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.
The general vibe I get lately is that a lot more folks are open to the idea that pronation of the foot is actually useful. This is fantastic. In much thanks to the work of Gary Ward and all the amazing Anatomy in Motion peeps around the globe.
Some of you might even own the ubiquitous AiM wedges to help your feet pronate more happily
I even got a delightful message last week from a lady asking how to help her daughter pronate her feet better.
Wow!
A few years ago nobody was asking how to pronate better. They (me included…) were condemning it and asking how to strengthen their collapsed arches. Preaching to push knees out over 5th toe. Walking on the outsides of their feet as a solution for over-pronation.
Times are changing, and I’m optimistic for humanity… Well, mostly.
But in all fairness, in Canada we have a “May 24 weekend”, that doesn’t always land on May 24, but we still call it that… I don’t get the logic.
With pronation coming out of purgatory, embraced by the masses, let’s not forget that it is just one of two complimentary extremes on a spectrum. Just because one is trending and useful, not to forget the other.
Like when someone says “too many carbs are bad, go low carb!”, what do we do? EAT NO CARBS EVER because they are bad.
Or when someone says “you should eat more fibre because it keeps you regular”, what do you do? EAT 5LBS OF BRUSSEL SPROUTS EVERY DAY, because more is better.
Not that I’ve ever had problems with nuance, extremism, and carb-confusion. Not me. No way.
All that to say, let’s embrace pronation but…
DON’T FORGET THERE’S THAT OTHER THING THE FOOT DOES
Supination is still important. Always will be.
Pronation and supination are a both/and combo, not an either/or.
Doing something in an extreme, one-sided way should be practiced deliberately, like a medicine to restore balance. And an extreme medical intervention should not be permanent…
The goal isn’t to only work on pronation forever, but to be constantly re-evaluating what balance means, and choose foot exercises with a clear intent.
So please, at the risk of pronating the crap out of our feet becoming the next “trendy” thing to do that gets grossly misinterpreted, people get hurt from it, and pronation becoming demonized yet again, remember that the main benefit of pronation is actually to help better supinate the foot.
This blog post is to offer a bit more info on supination of the foot:
What it is.
What is isn’t.
Can you do it well?
And what’s its relationship with pronation?
TWO FOOT SHAPES REVIEW
There are two main shapes the foot can make: Pronation, and supination.
Here’s a slide from day two (foot day) of my workshop, Liberated Body, to describe what to look for in an embodied experience of pronation and supination. Notice how they are the opposites:
Every movement the body can do takes place on top of either a pronating or supinating of foot, depending on the moment in time in the gait cycle.
Some movements of the body happen only on a pronated foot, some happen on only a supinated foot, some happen on both, and some can happen on both but we don’t want to ever move that way if we value our joints…
For example, a hip can flex while the foot is pronating or supinating. Both happen in gait and are healthy, useful options.
Here is me flexing my left hip and *trying* to pronate my foot: Two motions which happen together in the loading phase of gait.
Here is me trying to flexi my left hip with a supinated foot (which happens in heel strike in gait)
However, hip extension should only happen on top of a supinating foot in gait.
This is helpful to know so that when you’re doing exercises to work on hip flexion and extension you can accurately sync up your body with your feet.
If we’re not moving in consideration of the hip’s relationship with the foot, then we’re not actually teaching the body to do anything new. We’re just moving a hip in isolation from its role with the rest of the body.
(There are many more examples of this, and if you’d like to learn more about foot/hip things, I recommend Gary Ward’s online course, Closed Chain Biomechanics of the Lower Limb).
MORE THAN JUST SHAPES…
Pronation and supination are best considered as verbs, not nouns.
They are words to describe very specific patterns of movement that all 26 moving bones and 33 joints of the foot do, in three planes of motion.
Lots of bones down there folks!
Anything other than these specific patterns must be called something other than pronation and supination. If even one bone is going the wrong direction, it’s in foot purgatory. This degree of specificity is important.
(and if you have slightly OCD tendencies, you will love studying AiM.)
As verbs, the body should have dynamic access to both options end of the foot motion spectrum, never stuck in one or the other.
Now let’s dial in on supination.
WHAT IS FOOT SUPINATION?
First, follow along with this demo, which is the supination self- check from day 2 of Liberated Body:
So… Do your feet supinate well?
Here’s what we’re looking for as a felt experience of supination:
All arches of the foot rising
Foot shortening and narrowing
Foot pressure distribution travelling to posterior lateral heel
Joints on dorsal (top) and lateral (outside) of foot opening
Muscles under the arch shortening
Muscles on dorsal, lateral foot and ankle lengthening
THREE POINTS OF FOOT TRIPOD ON THE GROUND (otherwise it’s not a real supination)
Could you feel all of that happening?
WHAT IS SUPINATION NOT?
Supination is NOT “arch strengthening”.
Supination refers to motion between the bones of the feet. Actual moving joints. Not just contracting foot muscles to strengthen them.
You can strengthen a muscle without actually articulating the bones in a new way. You can only strengthen muscles within the constraints of your current options for joint movement.
Interestingly, arch strengthening drills like towel scrunching and practicing “short foot” may even block your ability to supinate well.
Whilst towel srcunching, you may be inadvertently pressing your big toe into the ground to grip the towel. Alas… Big toe flexion is actually part of the collection of motions that happen in foot pronation. Oops!
If you’re squeeezing with your big toe, it ain’t supination anymore
I appreciate the valiant goal of the short foot exercise, however the foot is still being treated in isolation from the rest of the body, inconsiderate of the specifc pattern of triplanar motion that is supination. In particular, the rotational component of supination (transverse plane) is lost, which you can see (rather, not see…) in the video below.
I have no doubt you can strengthen your foot muscles and get better at short-footy, towel-scrunchies, but does that equate to moving those feet differently, unconsiously, whilst walking? And consider them in relation to the rest of the body?
Supination is NOT the same as rolling to the outside of your feet.
That is just losing the tripod, which means you’re log-rolling the foot as a whole chunk, versus being able to articulate all joints with each other.
Remember, if you lose the tripod- 1st metatarsal contact, it is no longer supination. It’s inversion (aka how many ankle sprains happen).
Loss of 1st met head contact= inversion: Aka oh shit there goes my ankle again!
It’s the difference between moving a collection of bones as a unit, through space, and moving the bones against each other, in one place, articulating on the ground.
Supination is NOT the same as having high arches.
You can have high arches but ankles that are actually internally rotated!
Remember, as I hope you experienced in the supination check-in video above, we want the ankle to externally rotate with a supinating foot. But many folks with high arches actually have internally rotated ankles!
Foot purgatory. Neither here nor there…
AN INTERDEPENDENT RELATIONSHIP
Pronation and supination together can be considered as a spectrum of movement we perpetually move through as we walk.
They are Yin and yang. They are the opposite and complimentary movement of the other. They are interdependent, not independent.
Pronation relies on supination. Supination relies on pronation. Mess with one, and you impact the other.
In pronation, all the muscles that supinate the foot (primarily muscles attaching under the arch) get loaded eccentrically (stretched like an elastic band), providing the necessary stimulus to contract them, pick up the arch, and generate a healthy supination.
This includes some lovely muscles like:
Flexor hallucis longus
Tibialis posterior
Peroneus longus
Tibialis anterior
Soleus
Gastrocnemius
Et al.
Loading up these muscles generates the stimulus for supination.
Then the foot can start pronating again from it’s fully supinated position, instead of still being half-way (or all the way) pronated. This gives the foot more time before the arch completely lowers on the ground, preventing us from “over-pronating”, the foot crashing into the floor too quickly.
As a bad analogy, imagine if Johnny starts the 100m dash from the 50m line… He’s going to get to the finish line a lot faster than everyone else. But if your foot is like Johnny, starting to pronate from an already 50% pronated place, it will hit its full range a lot faster.
Johnny is like an over-pronating foot.
Healthy pronation sets up an environment for a healthy supination by virtue of muscular contraction.
Healthy supination sets up an environment for healthy pronation by virtue of allowing more time for pronation to take place within.
CONCLUSIONS?
Don’t forget, in your excitement about pronation, that supination is important, too.
A main goal of pronation is actually to help your foot supinate.
A high arched foot is not the same thing as a supinated foot.
If you lose 1st metatarsal head contact (tripod), it is no longer supination.
Pronation and supination are interdependent, wholly reliant on one another.
Eating 5lbs of fibre every day might make your guts hurt… Take it from me.
I’d love to hear if this blog post was useful for you. Did you try the foot supination check in? How did it go?
Again, helpful links if you’d like to learn more about your feet (and your body mechanics):
On the go? Listen to the audio-only version while you’re washing the dishes, saving the world’s bee population, waiting for your dog to take a poop, or whatever you do while listening to podcasts/radio/audiobooks.
What is moving honestly?
First, don’t feel bad… Not moving honestly doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s not a moral judgement. Simply a lack of awareness. And it’s OK, we’ve all got blind spots.
But, to quote Mark Manson’s PSA to millenials from his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: “It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility”.
I really enjoyed this book when I read it as a 20-something year old…
Now that you know moving honestly is a thing, it’s your responsibility to be aware of it. Sorry (not sorry), to burst your bubble.
Professor Google defines honest as: “Free of deceit and untruthfulness; sincere.” (Although I’d argue that honesty has a quality inherent to it that can’t be defined by the lack of something. Similarly to how “health” is more than simply the lack of illness… )
How can movement be insincere or deceitful? (again, I’m not implying you’re trying to deceive to people with movement… Unless you’re actually telling lies via sign language, or playing an evil character in physical theatre)
When you can convince yourself that the current way of moving is all there is, the best way there is, and there’s nothing else to learn. Especially true when we’ve worked very hard to learn a skill, like ballet. Don’t ever tell a ballet dancer that they’re allowed to turn their legs in 😉 Just kidding…
When your body has adopted a compensatory way of moving that you don’t even realize you’re doing– You think you’re moving the thing you’re trying to move, but you’re not…
When you willingly compromise quality and accuracy of a movement to achieve an aesthetic, a fitness result, or an athletic goal, without considering the long-term implications. A client of mine who is a dance teacher really related to this. She reported that her students have no qualms sacrificing the alignment of their hips to make it look and feel like they are more flexible than they reallly are.
My definition of moving honestly: Moving in such a way that what your perception of what your body is doing is in alignment with what you’re actually doing, why you’re doing it, and you’re not denying that your current way of moving isn’t all that there is.
So it’s not moving “perfectly”. It’s about moving with awareness, as much self-objectivity as possible, and being open to what more could be available.
Perception vs. Reality
A good word to use is “actually”.
Profession Google defines actually as: “The truth or facts of a situation; really.”
Are you actually moving your spine or are you just shifting your weight around on your feet?
Are you actually rotating your shoulders externally or are you twisting out your forearms and wrists instead?
In the case of my client’s story, are you actually retracting your scapula or are you finding three other ways to do it that don’t remotely involve moving your scapula?
A little farther down in this post I’ll invite you to try the move-your-scaps-honestly challenge (as I described in the video… did you watch it to the end??). You might like to take a video of yourself, and check your perception vs. reality. What is your actual movement strategy?
How did we begin to move DIShonestly?
Why do we lie about anything? Because for some reason it served us.
We found a way to get what we wanted while conserving more energy: Taking short-cuts without understanding the repercussions.
Sometimes these are conscious choices. Sometimes a result of injury. Sometimes necessary for athletic performance.
As an example from my own life, the three most dishonest ways of moving I lived out:
Lots of passive stretching when my structure couldn’t actually tolerate it: Being insincere to my golgi tendon organs. Sitting in the splits for 30 minutes straight is not very smart.
Sorry, muscle spindles, for the years of thrashing
2. Lots of heavy deadlifts when I couldn’t actually flex my hips without lumbar extension: Failing to see my true biomechanical needs and abilities. I got pretty strong, but at a cost. Working with a coach earlier would have helped.
3. Lots of high intensity exercise when what I actually needed was to rest and recover from injuries, but I was scared by the dance-world’s focus on being thin: Not being true to me, and using exercise to control my appearance, based on how I thought the dance-world wanted me to look.
Do any of these resonate with you?
Moving dishonestly can range from a simple lack of awareness easily remediated with a technical cue, to a more severe, systemic issue in which our entire movement practice is out of congruence with our values, needs, and goals.
Biomechanical honesty
Biomechanical honesty refers to being able to move every bone and joint as per its original intructions, with awareness.
Movement based on the actual joint architecture. According to our anatomical set-up. The shape of the bones themselves dictate how they are able to move.
Dishonesty happens every time we lose an option to move as per our original instructions, and replace it with something else less precise, less pure, less “true”, without us knowing.
Or every time we put our faith in someone elses’ movement system that is not congruent with the actual movement possible based on the articulating surfaces of our bones, and the lines of pull of our muscles, because their biomechanical understanding is hazy.
For example, THIS representation of the gluteal muscles:
Face palm 🙁
So be careful who you learn from (even me…).
Speaking of glutes, I once believed that squeezing my glutes as I walked was a good way to “activate” them, because I heard someone say that, and started doing it. Not really how the body works, but my naive self didn’t know better at the time…
So what causes us to lose an option for honest movement?
Injuries not completely healed that we learn to adapt around
Trained movement skills (sports, yoga, etc)
Being told to stand and walk a particular way (don’t walk pigeon-toed, stand up straight)
Long periods of being mostly sedentary
Repetitive habits (like always sitting with one leg crossed)
Early childhood sensory-motor deprivation
Weird birth experiences
All of the above experiences can distort our perception of how we’re moving because they all will result in the distortion of our movement mechanics from its original instructions.
Not “bad”. Just not how we came in our original packaging.
You gotta step out of the original packaging to live your life… But at least try to remember what it was like!
Judgement and attachment in motion
Sometimes we get overly attached to particular ways of moving and deliberately avoid movements we were taught are “bad”.
As a ballet dancer, I believed for years that hip internal rotation was bad, and refused to consider otherwise. External rotation was a badge of honour, even if it was hurting me.
You might also have been told that slouching is bad, letting your pelvis hike in the frontal plane (sassy hips) is bad, or pronating your feet is the devil.
In fact, I had a client once tell me that as a yong woman, she was shamed for appearing “too sexual” by authorities in her Christian community for letting her pelvis hike while she waked. So she deliberately stopped doing it. Now, years later, our work together involves helping her re-experience this movement with the understanding that its actually crucial for shock absorption mechanics in gait. Oops…
Moving honestly, for her, means embracing, de-vilifying, and remembering her original instructions for pelvis movement.
The confabulating body
Confabulation is when we’re lying but we think we’re telling the truth. We don’t even know we’re being dishonest because we lack sufficient information to know any better!
Our bodies are excellent confabulators. And thank goodness they are!
Like my client who stopped hiking her pelvis, her clever body figured out multiple strategies to make up for it because our bodies are always 100% functional to keep us moving.
Threfore, the better you are at confabulating, it is a sign of just how functional your body is.
But there comes a tipping point at which the number of confabulations becomes too high and your body can’t keep up with the demand.
Like if you’ve ever tried to lie to 10 different people at once, each with a different story, and you lose track of your stories and eventually get caught and things blow up in your face…
So what happens when your body exceeds its capacity to confabulate? What if you run out of available body parts to subsitute with?
This is the law of compensation and adaptation: As long as compensation is possible, progression of the problem is imperceptable. It is when all the adaptive processes have been exhausted that the symptom suddenly appears. (from osteopath Jean-Pierre Barral’s Visceral Manipulation textbook)
The solution is to strip things back to their original instructions, so that body parts are both independednt and interdependent, not co-dependent, caught in eachothers’ web of lies.
This is challenging when multiple body parts are engaged in what Anatomy in Motion instructor Chris Sritharan calls a “negotiation”. How does one resolve a negotiation? Lots of honest, open, conversations…
Which isn’t fun and sexy… But rewarding, if you do the work.
The move-your-scaps-honestly challenge
Would you like to give this “honest movement” thing a try, and give your body a chance to have an honest conversation between its various parts?
In the video at the beginning of this post, I invited you to try the exercise I gave my client: To find pure, honest scapular retraction without using any confabulatory strategies.
Are you up for the move-your-scaps-honestly challenge?
Here’s a version of the exercise I gave my client to explore scapular retraction and protraction. Try it out and see if you can do it honestly 😉
As you go through the exercise, try to be aware of whether or not you are using any of the following strategies:
Elevation of your scapulae
Depression of your scapulae excessively
Rotating or bending your whole body to one side
Extending your lumbar spine excessively
Pulling your arms behind you
Probably other stuff!
Using a mirror or filming yourself might help to catch your blind spots.
Remember, it’s not about BIG movement. It’s about moving differently, accurately, purely.
This might mean moving througha smaller range of motion, but more purely and precisely, with the actual body part you intend to move.
Or maybe finding an entirely new pathway for movement that you didn’t know existed.
4 guidelines for moving honestly
As you do the honest scapular motion challenge, these four guiding principles for honest movement might help. They are very similar to Anat Baniel’s 9 guidelines from her book Move Into Life.
I really enjoyed reading thsi book, until I had to stop and remediate my book addiction.
4 Guidelines for Honest Movement Exploration
Move slowly. When you move quickly, all you can do is move the way you already know how. Slow. Down. Think milimeters per second, not miles per hour.
Move with moment to moment awareness. Pay attention to the bones and joints your’re trying to move. Can you visualize and feel them moving? What muscular sensations do you notice? How are you distributing your weight in your feet? Are you doing werid things with your neck? Are you clenching your jaw? What new sensation of your body in motion can you tune into today? What new detail about your body’s preferred movement strategies can you disccover?
Use external boundaries for feedback. Like I did for my client with my hands, it can be helpful to set up your environment with bumpers and boundaries for external feedback so that you can move honestly without hurting your brain. Chairs, walls, bands, etc. There are a ton of creative ways to create an environment condusive to honest movement, when you know it likes to confabulate 😉 This is also where a movement coach or guide can be of great assistance.
Move small and subtle. Much like moving quickly, when you move big, all you can hope to do is what you already CAN do, just bigger. Lasting freedom is unlocked milimeter by milimeter.
These four guidelines will help you reduce your tendency to use cheaty strategies, and confabulate, and help you to move more honestly.
Conclusions?
The more honestly you can move, the less strain there will be on your system, with each body part being able to do what it was originally designed to do, in isolation, and integrated with the whole bdoy.
Just like the chronic liar who gets caught in the stress of having to keep up with all the stories and webs of lies… Life is easier when we’re being honest. With ourselves, our bodies, and how we move.
Start by trying the move-your-scaps-honestly cahllenge a try, and let me know what you find.
Get help from a coach or movement professional when necessary.
And remember, it’s not a moral judgement, just a call for higher awareness, and to investigate if there could be a more useful way of moving.
Want more help moving honestly?
I’ve pretty much dedicated my life to practicing honest movement (a brutal, life-long process for me it appears…) So I created a workshop with that in mind 🙂
My workshop Liberated Body guides you through an exploration of your body’s movement mechanics based on what it ought to be able to do through the gait cycle (if you still had your original packaging).
The next 4 week workshop is coming up on November 23. You can learn more about it and register HERE.
Liberated Body is a little different than other movement workshops. The goal isn’t even to move “better”, but let your body decide for itself what “better” means, based on honest investigation into your current options for movement. What more is possible? Only one way to find out…
Two of my students, Garrett and Maggie, sent me deligftul videos describing the process they went through doing Liberated Body. And while they didn’t use the words “honest movement”, I think that’s exactly what they’re describing.
Check out their sucess stories, they really made me smile and blush:
That’s all for now folks. May you move inquisitively, honestly, and with ease 😉
Do you have a deep achey painy thing between your butt and your back, and you’re not sure if it’s lower back pain or butt pain?
That’s probably your sacroiliac joint. And we can totally figure it out 🙂
In this blog post I’m going to share some video clips from my Troubleshooting the SI Joint (part 1) Movement Deep Deep session from Sept 18 2021 help you work with that poor, misunderstood SI joint of yours.
Yes I am an excellent photo editor. Check out my IG account for more excellent work like this @monvolkmar
How to be a DIY SIJ Detective
Quick back-story: I became a self-appointed DIY movement detective by sheer necessity.
At age 22 I was broke and broken from my career in dance (marry rich, one prof told us).
I had no money to get physical therapy (literally like $500 in my account, the remnants of my student loan not even my own money), no future as a dancer, and a part time customer service job at the local Goodlife Fitness (when they changed the title “Customer Service Rep” to “Motivator” and I knew I had to get out of there…).
What I did have was time and hunger to understand my body.
The insight struck me as I limped to the physio clinic one day to get yet another ineffective treatment: I have to become my own best therapist. No one can do this for me, or care more about me more than me.
That limp was my victory march, and the beginning of my journey as a DIY movement detective.
As the beloved Buddhist teacher Pema Chodran wrote in her book, When Things Fall Apart, “We’re here to study ourselves. Studying ourselves provides all the books we need.”
A fantastic book for anytime, but particularly for right now
I’ve come to see my body is my best textbook. All the info I need is within it.
Saying this because if you’re in a similar place- you’ve realized that only YOU can figure you out, then what I have to share today will help your investigations.
So before you hop on Youtube and do a search for “How to make my SIJ stop hating me”, let’s see if we can help orient you to your SI joint by opening the textbook of You.
Time to get off the lacrosse ball you may be sitting on, cursing your pririformis as the root of all evil, and get to learning 🙂
SIJ Made 10-Year-Old Simple
I’m not claiming I know everything about the SIJ. Not even close…
My hope is that the two video clips in this post will help orient you to 1) What your SIJ is and, 2) Why it might feel like it does from a movement perspective.
From there, you can make better informed decisions about WHAT to do about it.
This first clip covers:
What the heck is the SI joint anyway?
How much movement does it actually have?
What primary purpose does SIJ motion serve in gait?
What two simple terms can we use to name SIJ movement that even a 10 year old can understand?
Side note: After editing this video I’ve now heard the word “SI joint” so many times it doesn’t even sound like a real word anymore and I never want to hear it again.
In case you didn’t watch the video, here’s the quick summary:
Gait is my favourite context to observe movement within. All joint motions our bodies can do happen while we walk. Unless they can’t 😉 This gives us a fabulous set of joint interactions to assess movement quality of.
The SIJ has it’s very own role in gait. Is yours performing that role based on its original instructions?
In gait, we’re interested primarily in the ability of the SIJ to compressand decompress at the appropriate times with each footstep to help us with shock absorption.
Let’s move into how to self-assess your SIJ as your pelvis moves in three dimensions..
A Comprehensive Gait-Centric SI Joint Self-Assesssment in Less Than 8 Mins
AKA: The SIJ self-assessment a 10-year-old can follow along with (I hope…)
Here’s the second video clip from my Troubleshooting the SIJ (part 1) session: Dynamic assessments of SIJ compression and decompression in gait.
Here’s a quick recap of what is happening at the SI joint space during pelvis motion:
You should now have a better idea about:
Which pelvis motions are flagging up your SIJ stuff
Whether its a compression or decompression
In which planes of motion it’s happening
So what did you discover? Are you like me: Compression in two planes, and decompression in the other? Compression in all three planes? Decompression causing most of your problems?
Now you know more about your SIJ than most therapists will be able to tell you, beyond, “Your piriformis and hip flexors are tight”. Can you see why this isn’t enough information to change the movement habit keeping you stuck as you are?
So… Now you have your data. What do you do with it?
4 Steps to SIJ Relief
A few important notes.
First, there is no one-size fits all approach. I don’t think its wise or responsible to advise on what exactly to do in a blog post, so I’m not going to 😉
Second, this is only ONE perspective. If it resonates with you and feels useful, that’s great.
In the full 90 minute Movement Deep Dive session I shared 5 exercises to try out. Their intention is simply to help you explore and reclaim the triplanar movements your pelvis might be missing, and then integrate these motions into two lunge-y, gaity-y exercises.
The all important pubis/xyphoid stack
The reason I hesitate to share the specific exercises here is not because I’m a selfish jerk…
To fully appreciate them, a fundamental understanding of the body’s movement mechanics through the gait cycle is key. This is why I like folks to go through my Liberated Body Workshop FIRST before attending my Movement Deep Dives sessions. Otherwise, the exercises will have no context, and you won’t get anything useful from them other than a face workshop from making confused faces.
But I can provide a thought process to get you started with right now.
STEP 1: Understand in which planes of motion your pelvis has movement restrictions or discomfort: Sagittal, frontal, or transverse (we already did that).
STEP 2: Note whether or not each of those motions correspond with compression or decompression of the SIJ (we already did that, too).
STEP 3: Experiment with exercises to give your pelvis, as a whole, the experiences of movement, compression, and decompression it is missing in ways that feel safe and comfortable.
For example: Are you missing the ability to posterior tilt your pelvis and could this be why the anterior tilt feels compressive? Explore some posterior tilt exercises and see what happens.
Experiment with different body positions. Supine? Prone? Standing? Handstanding?? (just kidding.. kinda).
The HOW is even more important than the WHAT. This means moving slowly, paying attention to details, and valuing quality of movement, such as:
Is the issue because you’re deviating from the plane of motion you’re trying to move within? For example: You’re trying to rotate your pelvis, but instead you’re deviating into an anterior tilt, compressing your SIJ. Could finding a way to make that movement more pure, clean, and honest be the solution?
Is the issue that you think you’re moving your pelvis, but you’re actually moving something else, like your spine, or ribcage, in an attempt to move your pelvis?
Are you doing the right movements the wrong way? Too intense. Too fast. Too little awareness. Too many reps. Too big. Too small… These are things it helps to have an outside eye with.
STEP 4: Integrate these missing pelvis motions with the rest of the body, the way we should see it in gait, so that the body learns to walk-IN the new movement options, not walk it off.
Show your body how these movements fit back in with your original instructions. Otherwise it’s just another novel experience.
Want MORE?
The clips from this blog post are from Troubleshooting the SIJ PART 1. But… There are two more parts, and I’ve compliled all three together into a little workshop for you: Troubleshooting the SI Joint
PART 1: What is the SI Joint? What movements of the pelvis create SIJ compression and decompression? How can we assess this? And a movement exploration to bring awareness to our pelvis motion and restore all movement possibilities that should be available to it (the topic of this blog post).
PART 2: What lower body influences could be contributing to SIJ crankiness? How do movements of the feet, legs, and hips impact on how our SIJ feels?
PART 3: What upper body influences could be related to how your SIJ feels? How do movements above from the spine and ribcage play into how our SIJ feels, in terms of com back. Stipulation: You have to write me a 500 word essay about your experience 😉
I hope you enjoy this guided exploratory series of movement sessions to get to know your pelvis and SI joint better 🙂
This is certainly not the definitive guide to SIJ mastery, simply one perspective for understanding what’s up with YOUR SI joint, through the lens of gait mechanics.
Knowledge is power. You deserve better than a generic, glute squeezing, lacrosse-ball-sitting approach. You deserve to understand your body mechanics to make an informed choice.
Decompression isn’t always the answer. Sometimes our symptoms are due to decompression, and we won’t know until we assesss! Could you be compressed in one plane, but decompressed in another? Again, knowledge is power! Before chooseing an intervention, know your specific intent based on your body’s true demands.
This is an investigation of YOU, by you, for you. This is the creed of the DIY Movement Detective. No one can do your work for you, but you don’t need to do it all alone. There are folks like me interested in helping you figure your body’s shit out. I don’t want to tell you what you should do, only to help you think more critically, and give you more avenues to explore so you can find your own answers.
Seek professional help when you’re stuck. Massage, physio, acupuncture, movement coaching. If you have a structural/tissue restriction, or your nervous system is a little too triggered to feel safe enough to do any movement exploration, I strongly recommend finding a practitioner you trust to help you out. Even DIYers like me need a little guidance and support sometimes 😉
What did you discover about your SIJ?
I’d love to hear if you discovered anything new (or remembered something old) through this exploration. Was this useful? Is there anything that you want more clarity on? Shoot me an email or leave a comment on this blog post and let’s chat 🙂
If I had only 15 minutes with someone to help them move and stand with more ease, but was not allowed to assess anything or ask about their injury history, I think the most impactful thing to do would be…
Teach them how to pronate their feet.
Pronation is not the devil, but the devil is in the details.
I’m here about the pronation!
Pronation is an important motion the foot must be able to do as we walk. Contrary to what your orthotics person may have told you.
With each step, the foot gets just one chance to pronate. Could you missing out on the important benefits of this moment in time? (more about that below, read on!).
At some point in my work with most clients, I know I’ll do eventually take them through an exercise to show them how to access a healthy pronation, its just a matter of when.
I think that the world of therapy and movement professionals is opening up to the idea that pronation is a healthy movement to promote, with much thanks to the work of Gary Ward. Which is awesome.
However…
Just rolling your foot IN is not the same as pronation.
Do you know the difference?
Eversion (rolling onto the inside of your foot… I know, it seems like it should be called INversion, just deal with the counterintuitive language), is the frontal plane component of pronation, not the whole shebang.
My intention with this blog post is to highlight the diffrences between pronation and eversion of the foot, so that you can liberate your feet and wake up their muscles instead of living with a problematic chunk at the end of your leg.
So before you read any further, stop what you’re doing (unless you’re saving your baby from being eaten by a dog or something) and follow along with the video below. Let’s see how well your feet move. Are you just everting, or are you actually pronating?
The clip is from day 2 of my Liberated Body workshop: Foot mechanics day, in which we explore healthy pronation and supination of the foot.
In fact, embracing pronation is often the biggest take-away for my students. One said: “I was convinced that pronation was a horrible thing until this class!”
Pronation is a tri-planar movement
Eversion describes only the frontal plane aspect of pronation
The main difference between pronation and eversion, in super simple terms (because my brain needs things to be simple):
Do you roll inwards on your foot, dump your knee wayyy inside of your big toe, and lose contact with the 5th metatarsal head on the floor? That’s eversion of the whole foot, not pronation.
Check out these images:
Accurately labelled. Notice the loss of 5th met contact in the eversion photo, and likewise, the loss of 1st met contact in the inversion photo. No tripod, no pronation.
Yes, these are also labelled accurately: Notice how the calcaneus (heel bone) is rolling into eversion, but it appears that the whole foot tripod is still in contact with the ground. Got tripod? That’s a pronation.
Notice how the labels in brackets underneath that say pronation and supination are not accurate, because the foot is clearly rolling off the floor, losing tripod contact.
Are you doing the right thing the wrong way?
As with anything, attention to nuance is the key for success. We could be doing the “right” thing the wrong way,
Like when I first tried a low carb, high fat diet in 2013ish because that’s what the whole internet was doing… No one told me how easy it was to eat 12483275939 calories of fat a day and gain weight on a “fat-loss” diet. Oops.
Could you be thinking you’re pronating, but just smashing the shit out of your first met by dumping all your weight onto it, with no muscles managing the situation?
Here’s one more nuanced pronation “DO” and “DON’T” that I hope you picked up from my video: We DO want the knee to go slightly inward to access foot pronation, but we DON’T want the knee to dump inward so far it generates eversion.
Check out this video by Gary Ward (which he created to illustrate the concept from his book What the Foot, that knee over second toe is not a thing we should get dogmatically locked into because it limits foot movement in gait):
Here’s your pronation vs. eversion check-list for success:
Eversion:
No articulation between foot bones
Foot “log-rolls” inward as one chunk
Loss of tripod (5th metatarsal head lifts from floor)
No change in muscles length or experience loading/stretching under foot
Joints remain in same position, nothing decompresses/compresses
Pronation:
Articulation between the foot bones with each other and the ground
Tri-planar motion of the foot (sagittal, frontal, and transverse plane components- eversion is just the frontal plane component of pronation)
All three points of the tripod in contact with the floor
Muscles on the bottom and inside surfaces of foot, and back of the ankle load and lengthen
Joints on the bottom and inside surface of the foot open and decompress.
Here’s a slide from my Liberated Body workshop day 2 presentation that outlines what we’re looking for in healthy pronation and supination:
Why is pronation actually useful?
Just to clarify: PronatING is great. Being stuck in pronaTION, the noun, is not so great.
Pronation is like going to Wal-Mart- Get in, get what you need, and get out as quickly as possible.
Here are a three amazing things our body gets from healthy pronation (but does not get from rolling in, aka eversion):
Natural lengthening and loading of the muscles under the foot with each step: Got tight feet? Stretching not really helping? Rolling fascia out feels good, but not changing anything? Foot pronation is the movement that naturally allows the muscles under your foot to lengthen with each step. Got plantar fasciitis? Letting your feet pronate could be a game changer for you.
Extensor chain (dem glutes) load: Looking for more ease and power with each stride? Or to explode up from a squat position? Or land from a jump with more control? At the same moment in time that we pronate our foot in gait, the entire extensor chain of the lower body loads up. Calves load to generate plantarflexion, distal quads load to generate knee extension, and proximal glutes and hamstrings load to generate hip extension. Want to jump better and run with more ease? Make sure your feet can pronate well.
Pronation and eversion (rolling in on the foot) are not the same. One is a useful experience for the whole body, the other just feels uncomfortable.
Eversion is just one component (frontal plane) of a healthy, three dimensional pronation.
Losing the foot tripod makes or breaks a pronation. And a tea towel might be your new best friend.
Pronation has important movement repercussions for the body, such as allowing us to mobilize our feet naturally with each step, helping us engage our glutes better, and even freeing our neck and jaw tension.
Wal-Mart sucks.
Want to learn more?
I think you’ll really love Wake Your Feet Up, an online course by Gary Ward that teaches foot mechanics in a way that even my simple brain can comprehend.
He designed this course for folks who want to learn more about their foot mechanics and explore exercises to give their tootsies back their full movement potential. This online course is appropriate for all humans with feet, not just movement and therapy professionals who can speak biomechanics.
Ok I realize this post makes me seem like a huge Gary Ward fan-girl. I kinda am. Deal with it. I think he was my dad in a past life.
That’s all for now, movemet pals. I’d love to hear if you discovered anything new about your feet: Are you pronating well, or just everting? And if you can get your feet pronating well, what does it feel like for your feet, and the rest of your body?
Leave a comment, or shoot me an email, and let me know 🙂
Why do they form? What do you do about them? Can you do anything about them? Aren’t they genetic? Do you need to get surgery? What about those toe spacer things and splints?
So many questions!
I’m not claiming to have any conclusive answers (and I think the moment we conclude something is the moment we stop learning anything new).
But what I do know is that bunions can be understood and worked with from a movement perspective. That is, movement of the big toe created the bunion, why could movement not also be at least part of the remedy?
I believe movement is medicine. But too much medicince can be problematic too, can’t it?
Here’s a key thing to know: The movement of the big toe that leads to a bunion forming- toe abduction/valgus- happens at a specific moment in time in the gait cycle. Things get problematic when that movement becomes the only option your foot has and becomes a structural adaptation, ie, the actual shape of your foot changes.
The bunion itself is the solution your body found for a problem.
The video below is a clip from a Movement Deep Dive Session I did recently with some of my amazing Liberated Body students. The session was to help them understand big toe mechanics with foot pronation and supination as we walk.
I think knowledge is power… Wanna geek out?
In the video I cover:
What joint motions are possible at the big toe joint (aka 1st metatarsalphalangeal joint aka MTPJ)?
How is movement of the foot on the floor- closed chain- different than when it swings through the air- open chain?
What does the big toe do when the foot pronates and supinates?
What big toe/foot movement creates a bunion over time and when does that happen in gait?
How can a bunion be seen as an indicator to that we need to pronate that foot better?
How could this be affecting stuff above, like your neck?
When we understanding how the big toe moves in relationship with the foot and the rest of the body, we have powerful information to inform the decisions we make for our bodies everyday.
I hope the video demonstrates how the big toe movement that leads to a bunion forming- toe abduction- is a totally natural event with each step we take. We just want to have other options, too.
Interestingly, while bunions are association with a more pronated foot, the bunion may form because the foot doesn’t pronate well! The big toe abducting away from the foot was the last ditch attempt to do something that resembles pronation. I often find that if we show the foot how to pronate better without relying solely on the big toe deviating into excessive abduction, good things happen.
So if you have a bunion, maybe your big toe is just stuck in a moment in time because it only has one option for movement? What if you could show it a new option?
I think its safe to say that before electing for an invasive buinion procedure, or using a medieval-looking toe stretching devices, or shoving spacers between your toes, why not try some natural movement, first? Give that foot some of its movement potential back.
Best case scenario, you can get that toe moving again and things will feel better. Worst case, you mobilized your feet and got some extra bloodflow. Win win.
This is why I’m so passionate about the work Gary Ward teaches in his Anatomy in Motion courses. What if we could restore the movement potential inherent in our gait cycle, so that each step we take has the ability to reinforce healthy joint mehcanics? Walk ourselves well.
Want to learn more? I think you’ll really enjoy my four day workshop Liberated Body. We spend the whole of day two moving your feet 🙂 I have a live workshop every few months, and it’s also available as a home-study you can start today 🙂
In fact, here’s a story from one of my students, a dancer and yogi, who embraced pronating her feet and was able to free up her bunion:
“My most enjoyable class and the biggest change I noticed was in the FEET! I feel that I have avoided pronation like the plague which stems from ballet training for sure – but my feet, achilles, calves and even knees felt SO GREAT after that class. I purposefully went for a walk afterwards and could really feel a difference in my foot pressures as I moved. Also as I mentioned at the end of the session, my bunion on the right side felt released and not as painful – coming up to demi-pointe on that side was a breeze.”
Super cool, right!?
What do you think? Do you have bunions? Have you had a bunion surgery? Have you had success using movement to relieve bunion pain? I’d love to hear from you.
Leave a comment here, shoot me an email, or find me on the social media things you do. I’m pretty much the only Monika Volkmar on the planet, so I’m easy to find 😉
Alternative title: Foot pronation is not the devil.
If you don’t want to read this whole blog post (won’t take it personally, my posts can be long…) go to the bottom to watch an excerpt from an online movement session I did last week linking foot and jaw mechanics in gait.
Go with the flow (motion model)
About once a week I do a movement session with students who’ve completed my Liberated Body 4 day workshop. The intention is to help them deepen their understanding of how our bodies were designed to move based on the joint interactions taught in Gary Ward’s Anatomy in Motion, and his Flow Motion Model of the gait cycle.
I love this model (FMM) because it maps how any one part of the body is linked to all of others via their joint interactions through the gait cycle.
We can use the model as a map to identify the joint motions and interactions your body is having truoble accessing so we can give these sepcific things back to your system.
Peoples’ bodies tend to like feeling more complete.
I thought it would be nice to summarize one of my most recent online movement sessions in which we looked at the joint interactions that link movement of the foot with the jaw.
The very short story: Foot pronation couples with jaw decompression (mandible sliding forward and down from the temporal bones).
My invitation to you, if yo’re interested, is to come take this journey from your foot to your face. It’s fun. It’s logical. It will hopefully even be useful! (and check out the video at the end of this post to see a clip from the session to follow along with).
WHAT IS THE JAW?
Seems like an obvious question. However, I’ve made it my personal practice to never again take for granted that I understand what a joint is. Nor will I assume that the person I am talking to has the same understanding of a joint as mine.
I fondly recall the moment I actually understood what a shoulder was. It was just last year…
So when we say “jaw”, what’s the reference point? Are we talking about the mandible? The temporal mandibular joint (TMJ)? Where does the word jaw even come from?
I did a bit of etymological research and tfound that “jaw”, from mid 15th century old English referred to “holding and gripping part of an appliance”.
Holding and gripping… Sounds like what many of us do with our jaws today.
Your jaw is actually the “gripping” part of your face. Feels true, don’t it? 😉
The jaw has two articulating bones: Mandible + temporal bone.
In desribing the motion of the jaw, we’ll refer to the mandible’s movement interaction with the temporal bone.And we’ll consider the temporal mandibular joint- TMJ- as simply the space between the mandible and temporal bone. There’s a articular condyle in there. And some synovial fluid, too.
We’ll use the words protrusion (forward) and retrusion (backwards) to refer to mandibular motion in relation to the rest of the skull. And we’ll use the words compression and decompression to refer to the TMJ’s state of more or less pressure respectively.
As you open your mouth the mandible protrudes (slides anteriorally and inferiorally) opening space in the TMJ, and we’ll call it a decompression. And visa versa.
For purposes of this blog post, we’ll talk mostly sagittal plane (forward and back movement), but know that the mandible and TMJ have movement capacity in frontal and transverse plane- lateral shifts and rotations right and left. Not a lot, but enough to be significant.
Now the fun part… Your jaw has a specific way of interacting wiht the rest of the body as you walk.
All joint motions the body can do show up in gait. Even the jaw’s motions, though it is so subtle and happens too quickly to pay attention to it unelss you really focus.
Every single joint in the body has the opportunity to articulate to both ends of it’s available movement spectrum, in all three planes, with each foot step. Every movment your body can do it does in the space of 0.6-0.8 seconds with each step.
Unless it can’t.
So if a joint doesn’t have access to a movement just standing and trying to isolate it, you can bet it won’t be happening when you walk either. This leads to new strategies that are more effortful, and may lead to new problems later.
How does lack of movement at the foot affect the jaw? How does lack of movement at the jaw affect the foot?
The jaw is a DANGLER
In AiM, Gary has taught us to think of several structures as “danglers”.
The mandible is a dangler.
Because it dangles, it doesn’t really do much on its own accord as we walk, it just comes along for the ride. It doesn’t actually have inherent motion that contributes to gait, but think of it as needing to sway in harmony with its surrounding structures as part of a global mass-management strategy.
When the jaw gets stuck in one position and only has that one option, it can impact on the movement options for the rest of the body.
OCCLUSION, PROPRIOCEPTION, AND THE RETICULAR ACTIVATION SYSTEM
Occlusion refers to where the surfaces of the teeth touch. This can have an impact on whole body on movement potential.
In my early AiM days, I recall that I couldn’t find my hamstring load in the heel strike (hamstring “stretch”) exercise on my left leg.
Then I randomly came accross a chart with the teeth and their association to different muscles. I’ve misplaced said chart and all I remember was the connection between molars and hamstring (and if anyone has this or a similar chart I would love to see it!).
Just for the fun of it, I tried doing the heel strike exercise while holding contact with my left molars. BOOM hello hamstrings. Freaky biomechanical magic.
(If you want to learn more about heel strike and how the hamstrings load in gait, I recommend Gary Ward’s Lower Limb Biomechanics course. So good!)
It is also said that the jaw is said to contain the highest number of proprioceptors compared to any other area of the body. Meaning we get a ton of information about our body’s orietation in space from our jaw. And because we can’t see our own jaw, we probably oreint our body’s center of mass based on our jaw’s perceived center to some degree. (I am going to make a little video soon for you to play with this concept… stay tuned!).
Lastly, its good to know that the muscles of the jaw are supplied by the trigeminal nerve, which is closely related to the reticular activation system, which helps us filter information from our environment into categories of safe vs. unsafe, and is linked to states of anxiety, stress, anger, etc.
A curious personal observation is that on days when my bite is more centered, I’m usually in a brighter, cheery mood, full of optimism, and my body has less of my usual annoying symptoms. When my bite is off (usually shfited, laterally flexed, and rotated left), I’m likely to be more irrtable and triggerable by silly bullshit, and more of my symptoms may be present. N=1, but its been useful to pay attention to this.
All this to say, TMJ mechanics and resting bite can have an effect on how we move and how we feel. So we want it to be able to dangle freely, in the right relationship with the rest of the body, which should happen in a particular way with each step we take.
“DEMONIZED” MOVEMENTS THAT COUPLE WITH JAW DECOMPRESSION
What happens when we start labelling one movement “good” and another bad”? We avoid the bad ones and do more of the good ones. This may be conscious or unconscious.
Either way, avoidance of a movement is problematic because no joint motion in the body happens in isolation, but in relationship with everything else.
In gait, if one joint moves, every joint moves.
So when I ask your foot to pronate, I’m actually asking your whole body to pronate with it- A foot pronation accompanied by all the other joint motions that should happen at the same snapshot in time at which the foot pronates in gait.
Have you been taught that pronating your feet was bad? I was. Like, hardcore by my ballet teachers. To the point that I thought that I was a bad person for pronating my feet. (we were also made to feel bad about having to go take a pee in the middle of class, so I held my bladder a lot back in tose days… I think I wrote about that in my book Dance Stronger)
Here’s the paradox: Can a movement deemed “bad” happen at the same time as another movement that is “good”? And if yes, then does this make the good movement more bad? Or the bad movement more good?
Neither. They both just happen. No need to place any meaning or judgement.
To give you an idea of the stuff we recognize as “good” that happens when the foot pronates:
Glutes load (leading to a glute contraction that then extends the hip)
Plantar fascia and all muscles under the foot load and stretch and then help your foot supinate
Vastus medialis gets to do something useful (decelerate knee flexion)
TMJ decompression (as we are focusing on today!)
And more.
On the flip side, there are many other joint mechanics that couple with foot pronation are generally deemed “bad” for the body. A few of such terrible movements are:
Pelvis anterior tilt
Knee valgus
Spine extension
Hip internal rotation (although perhaps only in the dance world… we love to hate on hip internal rotation)
But remember, please, none of these movements are inherently bad or good. They simply happen.
What makes a movement better or worse for us is if it is happening too much, too fast, at the wrong time, or we get stuck in it as our only option.
Pronation is a like visiting Walmart. You want to get in, get what you need, and get out.
When we lable a movement (or anything…) as bad its often because we don’t understand it in its proper context, so our solution is to try to minimize, avoid, or control it.
Real freedom isn’t reached by controlling and manipulating our bodies, selectively avoiding entire movement spectrums. Just a little perceptual recalibration is required.
Let’s follow the flow (Motion Model)
In theory, using the Flow Motion Model, one can look at any bone or joint and, based on its position and velocity on the space-time continuum (if one can really measure both simultaneously…), one could extrapolate what the rest of the body should also be doing at that time moment in time. I think that’s pretty cool. Useful, too.
This is how we are able to make the connection we’re interested in today: Foot pronation couples with TMJ decompression.
If you’re up for it, join me now for a delightfully logical adventure through the body, joint by joint, from your foot to your face, linking foot mechanics to jaw mechanics.
I hope to highlight how movements like pronation and pelvis anterior tilt, which somtimes get a bad rep, are coupled movements. “Coupled” meaning that we want to see them happening at the same moment in time in gait.
Heel strike and away we go…
Let’s start at the beginning…
Which isn’t always so easy, even for a president.
… with the moment your heel hits the ground, and follow your foot as it rolls into it’s most nicest, flattest position.
For simplicity, we’ll call this moment in time pronation, and we’ll defnine it as the one chance your foot gets to pronate on the ground in gait. Its the moment in time at which many mechanics of shock absorption spring into action (get it??).
Let’s keep things super simple and define our pronating foot in terms of pressure, shape, open vs. closed joints, and long vs. short muscles.
As your foot fully pronates in a healthy way, and hoping it can maintain three points of contact- on the 1st and 5th metatarsals and your heel- you should notice the following:
Pressure on the foot travelling anterior and medial towards the 1st metatarsal joint.
All foot arches lowering and spreading, foot shape is becoming wider and longer.
All joints opening on the plantar/medial foot, and closing on the dorsal/lateral surface.
Muscles lenghtening on the plantar/medial surface, and shortening on the dorsal lateral.
A slide from day 2 of my Liberated Body workshop
And all the reverse mechanics happen as the foot supinates.
Pronation of the foot should happen with knee flexion. Let’s check if that joint interaction is naturally present for you.
What’s happening at your knees? If you stand on your two feet and bend your knees, without trying to do what you envision the perfect version of a knee bend should be, do feel your feet naturally pronate, as described above? How do your feet naturally respond? Has your training, like mine, been to avoid pronating your feet? And whait happens if you suspend that belief about pronation being wrong?
If you had no prior information about what SHOULD happen what do you feel IS happening?
If your foot pressures are going the opposite way- lateral and posterior towards your heels, what does it feel like to allow the pronation to occur?
Yes, your knees may go slightly inward. A little bit is ok. A lot is not. Embrace your right to valgus in this moment. The real money is when you don’t need to use a knee valgus to pronate your feet.
What’s your pelvis doing? As you bend your knees and pronate your feet, are you doing a pelvis anterior or posterior tilt? We’d like to see an anterior pelvis tilt. Why?
Feel this out: As you anterior tilt your pelvis, notice how this internally rotates your femurs, tibias, talus(es), and all that internal rotation should contribute to both feet pronating (talus IR is part of foot pronation).
If you do a posterior tilt with your pelvis, you drive supination mechanics via an external rotation of all those leg joints. Maybe posterior tilting is a good way to avoid pronation. But also, maybe you don’t need to avoid pronation?
Also note there are two ways to anterior tilt the pelvis, and only one of them is useful in gait (watch the video below…)
What’s your lumbar spine doing? As you anterior tilt your pelvis, what is the natural, uncsonsioud response at your lumbar spine? We know that as the sacrum nutates with the whole pelvis anteriorally tilting, the lumbar spine will follow into extension. But what does YOURS actually do? Also consider, does it feel like you use your lumbar extension to anteriorally tilt your pelvis? Or does your pelvis anterior tilt lead to a nice extension of your lumbar spine?
What’s your thoracic spine and ribcage doing? As your lumbars extend, does that extension continue to flow up into your thoracic spine, tilting your ribcage up and back (posterior tilt)? Should do! Unless you have a restriction blocking that spine wave up.
What’s your cervical spine and skull doing? Keep your eyes on the horizon, stand on your happily pronating feet, and notice, with spine extension, what motion do you feel happening in your neck? Does your chin lift up and extend your neck? Or do you feel your chin drop and your neck flexing?
Hopefully you feel your kkull anteriorally tilting and your neck flexing. Occipital atlantal joint decompressing.
And finally…
What’s your jaw doing? Remembering that your mandible is a dangler, let it dangle as you tilt your entire skull anteriorally, with your spine extending underneath. Which way does your mandible slide? Forward and down (protrusion/decompression from temporal bone) and dangling further from your face? Does it retract back in towards your face? Or does it do nothing?
Ideally, what you’d like to feel is the jaw sliding forward. Decompressing. If you try to keep it retracted it will seriously block your ability to flex your cervical spine. Just try it!
Do you have all these links in the chain? Or are there some blocked interactions?
If that was too wordy, I invite you to follow this adventure guided by me! Here’s a clip from the session last week in which we did this exploration.
How’d that go for you? Got all the links in the chain? Would love to hear what yo uobserved.
And if that wasn’t so smooth and flowy for you, what do you do about it? Perhaps you’d enjoy my workshop, Liberated Body. which I am now teaching online via the ubiquitous Zoom. Liberated Body is all about finding the missing links in your own body, and restoring them to have a richer experience of your body.
The next workshop is coming up in a few weeks on June 27th. Tell yo’ friends.
Until next time, my fellow body mechanics detectives 🙂
“Overall, these exercises are much harder work than the physio I was doing before, in that I have to really concentrate on small things. Can’t just put myself through them. Have to be present. It’s good. It’s why I sought you out rather than doing more straight up physio as I kinda knew this was what was missing, what needed to come next.”
This is an from an email sent to me by a lady that I am working with after, our second session.
We’ll call her Jean (not real name).
Jean is the epitome of the perfect student of exploratory movement, and I think the quote above sums up nicely just what that means.
When the body is in pain, generally there are three main systems we are working with:
Mindset and emotions (perception of experiences, chronic negative emotional states etc.)
Organ and systems health (digestive, immune, etc)
Of course, these three become an inseparable web called a “life”.
As a body-worker, some things I can help with, and some things I can’t. For the individuals themselves, one thing they can start to work with that doesn’t cost a thing is the mindset bit.
Jean’s mindset is on point with where one would want it to be to make changes and heal other systems, and I want to use this blog post to explain a little more about what I mean by that- having a mindset to change and heal.
Because “healing mindset” isn’t this woo woo, think positive, manifest good health and meditate on being better you’ll be ok… It’s about engaging with the work.
When the standard approach fails…
Jean found me through my dance blog that I’ve since taken a break from writing on (danceproject.ca), but she is not a dancer. She is a pianist and also participates in horse riding and dog sledding.
Jean is in her 50s and has been experiencing pain for many years but had stopped seeing her physiotherapist because it wasn’t doing anything. When I first met her she expressed that she was frustrated with the care she was receiving from physio because they were only looking at the parts of her body that hurt: Her right knee and hip primarily. But they weren’t looking at the rest of her body, and Jean had a strong intuition that this was the reason things were going nowhere. She felt very distinctly that there was something going on with her upper body that was related to her knee and hip issues, but no one was looking there.
Smart lady to listen and act on her intuition.
Looking at the location of symptoms as “the problem” and stopping there is the standard approach. The approach that says, “treat the symptom”.
Luckily (I think…) for me, I never learned the standard approach because a) I went to school for dance, not for whatever it is I do now*, and b) all my most influential teachers are out of the box thinkers, who don’t ascribe to the standard approach and aren’t afraid to go against the norm, old-school movement paradigm. Maybe I’m missing out? I’m ok with that.
Jean was pleased that our initial assessment looked at her whole body, from her toes to her skull. Isn’t it nice to be treated like an entire person? Don’t you hate it when people only see you for one aspect of who you are?
*What do I even do? I dunno. I work with bodies and movement. I get people to move their joints in specific ways. I sometimes massage them, Thai style. I sometimes have people deadlifting heavy things if they want to. But the end game is always for them to have a different experience of their bodies, push their comfort zones, and access the movements their bodies are currently missing. What’s my job title? You tell me…
Ready for an AiM-style geek out?
For the Anatomy in Motion (AiM) students like me 🙂
Here is how Jean showed up (some interesting distortions):
Pelvis: Right hike, left rotation (stuck in right suspension)
Spine: Right lateral flexion, right rotation (stuck in right suspension)
Right knee: Can’t externally rotate (can’t access right suspension)
Right foot: Can’t pronate (can’t access right suspension)
The story her body was telling me was that nothing from the hip down knew how to pronate, and her pelvis, spine, and ribcage were trying to make this happen for her. Or, maybe her pelvis, spine, and ribcage were trying to stop her foot and knee from needing to pronate because it felt unsafe?
Regardless of the story I choose to attach to her structure, what I was witnessing was an exchange (something I wrote aboutHERE).
We can consider that in the phase of gait in which the foot pronates, that the entire skeleton is organizing itself to allow pronation. It’s not just a foot pronation, it’s a whole body pronation. In AiM this whole body pronation phase is called suspension.
As mentioned above, while Jean ‘s pelvis and spine are pronating, she is missing some very important pronation mechanics below: Foot pressure not getting onto the anterior medial calcaneous, foot bones not spreading and opening on the plantar and medial surfaces, and femur not rotating internally over the tibia.
If things aren’t happening below, something up top may need to do this for her. In her case, I believe this is why I was seeing the type two spine mechanics (same direction lateral flexion and rotation), right pelvis hike, and left pelvis rotation. If you can’t pronate below, something must make up for it above, or next door. A useful strategy to help her make up for a hip, knee, ankle, and foot that don’t pronate, but not an efficient way for the body to move that will stand the course of time.
Want to try this for yourself? Stand with your feet side by side and:
Put your weight primarily on the outside of your right foot
Hike the right side of your pelvis
Twist your pelvis to the left
Twist your ribcage to the right
Laterally flex your spine to the right
Not an effortless posture to hold! Feels pretty terrible for the right hip doesn’t it? No wonder Jean was having some issues, eh? But somehow this was the most efficient way her system knew to hold herself based on that tangly web of “life”.
So, we have really one of two options for how to sync her joints back up. We can:
Teach her foot and knee to pronate to match the rest of her body.
Get her spine and pelvis to experience the other end of the spectrum (left lateral flexion and rotation) to free up the opportunity for her right foot and knee to safely experience pronation.
Or, more realistically, probably do both (and we did both).
Anyway, that’s just a little bit of background on what she was dealing with to provide some context.
The mindset for healing
What I really think is beautiful to share about Jean ‘s journey so far is her mindset and attitude embracing the process that I suggested we follow.
If we come back to the quote at the top of this post, from the email she sent me, I’d like to break down what is so lovely to take from it, particularly if you are someone who has been in pain for a while, like her.
“These exercises are much harder work than the physio I was doing before”
In AiM, we try not to call the movements we do “exercises”.
This is partially because of the connotation the word exercise has for many of us.
“Exercise” brings up images of a gym, performing a set number of repetitions of a movement with the end goal of getting stronger, or more flexible, or sweating, or punishing ourselves for eating cake, or burning a particular amount of calories, or making ourselves vomit from effort, or escaping from reality, or for mental health, or cardiovascular health, or whatever our notion of what exercise is for may be.
And so the word “exercise” comes with undertones of needing to get something out of it, which is not what we’re trying to teach with the AiM philosophy. The goal, instead, is the process itself: Exploration and learning; investigative movement. To show the body a new way of doing things. Give it an experience.
How often do we go into an experience expecting to get something out of it, and missing the meat of the experience itself? Like going to a concert, and watching most of it through your phone to get that perfect video memory of it (done that…).
Wouldn’t you rather watch the show directly with your eyes?
The movements are simply to immerse the body in an experience it doesn’t usually get to have. To access joint motions that are currently being avoided. To move into new airspace and dark zones where learning can happen. To open up new options for movement that had been denied. To reorganize the skeleton and resultant muscle tensions.
Per Gary Ward’s big rule of movement #2, joints act, muscles react (from What the Foot). We want to give the muscles something different to do by moving the structures they attach to, not by trying to strengthen and stretch the muscles in an attempt to control the skeleton.
To quote something Gary said on an immersion course:
“The presence of muscles that contract first before lengthening will always be present in a system that doesn’t flow.”
You shoujld follow Gary on instagram @garyward_aim. He posts useful stuff like this and photos of his kids climbing that will make you jealous.
Some people report they feel “stronger”, or they are getting more “flexible”, or they have more energy, as a result of practicing the AiM movements, but these are only secondary to showing the body a more efficient way of moving.
How many of us have truly investigated our relationship with exercise? I did this in 2015 as an experiment and I would encourage anyone to do the same. I stopped anything that felt like exercise. I wrote two blog posts about it and the ensuing existential crisis here PART 1, and here PART 2.
Many of us are forced to investigate our relationship with exercise only when exercise has no longer become possible- after injury in particular, as was my particular case.
At this point we have a choice. To go back to the way of doing things before injury, or to try to understand that how things were being done “before” is what led to being in this state now.
“I have to be present. I can’t just put myself through [the motions]”
Not to go mindlessly, counting down the reps of the homework exercises until they’re done, but to be fully immersed in the experience.
In fact, I rarely give a specific number of reps to do. Why? Because the goal is not to get to 10 reps. The goal is to be immersed in the experience of the movement. Its not what happens when you get to rep 10, its what is learned in the space of reps 1-9.
There will be a distinct sense of “knowing” when you’re done with a “set”. You’ll feel something has shifted. You’ll feel things working that haven’t worked in a long time. Your brain and body will simultaneously say “enough!”. But to know when you’ve reached this point means you must pay attention to what you are feeling. It could happen in 3 reps, or it could happen in 12, but you have to tune in to this feeling.
In Jean ‘s case, the foundation of our process was to tidy up the coordination of the joints that were out of sync: Change the ratios and timing of pronation through her entire system, from her foot up through her spine.
It took a lot of focus and energy on her part. She had to tune into parts of her body that she had no prior awareness of and the movements they were capable of performing.
Just being able to feel where the weight in her feet honestly was through all the noise in her system proved to be a challenge.
“Where am I, and where am I not”.
Had Jean simply counted to 10 and gone through the reps without awareness, she would be moving too quickly and automatically to learn a new pattern or to feel whether she was moving the parts that we were actually aiming to move.
In the book Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, Daniel Everett tells a story of how the remote Amazonian tribe he is living with, the Pirahã, do not use numbers or math. He tried to teach them simple addition, but they didn’t have any prior experience with the concept of numbers or adding and would not learn. What if for some people, areas of their bodies feel like math did to the Pirahã? They could learn math if they wanted to, they have the same brains as every other human, after all. But they have survived so long without it, found a way of living without math, why start now?
“I have to concentrate on small things”
We weren’t going for big sexy movements, but small, precise ones. She needed to tune into how things felt rather than just perform the motion.
For example:
Can you get your weight onto the anterior medial part of your heel?
Can you drop your right pelvis lower than your left?
Can you feel your spine bend to the left when you reach your right arm up?
As a closed system, changing one thing about the body must cause an adaptation from everything else. One degree can throw the entire system off.
If the pelvis isn’t level by one degree, everything else will be off by at least that much, probably more. If you draw two lines originating from the same point, one degree apart, how far apart will the two lines be after 2 inches? One foot? 100 feet? One degree matters, especially if there is pain present.
So for Jean to accomplish just several degrees of movement from a joint she doesn’t normally even have awareness of, or feel a change in where she is weight-bearing on her feet, while subtle, feels like an entirely different place to put the body. Off balance. It’s only a matter of degrees, but the brain starts to freak out because it doesn’t know where it is, and this is where the learning happens.
It takes so much more energy to focus on and feel the subtle differences I am describing than it does to squeeze your butt 10 times while thinking about what’s for lunch, and so for Jean, our work is hard not necessarily for the physical effort required, but for the ability to tune in, cope with change, and integrate it.
Not a “fire this muscle” approach, but a “move your structures into new spaces” one.
“I knew that this was what was missing”
“What’s missing”. In AiM philosophy, it always comes back to finding what’s missing, and claiming it back.
In Jean’s case, what’s missing was all of the above: Having her whole structure addressed, being asked to tune into her body, feel the parts she wasn’t aware of, move in ways she normally does not, access joint movements she has not felt for years, and do this subtle work in a completely present way.
I think Jean’s experience rings true for many people, certainly for myself in the past: Get hurt and go about getting treated in a way that has no expectation for us to engage with the work and be a part of our own healing process. Lie on the table and get worked on, without an expectation to do any work.
People are rarely presented an experience that allows them to heal themselves, and many people will rarely look for one because they don’t know what they don’t know.
In fact, in our first session Jean said:
“I’ve experienced body work of different sorts. But body work is something being done to me. It helps to get things to let go, to wake up things that are shut down. It does not teach my body what to do when I get up off the table. I feel like as soon as I move I’m going right back to whatever caused the problem in the first place. I need someone to teach me how I myself can get my body to swap out dysfunctional for better, consistently, and long term.”
I knew right then that we were going to get along great.
Conclusions?
If things are not changing in your body, ask:
Are you treating it as a whole system, or as separate parts?
Are you being present with it, or just going through the motions?
Are you checking in with it daily, or ignoring it’s signals?
Are you moving with awareness?
Are you moving out of your comfort zone, accessing ranges that you don’t usually move into, or sticking to what you know and normally do?
Are you determined, trusting, and committed to the process, or feel doomed to be stuck forever?
The real healing happens in the space of engaging fully in the process. Like Jean’s begun to do.
Realizing that the process is the goal.
“It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top” ~Robert Pirsig.
Jean always mentions how because she is “old”, she is having a hard time at making changes. But I don’t think this is true. I think she is doing incredibly well at making changes because of the attitude she has towards her journey. Its not a race after all, and it will take the time it’s going to take.
Time doesn’t heal, but what you do with the time you have to heal, will.
I recently started a small group six week program that meets Sunday mornings. I unofficially call it “Church of Core”.
Its a program designed under the premise that, being that there is so much misinformation on the internet, in the media, and from people at the grocery store on what we should be doing to “train the core”, there should be a class to help people understand the truth of how the body moves so they can make their own informed choices on what to do at the gym.
And honestly, do whatever you want at the gym. It’s all good. Do what makes you happy. Just make sure your body possesses and understands the mechanics to cope with those choices.
I wanted to share a little case study from a participant in the program who was having some issues.
Twist and shout (ow)
Nancy (not real name) is a dancer in the program. We had just finished day two, in which we’d explored sagittal plane spine movement and stability, and she asked me if we were going to look at rotational movement next, because she was having some issues that and she had a big dance workshop weekend coming up. I said, yeah, come early to church next week and we’ll take a looksie.
Nancy’s primary complaint was that left ribcage rotation caused a straining painful feeling through her left side from her pelvis up to her ribcage. This is obviously an issue for a dancer because rotating is kind of a big deal in a lot of dance movements. She got the same symptoms with right pelvis rotation- Pain and tension through left obliques. So it’s not just a left spine rotation issue, its a transverse cog issue.
In AiM, “cogs” refers to the role in gait of structures moving in opposition against each other, like turning cogs. In gait, the pelvis and ribcage have a cog-like motion in that they should always oppose each other’s movement in all three planes of motion: In normal walking, when the the pelvis rotates right, the ribcage should rotate left.
In the case of Nancy’s symptoms, it was not just a ribcage rotating left issue, but an issue with any part of the gait cycle in which her left leg is forward (pelvis right) and her upper body is swinging to the left (ribcage left).
It’s nice when things make sense like this because they sure as hell don’t always do.
Her chiropractor identified that her issue was her left external obliques. Let’s look at why her obliques might be complaining about this rotational pattern.
Obliquing, long and short
If we’re going to blame a muscle, it stands to reason that we should know if its sore because of concentric shortness/compression, or it is locked long, under eccentric load.
Left ribcage + right pelvis rotation will lengthen the left external obliques, as the left EOs rotate the spine to the contralateral side
So, we could infer that the muscle is not happy with being loaded eccentrically to decelerate left spine rotation.
In the case of many muscles strains, the tissues have become locked long and because they are already loaded and lengthened they will have trouble decelerating joint movement because they’re already stuck doing that all the dang time.
In Nancy’s case we want to know WHY left spine rotation has become an issue to manage. Why are the obliques being lengthened all the time? Perhaps there is something NOT happening in this rotational pattern that the left obliques are picking up the slack for?
Time to stop thinking about muscles
I’m not telling you what to do, but muscles are confusing and chaotic. Looking at joint motions makes things much less noisy.
To quote Gary Ward, “Would you rather look at 13 muscles that connect to the knee or look at the 4 movements it can do?”.
I’d rather work on 4 things than 13, personally.
What stood out in interviewing her body was that her right talus was positioned internally rotated, everted, and could not externally rotate and invert. The chances of her right foot being able to supinate were pretty slim. This turned out to be key for helping her access left ribcage rotation with much less discomfort.
In the Flow Motion Model™, whenever the talus goes right, the ribs and spine go left, and when the talus rotates left, the ribs and spine go right.
This is because the rearfoot and pelvis always move in the same direction in transverse plane in gait (in all planes, actually), and recall that the ribcage and spine always oppose the pelvis.
So we could infer that the ribcage and spine should always oppose the talus*.
Therefore, if the talus can’t go right, another structure might have to go right MORE in order to accomplish every phase of gait in which the right foot supinates (and that’s most of the gait cycle, FYI).
In Nancy’s case it seemed to be the spine/ribs trying to rotate excessively to make up for a lazy right talus. And what might get tired of decelerating this motion over and over? The left external obliques.
Supinate the shit out of it
So we got Nancy’s foot to experience supination with her foot tripod grounded on the floor. With a little nudging and wedging, her right talus obliged and started inverting and externally rotating. Sweet.
We then integrated it into a pattern that required her to do left spine rotation and right pelvis rotation (we chose right propulsion phase). What was cool was that as long as her right foot was supinating, she could access left spine rotation with almost no discomfort.
When she retested her rotations there was significantly less discomfort than before. Her right talus was also sitting less everted and internally rotated at rest.
The entire process took about 20 minutes. Then we hugged and went to church.
*Talus and ribcage always oppose… Except for that fraction of a second in which gait is homolateral!
Conclusions?
Few things, I guess:
Learning to work with the FMM and AiM philosophy makes connections like this possible.
Blaming muscles for issues doesn’t provide enough useful information. I was not thinking about what muscles were tight or overworking of facilitated or inhibited while I was working with Nancy (which would have driven me crazy back when I used to do a ton of Neurokinetic Therapy® testing). Saying “it’s my oblique that’s the problem” doesn’t tell you why. Muscles react to joint movement. The answer will show in the structures, their position, and the movements they can and cannot do.
Thinking about her oblique pain in terms of concentric muscle action might not have led to the same resolution, but thinking eccentrically made a lot of sense in this case.
The “talus drives the bus”, and its useful to know how movement of the foot affects movement up the chain.
Knowing how to palpate the talus is a useful skill (that I didn’t have until very recently, thanks to “Foot Dating” on an AiM course).
It really is true that one of the most powerful experiences for the body is just to help the feet to experience true pronation and supination.
I used to be very flexible. These days, it’s a slow grind to get my hands to the floor in a forward bend.
I’ve lost the ability I had as a dancer to bust out a middle split, cold, anytime or place, provided I’m wearing stretchy pants (and I’m ALWAYS wearing stretchy pants because I made excellent career choices).
A spontaneous JCVD splits-off moment with my step-nephew-in-law, back in the day when I could splits anytime…
I don’t consider myself to be flexible anymore, and you know what? I’ve never felt better.
Ironically, most people think they need to stretch more to get out of pain. Or that being flexible is a universal goal. But the stiffer I get, the less pain I have.
So what’s that about, huh??
Flexibility doesn’t make you a better person
I’ve spent months and years worth of hours of my life stretching to get more flexible, and all I got was injured, tight, and fragile (that should be on a T-shirt.)
But it wouldn’t be completely accurate to blame my problems on stretching. The fact is I made pretty bad life choices. Excessive, mindless stretching just happened to be a symptom of my complete lack of respect for and awareness of my body.
I pushed through pain, performed through injuries, and I lived in fear that if I ever stopped stretching my dance career would end. Which was again ironic, because I wanted to quit dance when I was 15 but just couldn’t seem to let go…
Anyway, flexible as I was, I was trapped in my body. Shackled by the constant tightness you know probably all too well if you are as obsessed with stretching as I was. A tightness that only seems to be relieved by stretching more. A tightness which, ironically, is your body’s way of asking you to stop stretching it.
I’ve learned that my body feels much better when I don’t stretch it when I’m less flexible. So I don’t stretch anymore because I like to think I’m not a complete idiot.
This is part one of a blog series about why stretching and flexibility are not the ultimate pain panacea. Part one is a bit of a rambly, ranty thing about the traditional paradigm: “If it hurts, if it’s tight, stretch it”.
Beyond mobility and stability: Harmony
In 2015, I decided to try elimitating the words “mobility” and “stability” from my vocabulary to see if I could define everything the body did in terms of actual anatomical motion. It was an awkward, challenging year (probably for my clients, too…).
How is that body part moving? In what direction? Is it moving too much? Too little? Too fast? Too slow? I wasn’t focused on muscles, I was looking only at joint motion, which was a big paradigm shift after taking the Anatomy in Motion 6 day immersion course in 2015.
The reason why I started this vocab change was because the words no longer seemed useful to describe an experience the body is having.
Stability implies no motion. Mobility implies movement. But in the body, nothing is ever not moving. Everything is always moving, just in different ratios, relationships, and timings with other body parts.
When something is actually NOT able to move- true stability- there is problem. For example if your knee actually can’t bend and is stuck straight. That’s a stable knee. But that’s a problem.
Knees have to be able bend for us to walk. But we want to get it to bend in a way that is meaningful for the rest of the body. With the right timing, and ratios of motion in relation to the other body parts, not just by doing a mindless leg curl, inconsiderate of what every other joint in the body should be doing when the knee bends.
So is stability a good goal? Not in the true sense of the word. Is mobility a good goal? It depends on how the thing is moving, in relation to the entire system.
To me, a better word is harmony. Or order.
I don’t want my body to be mobile just for the sake of mobility, because Kelly Starrett said you should want to be a supple leopard.
I want my body to move harmoniously, in an orderly way. This goes beyond mobility and stability. Beyond flexibility. This is a unique state for each one of us.
Am I over-thinking? I don’t think I’m thinking enough…
Flexibility is not a universal pain solution
One of my mentors, Chris Sritharan (Anatomy in Motion instructor) once said that there are 4 ways we can use a body part:
Overuse
Underuse
Misuse
Disuse
Do stretching address any of these? Not really… (but over-stretching a muscle that doesn’t need to be stretched falls into the “misuse” category).
I hear people say stuff like this constantly:
“I should stretch more.”
“I never stretch, that’s probably why my body feels so tight all the time.”
“I do always do hip stretches, by they just keep tightening back up.”
“My neck hurts *goes on Youtube to look for neck stretches*”
Sound familiar?
Back in my pre-thinking days (I consider age 22 to be when I officially started trying to use my frontal cortex for inquisitive thought), my left hamstring felt really “tight”, so I stretched it daily, really hard.
A few months later I strained my left hamstring while I was stretching in jazz class warm-up one day. Injured while warming up… The irony. Well, I was only doing what I thought was right based on the information I had.
I thought stretching would set me free. Make me a better dancer. Make my tightness go away. Make me a better person, even (if only I could do deeper splits, everyone will admire me and I’ll be a big success! Nope…).
Can we stretch my shoulder?
A few years ago, a client came in saying that his shoulder felt “tight”, and, “can we do some stretching for it?”.
I had to take a breath and collect myself. A part of me wanted to say, “No we cannot stretch your GD shoulder because the problem isn’t your shoulder, it’s that ankle sprain you keep denying is a problem!!”.
But I didn’t… Because I like having clients that support my ability to pay my rent.
His shoulder didn’t actually need to be stretched per se, because the muscles were already in a lengthened state in the area he had discomfort- That spot actually needed to be shortened to take the tension out, not put more tension in by tugging on it more.
But, because I try to be diplomatic, we did a thing that I told him was a “stretch”, and afterwards, when the sore spot felt better, I explained to him how it wasn’t actually a stretch and why it worked (it was a whole body lunge-type-movement to get his foot to pronate, disguised as a shoulder stretch).
How the traditional stretching-makes-everything-better paradigm fails
A client I used to see many years ago would come in every week with low-grade back pain that she describes as tightness. In her words, “it’s fine because I just stretch it out with yoga.”
To which I wanted to ask if yoga “works”, then why do you show up every week with the same old back pain? But I didn’t… Because it was a time in my life that I was financially insecure and was terrified of losing a client by asking potentially provocative questions like this.
My point is that stretching a muscle doesn’t necessarily teach that muscle anything. To again quote Chris Sritharan (aka #sritho):
“We’re not trying to stretch a muscle, we’re trying to give it something to do.”
What do muscles do? Manage joint motion: Joints act, muscles react.
If flexibility and stretching were the solution to the body’s problems, then contortionists, dancers, and circus performers would never have issues. Ever. But they do. Lots of ’em. Explain that for me with stretching logic.
I think a big problem is that most of us look for a solution too quickly when we should take the time to ask better questions.
Asking questions like, “why is it tight?”, instead of “what stretches should I do?”.
In fact, this blog post was born from my feeling completely insufficient at the art and science of asking questions.
Questions help us see facts. “My neck feels tight”, isn’t a fact, it’s a subjective experience.
“Tightness means I should stretch”, isn’t a fact. It’s a belief.
Well, that’s enough of a ranty primer for part one. In part two (and probably three) we’ll go deeper….
What are the questions we need to ask to get the facts we need to go beyond stretching?
What ARE the facts we need?
What do I mean by harmony and order? (hint: gait mechanics)
If not stretching, what SHOULD we do?
How is stretching different than eccentric loading? (hint: center of mass management)
“But Monika, I hear you talking about feeling stretches all the time in your classes… I’m confused.” Me too! It’s a good way to be. It means there’s something to learn 🙂
Stay tuned!
Until then, may you have the courage to stop compulsively stretching your tight spots, and the curiosity to wonder, “why is it tight?” in the first place.
(see the video below)
In the book Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, Daniel Everett tells a story of how the remote Amazonian tribe he is living with, the Pirahã, do not use numbers or math. He tried to teach them simple addition, but they didn’t have any prior experience with the concept of numbers or adding and would not learn. What if for some people, areas of their bodies feel like math did to the Pirahã? They could learn math if they wanted to, they have the same brains as every other human, after all. But they have survived so long without it, found a way of living without math, why start now?
