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

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

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

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

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

The 10 most common hip extension errors you might be making

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

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

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

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

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

The story is called…

Why You Shouldn’t Stretch in Bed

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

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

Other silly things dance teachers have suggested include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promise me you will learn from my mistakes?

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

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

What is hip extension? 

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

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

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

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

No it is not… 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This leads us to another important techincal detail…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Size is not the problem 😉 Accuracy and specificity are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An eccentric load is an educational experience for the body.

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

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

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

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

When does hip extension happen in gait?

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

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

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

Remember the rule: Muscles lengthen before they contract.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s begin with some basic functional anatomy…

Anatomy of your butt 101

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

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

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

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

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

SAGITTAL PLANE	GLUTE MAX STATUS
Flexion	Long
Extension	Short
FRONTAL PLANE
Adduction	Long
Abduction	Short
TRANSVERSE PLANE
Internal rotation	Long
External rotation	Short

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

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

SAGITTAL PLANE	GLUTE MAX STATUS
Flexion	Long
FRONTAL PLANE
Adduction	Long
TRANSVERSE PLANE
External rotation	Short

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

Gary Ward’s First Two Rules of Motion

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

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

Rule 1: Joints act, muscles react

Rule 2: Muscles lengthen before they contract.

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

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

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

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

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

Unless you have a pair of snowshoes…

Think of muscles as managers of joint motion.

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

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

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

Like deep-snow country snowshoeing

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

What motions of the hip do the glutes manage? 

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

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

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

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

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

• Extension
• Abduction
• External rotation

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

• Flex
• Adduct
• Internally rotate

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

So…

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

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

Internally rotating the hip blah blah blah hip external rotation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do butts go to sleep?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give the glutes no option but to contract

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hip joint acts, glutes react. 

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

Stop blaming your muscles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me know how it went 🙂

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

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

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

A movement detective’s comprehensive guide to calcaneal motion!

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

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

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

But first… The basics.

What is the calcaneus?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So… Calcaneal motion is kind of important!

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

What if your heel bone can’t slide?

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

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

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

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

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

TRIPLANAR CALCANEAL MOTION:

	Sagittal Plane	Frontal Plane	Transverse Plane
Pelvis language	Anterior and posterior tilt	Hiking and dropping	Rotation right and left
Anatomical language	Plantar and dorsiflexion	Eversion and inversion	Internal and external rotation
Foot pressure distribution	12 o’clock: Front (anterior)	3 and 9 o’clock (medial and lateral)	3 and 9 o’clock (medial and lateral)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before I say more, check out this next clip:

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

So…

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

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

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

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

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

Calcaneus movement check-in

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

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

Now let’s bring your pelvis into the equation…

Pelvis and calcaneus movement check-in

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

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

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

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

How does calcaneal motion impact on neck motion?

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

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

My personal findings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions?

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s quite possible…

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Liberated Body student recently asked me this question:

“I find myself not really taking the time to do the exercises we went through and continuously do my stretches, I’m not really sure why there is such resistance. Does this happen with your clients?”

Ummm YES. 100% this was me. Does this feel familiar to you, too?

This student is essentially asking: I know this work is important, so why am I not prioritizing it? I answered her question in a video:

I didn’t realize I was talking for an hour! So if you’d like to listen while you’re on the move, I have an audio-only version for you:

Audio quality isn’t fantastic, but I wasn’t really planning to make it into a “podcast”. Next time I’ll use my mic!

Originally, did this video on a Facebook live, my first time ever doing that (you can check that out here in all its unedited, awkward glory).

Do you need to practice the “middle finger mudra”?

Usually if there is something we want (like to move better with less pain) but we aren’t taking the action to get it, it’s because a form of resistance is in the way.

Identifying your resistance will show you exactly what action you need to take. What story you’te telling yourself that you need to say a big F*#K YOU to. Starting today.

I find the middlge finger mudra very helpful here 😉

Go 100% into the resistance. Give yourself no option. Stop thinking, just do the thing. No matter how small that first step is, go into it 100%. Worst thing that can happen is you’ll quit and things will stay exactly the same.

So there’s really nothing to lose! Just take the next little step.

If you haven’t tried this meditation yet, do it now (and use that special middle finger mudra to embody it…)

Do you need a little help with that first small step to taking ownership? Need some accountability to make sure you don’t back out again? Or feel like you need a “reset” to help start a new movement practice or routine? 

I invite you to join my next Liberated Body workshop.

I make the process of doing your work less big and daunting, showing you exactly what to do and how to do it. And hopefully fun, too 😉

Not sure if its right for you? Email me and we can figure that out.

Anyway, below is a complete breakdown of the stuff I rambled on about in the video, in case you’d rather read the bullet notes.

Enjoy!

Why am I so dang resistant to doing the work?

In the video I cover:

• What is resistance?
• 6 step framework to get from facts to results
• 13 of the most common mindset blocks that are keeping you from actually doing dang exercises you know you should be doing.
• 3 step process of awakening: Consiousness, witnessing, awareness
• How behaviour influces our attitude, not the other way around

What is resistance anyway?

That voice in our head that says:

• This isn’t important
• I don’t want to do that
• I don’t know how
• It’s too overwhelming
• I don’t have the time
• It’s too complicated
• I’m not motivated
• I’m too tired
• I’m scared
• I’m embarassd 
• What will people think
• I have this other thing that’s more important, I’ll do it later

The 6 step framework

Using this framework can help take you from seeing the facts to getting the result you want.

Let’s say for Annie, the result is she wants to get out of pain so she can do her work better- Acting, dancing, and living without fear of flaring stuff up.

What does her six step framework look like?

Facts→ truth→ demand→ effort→ transformation→ result

1.  What are the facts? Annie is in pain and can’t seem to get out of it. 
   
2. What’s the truth? Annie can’t bring herself to prioritize the work. To put bluntly: The work isn’t important enough to her, yet. 
   
3. What’s her demand? To see the importance in the work she has to do. To do this, she must have a clear vision of the result she will have in her life when she is no longer living in pain. 
   
4. What’s her effort? What’s the Sadhana- The daily effort to undertake. Not perfection. For her this might mean putting in her calendar 5 minutes everyday to start working on just one exercise.
   
5. What’s the transformation she needs to make? From someone who isn’t able to give herself even 5 minutes a day to focus 100% on her, to someone who can face her facts with confidence, and be disciplined to do the work, put herself first, prioritize her body’s demands for recovery and healing, while saying no to everythign getting in the way. 
   
6. The result? Annie is able to live a pain free life. The result is also bigger than just her. It’s also a blessing for all, when she are living out the vision she has for herself. Annie becoming pain free and modeling ownership of her body’s needs is a blessing for others who meet her. Seeing the blessing relinquishes the sense of guilt or feeling selfish that can arise.

I encourage you to define what these 6 steps look like for you, right now.

13 common forms of resistance: Which do you identify with?

Disclaimer: I’m not a psychologist. Far from it! I’m definitely not claiming I know what’s going on in your hear. These are simply some of the common things that come up, that I’ve observed in my clients, and in myself.

1. You think you need more information, or something external to happen before you can get to work. In reality, what is necessary is to put 100% of the focus on YOU. Putting 100% of your focus and attention on you, might be scary because you see how much of a mess things really are, how much effort it will take, so you abort mission. Are you treating your body like I treat my taxes?
   
2. “I can’t change”. Nope. The only truth is that change happens. So we need to be very selective about the tpes of stimuli we expose ourselves to.
   
3. “I don’t have the time”. AKA this is not yet important enough to me. Do you know your values? Can you link doing the work to one of your actual highest values
   
4. It feels too overwhelming and you don’t know where to start. What is overwhelm? It’s the failure to organize something complex into a system with easy to follow steps. Are you not willing to ask for help, or do the research to break the process down systematically? Is there a book you can buy? Is there a program you can enroll in? Do it! You just have to start! The longer you put off doing the work the more it builds up and it seems daunting and you don’t know where to start so you convince yourself its not important anymore.
   
5. The fear that if you commit to getting the result, your entire life has to change. Becoming the new version of yourself can be utterly terrifying because you’re so attached to the comfort and familiarity of the routines and habits and structures you’ve built for yourself, even though they might be keeping you in pain. Are you numbing yourself to this? What are you using to numb out the fear of rising to the new demands?
   
6. “I don’t think it will work for ME”. AKA do you think you’re special and the rules of “put in the work, reap what you sow” don’t apply to you? Or that if it doesn’t work instantly that it doesn’t work at all? Are you addicted to instant gratification so that if something doesn’t immediately make a change, you dismiss it? Sometimes this work takes time. This might be a long term process. It will work for you if you do the work.
   
7. “I’m afraid that things will get worse because I might do it wrong, so I don’t do anything”. Well they’ll get worse if you do nothing, so you might as well start doing something so you can rule in and out what works for you and what doesn’t. 
   
8. “I don’ thave the motivation”. Motivation is relying on something external. Inspiration is when something wakes up inside and says “I need to do this, and I want to do this”. When we can see the situation clearly- the facts- and wake up to the demand, something WILL automatically spark in us to take action.
   
9. Are you worried about what other people will think? We get invested in the image people have created of us. Maybe taking time to do self-care isn’t part of your identityand you worry what people will think of you. Will it look selfish? Will I look weird? Will people think I’m weak? Could trying to be who you think people want you to be keeping you stuck? Two options: Stop caring, or get new friends.
   
10. Is your identity built around moving and exercising in only one particular way? And do you put up a wall against anything that isn’t that thing, because it’s not in line with the current image of yourself you’ve built? Are you addicted to intensity? Unwilling to try a gentler way because the only way you can feel something is when its 100%, hardstyle? We can’t toperate at 100% all the time. What if you aimed to operate at 20% effort, 80% of the time, to build a reserve?
    
11. Does taking the responsibility for your body feel too scary? Do you think life shouldn’t be scary sometimes? This is called delusion… Do you just want to escape into fun, and when things get too hard, or aren’t interesting do you quit? Use this resistance as the cue to do the thing. Stop thinking about it and just do it.
    
12. Do you see doing the work as punishment, or as an act of self-love? Can reframe it? Can you make YOU sacred, and the work your ceremony? Can you see this work as love, not punishment? 
    
13. Are you unwilling to say no to the things and people you need to say no to, in order to say YES to doing this work? To do one exercise for just for 5 minutes a day, what will you have to ssay no to? Mindless scrolling on your phone?

Thats’ definitely not a complete list. And I’m certainly not trying to psychoanalyze you, or Annie, or anyone else. I simply hope that this helps you identify if any of these patterns exist in you, right now.

Now your turn… What forms of resistance did you identify with? I’d love to hear. Shoot me an email back, or write a vomment on this post. Or is there soemthing else I didn’t mention? I’m genuinely curious 🙂

Books and stuff I referenced:

Dance Stronger ebook and training program

The Values Factor, book by Dr. John Demartini

The meditation teacher I mentiond: Dhyan Vimal

In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, book by Dr. Gabor Mate

The Flinch, book by Julien Smith

Liberated Body Workshop

Want more movement nerdy goodness? Come hang out with me in one of my monthly free Movement Nerd Hangouts, every second Friday of the month. Check the schedule here and get on the VIP list.

Have you ever had an ankle sprain?

That’s a silly question… If you’re a human, your answer is most proabably yes.

If you’re a dancer, like I am currently having an identity crisis about, statistically, ankle sprains are one of the most common injuries.

The problem is that most of us disregard our past ankle sprains as being unimportant and unrelated to any of our current aches, pains, and chronic niggles.

And then our bodies woes become this mystrious thing, a senseless cascade of symptoms of source unknown.

I work with a lot of folks in this situation, and I often see the impact of an an old, forgotten, ignored ankle sprain, on their body’s current state.

The way their body is moving now has become their solution. Their current set of movement options is an adaptive strategy in response to that sprain.

Could this be you? (chances are likely, yes)

How do you know if your old ankle sprian is still messing with you, and what can you do about it?

You can totally figure this out…

On one condition: You’ve got to stop trying random shit you found on Youtube and instead, find a system to investigate your ankle/body as objectively as possible.

I’ve been blessed to have been shown such a system, and I want to share it with you, step by step. And it’s not rocet surgery.

You can become your own ankle sprain whisperer.

But first, there’s a bit of background info to get familiar with, so I made a little three part video series (all the clips are from my most recent Liberated Body Movement Deep Dive session, called: The Ankle Sprain Retrospective)

Ankle Sprain Whispering: The Preliminary Theory

I love those two words together: “Preliminary theory”. Feels so sophisticated, doesn’t it?

This first video describes why it is important to consider how an old, forgotten ankle sprain could be messing with other distant parts of your body.

There is a system you can use to determine how many other issues your ankle sprain may be linked to (and I’m going to share that system, just a little farther along. Oh how I love a good system, don’t you?!).

So if your neck feels restricted, and 5 years of neck stretching hasn’t helped, should you keep doing those streteches? Or is it time to get curious about the real source of that neck issue? Is your neck being affected by your ankle?

We can totally figure this out!

6 Important Considerations for Ankle Sprain Significance

Video two is to help you consider how significant that ankle sprain was, so you can truly give it the time and attention it needs.

Most people under-appreciate the impact of an injury, because while their minds may have forgotten it, their bodies still remember.

This next video outlines a few important considerations to develop an appreciation for the amount of time, attention, and care that old sprain might need now, so we can move forwards and heal appropriately.

*NOTE my audio turned off as I was speaking about the first consideration (tbh I actually dropped my phone in my toilet right before recording the session… Guys, you don’t need your phone in the bathoroom with you. Learn from my mistakes!), so the video begins at #2.

Not on the video, consideration one is,“How old were you at the time of injury?”. Consider that the younger you were when the sprain happened might make it more significant, not less. THis goes against how we usually think.

Consider that 20 years of adaptation and habit formation around that sprain is more impactful than one year. Just because you were young and you healed, doesn’t mean it didn’t have a significant effect on your body to this day.

The 6 considerations in a nutshell:

1. How old were you at the time? *see note above
2. What was your emotional/nervous system state?
3. Did it cause you to cease activity for a period of time, and did you respect that?
4. Did you receive the appropriate rehabilitation or complete care needed at the time?
5. Did you personally, or other authority figures take it seriously or did you ignore it and push through it??
6. Did any new symptoms, of unknown cause, at other parts of your body pop up weeks, months, or even years after the ankle sprain?

And then a little rant about the standard medical system and how it so often dismisses us when doctors don’t have answers. All too common…

The Ankle Sprain Whispering System

Ok, now let’s look at a practical system we can use to rule in or out any suspisions about how and what that old ankle sprain is affecting.

This system is based on the Anatomy in Motion check-in process, which is a self-assessment of the motions your body should be able to do during gait. In AiM philosophy and practice, we think of gait as:

a. One of the most objective movement assessment tools we have

and,

b. A highly meaningful context to reintroduce missing movements to restore effiency and ease to the body

To be honest, I didn’t assess myself prior to recording the session, so I had no expectations, and I was quite surprised to find that my left ankle was affecting my left shoulder and neck range of motion. Well shit! Didn’t know that until I checkd in…

Give yourself about 20 minutes to participate in the “Ankle Sprain Whispering Check-in System” (patent pending… jk, this is not my work, it’s adapted from the teachings of Gary Ward and Chris Sritharan, through my AiM studies, and I consider it to be a necessary chapter of the “how to have a human body user’s manual”, so please share far and wide).

The Ankle Sprain Whispering System steps:

1. Check in with your baseline mechanics. We want to know:
   – Where is your center of mass resting ( based on your foot pressures)?
   – Which leg do you trust/not trust to stand on?
   – What is the current movement potential of your body telling you about which leg you like to stand on more (pelvis shifts, rotations, stepping forwards)?
   – Does your ankle have its full set of movement options?
   
2. Manipulate ankle variables (the towel “hug”, inversion, and eversion) to determine what else in your body is being affected by your ankle’s current state. Do your mechanics improve when your foot is more everted? More inverted? When “give it a hug”?

Simple.

What did you find? I’d love to hear.

What do you do with the data?

So maybe you found, like me, that your body has some unresolved issues with your old ankle sprain, and now you’re wondering, what do you do about it?

We want to restore movement options at your foot and ankle so that it can be an independednt, self-actualized body part, no longer interfering with mechanics above. Only when your ankle can know itself and its potential can it then be re-integrated with the whole body, in harmonious relationship.

Restoring missing movement options to a locked down, or hypremobile ankle will help it continue and/or complete its healing process, thereby not needing another part of the body to make up for its loss of options.

We also want to ensure that other parts of your body no longer have to make up for a lack of motion below. For example, if you’re like me and your left humerus external rotation is affected by your left ankle, I also want to do some work on restoring some missing movement to my humerus.

In a nutshell: Can your foot ankle pronate and supinate? Dorsiflex and plantar flex?

If you give these movements back to your system, then re-check with your body’s mechanics, you just might find that your neck problem, at its root, was really more the result of an ankle problem.

That’s what it means to be an ankle sprain whisperer: You are fluent in speaking, listening, and interpreting your body’s language.

How do I restore movement options?

Restoring movement options should also be done in the context of a system (I reallllly love systems because I’m super lazy), and therfore I hesitate to share specific exercises out of context, as they may become yet another random thing someone finds on Youtube and misinterprets.

So if you want to learn more, get the context, and get the system to make the exercises effective, I’m going to invite you to join my next Liberated Body online workshop, in which I share allll the things.

The next one is coming up on Sept 19th 2020, and registration is now open 🙂

In Liberated Body, I make understanding the complexity of gait mechanics simple for anyone, regardless of your background in movement and anatomy, so you can get results with it.

We cover your whole body’s movement mechanics based on its original instructions for the walking cycle. Day two is where we cover foot and ankle mechanics.

It’s a lovely experiential study of your anatomy to troubleshoot why your body feels the way it does, and find strategies to make it feel better, move with less pain, and do all of the things you love with more ease.

Shoot me an email if you want to chat more and learn if this workshop is a good fit for you right now 🙂 Or if you’re ready to register right now, sign up here.

How good of an ankle sprain whisperer are you?

How did that process go for you? Did you discover anything new?

I didn’t even know my left ankle was related to my lef arm until I recorded that session! Crazy! There’s so much to explore…

I’d love to hear what you found. Write a comment below or send me an email about your experience with this ankle sprain business.

You CAN be your own Ankle Sprain Whisperer!

All the best with your ongoing movement explorations 🙂

Want to explore this nerdy stuff with me live every month?

You should join one of my free monthly Movement Nerd Hangouts. See the full topic schedule here, and sign up below so that I can email you when registration opens for the next hangout 🙂

The topic for the inaugural edition of my monthly free Movement Nerd Hangout series was: Are Your Shoes Working For You?

We spent over and hour and a half geeking out on whether or not you’re wearing shoes that work for you, or if it’s time to let go.

As a bonus, I made a free PDF workbook to go with the session, because there’s a lot to keep track of! GO HERE to download the workbook and use it as you follow along.

We went through a 4 step process to learn about what makes a shoe a good fit, and discussed why its important to make sure you have strategies to make sure your body is robust to any shoe you choose.

I recorded the whole dang thing, and I invite you to participate along with it when you can make the time! (or just sit back with some popcorn and enjoy the show…)

Here’s what we covered:

1) What 5 things should you look for in a shoe that is good for your body?

2) Can your feet currently pronate and supinate well outside of a shoe? (let alone in one?)

3) Test out a few pairs of shoes with the “Does My Body Like My Shoes?” system, based on Gary Ward’s Anatomy in Motion model of gait mechanics.

4) How you can use the system for the rest of your life for all future shoe purchasing situations, and how to find “post-shoe unwind routines” for when you DO wear shoes your body doesn’t like.

The purpose of the session is to help you become an empowered, informed, wearer of shoes

I definitely learned something new about how my shoes are impacting on my body.

For example, I learned that my favourite hiking boots actually restrict my ribcage and neck range of motion, but improve movement at my hips. And my Vivo Barefoot shoes improve movement at my ribcage and neck!

This information is useful for me to have so that I can track weird neck and ribcage symptoms (of which I have…) to whether or not I wore shoes my body didn’t like and failed to unwind with some self-care afterwards.

Knowledge is power, guys!

To see the full schedule of my Movement Nerd Hangouts, go here and sign up to attend live (and live attendees get free stuff!)

Now if you enjoyed this hang-out and are wondering how you can learn more about your foot mechanics, create your own “post-shoe unwind routine”, and unravel other myseteries in your body’s movement system, this is exactly what we do in my Liberated Body Workshop.

Liberated Body is a movement workshop to free your body from the shackles of inefficient, compensatory movement habits, formed over the years. Sports, habitual postures, injuries… All have an effect!

Over the four days you’ll learn how the human body was designed to move through the walking cycle (gait mechanics), and be guided through a step by step process to restore this movement potential where it is missing so you can get out of pain and do what you love. 

If you want to talk about whether this workshop is right for you, I’m happy to chat. Shoot me an email 🙂

Liberated Body is not a one time workshop to solve all your body’s woes. It’s a system that helps you engage in the life-long project of taking care of your body. 

It’s not a class to stretch and strengthen, like a pilates or yoga class- But it will help you perform better at pilates and yoga with more access to your body’s movement potential. 

Anyway, let me know how things go with your shoes. I’d love to hear what you discover about how your foot wear could be impacting on your movement potential.

After each “lesson” in my Liberated Body online course I ask students to reflect on a few questions to help them process their experience.

Unintentionally, the answers have been inspiring material for my brain to nom and poop into blog posts.

For instance:

My question: What does having a “liberated body” mean to you?

Student answer: “Being able to move with ease and skill long term + feeling joy while defying societal expectations of body/movement acceptability”

Defying soceital expectation of body/movement acceptability.

Because I could not do this is exactly how things went wrong for me.

This soceital defiance in the name of our bodies is the embodied revolution we need (maybe that’s what I should call my workshop instead?? Don’t steal plz).

It got me thinking… Why do we need an embodied revolution? Have we been bullied? Coereced? Indoctrinated?

Have you been bullied?

I didn’t realize until recently how bullied I was, we all are, by societal expectations for how a body “should” be.

Have you been bullied into dismissing your body? Made to believe that how your body looks is more important than how it feels to inhabit? I have. Most women have. Men, too.

I have have been bullied by ballet teachers to care more about my appearance and the pretty shapes I can make my body do than for the relationship I have with it.

Have you been bullied into doing someone elses’ bidding at expense of the well being of your own body?

Most of us been reduced by society to think that the body is nothing but a piece of meat to manipulate. That the highest echelon of acheivement is to appear to fit in and toil away at the expense of ourselves being present as… Ourselves!

Well I got news. You. Are. Not. Steak.

The Meat-Body and the Feeling-Body

That we are reduced to a “meat-body” who has fogotten it can feel is at the root of so much suffering.

For me, the manifestation of my meat-body was an eating disorder. For others, addiction. For others, being sucked into a career path only to wake up one day to see how it’s not what they really wanted, but what their parents wanted for them.

Whatever your case may be, our CULTutral environment asks us to dismiss inhabiting a body that can feel.

At best, we are advised to exercise as a clever ruse to pretend we’re taking care of our bodies. But this advice is for the meat-body- Conform, fit in, look busy, but don’t feel.

Its no wonder its so tough to figure out for ourselves what is “best” for our bodies. And everybody’s got advice for the meat-body that sounds great.

Go for a run. Get an injection. Try these orthotics.

The only advice I feel is ethical to give is that nobody can know what’s best for your body but you, but as you are now, you’re probably asking the question to a piece of steak.

So, how do you know what’s best for your body?

Society knows best

For most of us, the pull of society’s standard is too strong and becomes “what’s best”. By this travesty, we gradually forget how to actually feel our bodies.

Not only are we steak, we are so well cooked we need to add globs of sugary BBQ sauce to make going there even palatable.

We need help from apps that tell us when to eat, when to sleep, when to move, if we’re breathing the right way.

We need all kinds of biofeedback technology just to tell us about how our body is feeling, because we can’t yet tell for ourselves.

If I’m being honest, I’m talking about myself here.

I’m still recovering my sense of true physical hunger. Most of the time I still have to intellectualize whether I should eat or not because I’ve lost the ability to hear a signal so fundamental for survival. Sometimes when I do feel real hunger it makes me feel nauseaus and I have to stop and tell myself I’m ok. I’m not perfect, I’ve got an over-cooked meat-body, too.

Why is it so easy to lose the ability to feel our bodies?

Because this need to fit in pervades all aspects of our weird societal structure.

And if we can stop feeling the subtle messages from our body, the ones that say, “Rest!” “Eat!”, “Don’t eat!”, and “Don’t trust that guy!”, we can ignore the uncomfortable sense that we’re going wrong.

If you could choose not to ever feel wrong again, wouldn’t you?

But in denying the feeling-body, all we can do is conform to an expectation that was never originally ours. If we could feel this bullying as it was happening, it would hurt! And who wants to feel hurt? Not me.

Better to pretend its not bullying at all. Better to stop feeling. Ignorance is bliss.

Hello meat-body.

And your meat-body is very good at getting shit done at your expense.

Your meat-body brings home the bacon

Most of us would rather not admit we willingly dismiss our bodies in order to focus harder on our work, make money, and survive. Especially right now, in COVID days.

Most careers rely on our minds to get shit done at the expense of our bodies.

The mind and the feeling-body can rarely coexist, not without deliberate training. It’s freakin’ hard. Just try it: Do some algebra or some other intellectual task, and pay attention to your breathing at the same time. Maybe you can do it… I can’t.

The benefit of using the mind from a meat-body state is that we can get sucked into it work-mode so intensely that it feels hella productive.

In fact, we feel pretty great! Great that is, until the feeling-body speaks up one day- Shit, you have a herniate disc and it hurts. How the heck did that happen? I didn’t feel it coming.

That’s because you’re steak. Steak doesn’t thave feelings.

Alas, even when the feeling-body starts to speak, we don’t want to hear it. We mean to do right by our body, but we instead we silence it with exercise to “fix”it so we can go back to being steak + mind.

But lack of exercise wasn’t the original problem for the meat-body. The source of the probelm was that we were not paying attention to our feeling-body.

Is the solution to not listening just to yell louder?

Tempting… But no.

Layering stretching and strengthening on top of a body that cannot feel is like shaking a crying baby. You get the result you wanted- silence, but then you have to deal with the devastating consequences.

Exercise is not the fix, because “doing” isn’t the solution for not being present.

Tenderizing an over-cooked steak doesn’t make it any less cooked. It just pummels it. But it feels productive to do something, doesn’t it?

Bringing feeling back to the meat-body

When we are stuck doing and attaining- exercise, career-focus, fitness goals, etc- instead of feeling, we are taken away from being in a body that can feel.

Feeling should be a natural state. Imagine a toddler just developing its senses. All feeling all the time.

But for most of us, feeling is something we have to train ourselves to do again. It becomes a “doing”, and we risk going wrong, yet again, by making “feeling” an output, instead of an input.

In my work with people, and in Liberated Body, this is where we begin: Using movement as input first, output second.

We were all born with the ability to feel our bodies, but somewhere along the way we were told there were more important things than our sensory experience.

We must remember the feeling-body. And only by this alchemical rememberance, overcooked steak can be transformed to its original, raw state.

Non-verbal communication requires a feeling body

So what’s the use of a feeling-body anyway if we can get more shit done by ignoring it?

Life has such sensory richness the meat-body cannot come close to knowing.

Do you know the depth to which the body can feel and communicate beyond the mind?

If you don’t know what I mean, you are probably steak.

What if just being was the ultimate attainment? So rich. Such a joy just to inhabit. What if that was enough?

This transformation from steak into a feeling body is the embodied revolution, and it’s better than chocolate cake (but try telling that to the mind).

Our pre-frontal cortex is great, but…

You are more than a steak with a PFC.

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There’s this place between input and output called stillness where I never allow my body to go . 

It’s a shame because between input and output everything exists. 

It’s the space between cause and effect. 

Between thought and reaction. 

It’s where I can feel.

It’s a space of possibility. Pure potential.

It’s where I give myself fully to ground and gravity. 

And its also the place I use input and output to escape, because I’m too afraid to go. 

This place called stillness is part of physical mastery. And paradoxically, we have to work to attain mastery stillness.

But its a nuanced kind of work that I don’t know if I can explain well.

Think of it like this: Most people think that mastering something is an act of doing. Or trying. An effort.

Anything we can attain must be through an effort to get it, right? 

This is perfectly fine in many areas, like strength training, or improving movement capacity in some regard.

There’s even an inspiring song (and movie) about it:

But with stillness… Not quite the same effort.

Just think to the last time someone told you to relax, which is what we tend think of as stillness.

Someone tells you, “Try to relax”.

What did you just do? You TRIED. You put in EFFORT to attain a state of relaxation. In all likelihood, in your best effort to relax you succeeded only to tighten and compress your body. 

The challenge is that in stillness there is no reference to tell you that you’re doing it. When you contract something, you feel it in the spot you’re contracting. When you are doing nothing, however, what do you feel, and where do you feel it?

I actually don’t have an answer to that because I don’t do enough nothing to feel what nothing feels like (if nothing can even have a feeling…)

What is the reference point for non-action? If we are the one being still, what moving thing gives reference to us?

Stillness is when the world is still moving, and we are just there in it. Not moving with it or against it, just there in it.

Stillness it not felt as an effort. Which is supremely unsatisfying.

It’s not felt as something acting, tensing, straining, contracting, or doing something effortful, in a particular location in your body. So what is even telling you that you’re there? How can you tell that you’re still?

Maybe this is one reason why stillness can be so scary: It’s like you’re not even there… We’re so used to being the point of reference based on input and output.

So when you hear “Try to relax”, it’s not your fault if your default is to tighten your body. 

I’ve been trying to find better words to describe this state of stillness. It’s a place where no effort is required to be. Nothing coming in. Nothing going out. 

I think its so hard to describe stillness because for most of us the brain structures to comprehend it don’t even exist. And we can only understand that which we already have the neural structures to understand…

The Taoist concept of Wu Wei comes to mind: Action through non action. Doing through non doing. Stillness as a state consciously attained through an intention to not act. 

The best way I’ve come to understand stillness, as thing for my body, is as a deep surrender to gravity. A act of non-resistance to it. Letting it bear down, pressing me to the Earth without fighting back.

Most of us are fighting back. We don’t want to surrender. We don’t want to feel helpless in our non-action. 

In fitness and rehab we are taught exercises to “fight back”- Anti gravity exercises, spine extension, standing with “good posture”. I even teach these exercises. And to do them can bring a sense of power and sovereignty: We will not be pushed down. We are strong. Fuck you gravity.

But oh, if you let yourself go to this place called stillness without fighting you’ll feel the pure power that is there What if you could just be in that power without using it? Just in it.

I tried. It was unsettling.

To lie in raw, unused, undirected power feels dangerous and out of control. So instead of lingering in it, we direct it into a protective action, or “productivity”, or business (aka laziness). 

This is why stillness, as a practice, is part of physical mastery. Its how we learn to exists beyond doing. Its where we get to be with our personal power and feeling it’s surge without expending it.

That is, if we don’t escape how chaotic and weird it is.

I was out walking a few days ago and the insight hit me like a ton of bricks: I don’t ever allow myself to be still. There’s always some input I’m taking in, or something I’m doing as an output. 

Not that this is bad… But something’s missing, living that way.

Inputs and outputs are like ducks always coming and going on a pond, creating ripples on the surface so there’s never quite enough clarity to see through to the bottom. See there are actually fishes there. Maybe a rare turtle or some other treasure.

When I’m always using an input or output I avoid stillness and so I can never see what’s really there. 

And in so doing I’ve learned not to trust my body. I’ve never learned to be with it without having to force something in or do something active with it. 

In blocking my stillness, I also block feeling my pain, hunger, emotions, and fatigue. I don’t get accurate sensory information.

Food, information, music, coffee, manual therapy- Inputs I use to alter my state from stillness to analysis or distraction.

And exercise is the main output I use to control what I will allow my body to feel, which is preferable to letting unpredictable and uncomfortable feelings come over me.

And these keep me from experiencing me as I am, as a still pond. With treasure at the bottom I’m missing.

If I’m being honest, I realize I’m just using these inputs and outputs to avoid being still. 

For example, I say, I’m going out for a walk to be “still”, or to “be with myself”. But I’m walking, which is a doing. I’m listening to music, which is an analysis and a distraction. I’m not being still, I’m just pretending. 

I’m not saying you’re doing this. But I definitely am when I look closely.

I laughed out loud as I realized that all the things I call “stillness” are really just me fooling myself. Escaping stillness with something that looks sort of like it.

Even when I sit down to meditate, I’m actively trying to hold a posture (an output). Or I’m meditating on a concept- An input, an analysis, a distraction from a still state. 

Well shit.

And if I’m being really honest, I realized that the number of minutes I spend being truly still in a given day is less than 30. But probably less than 5.

But all life can’t be in stillness. We’d be such easy prey that our biology won’t allow it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a valuable place to visit more frequently, when it’s safe.

So I decided to try (there’s that word “try”, crap) to find real stillness. 

I lied on my back, and said to myself, “Be fully with the feeling of ground and gravity”. And just wait…

For what? 

That’s the problem… There is no “what”. Just wait. 

But then what the fuck is this supposed to accomplish?

After a minute or so I had the urge to get up and write down all the thoughts (pretty thoughts) that were coming in, because it felt really important that I “get” something tangible out of this. But that would be an output.

I had the urge to move because I was restless. I was the literal embodiment of 100 impulses to do something more instantly gratifying. Anything to escape. 

Boredom. Feeling useless. Feeling like I’m wasting time that I could be DOING.

There wasn’t anything bad happening. But without reference of something coming in, or something going out, I had no reference for who I even was. 

Maybe that’s the point… To dissolve.

Something about it was liberating. Also extremely uncomfortable. 

I lasted 10 minutes. 

I think we’re always balancing inputs and outputs to try to feel like we exist. To sense we are the reference point of our lives by whats going into it and what’s going out.

Right now, as I type this (output), I’m drinking a coffee (input). 

Later, I’m going for a walk (output), and I’ll listen to music (input). 

Then I’ll go work on my pull-ups (output), and eat some dinner (input), while I probably watch Downton Abby (input).

But what if there was a less effortful balance that existed in the space between input and output? I think I would truly like to visit that place more… 

And so I want to leave you with the question, should you like to reflect on this yourself:

How are you blocking your stillness with inputs? 

And how are you blocking your stillness with outputs? 

What would it feel like to exist referenceless?