Stuff I Wrote | Page 3 of 8 | Monika Volkmar Bodywork and Movement Education

Movement Sleuthing Challenge: Your Jaw vs. Your Hips

Fancy a little movement detectivery you can do for free, from the comfort of your own home?

Well, not completely free… You need the internet (and I don’t know about you, but my rates just went UP!). And you’ll have to stand up and use your brain and your muscles a bit, so it might not be as comfortable as sitting on your butt.

Regardless, if you have jaw issues, hip issues, or both issues, I think you’ll appreciate this little piece of biomechanical investigation. The video below is a simple way to test if your jaw’s resting position (which may be a lil’ off center), is messing with how your hips and pelvis are able to move.

Can you see how when I shift my jaw one way it makes things looks really discombobulated? What’s up with that huh?

The Jaw vs. Hips Test Explanation

In this video I’m testing if the resting position of my lower jaw (mandible) is impacting on my ability to hike my pelvis on either side (and thus adduct/abduct my hips- which needs to happen with every step we take for efficient gait).

The Mandible - Structure - Attachments - Fractures - TeachMeAnatomy

Ideally, our pelvis hikes and drops with each foot step we take. We also want our bodies to move as evenly as possible on the right and left sides: Pelvis hike on the right should be pretty dang close to the hike on the left.

In this assessment, we’re looking clean and clear (and under control…) frontal plane motion, meaning purely up and down motion. Not a pelvis rotation. Not a pelvis thrust. Pelvis bones ought to move like elevators, not a washing machine.

In this assessment, pelvis hiking is accomplished by gently bending one knee to allow the opposite side of the pelvis to hike up on it’s own. I’m not trying to use my side-abs to pull my pelvis up with a muscular contraction. This is an assessment of how your pelvis reacts to a knee bend, NOT trying to see how high you can jam your iliac crest into your ear like it’s a contest.

Start by evaluating how each side hikes with your jaw doing it’s natural thang. Note any differences. This is your baseline.

Next, slide your jaw to the RIGHT (like a type-writer). Repeat your pelvis hikes. Notice if that changes anything. Better, same, or worse?

Lastly, slide your jaw to the LEFT. Repeat your pelvis hikes. Notice if that changes anything. More even right and left? Less even? Any discomfort?

Did one of those three jaw positions make your pelvis hikes more even? More comfortable? Worse? Or no difference?

The Results

If you are perceptive, you can probably see which jaw position helps my pelvis and hips achieve more balanced, clean motion.

(FYI my right and left sides are reveresd. My tattoo leg is my right leg…One of my online students actually remarked that it was great to have my right leg so clearly denoted because it helps her keep track of the rights and lefts in class! Yes… I got that tat for exactly that reason… ;))

Here’s the video again, to save you some scrolling:

Round 1: Jaw in it’s default resting position. My pelvis hikes look pretty even right and left, eh?

Round 2: Jaw shifted LEFT. When I hike left side up, I shift off of that leg. And when I hike right, I rotate towards the right instead of hiking. This is NOT clean motion, meaning I have poor access to both pelvis hikes.

Round 3: Jaw shifted RIGHT. This looks very similar to round 1, but in my body it feels smoother and happier.

So, if I had to pick one jaw position that promotes optimal hip motion, jaw shifted right is the winner.

Interpretating the Results

Okay, so what’s the point of this, and what, if any, useful information can we glean from it in the name of better, pain-free movement?

Jaw position is kind of a big deal.

Interestingly, our mandible’s position in our skull dictates a lot about how we’re able to move our hips and pelvis in gait (among other things… THAT’S a rabbit hole of a lifetime that will make you very disappointed in humanity and yet empowered to pay attention to your oral-facial health and tell everyone to shut their dang mouth while they breathe. But don’t get too high on that soapbox…).

We can consider the jaw to be a “leveller” of the body- A mid-line structure with a significant impact on whole body mechanics. What if your body took part of it’s cue for where its center is, based on where your jaw is? What if this had an impact on which phases of gait you can and can’t access (it does)?

So when you notice your jaw is “tight” or clicky or you clench it, know that this is not just a jaw problem- It’s a whole body problem.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that my jaw’s default resting position is already shifted to the left.

So in round 1 of the test, my jaw is actually sitting slightly left of center. I think it’s been that way since I was at least 3 years old. Why do I think that? Because I have a photo of me on my third birthday in which my jaw looks like it’s pushed farther back on the left side.

Like this:

*Its subtle, but can you see the left side of my jaw shoved back farther than on the right?* *Happy bday to me!*

In round 2 of the test, when I slide my jaw to the left, my pelvis and hips have no clue how to move in the frontal plane! What’s going on here?

As mentioned earlier, hiking the pelvis needs to happen with each footstep. It’s part of our bodies’ shock-absorption mechanics that happens when our foot pronates on the ground, loading the lateral glutes medius and minimus (this is suspension phase of gait for the AiM folks, loading phase for the rest of y’all).

So too does the jaw have it’s own coordinated movement with the whole body in gait for optimal efficiency.

In gait, when the pelvis hikes on one side, the jaw actually needs to slide over and gap (teeth come apart) on that side as part of a whole body pattern for efficient movement.

In another moment in gait, when the right heel hits the ground (heel strike), the jaw actually shifts to the left. Interestingly, right heel strike is a phase in which I experience right hip and SIJ pain sometimes. In fact, right hip pain was the first chronic pain symptom I ever remember having.

So this gets me thinking… How long has my jaw been messing with my hips? Has my resting-left jaw tendency predisposes me to having the hip problems that I did/still do? Have my hips really been on a path of destruction since I was three years old (or even earlier?). I don’t think this is random, or coincidence…

What do you do with this new data?

Let’s say you’re like me, and if you shift your jaw left your pelvis doesn’t know the meaning of “hike”.

Let’s look at the data:

Where’s my jaw at rest? Shifted left.
When I shift it MORE left (deeper into default) I can’t hike either side of my pelvis, when I shift it right, things improve.
Thus my jaw being positioned left is highly likely to be giving my hips and pelvis some grief
Solution? Getting my jaw to not be stuck to the left all the time and have a more centered default position would likely have a beneficial whole body effect.

The journey from here- what you decide to do, will vary based on the tools you have in your toolkit to reorganize your jaw. Manual therapy, movement re-training, goofy looking face stretches, all can be useful.

For the past 3 years I’ve been on a journey of levelling my jaw. It’s been a fascinating, enriching, and frustrating project.

Here are a few interesting things I’ve noted along the way that have helped me un-leftify my jaw, and significantly improve how my hips feel:

I prefer to unconsciously chew on the left side. It’s my happy place. I try not to always chew in my happy place.
When I am in social-anxiety-producing situations, I unconsiously clench my jaw and shift it to the left. It’s where my jaw goes when I’m trying to cope with stress. Now I’m at the point that I’m conscious of it happening. Sometimes I can even NOT DO IT.
Oral-facial integration techniques (a la MNRI) and craniosacral therapy have been super helpful for me. I can do these manual therapy techniques on myself because our faces are easily within hands-reach. Learning these two modalities have been game-changing.
Understanding how jaw motion couples with the rest of our bodies in gait, as per the Flow Motion Model taught by Gary Ward in his Anatomy in Motion courses has been crucial for me to use whole body movements to re-integrate my jaw with my body in a meaningful context, i.e. walking. Do you know what your jaw should be doing in three dimensions with a pelvis hike? Well mine isn’t doing the right thing! And reorganizing that has been key.
I used to get weird popping and ringing sensations in my left ear, especially under stress… Now they are almost gone, but come back when my jaw is more to the left (which happens when I’m under stress).
Making funny faces is an awesome and important part of changing the way you move 😜 I mean, this is serious business, but that doesn’ t mean we can’t have some serious fun with it.

My invitation to you

Are you feeling like a Movement Detective? This is the kind of stuff I like to share with my students in my secret Movement Detective School. Oops, not so secret anymore…

Give this test a try and see if your jaw could be impacting the motion of your pelvis and hips.

It is quite likely you have one position in which your jaw discombobulates your hips.

Is that the same side you have a clicky, poppy jaw? Is that the same side you chew on primarily? Is that the same side you got smoked in the face by some aggressive jerk in a hockey match? Is that the same side you had a traumatic experience getting your wisdom teeth removed?

Let me know what you find. What if you could free your jaw, free your hips, and free your life? (you can!)

PS I share little videos like this from time to time on my Instagram page. I think social media sucks 90% of the time, but I like to use it to share the nerdy movement things that I do. Feel free to follow me @monvolkmar

Five Books That Changed Me

In my 3 Essential Tools resource (a must-read for budding Movement Detectives) I extolled the importance of continous learning. Education is truly one of the most valuable tools for helping our bodies move with more ease and less pain. If you don’t know what a healthy body should be able to move like, how are you going to get yours to move better??

Education comes in so many forms: Attending courses and workshops (online and in person), diploma and degree programs, working directly with mentors, doing independent research, and reading. If you’re me, lots and lots and lots of reading.

I confess… I have a reading problem.

Not that I can’t read well, but that I have a tendency to get so stuck into reading a book that I might shirk my more pressing life resonsibilities. This can get me into trouble when I actually have important shit that needs getting done. Adulting is hard sometimes…

That said, some books have literally changed the trajectory of my life.

Has that ever happened to you? After reading a book, something actually woke up in you that forever changed how you think and engage with life?

It’s rare… Most of the time, embrrassingly, I struggle to summarize just three key take-aways after finishing one chapter. Reading a LOT of books clearly doesn’t equate in me actually absorbing the content.

And then there are some books after which the trajectory of your life shifts a few degrees.

Have you heard of the 1 in 60 rule in aviation? It states that a one degree change in direction can result in a disproportionately large shift in final destination: Each degree off over a distance of 60 nautical miles translates to 1 nautical mile off course. Think about the crazy implication this has for where you might end up… A completely different city, or country, or even continent!

Some books push us that one degree (hopefully in a meaningful direction…). How amazing is that?

So I’ll stop blabbering now, and get to the point. I’d like to share five books that stand out in memory as having changed the trajectory of my life. I don’t expect that they’ll have the same life-changing effect on you, but one of these titles might lead you somewhere new that you wouldn’t have explored otherwise.

5 Books That Changed Me

What the Foot?: A Game-Changing Philosophy in Human Movement to Eliminate Pain and Maximise Human Potential: Gary Ward;: 9781907261084: Amazon.com: Books

What the Foot- Gary Ward

Well of course this is at the top of my list. I don’t know who or where I would be right now had I not read this book. Is has had the largest impact on both my professional and personal philosophies for working with human bodies in motion, including my own.

WTF is a mind opening read that made me question the conventional fitness and therapy paradigms around stability and core training, foot mechanics, and the utility of stretching. Like the tagline says, “A game changing philosophy…”. This book also led me to take the plunge and take the six day Anatomy in Motion immersion course (7 times…) which at the time was a big financial investment. Now, I am working with Gary and Chris of AiM as both a mentee and mentor to help other AiM students learn more deeply.

Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance: McGill, Stuart: 8601409972480: Books - Amazon.ca

Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance- Dr. Stuart McGill

Here’s a story I’ve never told here before: When I was 21 and getting hamstring rehab, my physiotherapist lent this book to me, and it was the inspiration to create a program to help banged-up dancers with back (and other) problems build strength and prevent injuries (The Dance Training Project).

This is the book that first got me interested in learning about my own body. Up until then I’d never given much thought to the notion that I could have any effect on changing my reality. This book inspired hope in me that, with this new information about how the spine works, I could take responsibility for my back problems and get myself well. Honestly, I haven’t referenced this book since I was 21, though I’m sure there are some excellent golden nuggets to review. But the biggest thing I got from this book was the sense of empowerment that came from learning something new about my body that I previously had zero awareness of: It woke up my inner Movement Detective.

Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness– Erich Schiffmann

This book denotes a major pivot in my life: The moment I learned what it meant to feel “good” after moving my body. I was 19 or 20 at the time, and decided on a whim to take a yoga class. It was the first time I actually breathed while moving- What a concept. It challenged my body in a whole new way comapared to my dance training. And after the class, something felt very different. I was used to feeling broken down after dance and exercise, but that day I left the studio feeling clear headed, calm, aligned, and “good”. I didn’t know what good actually felt like until then!

Intrigued, I went to a local indie bookstore, and this book jumped off the shelf at me. The first section the author’s story, his journey into yoga and meditation. I had never considered trying meditation before, and I gave some of his exercises a try. It was a gradual shift, but this was my initiation into observing my own thoughts, and that movement could feel restorative, not punishing. I began willingly observing myself. Slowly, I started to value awareness and self-inquiry. I don’t know if this book is anything special compared to other yoga books (haven’t read other yoga books), but it was the exact book I needed at that moment in time.

Loving What Is- Byron Katie

This lovely book gave me practical tools that helped me reduce my neuroticism to a level that made my life much less sufferable. In her book, Katie outlines “The Work”: A four-question process for investigating the sneaky beliefs and thoughts that are keeping us stuck in the same old cycles of emotional reactivity, and holding us back from evolving in all areas of life.

I remember the first time I used her framework I immediately felt as if a weight had been lifted. I realized for the first time the depth to which my unconscious belief-systems were ruling my every thought and decision, repearing the same behaviours over and over. I can’t recommend this book enough for anyone looking for a structured, systematic way of compassionate self-inquiry.

The Art of Asking– Amanda Palmer

Amanda Palmer is a musician who began her performance career as a “living statue” street-performer (and made more money than she did at her “real job”). Her story has nothing to do with the body, but it heart-warmingly covers important themes common to all humanity: Defning your personal version of success and marrching to the beat of your own authentic drum. The courage it takes to risk being vulnerable. The value of human connection, and nurturing relationships (which I often still take for granted). The magic that can unfold when you put your trust in people and life and your intuition, even when things are uncertain. That sneaky little “fraud police” character within that can sabotage us from taking action towards our dreams. And so much more (in fact, after reading this book I was inspired to start writing my book Dance Stronger).

Disclaimer: These books probably will not change your life. Don’t get your hopes up 😉

I think books find their way into our hands at the exact time we need them, for eactly where we are in our lives at that moment, for the exact lessons we personally need to learn. Life works in mysterious, magical, and serendipitous ways.

It is 100% possible (more like, probable) that you could read one of the books and get absolutely nothing useful from it. Boring. A waste of time. And that’s ok 🙂

Anyway, I’d love to hear if you’ve read any of the books on my list, and then what the top five books are on YOUR life changer list 🙂 Because I can always use more book recos.

*BE AWARE: Some of the book links are Amazon Affiliate links, which means that if you click through and happen to purchase one of the books, I get a microscopic % of the profits. I’m not doing this because I’m a greedy-pants person, but because every litte bit helps support me spending hours of my time writing this blog. I am ever so grateful if you do wish to purchase one of these books, that you choose to go through one of my links, and help support me writing more for this blog (and simultaneously divert some $$ from Amazon into my pocket). Thank you! 🙂

Does Getting Stronger Fix Pain?

I had faith that strength training would cure my pain.

*Me, 2013ish. Total strength training nerd. Also, this photo somehow ended up in a T-Nation article about single leg deadlifts, without my permission*. *I took it as a compliment, but no one ever replied back to me about it…*

What do you think? What role does strength training play in healing from injuries and chronic pain?

I don’t necessarily have answers, but I have some humble thoughts.

When I first started working (customer service) at a gym in my early 20s I heard all kinds of things from trainers like:

“Your core is weak, that’s why your back hurts.”

“Your butt is weak, that’s why your hips are tight.”

“Your knees hurt because they are too unstable.”

Naive and impressionable, riddled with acute injuries and chronic symptoms from my dance training, I translated this to “I am in pain because I am weak, therefore getting strong and stable will fix my body”.

Long story short, I was wrong (and I will elaborate on the long story in this blog post).

The strength-healing fallacy

I think there is a logical fallacy here we can observe:

Training to become stronger will not necessarily result in healing, but physical strength is inevitably a by-product of a healing process.

I have an acquaintance that lives this fallacy out perfectly, to whom I will give the gender ambiguous name, Frankie.

Frankie thinks their 20+ years of chronic back pain is related to being weak. Because their back is in pain, they can’t workout to build muscle and strength like they used to. However, Frankie also thinks that a direct cause of their back pain is because of not working out and losing muscles and strength- Two panaceas for pain.

Frankie fears that losing strength and muscles will make their pain worse, therefore going to the gym to workout is the solution. Then Frankie is astonished when it doesn’t make things feel better. Worse, in fact.

I’ve done this, too! Been there, done that. How about you?

What if strength and health have an asymmetrical relationship? One supports the other, but the other doesn’t necessarily support it back.

The actual definition of strength: The capacity of an object or substance to withstand great force or pressure.

Think of strength as a quality or a state of potential one can develop when one is already in a state of well-being, not necessarily an act that will produce wellness.

Frankie was convinced that strength would produce healing and health, instead of seeing that first becoming well would allow him to restore his strength.

Now, what is healing?

“Healthy” is a BIG word and I think the definition is a little different for each of us. I won’t even try to tackle it right now.

The old English root of the word “heal” is actually “whole”.

My sense is that healing and well-being have more to do with the state of our system moving towards “wholeness” and integration, not as simple as being strong or weak.

Having access to our whole body must precede trying to strengthen it. Bodybuliders know this- You can’t stregnthen something you don’t have a neural connection with. The first 6 weeks of a strength training program is more about strengthening neurological pathways to our muscles than actually building them up in size and contractile ability.

We cannot strengthen what we cannot access.

So the 64000$ questions is: What has caused us to lose access to our bodies?

Injuies. Accidents. Periods of chronic pain. Learned movement skills, deeply ingrained. Habitual ways of moving (or not moving). That weird ear infection after which nothing felt the same again…

Could real healing be a process of reclaiming access to the individual parts we ignored, neglected, or never rescued from harm? And then a process of integrating them into context with each other, to work together as a whole?

And then in a whole, more structurally balanced state, there will be less pressure and strain from our bodies getting pulled asymmetrically to one side. Muscles that were stuck short get permission to lengthen, and visa versa. Joint spaces that were closed can begin to open and allow blood flow where previously it was impeded. The narrow pathways through which nerves must travel can deliver their signals can do so with less structural roadblocks.

So is access and integration are important for healing, how do we do this, if not by strengthening things?

What’s in a healing process?

Here’s a chart I found on Symmetry Physical Therapy’s website:

It takes a real duration, weeks to months, for tissues to repair from mechanical damage, but that doesn’t imply completion of a whole process (involving the whole body).

Time elapsed doesn’t mean anything happened in the space of that time. It’s like a teacher saying, “you’ll need to study for 5 hours for this exam”, so you stare at the textbook for 5 hours thinking you’re engaged in the right action required for learning.

Are you engaged in the right action required for healing?

If I’m being honest, I’m still engaged in a process of healing my left hamstring. The injury happened 10 years ago. I’m quite sure I’ll be worthing with it for another 10 years, at least. There are so many factors impacting on this… Stories for another time 😉

After tissue repair, access to that body part needs to be reclaimed and integrated with the whole body again, as close to original instructions as possible. If we don’t attempt to do so, our body learns to move with a “dis-integrated” body part, disconnected. Mechanically attached, but not truly belonging to us like it used to.

And then we (and I am referring to myself) decide to lift some heavy-ass weights… Can you see a problem?

So could the real question be…

What’s preventing our bodies from healing?

Could it be… Us?

Could we be blocking our own capacity to heal by imposing a greater stress -strength training, upon it before we are ready, because of some idea we have- like the one I picked up at the gym about strength, but convinced we are making our system more resilient?

Could the effort of strength training actually be an output blocking our bodies’ innate healing processes? And why are we doing that?

Personally, the aggressive manner in which I attended to getting stronger (more on that story below) only served to reinforce the wonky mechanics and false beliefs that were keeping me stuck with pain. Yeah, the number of pounds I could lift showed I was objectively pretty dang strong… However, I was not very healthy, and still in a lot of pain.

So, what do we make of this? Theorizing aside for now, I’d like to offer my story and lived experience, for whatever it is worth…

Getting strong felt really great (until it felt worse)

I remember the exact moment I realized I was stronger.

I was 21 ish. One day I bent down to get something from the bottom shelf of my fridge (probably a tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, because I was addicted to that stuff. I’d mix it with pure white sugar and eat it with a spoon…), and when I stood up, I actually felt some oomph in my legs I’d never noticed before.

Fabio Plays With an Epic Toaster in New I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Ad — *If Fabio eats it, it must be healthy*

Whoah. What the… Am I getting stronger? This feels amazing! What if… Maybe… Could it be… that how I feel in my body is more important than how it looks??

“Strong” was a weird, new sensation for a person intent on making herself smaller, who had formerly, distortedly, associated weakness with success (that’s what a calorie deficit feels like- Profound, inner weakness).

This feeling of power in my body was an important reminder: That perhpas reclaiming my personal power was more important than fitting an unreasonable physical standard- What a body should look like.

But I ruined this beautiful insight by rationalizing that getting stronger could be the new correction of everything I believed was wrong with Me.

And if weakness is the problem, and being strong feels good, then logically absolute strength is the solution.

What’s the most linnear path to absolute strength? Powerlifting. Anyone who can lift 225lbs off the floor can’t possibly be in pain. Right??

Hmmm… Not really.

*Here I am, 2014 I thihnk, lifting 225lbs, and I still have problems (I just can’t feel them). Ignore the Five Finger shoes… 😉*

Did getting strong help with my pain? Yes… For a while, but only because I forgot my pain was there.

And then… things started to crumble.

My lower back pain began to flare up after back squats. Pushups would exacerbate my back and shoulder pain. Something as seemingly innocuous as a single leg deadlift, without any weight, produced deep, grindy pain in my right hip and SI joint.

Gradually, I was left with a smaller and smaller pool of exercises that I could actually do pain-free (sort of):

Hip bridges and planks felt OK (and by “OK” I mean didn’t make things worse).

My upper body could only tolerate rows and horizontal pulling (but to be honest, still hurt my shoulders, just not in an existentially threatening way. And the internet said “rows are good for shoulder health”, so I kept at it).

But despite all actual evidence otherwise, I still had faith that strength would set me free. Why?

Strength: An amazing tool to ignore life’s problems

I remember a meditation teacher once said to our class that being busy with something unimportant that feels productive is a form of laziness. Laziness not being limited to simply sitting on one’s butt, but using something as a distraction from what is actually important.

Paradoxically, my laziness manifested as strength training, and it was an amazing way to distract me from facing some of the uncomfortable facts about how I was living my life.

Here’s a few ways I learned that strength training can be used to ignore my body’s (and life’s) problems:

First, when strength is a novel stimuli, it will take center stage.

It’s how our nervous systems are wired. The new physical strength I was building, manifesting as the pleasant body-feeling of power, was so novel as a sensory experience that I was able to push all my noisy joint (and life) pain into the wings.

Too, the novel and productive pain of DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) was a sensation that distracted me from the more subtle, nauseating feeling in my solar plexus. You know, that visceral senes that something’s wrong, but you can ignore it if you keep busy enough?

If my body was tightly gripped in a neuromuscular stress reaction 24 hours a day, I couldn’t tell, because my muscles were constantly sore from working out and I felt powerful. It felt useful.

The pain of building strength was a pain I chose to endure. A pain I can put myself through is preferable to a pain I cannot control, like the pain I had in my spine, hips, and SI joint, to which I felt like a helpless victim.

I’d willingly suffer the micro-trauma to my muscles, rep after rep, knowing that the by-product would be a pleasant, empowering body feeling that could temporarily numb the pain in my joints.

During the grueling, physical exertion itself, endorphins- our natural pain-soothing peptides, circulating into my bloodstream, helped me to numb out the unpleasant feelings in my body.

Strength- building it and languishing in its nice-feeling by-products, was a good diversion from my pain signals. The consequence, however, is that I became disconnected from the afferent signals my body was sending up to my brain about the actual state of affairs: “Monika, you’re just a few steps from self-destruction…”

Second, it felt very productive to occupy myself with learning about how to get strong.

Having let go of my identity as a “dancer”, I craved to replace it with something else. I chose “lifter”. This meant filling my mind with as much information as possible on the subject so I could talk the walk.

Reinforcing an identity feels very productive, doesn’t it? And feeling productive, I discovered, was another great way to ignore that awful feeling in my gut that I was on the wrong path.

So I immersed myself in a pth of intellectual conquest. I read the fitness “literature”. I took courses. I spent countless hours on Youtube becoming indoctrinated with not only WHAT exercises to do, but WHY being strong would make me a better person.

A strong butt, in particular, was directly correlated with a higher moral state. The video below is a good example of this. Why YOU NEED strong glutes:

Beware oversimplifications like this, which cam, ironically, come accross as incredibly complicated. Glutes are no more or less important than any other muscle, unless we place that importance upon them.

Third, through powerlifting I found a sense of acceptance from gym people.

I loved having a supportive crew of powerlifting pals, but if I’m being honest, my lifting crew was enabling me further to use training as an escape from my life.

The trap was that it felt so positive and inspiring. We were each others’ cheerleaders. “Add 5 lbs more!”, “You can do one more rep!”. It all felt very uplifting. But it wasn’t helping me face my facts.

The fact was, unbeknownst to these people I considered my friends, they weren’t actually interacting with Me, they were talking to a sleepwalking representation of who I wanted you to see.

They were talking to a robot with a body moulded to look and perform like a lifter. The conversational content limited to information I’d accumulated about lifting. And by that representation alone I thought friendship could be forged.

The fact is, underneath the image of heavy-ass-weight-lifting person, I had no real social skills- I’d been avoiding developing them by building up this “acceptable” appearance that could compensate for it. And I had no idea.

They could not have known that underneath the persona of lifter, there was nothing even there to interact with. Try to have a conversation with Me, not the lifter, and I would have had nothing to say.

If I look like someone you’d like, isn’t that the same as Being someone you’d like? I don’t have to work at being a friend if I can just look like a person you’d want to be friends with.

They could not have known my hidden motives. It is even possible they were doing it, too.

And lastly, to actually become strong requires discipline, control, and manipulation, which can be addictive

Control and structure feel very productive.

In my addiction to control, I poured all my energy into manipulating every facet of my life that would support my identity of power-lifter, and telling everyone about it:

Keeping a strict training schedule
A strict, “healthy” nutritional plan (aka orthorexia in disguise)
Fine tuned sleep schedule
Avoiding social events that would expose me to “bad” food
Taking supplements
Reading, learning, studying all things to do with strength development.

Sounds all good and healthy, right? Not if you knew it was all a compensation to avoid honestly looking at Me. And the consequences were that I became numb in a new way. Isolated. Out of touch with reality.

The consequence was that I became completely disconnected from my body’s natural state of well-being. I wasn’t healing. I was forcing myself into a persona that wasn’t Me, thinking it would fix me. Becoming more and more split. More numb to my pain.

And in a numbed-out state, any action that feeds an identity is likely to only reinforce becoming more and more numb through that identity.

Today, I’d rather feel my pain and face my facts than be “strong” and numb. But that’s a state that took a long time to accept. And is still a work in progress that takes daily committment.

I’ll end the story here for today. There is more to share another time.

Can you relate?

Have you ever used a movement practice or form of exercise as a distraction from pain, and misinterpreted that distraction as a solution for it?

Have you ever used a solution for your body’s pain as a fix for your life’s problems?

Working for a physical quality: Strength, flexibility, even becoming more “relaxed” using meditation and breathing techniques, can be an escape. A means to feel in control. A way to numb out from the body sensations that are communicating to us that something’s not right.

For example, what if one says “I need to exercise for my mental health!” This may be true…

But perhaps more clarity could come from asking, “What is causing my mental health to suffer and I feel the need to use exercise to correct?” i.e. compensate for.

(Which is not to say that there isn’t evidence supporting exercises’ role in brain health- The book Spark by John Ratey is an excellent book about just that- Just that we ought to be clear on our intentions and honest with ourselves about it).

But we ought to question, is exercise the escape from seeing the root of the problem? The attempt to correct a problem that originally had nothing to do with exercise? A problem that has ntohing to do with being strong or weak or fit in any way? And if you attended to that, would you still feel the need to exercise?

And how does one become grounded in the actual experience of our bodies, without using exercise as a way of pretending to have already attained to that?

These questions, among others, are ones I think I might explore for the rest of my life.

I have more to write on this topic, but that’s another post, for another day. I’d love to hear your thoughts and answers to the above questions, if you’re open to creating this space for honest discussion around our relationships with exercise, and our bodies.

Please leave a comment below! Or shoot me an email! Or follow me on the IG (@monvolkmar), if you’d like to keep this conversation rolling 🙂

Center of Mass Management: A Missing Link in your Assessment Toolkit?

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.

center of mass – Physics of Taekwon-Do — *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.

Bones of the Foot and Their Names | Pivotal Motion Physiotherapy

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.

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

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.

What do you call that part of the Brain that connects the right and the left hemispheres? - Quora

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)

Exercise Addict: The Junky Society Applauds

When I was in my late teens/early 20s I started “exercising” and decided it was the cure for all my body’s (and life’s) problems.

I believed I was too fat (I wasn’t), and this major flaw needed correcting. In my narrow world view (inspired by the dance world) thin people were happier, more successful, and more popular: HSP.

So I created a problem (fatness) that didn’t need fixing (losing weight), and it felt very productive.

But I was unable to ever attain a size small enough that felt closer to HSP.

Where do you go after size 0? 00? 000? How many zeros does happiness have (and I suppose one could say the same about money…)? Every pound lost only led to disappointment that I wasn’t any more happier, succesfful, or popular than before.

My existence had become little more than the correction of my body’s size. My fulfillment was reduced to a hypothetical number. If I can control that number, I can control my life. If I can fix my body, I can fix my life.

As I already wrote about in this post, I’d developed a problem with eating (that is, not doing enough of it), which I can see now as a result of the subtle bullying I was exposed to in my dance training. However, deep down in my bones, I knew there would be terrible long term consequences to my extreme eating restrictions, like, actually dying of starvation. That realization smartened me up enough to change. Sort of…

However, like many eating disordered individuals, I cleverly reasoned that, at one end of the spectrum, if less calories IN was a solution to fatness, more calories OUT was another viable solution at the other extreme. So I turned my strategy 180 degrees: I decided to start using exercise to burn calories. HSP would be mine.

Then, to my dopamine-saturated (or deprived?) brain’s delight, I realized that exercise had an additional benefit starvation did not: I could present an image that the world would accept as “healthy”. I nearly convinced myself of it, too.

Addicted to control

Through exercise, I could control my body. Through my body, I could control peoples’ perception of me.

Jogging was my natural entry point for exercise: Low cost, and you can do it anywhere (even with no shoes, if you’re a little crazy). I adopted the noble persona of “jogger”, and this became my primary method to make myself suffer for my sins of fatness under the clever guise of health.

And people believed it, too. “Look at Monika being healthy and doing exercise! Exercise is good!” they said… I shudder and hope that no one was inspired to copy my “noble and disciplined” ways.

One summer (I must have been about 20) I started training for a triathlon and I fooled everyone, including myself, into thinking it was an authentic expression of a healthy lifestyle. No… It was a clever disguise.

As I reflect on my younger self, I see that I was little more than a living confabulation. A walking (jogging) pretension. And seeing this has taught me to never assume that someone’s motive for engaging in a “healthy” behaviour- diet, exercise, etc., is actually to attain greater health.

“Being healthy” is a great way to camoflauge a deep lack of well-being by pretending to want it, or to already have it.

Eventually, my jogging addiction started to hurt my joints (I was in the habit of going out for compulsive midnight jogs to make up for eating “bad” food).

Let me rephrase that. Jogging wasn’t hurting my joints. Jogging isn’t an inherently melevolant entity out for personal revenge. I was still Me, afterall. And this Me believed that my size was a moral issue requiring correction. I was hurting my joints.

Don’t blame the exercise, blame the exercisER.

But I was like a junkie, addicted to using exercise to manipulate my reality. Take the edge off. I felt powerless to change who I was. But I did have the power to change the drug. Bye bye jogging. I never understood that “runner’s high” thing, anyway.

What new drug did I choose? I’ll get back to that. But first, let’s talk about addiction.

The acceptable addict

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction: Mate, Gabor: 8601300368283: Psychopathology: Amazon Canada

In his book, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, author Dr. Gabor Mate shares stories from his time in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (an area notorious for it’s high levels of drug use/overdose, homelessness, and a range of other problems of social inequlity), working with individuals gripped by drug addiction.

Individuals that could be placed on the far end of an “addict-spectrum”- Physically destructive habits that are definitely not socially acceptable.

In his book, Mate also describes his own struggle with an addiction of a different kind- Compulsively buying classical music.

Benign as that may sound, he compares himself to the alcoholics and substance abusers he worked with. He makes the case that, in the biological sense of the word, he is just as much an addict, ruled by the exact same biochemical patterns in the brain.

The difference? We don’t judge the eccentric lover of classical music in the same way we do the eccentric lover of fentanyl. Maybe we even think it’s cute. Mayeb we even wish we had this quirky affinity for Bach, Tchaikosvky, and Chopin, because isn’t classical music something that smart, sophisticated, “well-adjusted” members of society enjoy?

But an addiction is an addiction is an addiction, at the level of our neuroanatomy

In THIS interview, Dr. Mate describes that addictive behaviour can manifest as anything “...that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves, suffers negative consequences from, and has trouble giving up”.

You may find it preposterous that an “extreme affinity” for classical music could be remotely comparable to a heroin addict’s plight… But I instantly connected with what he was saying: Holy shit. I’M an addict, too.

I am an addict that our cultural values system enables

Because exercise is healthy and good, right?

People perceived my exercise addiction as “good behaviour”, and I felt justified that I’d found the solution for my HSP problem. But I was merely an addict trapped in a compulsive dopamine-driven behavioural loop.

Behavioural addictions that are less biologically destructive and more societally acceptable than opiates, for example, like Dr. Mate’s classical music addiction, or my exercise addiction, are harder to spot, and have an impact of a different kind.

First, there is a wilting of the soul of an individual who knows that every time they “use” they are letting themselves down in a way that hurts like a punch in the gut. That gut-punch-feeling is the visceral sense of failing to take responsibility for onesself. It’s very natural to want to take the edge off it…

The visceral feeling of failure, and shame of failure, prompts further failure-esque behaviour, like the failure to show up for others- as a friend, partner, parent, employee, etc- because we don’t want others to see this sunken state. This increases the sense of distance from the all-important goal of HSP, and creates more “bad” feelings in the body, which can, again, be immediately relieved by “using” more (exercise, music, productivity… name your drug).

I was stuck in a loop like this, failing to see what gave my life real meaning and purpose beyond the illusive quest for HSP. Each day’s fulfillment was built around “When, where, and how will I get my next hit?”.

As one might predict, continuously sacrificing my well-being to fit in with an idea of who believed I needed to be, eventually manifested in physical symptoms. For me, joint pain, hyper-emotionality, and deep-to-the-bone fatigue.

Plus, a contsant fear that I’d be found out as a fraud that made me sick to my stomach (but at least I had exercise to numb those bad feelings out).

If you knew me at this time in my life, you weren’t really meeting Me. You were meeting my costume. I feel a deep need to apologize for the lack of awareness and destruction I inevitably brought to most of these relationships.

Such is the life of a junky…

What’s an addict with knee pain to do?

So to pick the story back up… Here I was, an exercise addict with knee pain. What do I do next?

I could change Me. I could look at why I felt so ruled by the constant need to be happy, successful, and popular. And where I’d learned that my body was the tool for this.

Or I could change drugs. Jogging isn’t doing it for me anymore. What else is out there?

Lacking the perspective, integrity, and support to learn how to go about changing Me (not to mention my incompletely developed pre-frontal cortex… I was only 20!) I chose a new drug.

What new drug could help me correct and forget my life’s (and body’s) problems without hurting my knees? Strength training.

Lifting weights, powerlifting, and all things gym, became my new persona. My new escape. My new costume. HSP will surely be mine…

But I’ll pick that story up in the next blog post. It’s rather long. There is a lot I learned in that new phase of my exercise addiction that I’d like to put into words, and a small chance it may be useful for somebody (you? maybe…) to read.

Would you inquire?

Until next time, perhaps you would like to inquire: Are you like me? Have you, are you, using exercise as a drug?

Could you accept the title of “addict”? Without shame, just as a fact with consequences that need to be observed.

What do you get as a side-effect of exercise? I wasn’t really exercising to be thin, I was seeking what I thought thinness would give me: Happiness. Success. Popularity.

Do you truly love to exercise, or are you using it to feel productive and in control? An escape? A distraction from investigating what’s really important to you? If you think about stopping, do you feel your skin crawling, anxiety building, identity crumbling (that’s withdrawal…)?

Are you fooling yourself, and everyone around you, that your motive for, and outcome of exercise is “health”?

Exercise and play

Am I still an addict? In some ways, yes. But there is a relief in being honest about it. I still use it out of compulsion at times. But now I see it for what it is, and that clarity has been a liberation.

And if I remember what I loved about my body, before I learned to think of it as too big, was that my body was my vessel for physical play.

Before exercise, my body was this awesome, capable, energetic vehicle through which I could play with my friends, and that’s what mattered most. Dig holes in the dirt. Play tag. Build snow forts. Play badminton, frisbee, and frollick in the ocean waves…

But after addiction, my body was a tool to manipulate others into believing I was somebody worthy of their friendship.

And that distinction takes courage to see. Courage I am still building.

It takes courage to inquire. Will you?

Walk Your Neck Well

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?? 😅

Putting the “Bio” Back in Biomechanics

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

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

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

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

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

But then things piled up and escalated. Fast.

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

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

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

I was 21 years old, and I realized…

I am my body’s biggest problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I wasn’t even there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I was praised for it.

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

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

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

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

Why am I getting injured?

WHY is different from HOW.

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

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

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

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

No option but to wake up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t it so great to be supported?

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

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

The rationalizing animal

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gait mechanics to the rescue

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

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

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

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

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

Bio = Life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Process, not puppet

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

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

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

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

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

Waking up the witness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Do My Knees Hurt? A 2 Minute Lesson

Knee pain sucks.

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.

If you liked this little tidbit, you may enjoy the complete 4 day Liberated Body Workshop. More info about that here: monikavolkmar.com/liberated-body-workshop

PS I post stuff like this on my Instagram page sometimes. If you’d like to be my IG pal, I am @monvolkmar

Why Should You Stretch? (part 2)

Why should you stretch? I don’t know… Maybe you shouldn’t. But maybe you should! I can’t possibly tell you what you should do, because your body knows way more about itself, than I know about it 😉

Here’s a quick summary of the points made in Why Should You Stretch? (part 1) (give it a read if you haven’t yet):

Stretching and flexibility seem to be the universal go-to solutions for pain and tightness.
Sometimes, especially if you’re me, stretching makes things feel worse.
Being more flexible doesn’t make you a better person.
Most people (including me) could save their future-selves a lot of time and money and suffering by asking, “why is it tight??“, before scrolling through Instagram for fancy stretches (probably demonstrated by a very attractive-looking, half-naked person with thousands of followers and a free ebook)

After writing part one, the question I got stuck on was why do we silly humans stretch in the first place? This question took me to some interesting existential spaces which may not be useful for 80% of you. Whatever. For the other 20%…

…Why Do We Stretch?

Despite our incredible cortex, opposable thumbs, and abilities to think, reason, and create cool shit, at the base, we humans are wired just like any other animal- With massively over-riding instincts, beyond reason, for sex and survival.

So I got to wondering: Do animals stretch?

Apparently they do, and they do so involuntarily, typically accompanied by yawning in the transition from sleep to wakefulness.

When animals “stretch”, it is referred to as pandiculation, and, according to THIS serves as a way to:

“reset the central nervous system to the waking state after a period of sleep and prepare the animal to respond to environmental stimuli”…

and,

“to maintain the animal’s ability to express coordinated and integrated movement by regularly restoring and resetting the structural and functional equilibrium of the myofascial system...“

A fancy way of saying, “keep shit moving good, like it should”.

Now please enjoy these animal pandiculation videos:

And here is a very satisfying video of a lion yawning:

If you want to read more about pandiculation and how modern humans are using this “primal” wisdom to “reset” their systems, and develop “natural” mobility, go right ahead. I’ve got nothing new to add to that conversation.

My mind wants to know: At what point did humans stop instinctively, pandiculating, and start stretching deliberately? And why? Was this a useful and necessariy transition?

When did the yawny, morning system-reset, become a form of remedial therapy (one that many of us feel guilty about not doing)? Or a means of control? Or a show-offy thing to post about online and have competitions based around?

Yoga competitions still baffle me.

An amazing show of discipline… But I am perplexed by the existence of competitive yoga. Next we’ll have competitive meditation and I will lose all hope for humanity.

Is the move from casual, instinctive pandiculatory movements yet another sacrifice of our evolution from quadruped to biped?

We suppressed our pandiculatory instinct, but gained rocket ships. I’ll leave it to you to judge that however you like.

Did our technological prowess hit a tipping point at which we were able to live with less physical burden? A point at which, with less manual labor, stretching had to become a compartmentalized “thing” to make up for the lack of general movement?

Some people say stretching originated in ancient Greek and Roman times, as a means to train their soldiers.

Or do the origins of modern stretching date back to ancient India, before yoga turned commercial, when it was a means to prepare the body to sit more comfortably for extended periods of quiet meditation (non-competitively…)?

At some point, did stretching became a “thing” to do in addition to living, because we started setting lofty goals for living that were beyond the capacity our bodies currently had?

So could it be that we use stretching to serve the ambitions of our higher brain- the frontal coretex? Whether that be to sit for 12 hours per day to build a piece of life-changing software: Stretching as remediation for sedentarianism (not sure if that’s a real word).

Or whether that be to run a marathon: Physical preparation; preventative care.

Or to get out of the physical pain caused by either of the above: Damage control; emergency care.

I guess it doesn’t really matter. Because its not even about stretching per se, but consciouly noticing when you’re neglecting your body’s needs for healthy movement and responding with the right action. Which may or may not warrant stretching.

Let’s get personal

Let’s make this less about humans, generally, and more about you. Why do YOU personally stretch?

If you keep asking “why” enough times (usually 7 is enough), you can get to the root of any question. So I invite you to try this exercise with me:

Ask yourself, “Why do I stretch?“. And don’t think too hard. Just write the first things that come into your head (below are my answers, yours will hopefully be different, because you are not me):

Monika, why do you stretch? (and let’s just assume for now that I actually stretch)

Because it makes my body feel good. But why?
Because my body feels crusty on days that I don’t stretch, and I like not being crusty and in pain. But why?
Because I’ve had injuries and accidents that have distorted my posture and movement potential, and I need to do something daily to balance things out. But why?
My body is healthier and functions more efficiently when it is more balanced. But why?
Because I’m not in pain, and I can participate in my life without distraction or fear or frustration. But why?
Because life isn’t about being stuck at home shackled to my couch, or bed, passively watching TV, drained of energy. I’ve got stuff to learn, explore, and share, and I need my body to be able to cooperate. But why?
Because my body is a vessel for me to live life in a way that is meaningful to me, participating with my highest values, part of which is that I genuinely love the feeling of moving for moving’s sake.

Ahhh there it is at #7: I want to be free. Free from pain. Free from restricted movement. Free to explore. Free to learn. Free to enjoy moving. Free to participate with my life and what fulfills me in it. (I guess my workshop is called Liberated Body for a reason).

Is this the answer you came to as well? You want to set your body free? Not just because pain is annoying, and it sucks, or you want to be more flexible, but because your body is your vessel for participating in what is meaningful to you?

I think this could be a universal principle. Humans just want to feel free. Physically, existentially…

Note here that I’m not saying stretching will help you find meaning in life. If only it were that easy… Remember, I don’t really like stretching. But I know my reasons WHY I’m doing what I’m doing with my body, so now I can choose wisely what I do with it.

Stretching may or may not be part of your process, but let’s put stretching aside momentarily and look at the question: What does it actually mean to set your body free?

What if discipline is real freedom?

When people say things like, I want my body to feel “free” and “more open”, what does that mean? What are we trying to set our bodies free from? And what does a free body feel like?

Do you want to be free from restricted body movement? Do you want to be free from how you restrict your own body’s movement?

Is freedom to be able move the way you want to, when you want to, free from worry? (like, if you ever wanted to try a handstand without fear of breaking your money-maker…)

Do you want the freedom to NOT move the way you want to? (like, to sit on a plane for 10 hours, or sit to meditate, and not be crippled afterwards)

Does freedom mean the courage to take up a new, random sport, or go for a difficult hike, and trust your body has the basic body mechanics to perform it without injury?

Speaking of basics, is real freedom is having the discipline not to skip past the basics? To put in the tedious, not so enjoyable work now that you know will bear fruit later.

Maybe freedom is having more options for how to move because you put in the basic, foundational work. You can’t paint a masterpiece without doing the rough sketch, first.

Maybe you don’t have the goal to build a skyscraper, but if you limit yourself to building a foundation that will only support a bungalow, you only have that one option. And one option is really no option. And who knows if you might change your mind about wanting that skyscraper 10 years from now?

Image result for krishnamurti think on these things

My favourite definition of freedom so far is from Krishnamurti’s book Think on These Things. I feel that his definition applies particularly nicely to the body, too.

Per Krishnamurti, freedom means (his quoted words in bold):

Not to want to BE anything more than what is. To be free from ambition.

Acceptance of whatever our bodies are experiencing without needing to immediately fix it, or solve the problem. Freedom to sit with the problem long enough to understand it before trying to solve it. Not seeing the body’s limitations as a reason to condemn onesself, but as something to be curious about and explore.

A state in which we are are not acting out of fear or compulsion, not needing to cling to a sense of security or protection.

As it relates to stretching, sometimes we compulsively stretch tight muscles out of fear, because it makes us feel like we’re doing something useful when we don’t know what else to do, because we lack information. That’s what I did with my hamstring. It ended badly.

Not to operate based on traditions or do something just because other people are doing it.

Many sports/movement forms have a traditional way of doing things- Stretch a certain way, warm-up a certain way, not so much because it is useful, but because it’s how it has always been done. Beware tradition.

To be able to understand who you are, and what you are doing, moment to moment.

Being present with our bodies. Moving with awareness, not just mindlessly going through motions. And knowing why you’re doing it. If you understand who you are and what matters to you, you can link any movement practice to your highest values.

And, freedom is not just to be able to do or say whatever you want, or go wherever you wish, but to understand what is happening, and why.

Paradoxically, setting the body free isn’t about doing whatever you want to do with reckless abandon, ignoring the facts (yes, you are free to run that marathon, but what is your body saying about that, really?).

Freedom isn’t ignoring and outsourcing your responsibilites to your body, even though it might feel that way. It’s about disciplining yourself to understand the real demands your body has. Asking, is this right for me based on my body’s current state of affairs? Have I done my foundational work? Do I know why my knee hurts, and am I ignoring it? And putting in the time to do the work to get things moving well again.

Freedom might be taking ownership of our bodies needs- When taking responsibility becomes not what we feel we have to do, but what we actually want to do, and find delight in it, for it’s own sake.

But I don’t want to take responsibility, that sounds like no fun

I 100% relate. Every year at tax time I just want to ignore my responsibilities. I may have learned how to take responsibility for my body, but I’ve got other problems…

Taking responsibility of our body’s needs for healthy movement initially feels like no fun- even scary- because it means looks at how you’ve failed to pay attention to your body. It means seeing just how long you’ve been going in the wrong direction, and how much work it may take to correct that.

If that causes a feeling of overwhelm, you’re not alone. The overwhelm is just a sign you don’t have the information you need to make your first step in a new direction. Get to learnin’!

But its not easy… I had a client tell me that he spent 40 years of his life deliberately dissociating from how his body felt so that he could keep going, doing the things he loved to do, ignoring he was in pain, until one day, after starting to work with me, it became clear that this strategy was no longer going to work, and the reality of just how much work lay ahead of him set in.

OMG I’ve been a bad friend to my body.

Fortunately, I’m pretty good at making befriending-your-body-again process fun (or at least not awful). He is currently doing great. Learning new things about his body every day. In much less pain, able to do the activities he loves with more enjoyment and skill than a few years ago.

A less positive example is a personal training client I had a few years ago. She would ignore when her elbows hurt, yet continues to ask me to put exercises in her program that make her elbows hurt.

She’d say, “it’s fine, I can just work around it”. Even though this was keeping her stuck with sore elbows, she would rather pretend things are ok than understand the root of why her ebows hurt. Her biggest fear is that she’ll stop being able to workout, so she’s clinging to her pushups, and rows for dear life, while the pain is still only tolerable, and not crippling. Ironically, this is the fast track to not being able to workout.

We eventually stopped working together when it became clear that I was not going to enable her. In the end, she confessed that she didn’t believe there was hope that she could ever get out of pain because she was “too old”. She believed she was stuck the way she was, with hurtin’ joints, for life, and that was that. And what could one do or say to change her mind?

Maybe show this amazing video:

And on that inspiring note, perhaps you’d like to sit with these questions:

Why do you stretch? or if you don’t stretch…

Why do you feel like you should stretch?

What does taking responsibility for your body look like for you?

What are your excuses to not take responsibility? (and “I’m too old”, isn’t allowed)

Stay tuned for part 3, which will be a lot more practical, and less philosophical.

Rethinking the Pec Stretch Paragidm

Friday March 19th was the March edition of my monthly, free, Movement Nerd Hangout. Our topic: Make Pals With Your Pecs. (scroll to the bottom to watch the session recording).

*My finest work yet (see more of my face superimposed on anatomical images on my Instagram account: @monvolkmar)*

Those pernicious pecs get blamed for causing a lot of trouble for our posture and shoulder health. In therapy world, most of the solutions involve stretching pecs, digging into the pecs with a ball, and other “myofacial release” strategies.

Back in the day, I used to do a ton of pec stretching and ball rolling and it didn’t change one single thing about how my body felt. Nothing changed until I began to pay attention to the actual motion of the bones and joints that the pecs connect to and manage:

Clavicle (collar bone)
Scapula (shoulder blade)
Humerus (big ol’ arm bone)
Ribcage (and by virtue of that, the spine)

As per Gary Ward’s second rule of movement, joints act, muscles react, we need to show those above bones how to move across their entire spectrum, in all three dimensions, if we want the muscles to do something.

We need real articulation between bones to generate an actual lengthening of muscles. And by virtue of Gary’s first rule, muscles lengthen before they contract, we need a muscle to first lengthen in order to generate it’s best contraction.

Bones moving= muscles get to do something.

Muscles getting to do something= happy body.

It is with this paradigm- what I’ve learned from studying Anatomy in Motion, that I set out to guide a movement-based query into your ability to access three dimensional lengthening and shortening of the pectoral muscles, via actual motion of the structures of your shoulder girdle.

Since I began working with my body in this way, I haven’t done a traditional pec stretch. They usually make my hands go numb… Instead, I simply make sure all my joints can do what their articulating surfaces are set up for, and the muscles seem to take care of themselves.

Anyway, here’s the replay of the full session. Follow along and let me know how it goes 🙂

If you enjoy this style of movement session, you may also like to participate in my online workshop Liberated Body. Its a study of how the human body moves in gait, through 4 exploratory movement sessions, based on the teachings of Anatomy in Motion. I run it live every so often, but you can start learning now by doing it as a home-study, at your own pace.