What happens when you pick up one leg to support all your weight on one side only? Are you standing or falling?
When you pick one leg to support all the weight on the other, what happens? Are you Standing or Falling?
Home Isolation movement tips... day 2. While we all shelter in place, here are some thoughts on what's going wrong with most of your deadlifts (yes I said YOUR... take it to heart, it really does most likely mean you.). Form really matters, it's the different between a movement that tunes your body an one that degrades your body... It's all how you carry your ribcage on your pelvis throughout the lift.
When your low back is tight... stiff... or goes completely 'out', these two PRI techniques and two simple stretches, can really change the game. The key is to get on it right away and not to give up and completely immobilize. Use these daily to keep the LBP Dr. away! Good Luck, and may your LBP be gone forever.
Walking is critical to every possible life function… might as well do it with good biomechanics so it’s working for you, rather than against you. Here are some great cues to get you started.
‘Dadbod' over 'fit abs'… seriously?
Hang on, when did ‘dadbod’ get defined with such a physiologically low bar?
The timelesss definition of ‘dadbod’, to me anyway, is more along the lines of: physically capable of handling life… emotionally, spiritually, mentally and PHYSICALLY.
This includes the ability to carry a cooler, two kids, and a beach chair while the other kid jumps you from behind… without injury or anger.
The modern ‘dadbod’ is not a healthy example. It brakes down sooner, gets sicker, moves slower, is grumpier and most likely has a shorter overall life expectancy… this is often called a ‘patient', who needs help with pain or poor performance!
Posting my version of a ‘dadbod’… I’m a dad, damn good one if you ask my little… sorry if it turns you off… let’s reclaim the standard!!!!!!
Acceptance of the physically, mentally and emotionally sub-standard human is a terrible trend… wake the F-up.
Life is a gift… your body is a temple… it’s delicious, and gloriously beautiful… please keep it healthy… it feeds the mind, the emotion and the spirit.
#Dadbodreclaim
I've been building out and moving my studio (across the hall), creating a fantastic solo space thats incredibly personal and functional.
It's been quite the journey, a rare one where the destination turned out even better then the adventure! It's an amazing feeling space, come visit.
I'm excited to finally drop the tool belt and get back to doing the teaching and training that I love most!
While the fine tuning continues, here's a quick peak at the major before and after.
Imagine the car in front of you on the highway has 75lbs of pressure in the left tires, and 25lbs in the right tires. What does it look like? Where do you expect all the load in the car to shift toward? Which side gets the most work, wear, abuse?
Now understand, that inside your own body the architecture is not symmetrical. Organs on the left are different then organs on the right. The result is that more air is sent into the left lung, much more air, on a regular basis in almost all human beings. Working exactly like the car example, this keeps our left sides over inflated and our right sides overloaded. The pelvic, spinal, and ribcage positions all torque under this air pressure and the ‘twisted’ sense in our posture can almost always be explained by this pneumatic reality.
For fun, watch the people in front of you walking…notice how most use their left leg (over inflated left tire) like a walking stick to ‘push’ them back on the right side, which sustains all the weight and work.). Then, feel it in your own body, it’s quite obvious when you pay attention.
Modern life and ancient bodies are the quickest explication I can give in this brief moment for the phenomena… but trust that the internal asymmetry is a physiological design essential for all things that involve pumping and flow (air, fluid…) so trust it.
If you want the long, detailed, fascinating and amazingly enlightening explanation... ask me. I’m passionate about it, and love to teach people how to harness this reality on their own personal quests toward pain free health and performance.
If you can’t make use of me, The Postural Restoration Institute is an excellent reference for local help on a national level. PRI has pioneered the use of this asymmetrical reality in both manual therapy and self mobilization techniques that help you achieve balanced, functional symmetrical asymmetry (take a second to unwrap that one!)
The moral of this mini story is: Exhale out of your left rib cage as often as possible.
Here’s a little quick adjustment technique to both teach you the concept described above, as well as illustrate a simple solution to balance and control it. I guarantee it’ll change more muscle tension relationships in your body then you might initially realize. Good luck.
Structural Respiration: SAFE II
The true ‘core’ is a respiratory engine. It is the physiological foundation of structure and flow. This power house supports stabilization, regulates pressure, and facilitates circulation throughout the body.
Once this mechanism is felt… sensed… it will change how you move and breathe forever.
This quick technique, visualization, is designed to walk you down the path of feeling what the ‘core’s’ job is…at the core. To tune you into what true diaphragmatic ‘breathing’ feels like. To help you sense your deep abdominal connection and to make sure you’re moving, exercising and living, physiologically SAFE.
· Begin in the 90/90 or hook lying position.
· Inhale and exhale naturally for 2-3 breaths.
· Next, focus on inhaling only into your belly / abdomen…’belly breathing’ for 2-3 breaths.
· Continue inhaling deep down into your abdomen but shift the focus from your belly to your lower spine and tailbone.
· Breathe 2-3 x into your tailbone and deep buttocks.
· Notice the air traveling down the spine, through the bottom of your ribcage on it’s path to your tail.
· Visualize the hoop made by the lower ribs encircling your abdomen just above your navel.
· The air passes through that hoop on it’s way to your tailbone.
· Inhale and exhale until you can sense the air moving through the hoop and filling your tailbone and expending your low back into the table.
· Next exhale and make the hoop diameter slightly smaller in all directions as you exhale. You can use your hamstrings to help ‘tuck your tail under’ and lengthen your lower spine and tailbone. This will make it easier to use your abs to shrink the hoop in the front.
· As you Inhale, maintain the now smaller hoop size, as well as feel the air travel down your spine, through the hoop, toward your now lengthening tail.
· Exhale again, feel your deep Abdominal wall engage toward the sides of your abdomen as you exhale, pulling your ribs down in front and shrinking the circle even more.
· Continue to breathe through the now smaller circle, into your tailbone.
o Do not let the circle increase its diameter on inhalation in any way!
o Your breath will not be deep, unless you error and release the circle.
o Take 2-3 breaths into your tail through your small circle.
· Exhale one last time, Shrink the circle even further… making the smallest ring possible (using the abdominal wall) for your air to pass through as you breathe deep into your pelvis.
· Hold your completed exhale, dead stop if you will, for 3-4s.
· Anchor your ribcage down to your pelvis in front, keep your circle tight and Re-inhale, contracting your lateral abs in order to keep the circle as small as possible.
· Feel the pressure created in the low back and head by activating this structural respiratory engine.
Belly breathing is NOT diaphragmatic breathing!!!
Belly breathing is NOT diaphragmatic breathing!!!
Simply contracting your diaphragm, compressing your viscera to expand your belly is not enough to call it functional respiration. It's only half the story... your lungs are NOT in your stomach!!!!!
For it to be true respiration with diaphragmatic contraction, the rib cage must remain down in the front and held back in the torso by the abdominal wall. The deep abdominal wall works with the diaphragm to support respiration and dynamic structural integrity. Diaphragmatic contraction without abdominal support is NOT functional respiration, and should never be mistaken for diaphragmatic breathing.
You breathe 23,000x per day, wouldn't it be nice to know how to do it right?!
Single Leg Control and the Tri-planer Essence of Gait.
Carve your turns with every step, there’s a ride in every stride.
Can you stand with integrity on one leg?
Believe it or not, every step is a journey akin to carving while downhill skiing, where you actually arc and dive toward one leg… the feeling is much like watching a dolphin breeching and diving back in to the water at a slight angle…it’s delicious.
This article / video will attempt a rather simplistic, though semi-lengthy, description of controlling your torso over your base of support while on leg.
Single Leg Standing, or single sided stability is a hugely complex and difficult to comprehend concept. This view is at the heart of Postural Restoration, and if you understand the message presented here, you’ll see one of its major goals more clearly.
The idea is to learn to move in a subtle tri-planer (all three planes of movement) way at the level of the diaphragm to control the weight in the torso over the anchored limb. The movement is akin to banking a turn as you dive in an airplane or carving on skis, and the generators of the movement are essentially the muscles of the deep abdominal wall.
In gait, or any single leg activity, you must anchor your center of gravity and control the mass of your torso, head and pelvis over the stabilizing limb, or you will simply fall toward the side of the leg you remove from the ground. Achieving this begins with positioning the bones of the pelvis and ribcage in a stable relationship on one side while opening them up for mobility on the other.
It all starts here as these two big pieces contain more then half of the weight of the entire body, especially the liquid weight, which as it shifts, drags the remainder of you with it (think walking with a large bucket full of water).
When an individual goes to stand on one limb and lift the other, they must move the mass of the body over the standing limb and maintain it there throughout the gait cycle on that side or they will be pulled off of the standing leg prematurely causing torsion and strain throughout the body as it attempts to compensate and keep you on top of that limb until the other foot hits the ground. Backs, hips, knees, ankles, feet, toes… all pay a huge price.
Much of the information that addresses this single leg need, focus’s on the muscles of glute medius, which anchors the pelvis down to the femur (hip to leg) and prevents your pelvis from falling to the side of the leg you’re lifting (Trendelenburg Sign for the PT’s in the room). You’re most likely familiar with an exercise called the ‘clam shell’, where you lay on your side opening your knees to strengthen the side of your buttocks, progressing to opening your legs with straight knees. While there’s no denying that glute med is a key player in single leg standing (though not in the open chain of the clam shell, on the standing leg at least…but that’s another topic entirely), focusing on the muscles of the torso which control the majority of the weight is absolutely critical to achieving single leg control.
‘Banking a dive’…’carving your turn’ is the simple key to controlling the weight over one limb in single side loading activities such as gait. It’s as subtle as it is monumental. This movement happens at the level of the diaphragm, right above the navel.
I want you to imagine, right below your sternum (breast bone), resting right in the sternal notch, is the cockpit of an airplane facing the same direction as you are. The wings of this plane extend out of your sides at the level of your lower ribs. When this plane banks a turn to the Left (left leg standing) it will dive, tip and spin (this is tri-planer movement: flexion/sagittal, sidebending/frontal and rotation/transverse) bringing the Right wing (ribcage) up and around toward the left front pocket, and the left wing down toward the left back pocket. This takes the entire contents of the torso and gently tips and shifts and spills them toward the Left, stabilizing limb.
At the hub of this task is the deep abdominal wall, especially the Internal Oblique and Transversus Abdominals. I’ve focused on the ‘SAFE’ position in previous articles and it’s vital here. Visualize the letter ‘A’ with it’s top at your sternal notch and the legs reaching out toward your outer pelvis (hips), and a ‘V’ angling up from your pubic bone up to your lower outer ribs. The SAFE position teaches you to draw these pieces together to anchor and control the anterior (front) ribs and pelvis.
This ‘banking a dive’ is a unilateral effort that requires you being SAFE on one side. In fact the “A/V’ muscles of the deep abdominal wall on one side will actually pull you over to that side if you ‘carve’ your step correctly. This will expel the excess air, secure the torso for loading without strain and spill the abdominal contents toward the anchored side. This abdominal action will also tip the pelvis backwards on that side, locking the pelvis for standing and turning the sacrum and spine to orient in the direction of the loaded leg.
The beauty is that not only do the muscles align the bones and joints for their respective tasks as well as shifting the abdominal contents over the base of support, but they also displace the air by compressing and deflating the lung on that side which allows for the space for the fluid and viscera to shift into. The now open, un-muscularly contracted side with the fluid and viscera contents sliding away, creates space for inhalation, which will bias toward this mobile / empty side. And as the unloaded side fills with air, this pneumatic pressure will literally ‘push’ you to the opposite side and directly over your base of support.
Perfection… use of structural (both force and form), hydraulic (in even more ways then described here) and pneumatic forces to maintain your center of gravity over your base of support in single leg activities.
In a nutshell, every step you take requires tri-planer control and subtle movement at the level of the diaphragm for ideal physiological function. Carve your turn…bank your dive. Beyond the structural integrity that it provides, the circulatory, digestive, neurological, endocrine and limbic benefits cannot be over stated.
Once understood, the movement is quite subtle and simple, and it needs to become a central aspect of your consciousness during gait, respiration and all other single leg activities. When you get it, it feels amazing…like skiing with every step.
I’ve added a video in attempt to give a quick demo and explanation, because I know, it sounds like a lot…but it’s critical. Good luck, and enjoy the ride.