Stuff I Wrote

Forgive the click-baity title. But its true: You’re probably screwing up hip extension (and I’d wager in more than 10 ways).

It’s not an insult. Garbage hip extension is perfectly normal (trust me, I know). But that doesn’t make it ok to live with…

I’d like to use this blog post to help you reclaim your best hip extension ever. Even if that happens 5 years from now… Get cracking today.

To give you a movement orientation to hip extension, check out this short excerpt from week three of my workshop, Liberated Body. Follow along and see where your hip extension capabilities are at:

FYI my next Liberated Body workshop is coming up Feb 18th! If you liked this clip and found it useful, you’ll love the whole 4 week workshop. 

The 10 most common hip extension errors you might be making

As you followed along with the hip extension movement in the video, were you able to feel lengthening of your hip flexor muscles? Or did you just feel your lower back getting cranky? Or your calf burning? Or or nothing at all…?

Check if you doing/not doing any of the following:

1. Not maintaining a supinated foot, Either by lifting your heel too high and losing forefoot contact on the 1st and 5th metatarsal heads, or rotating your leg internally, leaving you with a pronated foot.
2. Not getting a flat surface at the front of your hip (if it feels more slanted, it’s not extending)
3. Pelvis staying behind your head, instead of moving forward underneath it.
4. Stance is too split apart, pelvis cannnot travel enough onto front foot, and you may end up over-moving from your spine instead.
5. Back knee bends as you move your pelvis forward, which has the effect of flexing your hip instead of extending it.
6. Pelvis starts and stays in anterior tilt, which will also cause that hip to stay flexed.
7. Accessing hip extension with a massive glute contraction, which you shouldn’t need to do. This may indicate how much additional work it is for your body to get into hip extension.
8. Leaning ribcage backwards causing a hyper extension in the lumbar spine (swaybacking it).
9. Leaning torso forwards, thinking that you’re moving your pelvis forward.
10. Assuming that just because your leg is behind you your hip is extended! 

And here’s the confusing part: Just becaues you feel a hip flexor “stretch” it doesn’t necessarily mean your hips are extending well.

But before we get to the nitty gritty technical details of how to get your hips extending like a boss, I’d like to tell you the story of my poor, abused, hips.

The story is called…

Why You Shouldn’t Stretch in Bed

In my less informed days, I remember a dance teacher telling us it was good to sit in the splits for 30 mins at a time. So I did that.

I think one teacher even said that if we were really serious, we’d sleep in the frog position at night. Which I obvisouldy tried, too.

Other silly things dance teachers have suggested include:

• If you’re not in pain you’re not a real dancer.
• Wearing padding in your pointe shoes makes you weak.
• Never, ever, take time off or you’ll lose all your hard earned technique.
• And, always stretch. Always. Stretch. ALWAYS the solution.

I could drop into a split cold. I thought it was a cool party trick. I did a ton of hip flexor stretching, and as such, I thought I had a PhD in hip mobility.

But my hips were still “tight” all the time. I had anterior hip pain. Stretching felt good in the moment, in a palliative way, but never seemed to get me any additional mobility or relieve my tightness.

So I just forced harder (remember, dance teacher said ALWAYS STRETCH and pain is good).

Looking back on my hip flexor stretching efforts, I had at least 10 different ways to make it feel like my hips were extending, all of which were clever ways to avoid moving my actual hips by moving every other part of my body instead. 

So instead of extending my hips better, I was just compressing my lumbar spine with more resolve than ever before (see above photo). This is a factor in why I had so many lower back injuries (along with trying to show off in yoga classes).

The moral of the story is that stretching more and stretching harder didn’t help improve my hip tightness or range of motion. Quite the opposite: It reinforced all the other non-hip-motion strategies I’d unconsiously found in a naive attempt to stretch my tight hip flexors.

Promise me you will learn from my mistakes?

If you are like me- hip extension challenged- I hope this blog post helps you to find your truest, cleanest hip extension. 

And guess what… It’s not all about stretching your hip flexors.  

What is hip extension? 

If you Google “hip extension”, this is the first image that pops up:

More commonly appreciated in the guise of the all-mighty “hip flexor stretch”, hip extension is a joint motion that refers to the opening of the space at the front of the hip.

With each step we take our rear hip needs to extend well for efficient gait.

I can’t ever take for granted that all readers of this blog know what the hip is, or reference it in the same way. Not since I had a chat with a student who stated, “What are you talking about, Monika?? The hip IS the same thing as the pelvis.”

No it is not… 

The hip joint is the space between which the femur (leg bone), and the pelvis meet. 

The joke in my movement nerd fam is that the hip is actually nothing. As it is nothing, it does nothing.

The two bones- femur + pelvis- are the actual moving structures of the hip. How we name the motion of the hip is based on the relative motion of those two bones and the resultant change in space between them.

In hip extension, the bottom portion (foot end) of the femur moves behind (posterior to) the pelvis, with relatively little motion of the pelvis itself.

To name the bones’ motions, we could say the pelvis is doing a posterior tilt, and the femur is doing an anterior tilt, opening the space at the front of the hip.

So just tucking under your pelvis, squeezing your glutes, or getting into a deep lunge with your leg way behind you are not sufficient criteria to create an actual extension of the hip. We need the articulating surfaces of the two bones to experience real motion between them.

It sounds simple enough in theory. But in practice, oh man is it ever easy to screw up.

This leads us to another important techincal detail…

What’s the difference between a “hip flexor stretch” and accessing hip extension? 

A hip flexor stretch is the lengthening of hip flexor muscles. 

Hip extension is the joint motion that should result in hip flexor length when done correctly.

The two sound similar, but have different intentions, teach the body different things, and have very different outcomes. 

The irony is that one can find a hip flexor stretch without actually moving the hip joint. But it doesn’t feel very good because it means that you are over-moving another part(s) of your body in an attempt to put length into those hip flexors! (ie everything desribed in my story at the beginning of this post)

For example, over-extending your lumbar spine, over tucking your pelvis, leaning your ribcage way back, splitting your legs really, really wide apart and squeezing your butt, or any of the 10 things I listed earlier.

Another piece of the irony is that our hips only have up to about 10 to 20 degrees of actual extension. Finding those elusive degrees isn’t about making the movement bigger, but making it more precise and accurate.

Size is not the problem 😉 Accuracy and specificity are.

Eccentric load vs. hip flexor stretching: What’s the diff?

Eccentric load (or eccentric muscle contraction) is when the two bones of a joint are moving away from each other, and the muscle that spans those two bones must contract in it’s lengthening state to decelerate them moving away from each other.

However, the force of the bones moving away is greater than the ability for the muscle to contract to pull them together. All the muscle can do is slow down how fast the bones are moving apart.

(This is why eccentric muscle training tends to cause a lot more DOMS than concentric contractions, FYI.)

So one could say that the ability for a muscle to load eccentrically ensures a certain feeling of safety for the body in motion, because it is preventing a joint from opening too far for comfort, into a potential danger zone.

Gait (walking) is a predominantly eccentric muscle experience- Muscles decelerating joint movement, then contracting back.

Most muscle strain injuries are a result of a muscle’s inability to load eccentrically in response the force of the movement being undertaken. In fact, that’s exactly how I strained my hamstring: Over-stretching forcefully while warming up for dance class. *POP* Careful with those splits, guys…

This is why in Anatomy in Motion we consider the ability for the body to experience eccentric tissue load with joint movement to be so crucial. Not as a “stretch”, but as an indicator of healthy management of joint motion and efficiency in gait.

Joints act, muscles react, and muscles lengthen before they contract.

With each step you take, joints move, muscles respond to decelerate movement, and then contract back to move the joint back in the opposite direction.

This is a very different intention for a muscle than what my dance teachers had in mind: Stretch it into submission.

In an eccentric load, we are asking the muscle to respond back with a contraction.

In a stretch, we are asking the muscle to do nothing.

This was one of my biggest paradigm shifts when I began my AiM studies: We are not simply stretching muscles to get more mobility or flexibility, but we are showing the body how to access a joint motion in it’s correct context in gait, which should result in the muscle experiencing an eccentric load.

We don’t just want to tug on a muscle and over-ride the stretch response, because the intention of the eccentric muscle action is to contract that muscle back again, not make it longer and stay there. 

An eccentric load is an educational experience for the body.

If we are trying to access hip extension in the context of gait, we want to feel the hip flexors under eccentric load- not static stretch- which should give them no option but to contract back from their most lengthened position.

And where do they contract to take the hip? Into hip flexion! 

So what are we trying to teach our body with an eccentric load of the hip flexors, by virtue of true hip extension? To flex the hip.

This answer adds even more irony: Practicing hip extension isn’t necessarily to give you more mobility, or longer hip flexors, but to show your body how to better flex your hips.

When does hip extension happen in gait?

Hip extension, as a position, is a snapshot in time of your leg behind your body.

But as a motion in gait, hip extension doesn’t start and end with your leg behind you with the hip already stretched open. Hip extension starts the milisecond after the hip is fully flexed.

Hip extension begins when your leg is in front of you, and continues building until it ends up behind you, the moment when your foot swings forward again.

Remember the rule: Muscles lengthen before they contract.

Just as hip flexion is reliant on hip extension to eccentrically load the hip flexors and contract the hip into flexion, hip extension is reliant on being able to flex the hip with the leg in front of you, eccentrically loading the hip extensors, which then receive the stimulus to contract and bring the hip into full extension. 

(sorry, that paragraph was hard on my brain, too…)

So paradoxically, if you only have time to do one exercise to help your hips extend better, I personally would choose to work on my access to hip flexion instead of taking them directly into extension.

How can you tell if you’re actually extending your hip?

Your muscles are the best indicator for actual joint motion. Can you feel the hip flexors loading/lengthening?

Remember Gary Ward’s other rule: Joints act, muscles react. 

You will feel a hip flexor “stretch” if the surfaces of the pelvis and femur are actually articulating against each other, generating length (eccentric load) in the tissues spanning that joint space. 

What muscles? Anything that crosses the front of the space between the pelvis and femur, aka the hip flexors:

• Psoas major
• Iliacus
• Tensor fascia latae
• Adductors pectineus, longus, brevis, and the anterior portion of magnus
• Rectus femoris
• Sartorius

Here is an excellent video by Gary Ward, showing how the psoas, one of the most famous hip flexors, lengthens in three dimensions in gait to decelerate the forwards motion of the body through space.

Hip extension is just one dimension of the phases in which your leg is behind you in gait. Note how there are two other planes of motion to consider- Frontal and transverse plane, but that’s a topic for another time.

Also remember, hip extension STARTS from a flexed hip. What muscles do we consider to be the main extensors of the hip? Glutes and hamstrings. So we also want to be able to find eccentric load in those muscles to get our best hip extension.

I covered this in the November Movement Nerd Hangout: Wake Up Your Butt. It’s all about how to access hip flexion, which you now know is crucial for hip extension, too. Check out the full 60 minute session and technical write-up here. 

Conclusions?

Clean, honest hip extension means the joint surfaces of the two bones- femur and pelvis- need to articulate with each other, not move as one clump.

A hip flexor stretch is not the same thing as accessing hip extension cleanly.

A hip flexor stretch is not the same thing as loading the hip flexors eccentrically.

Hip extension starts from the moment your hip finishes fully flexing, not as the snapshot of a stretched open hip. 

In gait, hip extension must happen within a set of parameters that include foot supination, knee extension, pelvis posterior tilt, and center of mass moving forwards through space.  Change one thing, and you change everything.

There are more than 10 ways to screw up hip extension, but if you remember one thing: Never assume that just because your leg is behind you your hip is extending.

That’s it for now! It always amazes me how much I can write about one thing… It’s not a talent, it’s a real problem.

Let me know what came up for you. How is your hip extension? Shoot me a message and let me know!

I hope this was interesting and useful for you, and aids you on your journey to inhabiting your body with more ease and joy 🙂

Every month I do a free movement session to help you understand a part of your body better.

Friday Nov 20th the topic of the monthly Movement Nerd Hangout was Wake Up Your Butt.

Before I go on and on in typical long-winded Monika fashion, check out the full 75ish minute session on Youtube:

SIDE NOTE: Interestingly, despite doing very little to promote it, this hangout, and being very, very tired on go-day, this session got the most positive response and highest attendance to date. Must be the magical allure of the glutes. After all, who can resist the promise of a stronger butt, more functional butt, and less irritating pain in the butt.

The rest of this blog post will be the technical/conceptual summary of the session.

Let’s begin with some basic functional anatomy…

Anatomy of your butt 101

(excluding sphincters, pelvic floor muscles, and your butt’s role in elimination…)

You have three glute muscles: Glute maximus, glute medius, and glute minimus.

Not to be confused with this silly depiction of the glutes show below.

The glute muscles cross the hip joint, managing the motion of the pelvis and the femur.

The hip joint has lots of triplanar motion, which the glutes respond to by either shortening or lengthening. Here’s what the glute max does during each hip motion:

However, glutes become tricky when we look at what they actually do in gait. During some phases the glutes can be long in two planes, and yet short in another! Muscles can be confusing…

For example, in the loading phase of gait- when the front foot pronates and our entire bodyweight is on it (aka suspension phase, in AiM) we have the following:

And so at this point we shall switch gears from the traditional “what does that muscle do?” conversation…

Gary Ward’s First Two Rules of Motion

If you haven’t already read What The Foot, this is a good place to start to learn more about Gary’s 5 rules of motion.

The first two rules are very important for our glute discussion:

Rule 1: Joints act, muscles react

Rule 2: Muscles lengthen before they contract.

In gait, our muscles react to the movement of our bones and joints as we journey forward through space, from one foot to the next.

Walking is a predominantly momentum-based activity in which the role muscles contribute most strongly is to decelerate joint movement- Load up muscles like a slingshot, which then contract to move the bones in the opposite direction, then go on slack to let momentum do the rest. 

From this perspective, the solution to a sleepy butt is not just to squeeze it.

In gait, we do NOT want our muscles to only be concentrically contracting (shortening) to pick up our limbs and ambulate, which is a more energetically costly walking strategy. And we definitely don’t want to micro-manage every muscle contraction consciously.

Just think about the last time you had to walk in knee-high snow, and the feeling of having to contract your hip flexors more than necessary with each step. Tiring!

Unless you have a pair of snowshoes…

Think of muscles as managers of joint motion.

In gait, joints act, muscles react: Muscles manage the joint they cross by decelerating the motion of the bones that just moved into them, and sending them back the opposite direction, which generates our forwards locomotion. 

In efficient gait, glutes come alive, unconsiously, when the hip moves in such a way that lengthens them, providing the stimulus to contract back in the other direction.

This is important because each footstep you take contains all the building block joint motions that underlie every other movement pattern a human can do. If your hips can move with all their innate options, and glutes can load unconsciously while you walk, trust that your body has a much better chance of accessing them in all other activities.

Like deep-snow country snowshoeing

Now let’s apply this to the glutes, which manage the motion available at the hip.

What motions of the hip do the glutes manage? 

In any textbook or anatomy app, you’ll get the list of concentric joint actions a muscle does- What happens to the joint when that muscle shortens.

But you’ll probably never get the list of joint actions that muscle decelerates.

Key point: In gait, a muscle’s most important role is what it does eccentrically- A contraction while the muscle is lengthening.

Key question: What joint actions causes eccentric loading of the glutes?

Concentrically, the textbooks tell us that, at the hip joint, glute max will do:

• Extension
• Abduction
• External rotation

Which means that to eccentrically load the glute max (in accordance with the rules joints act, muscles react, and muscles lengthen before they contract), we need the hip to do the opposite:

• Flex
• Adduct
• Internally rotate

These three motions would lengthen glutes, which would then stimulate them to contract and create extension, abduction, external rotation, pushing us along our merry way.

So…

Flexing the hip gives no option but for glute max to generate hip extension

Adducting the hip gives no option but for the glute max to generate hip abduction

Internally rotating the hip blah blah blah hip external rotation.

So the question is not, “how many reps of side-lying clamshells should I do to activate my glutes?”, but rather “Can both of my hip joints access flexion, adduction, and internall rotation?”

Because if the hip joint can do those three motions, the glutes should have no option but to contract! 

Now of course there are many more muscles that cross the hip, which means we have a choice: Try to micromanage individual muscles OR, move the one hip joint in such a way it stimulates all said muscles to perform their role.

In Gary Ward’s words (from the Closed Chain Biomechanics of the Lower Limb course):

Looking at a single joint- the hip, will give us movement in every single muscles that is attached to it. So rather than thkning of working with 10 different muscles, we can still just focus on quality of movement in one joint.

It’s a great course FYI. And you can get continuing education credits at last!

Why do butts go to sleep?

The million dollar question: Why did your butts go “asleep” in the first place?

“Sleepy glutes” is a popular buzz term, and I am now guilty of propagating it (#marketing, yo). Calling any muscle “asleep” is a bit of an over-simplification.

Muscles don’t “sleep” exactly. They don’t have a REM cycle 😉 But they do adhere to the “use it or lose it” principle, and “joints act” is the “use it” that keeps us from losing our glute reaction.

Muscles “fall asleep” when we stop moving the joints they cross! Stop giving them anything to do, and they stop doing anything.

Most people’s technical solution to “waking up” a muscle is to repetitively contract it. Endless glute-squeezy activation drills. Thank you Jane Fonda.

However, you can squeeze your butt all day and it might not result in any actual new joint motion.

Try it: You can squeeze your butt without moving your hips. But if you move your hip, you give your glutes no option but to respond.

Give the glutes no option but to contract

Imagine you’re 8 years old again, and it’s Christmas morning.

You’re wide awake and ready to open the presents under the tree, but Dad’s still half asleep because it’s at 5am on a Sunday and he just came back from working in the coal mines to buy you said presents (you ingrateful punk).

But you don’t care about Dad’s back-breaking manual labour, so you poke Dad over and over hoping he’ll wake up so you can open presents and eat candy for breakfast.

Well, poking Dad more won’t make him want to wake up, he’ll just get pissed off and want to stay in bed. Poking doesn’t provide the right incentive to change Dad’s behaviour. 

However you can give him no option but to wake up, by setting the Christmas tree on fire.

That’s the action that will stimulate sleepy ol’ Pops to move! 

Maybe this is a bad analogy, but what we want to do is stop poking Dad incessantly (squeezing glutes over and over), and instead create an environment in which he is given no choice but to wake up. Cruel… But does the job 😉

So how do we light that Christmas tree fire for your glutes? Create an environment that gives your glutes no option but to contract.  

Hip joint acts, glutes react. 

If the hip joint isn’t actually moving, the glutes won’t respond. This has nothing to do with how flexible or stiff you are. No actual motion of the hip= no glute reaction.  

Stop blaming your muscles

Far too often we blame muscles as the primary cause of our problems. But(t) unless there was direct trauma generating scar tissue (like sitting on a nail, a surgery, etc) it’s probably not orignally the muscle’s fault. 

Even a muscle strain might not originally be the muscle’s fault. After all, it was only doing what the joint’s access to it’s own motion permitted it to do.

Remember, in gait, the muscle’s role is to simply react to what the skeleton is capable of doing.

So don’t blame your glutes, they’re doing the best they can given their environment (aka the joint’s movement potential). Ask instead, “What might be preveniting my hip from moving?”

Well I don’t know what might be preventing YOUR hip joint from accessing it’s movement potential.

It could be a learned movement patterning based on a sport or skill.

Maybe an ankle sprain that makes you not want to put weight on that leg- and if you can’t put weight on a leg when you walk the hip joint isn’t going to move.

Or maybe you just sit a lot and literally just don’t move your hips.

Whatever the case may be, I hope this inspires you to to think and work with your hips and glutes in a new way.

Conclusions?

Muscles can be confusing, but if you can get your hip to move in all three planes, your glutes will have no option but to contract.

In gait, we are more interested in eccentric muscle action, because this is what most effectively stimulates a muscle to contract and move us forward.

Gait contains all the building block joint motions. Accessing glute function in the context of gait, by virtue of quality hip movement, opens the door of opportunity to use dem glutes in all other activities and exercises, unconsciously.

Ask not, how mnay reps of X-Magical-Glute-Exercise I should I do, and instead, seek to understand what could be preventing your hips from accessing tri-planar motion?

Now go any do all the glute things your heart desires 🙂 Do your squats, and glute bridges, barbell hip thrusts, clamshells, and side-lying leg raises, and trust you actually got glutes to squeeze.

Did you do the full movement session? Did you find it useful?

Did you find your glutes in all of the exercises? Was there one plane of motion that was harder than the other? Easier on one leg than the other? Shoot me an email or leave a comment below to share your experience 🙂

Let me know how it went 🙂

Last Friday my weekly Movement Deep Dive session was all about calcaneal motion: Let Your Heel Bone Slide!

Before you read the rest of this blost, take a moment to get in the mood with da Maestro himself:

I’m not sure WHICH of the 33 vertebrae Maestro is referring to by “backbone”… But for today I will opportunistically pretend he’s talking about the pelvis (including the 9 total vertebrae of the sacrum and coccyx), because that makes for a smoother segway into today’s topic…

A movement detective’s comprehensive guide to calcaneal motion!

In today’s post and series of six tutorial videos, we’ll be covering:

1. What is the heel bone (calcaneus)?
2. What motions does this bone do in three dimensions when we walk? And can your calcaneus access those triplanar motions?
3. How should calcaneal motion couple with pelvis and skull motion in the gait cycle for more ease and efficiency?
4. Could a movement restriction at your calcaneus be impacting on movement of your pelvis of skull (reducing or liberating)?

If you don’t want to read, simply follow along with the videos and explore your own calcaneal motion- The embodied learning approach is better anyway 😉

But first… The basics.

What is the calcaneus?

The calcaneus is the big sturdy bone at the back of your foot.

It articulates with the talus above, the cuboid on the lateral side, and the navicular on the medial side.

Its the bone that first meets the ground in the heel strike phase of gait, so it has a nice cushy layer of fat to help it absorb the shock from each foot step.

The achilles tendon, plantar fascia, along with 9 muscles of the foot and lower leg attach to the calcaneus, including soleus and gastrocnemius (the two big juicy calf muscles).

So whenever there is an issue with any of those muscles, like achilles tendinitis, plantar fasciitis, or any other “itis” of the foot, we should get on our detective hats and look at how well the calcaneus can move.

Got a big toe issue, like a bunion? Hammer toes? Limited big toe extension? Other weird toe stuff I’ve never heard of?? The infamous flexor hallucis longus (flexor of the big toe) does not actually attach to the calcaneus, but has its own special groove that runs along the medial side of the calcaneus, behind the sustentaculum tali.

Your calcaneus should be able to move in three dimensions while you walk so that all it’s attaching musculature and tissues can lengthen and contract with every step you take.

Motion of the calcaneus, and its neighbour the ankle, also play an important role in venous return– Pumping the blood back up to the heart, because gravity makes that a little harder.

One reason people may get varicose veins is because of an increase of blood pressure in the venous system because the blood isn’t pumping effectively back up to the heart. Making sure the heel and ankle complex can move optimally to prevent venous blood backflow can reduce the chance of varicosity and distortion of the veins.

So… Calcaneal motion is kind of important!

Unfortunately many of us have restrictions in one or more planes of calcaneal motion (me included!), which can lead to a multitude of whole body issues, not only locally at your foot.

What if your heel bone can’t slide?

As mentioned above, one could experience any number of effects, ranging from local stuff such as a knee issue or plantar fasciitis, to distal issues like neck restriction and discomfort (stay tuned for how to assess that in part 6 of this calcaneal motion 101 video series).

The following two videos are clips, from Friday’s Let Your Heel Bone Slide session, to acquaint you with your calcaneus.

And now let’s take a look at the tri-planar movements your calcaneus ought to be able to do, and how to name them. We’ll be using the same langauge we’d use to name the movement of the pelvis (if you took my Liberated Body workshop, or are an Anatomy in Motion student, this will be familiar):

Being able to name and feel the motions a part of your body should be able to do is important in healing our bodies, and re-patterning movement. However, a barrier can be that every school of thought seems to use their own preferred anatomical langauge, and when everyone’s using different words to describe the same movements it can be super confusing!

The nomenclature I chose may not be the most “text-book-technical” anatomical verbiage, or sound fancy, but it is accurate and specific to describing the bone’s motion. So for those of you who are interested, here’s a little “univeral translation” chart:

TRIPLANAR CALCANEAL MOTION:

I really don’t care what words you use. You can make up your own terms, as long as you and your body know what’s happening.

Also note that in the video I am exagerating the size of calcaneal motions. In reality, they are much smaller. Calcaneus motion also happens concurrently with motion of the rest of the foot (and the rest of the body…), not in isolation, to give us pronation and supination.

Let’s move along and look at how the backbone and heel bone slide together.

What motion relationship do the calcaneus and pelvis have in gait?

This is where can start to have a little fun (if you’re a movement nerd like me).

The pelvis and calcaneus have a specific movement relationship in gait that should happen unconsciously for efficiency with each step.

Before I say more, check out this next clip:

In case you didn’t watch the video: When you walk, your calcaneus, pelvis, and skull move in the same directions, in all three planes of motion, at all times. Cool right?

So…

When your pelvis rotates right (which happens whenever you step forwards with your left leg), both heel bones, and your skull should also be rotating to the right right.

When your pelvis anteriorally tilts, so too should your calcaneus and skull.

Now, I know you’re dying to check and see if these movement relationships are present for your body, right? 😉

The next three videos are guided check-ins will help you do that:

• #1 How well can your calcaneus move?
• #2 How well does your calcaneus move in harmony with your pelvis?
• #3 How could a lack of calcaneal motion impact (restrict or liberate) motion at your pelvis and skull?

Calcaneus movement check-in

This first little check-in is to feel if your calcaneus moves appropriately while you are weight-bearing onto your leg.

Could you feel the movement from back, outside corner to front-inside corner of your heel when you bent your knee? Or did you skip right forwards into your forefoot and toes?

Now let’s bring your pelvis into the equation…

Pelvis and calcaneus movement check-in

In this next video, we’ll be checking in to see if your pelvis and calcaneal movements are synced up for ease and flow as you walk.

It’s not enough just to be able to move your calcaneus on its own. Does it move in the right relationship with your pelvis? Follow along and see what you find:

Are your pelvis anterior and posterior tilts synced up with your calcaneus anterior and posterior tilts? How about the hikes, drops, and rotations? What’s missing from your movement map?

Lastly, let’s tune in to see if your calcaneal motion has an impact up the chain, at your pelvis, neck, and skull.

How does calcaneal motion impact on neck motion?

What if a movement restriction at your calcaneus, due to an old ankle sprain for example, could be related to a movement restriction at your neck?

This final video is by far the most fun to play along with! Give yourself 10 minutes to geek out on how movement of your heel could be influencing stuff all the way up to your neck:

My personal findings:

To use me as an example, in the chance it helps you interpret your own data…

If I prop my calcaneus into more anterior tilt it frees my neck in both flexion and extension in the sagittal plane.

When I nudge my left calcaneus into a left hike- outside edge higher, more pressure on the inside edge (ie eversion) my neck motion into lateral flexion to the right (left skull hike) feels much happier.

So when I give my calcaneus(es) (calcanei?) back what’s missing, it has a positive effect on structures above.

So could it be that a “neck problem” might have a component to it that involves the foot?

Could it be that a hip problem is related to a heel that can’t move?

These things are good to know so we can approach any issue at one part of the body as a whole body issue.

This has become the over-arching intention of my Movement Deep Dive sessions: Let’s understand, explore, and restore the body’s potential for movement, one part at a time. Zooming in, zooming out, and integrating it all as a whole.

Conclusions?

Your calcaneus moves in three dimensions as you walk. Unless it doesn’t 😉

This three dimensional motion should occur in a specific interaction with pelvis and skull motion: Your heel, pelvis, and skull travel in the same direction, in all three planes, with every step you take.

A neck restriction could be related to a calcaneal motion restriction, and wouldn’t you want to know abut that? I sure would, so I can stop stretching my neck and get to the real root of the issue.

If you would like to learn even more about foot mechanics and how to use your “calcaneus influecing tools” more effectively, I recommend you check out Gary Ward’s online course Wake Your Feet Up. You’ll even get a set of official AiM wedges mailed to you, and more instructions for how to use them. But in the meantime, I’ve found that socks and towels work just fine 😉

This leads us into to one final important question regarding footwear..

Are you wearing shoes that could be messing with your pelvis and neck?

It’s quite possible…

If a foot motion restriction could lead to a neck restriction, then could a shoe that restricts foot motion also restrict motion elsewhere? For sure!

In fact, I have a system you can use to check that out for yourself.

My inaugural monthly Movement Nerd Hangout in September was dedicated to testing out whether your shoes or orthotics are working for you, or messing with your body.

Check out the entire 90 minute session, Are Your Shoes Working For You? for free, and get the PDF handout I created to test and document allll of your shoes.

That’s it for today folks 🙂 I hope you had fun exploring your bones and practicing your DIY movement detective skills with me today.

Feel free to share this blog post and video series with people in your life with stiff feet, or if you think it offers a useful perspective. And let me know what you discovered about YOUR calcaneal motion when you have a spare moment 🙂

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