up.
My workshop, Liberated Body, also helps you identify missing joint motions and coordinations that we need for upright gait (I teach it both online and in-person).
LB Part one is all about the level of gait mechanics: How should our bodies ideally organize for effortless, efficient gait?
LB Part two is a level deeper: How to explore the building blocks that preceeded upright gait- the primary motor responses, and then put those together in a meaningful way for effortless, efficient gait?
Liberated Body is available anytime as a home-study workshop. Part two must be done live, because I customize it to the individuals in the group, and work with you one on one to restore your foundation.
CONCLUSIONS?
Don’t be like Ocean Tower.
Its never too late to build your foundation.
I didn’t get mine right the first time, and exploring my missing building blocks continues to be an enriching part of my daily movement practice, and my life.
A few weeks ago I went on a canoe trip with my dad to the beautiful Kawartha Highlands Provincial Park.
View from our canoe-in campsite aka no trace of humanity… Take me back!
On the 2.5-hour drive, my dad told a story about “that time I had car trouble and blah, blah, blah…” (you know the kind your parents tell that you smile and nod through, but aren’t actually interested in?).
To my delight, his story contained an unwittingly wonderful insight from a Toyota dealership mechanic explaining why we get injured, and a simple heuristic for how not to.
Turns out listening to what your folks say is useful sometimes.
To get started, we need a basic primer on how the brakes work in hybrid/electric cars (trust me, this is going somewhere…).
The Problem With Regenerative Braking
My dad has a hybrid-electric car. A Toyota Corolla, to be specific.
Hybrid vehicles are built with mechanisms that make you morally superior save you fuel and battery life beyond all those other gas-guzzling, Earth-poisoning, death-mobiles.
One such mechanism is called regenerative braking.
What is regenerative braking?
Unlike conventional friction braking systems, which work by physically clamping the wheels to stop them from turning, regenerative brakes work by running the wheels “in reverse” to slow the car down. Simply taking your foot off the gas pedal initiates the regenerative braking mechanism. Additionally, the resistance created by the motor charges the battery. Cool, right? I thought so!
But here’s the important part: This mechanism causes the car to slow down a lot faster than a non-hybrid/electric, and so you don’t need to step as hard or as frequently on the brakes.
Just a little tap, taparoo.
Apparently some regenerative braking systems as so highly sensitive that just taking your foot off the gas pedal is enough to trigger the brake lights.
Sounds like a win-win-win, right? Saves your brakes the wear and tear, preserves the battery life, and gives you more miles per gallon.
But… And this is an important but. There is an ironic darkside.
A lot of hybrid and electric car owners (such as my pop) find that their brakes are actully wearing out in spite of using them LESS. What the heck?
This is when my ears perked up in my dad’s boring car story. Wait, what? Why would brakes wear out if the system is set up so that you use them less??
Use it or lose it
The “use it or lose it” principle is usually discussed in the context of the brain, neuroplasticity (the brain’s capactiy to re-wire neural circuits based on new inputs) and body- If you consistenly stop exposing a particular set of neural circuits or body parts to stimuli, your system interprets there is no need for them, and you “lose” access.
Or remember Wolff’s law. Bone remodels and lays down new cells based on the forces imposed upon it. This is why after a bone fracture force needs to go through, i.e. bear weight on it, it to stimulate new tissue development and heal.
This is also how bone spurs develop- Muscles pulling excessively on a bone will stimulate it to grow.
Basically the same thing that happens when you wear a pair of pants that are too tight, and by the end of the day they stretch out a little and fit a bit looser, based on the forces of your body on the pants.
This is also part of why some folks get osteoporosis. Lack of weightbearing exercise with high enough forces to stimulate bone to grow. If you don’t use it, you lose it.
*NOTE: See a completely unrelated story about a 97-year-old-woman and her osteoporosis at the end of this post.
The remedy for use it or lose it is to start using it again (and this becomes harder and more daunting the longer you wait).
What does this have to do with brakes?
Apparently, the use it or lose it principle applies with regenerative braking. Because the system is set up for inherent disuse (ironically positioned as a key benefit), the brakes are prone to corrosion because they don’t get used often enough.
You’ve seen how a bike chain rusts and stiffens if you leave it out all winter. Use it or lose it.
If you don’t deliberately “exercise” the brakes frequently and forcefully enough, when the time comes you actually DO need to hit them hard, say, to avoid running over a kitten, those rusty rotors might fail under the new load.
Don’t run over kittens. I just started fostering this cat. Look into her eyes and solemnly swear you’ll take care of your brakes.
As the mechanic at the Toyota dealership told my dad’:
“If you have a hybrid car, you won’t be using the brakes as hard. You don’t really use them as much as you would in a regular car. So what you kind of have to do once in a while is deliberately brake really hard to make sure they aren’t getting stagnant from disuse and accumulating corrosion”.
All I could think was, well isn’t that just how bodies work…
Bodies get “corroded” from disuse, too, and then wear out “suddenly” when exposed to a demand they weren’t adequately prepared for.
Or, as Gary Ward expresses the equation: Injury = You + Rate of change
What do you think? See Gary’s IG account @garyward_aim for more nuggets like this.
Another example you might relate with…
Were you super excited to get back to working out after a year of lockdowns? Did you mayyybe go back to your prior routine full-force like no time had passed? But all year long you didn’t once “tap the brakes” to keep all your body parts moving? (as a bodyworker/trainer, I saw a lot of this in 2021…).
And how many other so-called “syndromes” and “diseases” might actually have roots in disuse? Some types of arthirits? “Frozen” shoulder? Ankylosing spondylitis? Is disease the reason for disuse? Or is disuse the cause of disease? How do we count our chickens and eggs??
I’m not a medical professional, just a lowly bodyworker, and what I observe is that many labels are nothing more than fancy ways of saying, “a thing that stopped moving and now hurts and we’re not sure why…”. (and I also recognize that many labels are genuinely useful and liberating).
So if the problem is that you just stopped moving it, maybe try… Moving it? Sensibly, of course (that’s where people like me come in to help ya).
And much like the regenerative brakes on your uber-efficient hybrid/electric car, nothing seemed wrong, until…
It just came out of nowhere!
It didn’t come out of nowhere. You just weren’t aware of how little that body part was actually moving prior to the issue.
Disuse is a perfect set up for corrosion, mechanical damage, and malfunction of the non-moving parts. For your body, and your brakes.
Ankle sprains are a good example. Lots of people have sprained at least one ankle.
If you spend most of your life never exposing your ankles to the demands of ankle-rolly bumpy terrain, the soft tissues supporting your ankles (muscles, tendons, ligaments) are just like your car’s disused brakes: Slowly “corroding” away from disuse, but you don’t even notice because it’s so gradual, and you never put yourself in situations in which you even need to know your ankles exist, let alone use them in a challenging situation.
And then, one fateful day, whilst out walking your beloved pooch, you randomly trip, roll over your ankle, sprain your deltoid ligament, and realize how cushy your life has been.
Did that injury really “just come out of nowhere?” Or were you setting yourself up for it for years because you didn’t ever deliberately use the structures that would have (should have) checked your ankle from rolling over and causing damage?
Look at all those amazing ligaments (ie “brakes) in your ankle and foot! Use ’em or lose ’em.
How many of our injuries that just came out of nowhere are the result of the “regenerative braking paradox”?
Joints act, muscles react
I am reminded of Gary Ward’s second big rule of motion: Joints act, muscles react.
And how are muscles reacting? To decelerate excessive joint motion away from center.
This is why his work centers around helping people discover the eccentric loading (the muscle contraction as it lengthens) of their muscles to manage (slow down) joint motion. This is akin to “tapping the brakes” at every joint in their body, to check excessive motion that could end up in an unsafe, potentially harmful range of motion. Like in our ankle sprain example.
If you can teach your body to move based on the joints act, muscles react thought process, then you are keeping your intrinsic regenerative braking system responsive, healthy, and on-point.
I encourage you to read more about this, and the other 5 big rules of motion in Gary’s book,What The Foot.
Conclusions?
I LOVE that what I anticipated would be another boring “that time the car broke down” story actually turned into an amazing analogy for how to keep our bodies resilient and healthy.
If you don’t deliberatedly use all the bits and pieces you are built of with enough frequency and force to keep them at peak function, you risk losing function of said bits and pieces. This has been my general movement practice philosophy for years, and I was tickled that it has a parallel in an area I know nothing about: Car brakes.
If you don’t use the brakes often enough to know if something’s not functioning well, you’ll never even know there’s potentially a problem.
Do you deliberately use your ankles often enough to know they can manage a roll?
Do you explore using your wrists often enough to know they can support you in a fall?
Do you purposefully flex your spine often enough to trust it can tolerate sneeze #55837? (apparently the average person sneezes ~70000 times in their life… Don’t ask me if that’s an accurate stat)
A car’s brakes manage it’s motion, just as our body’s soft tissues are like brakes that manage our skeletal motion. A movement practice based on “joints act, muscles react” trains the body to effectively decelerate potentially threatening wayward motion. This is NOT the same things as stretching and strengthening.
I am also reminded of how counterintuitive it can be to know how to care for ourselves…
Did the folks who built regenerative brakes intuit that they would create the disuse problem and lead to many cranky customers wondering why their brakes were shot even though they barely used them?
Did the folks who built the comfiest, thickest-soled, most ankle-supportive shoes ever intuit that it could cause a disuse problem and the plague of immobile ankles and feet? “But I never DO anything extreme to cause damage and I always wear my orthotics! Why are my ankles so shit?” (that’s exactly it, my dear…)
If only our bodies came with a user manual, and a well-informed, honest mechanic from the dealership…
Well, fortunately there are people in this world who are dedicated to helping you write your own body-owner’s manual.
People like me. And I am just one of many.
My aim is to empower people to learn about their bodies so they can rely less on therapists. And at the very least, be able to better communicate with them so they can get the collaborative care they need.
In fact, this is the most frequently reported benefit from my Liberated Body students: “I can communicate with my physio/massage therapist/chiropractor better now and it feels more like teamwork than blind faith”.
This is important, because advocating for our health is not easy when we don’t know anything about the thing needing fixing, leading us to naiively believe that we need to come back to the friendly chiropractor to get our neck adjusted every week for the rest of our lives… Don’t buy it.
If you’d like to learn more about how your body is built to move so you can systematically explore and prevent the disuse problem discussed in this blog post, I recommed checking out my online course Liberated Body.
Liberated Body is a series of four movement lessons based on the teachings of Gary Wards’ Anatomy in Motion. You’ll learn how your body is meant to move through the gait cycle (how you should be able to walk), and then compare whether or not YOUR body can access all those mechanics correctly.
Check out Liberated Body HERE. You can do it as a self-study, or look for the next live (online) workshop date.
Or whatever. Just make sure you keep tappin’ those brakes ahrd every once ina while to make sure they still exist.
*THE STORY:
If you have osteoporosis, can you improve your bone mass? Some people say that you can’t, you can only slow it’s wasting. I thought so, too. But then one of my clients told me a story about a 97 year old woman she knows with osteoporosis who made it her mission to build her bones back. Apparently she did exercises for 3 HOURS DAILY (I forget if it was for a year, or less), and when she went back to get her bone density tested again, it had gone up! I think only by a few percentage points. But how inspiring is that? And honestly, if you’re 97, you’ve definitely got the time and no excuses to commit 3 hours per day to rebuild your bones. And now the running joke when she says something can’t be done is, “Just put in 3 hours a day”. No excuses.
If you’re reading this, it’s probably because some part of your body hurts, and it don’t make no sense.
I get it. I had(ve) mysterious symptoms that baffled and frustrated me for years. And then I was introduced to the concept of mass management, and things finally started making sense.
No, I’m not talking about weight management…
The Simpsons was my babysitter growing up…
Center of mass (CoM) management. Physics. Not physiology 😉 Not that I’m an expert in either…
Your body has it’s own personal, unique, unconscious CoM management strategy. Understanding it is a powerful tool to help your body get well.
If you have a goal of moving with more ease and less pain, I hope today’s blog post will serve as a useful introduction to what CoM management is, and why it matters. Because whether you like it or not, you’re managing your mass right now, even if you’re sitting on your butt…
Further down in this post I have a video with a simple assessment you can follow along with to start making sense of your personal CoM management strategy in your own body. Or just skip ahead to it, whatever.
Ready?
What is center of mass?
Here’s the technical definition (which is not necessarily easy to grasp unless you enjoy physics, which I do NOT, thank you Mr. Smith for ruining it for me):
“The center of mass is the point on an object at which the weighted relative position of the distributed mass sums to zero—the point about which objects rotate.“
Translation…?
Consider a sphere- Its CoM would be right smack in the middle. As the sphere rolls along the ground, the middle point (CoM) of the sphere doesn’t actually move relative to the edges of the sphere, but remains constant as the axis of rotation.
But bodies are not spheres. They are little more complex.
Bodies are way more cool (and complex) than spheres
Imagine if someone were to tie a rope around your wrist and dangle you from the ceiling. Then (after being let down for a break), you were dangled from your ankle from the same ceiling rig. The center of mass of your body would be consistently in the same loaction no matter which limb you were dangled from.
You can also imagine it as the central axis through your body while doing a cartwheel- An axis of rotation through which no actual motion occurs relative to your limbs.
So where exactly is this central point located in our bodies?
The location of the human body’s CoM is slightly different for each individual, depending on proportions. Some say it is roughly 10cm below your navel. I’ve read it to be anywhere between L3 and S2 vertebral segments. There seems to be a lack of concensus, and probably requires exact measurement for each individual.
But ain’t nobody got time for that.
So as a general estimate, if you were to put your finger somewhere between your belly button and pubic bone, and imagine a point at the depth your spine, that ought to be good enough.
What is CoM Management?
When you walk, your body has to transfer its entire weight from one foot to the other. I tihnk its pretty increadible that we even can do it without falling down. Silly bipeds. But somewhere in our evolution standing upright and growing our brains became more useful than being on four legs, so here we are. Every step a leap of faith.
The reason we don’t fall down is becaues we have specifically sequenced and timed body mechanics that help us manage the chaotic journey we call walking. A journey in which our CoM bravely shifts from right foot to left.
In gait, the center of mass of your body needs to get all the way from one foot to rest over top of the center of mass of the other foot.
The center of mass of the foot is the 2nd (or intermediate) cunieform.
Full weight-bearing on one leg happens when the CoM of our body sits directly over top of the CoM of our foot (2nd cuneiform).
This ideally needs to happens in the loading phase of gait (or suspension phase, in AiM terms). This is when the highest amount of force will enter that limb, which makes it a critical moment in time to have our body mechanics set up in an organized way to absorb the shock.
Except a lot of the times our bodies are not so organized…
Disorganized, distorted, off-center, our CoM makes a different sort of journey.
Maybe it doesn’t quite get over 2nd cuneiform. Maybe we find a strategy that puts extra strain on different parts of our bodies to compensate for that. Maybe we spend a higher percentage of time with our weight on one foot. Or more total mass on one leg than the other.
That is the essence of CoM management: The particular way your skeleton organizes the journey of getting it’s CoM over to the opposite foot, and back again.
You could think of it as your unique “swagger”.
Why care about CoM management?
If it is true that there is a particular set of mechanics with which we’d ideally like the body to use for optimal, flowing, efficient gait (and I believe that there is), the million dollar question is: How close to that “ideal” is your body currently able to use?
This is why I think taking a presonal interest in learning about movement mechanics is a critical tool for anyone interested in actually getting well. Most of us get busy fixing things before taking the time to understand the problem.
But rather than rant about that…
Using the lens of CoM management we get different information than assessing joint range of motion, “functional” movement patterns, and strength testing alone, such as:
Can your CoM move equally onto either foot, or is there a leg you don’t trust to weight bear into fully?
Why don’t you weight-bear fully into one leg? Do you avoid it due to a past injury or accident?
Which past injuries or accidents might be part of that strategy(ies) and need help now? Ankle sprain?
What problem areas today might actually have began as solutions for a past problem?
What body parts are you using to shift your CoM from right to left instead of actually getting your CoM to travel through space? Ribcage? Arms? Head?
Do you stand evenly on both feet at rest? If no, how could this be putting extra pressure, compression, or tension on some parts of your body more than others?
Admittedly, this is a qualitative study, not quantitative. But that doesn’t mean it is not useful, or can’t be reasonably objective. It just requires a different way of thinking.
Like, using your whole brain.
A whole brain approach
Assessing individual body parts’ movement capabilities is synonymous with our left brain hemisphere’s limited observational style- Looking at facts in isolation and disregarding their relationship to the whole.
As Iain McGilchrist has written about in his book The Master and his Emissary, there is much evidence to suggest that we are biased to process the world around us predominantly via our brain’s left-hemisphere, which limits us to a narrow, incomplete perception of reality, dominated by hyperrationality, an affinity for the familiar, and a tendency to deny when it is wrong.
Bodies are complex systems. To appreciate their magnificence, and the impossibility that we could ever fully understand their complexity is a function only our right brain is wired for: The ability to contemplate the unknowable and find delight in paradox and contradiction.
Only via our right hemisphere can we view our bodies’ state, not as a state- one that is static, but as dynamic. How we move is not reduced to a mere utility (left brain’s view), but has an intention within a bigger context.
Our right hemisphere understands that our bodies are much more than the sum of its individual parts’ discrete abilties, in isolation from one another. Each individual body parts’ isolated performance matters, but only has meaning in context with the body as a whole.
Relationships between parts matter to the right brain, not to the left, which wants only to isolate, categorize, measure, and judge.
Our right brain can ask why THAT particular mass management strategy? How is that currently serving me? When did that begin? The left brain can only interpret individual, static moments in time, zooming in, getting the details, but missing the big picture.
Probing curiously into the unknown (asking “why”) is the realm of the right hemishphere. Fixating on what we think we aleady know (“my trainer said my iliopsoas is the problem!”) is what the left brain does best.
Understanding CoM management demands a whole brain approach.
Despite structural or functional distortions and imbalances, our bodies WILL find a way to get us from one foot to the other.
It may not be perfect, but…
…whether you like it or not, shift happens
That’s a saying we have in the AiM community. It means that your body WILL find a way to shift it’s mass from one foot to the other (if you have two feet…). How efficiently your body is able to make that leap of faith, is the question.
Has your body been forced to to distort itself in a way that protects an old site of pain, keeping it safe, but creating weird movement habits in the process?
If we aren’t considering CoM management, we are likely to be providing only a temporary solution because we truly haven’t taken the time to consider WHY the body has chosen the mechanics it is using.
Is there a leg YOU don’t trust?
Enough philosophizing… This information is only useful if you can put it into practice.
You probably trust one leg more than the other. Want to find out which one?
The short video below will help you start thinking in terms of mass management. The goal is to see if your center of mass unconsciously reacts, in the appropriate direction, to you moving your spine from right to left:
a) Moves towards front leg b) Moves away from front leg c) Does nothing
Note, for the sake of simplicity, we will correlate your CoM with your pelvis, even though I know that’s not entirely accurate.
(This is a snippet from the Movement Deep Dive my all-access members are studying this month- A study of their frontal plane, i.e. side to side, hip/pelvis motion).
So… What did you find out about yourself? Is there a leg you don’t fully trust?
Why would you not trust a leg?
This is the question I leave you with.
Why would one lose the ability to fully commit to one leg? Or to put pressure only in one particular part of their foot?
Injuries. Accicents. Repetitive movements and postural habits. Things your mom told you. Trained movement skills, sports, etc.
What has your body been through? What needs attention now?
What if, like me, your body avoids one leg because of incomplete healing of an old (hamstring) injury? Unconsciously, I avoid committing to that leg. With each footstep, I reinforce a less efficient protective strategy to get from one foot to the other, which ends up making my neck sore.
Could this be keeping you stuck with limitations and pain that “stretching” and “strengthening” won’t help? Can you stretch out a CoM management problem?
Does your movement practice consider CoM management in your exercise selection?
These are the questions that I think are more useful than: Which exercise should I do? Or, how many reps? Or “what muscle should I blame?”
These are questions for your right hemisphere 😉
A final note: The goal of the video and the information in this post is not meant to “fix” your body. Simply provide an alternative way of thinking about why things feel the way they do. A tool to help you observe your body through the gestalt of your right hemisphere- More than the sum of it’s parts, but for the harmony with which those parts communicate.
All complaints the body makes stem from some kind of movement problem. Overuse, underuse, misuse, or disuse. And all movement problems will show up in gait. Gait won’t tell you what the problem is, but it will guide you where to look. And CoM management via gait analysis is an incredibly useful tool for making sense of it.
Oh, and if you’re not sure you can tell if there’s a leg you don’t trust, guess what… Sometimes it’s BOTH 😉
To learn more about CoM management, you may like to check out Liberated Body (a self-guided online workshop, avec moi)
What if going for a walk could be an opportunity for your neck to naturally “stretch” itself? Could you “walk your neck well”?
Neck motion in the gait cycle is pretty cool. It arises out of our need to keep our eyes level (not walk with a bobblehead).
In the 0.6-0.8 second journey from one foot to the other, your neck should be able to access every motion available to it, in all three dimensions, from one end of the spectrum to the other. Unless it can’t…
That means, in the space of just one footstep, your neck will (hopefully) get a full spectrum experience from:
– Flexion all the way to extension – Lateral flexion right all the way to to lateral flexion left – Rotation right to rotation left
But not like a bobblehead…
VID
The cool thing is neck motion happens by virtue of the skull itself staying STILL (eyes stay level so you can walk straight), and the rest of the body articulating underneath.
This is true of animals too. Check out this owl:
The next two video clips are a brief demo of how this works in the frontal (head tilts) and transverse plane (head roation).
How did those two movements go for you? Are you able you separate your skull from your ribcage with your eyes level? (and yes I am aware I did not make a sagittal plane video…)
I call it a “whole body neck stretch”, because it emulates how the muscles on one side of the neck would naturally lengthen (and the other shorten) with each footstep. Or, in the case of the transverse plane neck rotations, more like a torquing motion, like a towel wringing out.
But its more than “stretching”- It’s specific, sequenced joint motion our bodies crave in efficient gait, obtained via coordinated whole body movement. The by-product of which is that your neck joints and tissues actually move in a healthy way with each step.
What if, by practicing gait-based movements like this, you could walk your neck well? What if you started to notice you no longer need to deliberately stretch your neck? (unless you actually wanted to)
Let me know if you find this quick video useful.
These two clips are from a Movement Deep Dive session I filmed in May 2021 for my Liberated Body all-access students. The complete 60 min session explores this idea in three planes, integrated with the whole body, down to the feet, based on the teachings of Gary Ward’s Anatomy in Motion.
PS can you tell how differently my head tilts from one side to the other?? 😅
And like any other body part, it’s pain resolution is a process of restoring access to it’s complete set of options for joint motion, in correct sequencing with other body parts, in a way that feels safe.
AND… You don’t need to have an advanced understanding of joint biomechanics to do it (see the video below)
Your knee is a relatively simple, 2D joint (made complicated by biomechanists who’ve attempted to define what it does disparate of their own embodied understanding of it…)
To feel and move happily, a knee must have access to:
Flexion (bending) with femoral internal rotation, on a pronating foot.
Extension (straightening), with femoral external rotation, on a supinating foot.
All other combinations of knee, leg, and foot, will not feel happy, or be very efficient.
Here’s a quick demo you can try (this clip is an excerpt from a 60 min Movement Deep Dive I did last week on knee mechanics for my Liberated Body students):
If you don’t feel the above sequencing happening, it would not be surprising if your knees are unhappy with you
I repeat: A healthy knee must be able to experience the following things:
1) Knee bends + femur rotates in + foot pronates
2) Knee straightens + femur rotates out + foot supinates
And, if you followed the video, you’ll have the basic, embodied understanding that:
A) A pronatED foot will prevent a knee from fully extending
B) A foot that CANNOT pronate will not allow a knee to bend
My intention is to clarify and make simple the complexities of learning biomechanics, so that anyone can benefit from healthier movement. This can only be done by actually experiencing your anatomy.
In the words of Gary Ward, of Anatomy in Motion: Expose yourself to the truth of human movement, then let that experience create the learning.
When we try to understand movement ONLY with our intellect, our body doesn’t learn.
But if the body learns first, no words or intellectualization is necessary for real knowing. Words can be added later to faciliate communication (which is useful, considering all the confusion!)Remember, learning is not the same thing as knowing
I hope you enjoyed and found this mini biomechanics lesson useful! Let me know if it sparked any new understanding for you. Shoot me an email or leave a comment below.
(see the video below)
