KinAesthetics

06/01/2024

Breaking the Mould: Embracing Spinal Motion to build upon old ideas of spinal stability. ⁠
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Forget neutrality! To truly explore it's possibilities, the spine must venture beyond its neutral home. The muscles attached to the spine, which follow the big rules of movement, excel at decelerating spinal motion away from the revered neutral position. We are so used to thinking about stabilising our spine that we haven't paid attention to it's resting position and so all we are doing is stabilising our spine in this usually less than optimal position.⁠
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To truly activate these muscles of spinal motion is to lengthen them, which means we must deviate from stability into the realm of mobility and begin to explore our end ranges in motion. As the spine journeys from it's base in the pelvis through the ribcage and up to the skull, there are different structures to consider and organise in this endeavour. Pelvis motion brings hips to life which in turn invites the motion of the legs and critically feet, ribcage motion insists on scapulae and shoulder cooperation, leading down to the wrists and hands via the elbow, and lastly the neck plays a key role in balancing the skull on top of it all.... ⁠
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It's a dance of controlled movement, exploring boundaries and sophisticated integration all in order to unlock the potential of your spine. ⁠
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Are you ready to redefine your approach to spinal movement? ⁠
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Visit our website https://findingcentre.co.uk/ to learn more about our online courses. Take back control of your body today 🙌🏼⁠
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05/25/2020

A single muscle just might not be doing what you think it is... and may be capable of so much more

A single muscle that attaches to bone with three dimensional potential is at the mercy of the movement of those bones.

For instance, take the glute, always a useful example as most everybody knows what it is supposed to do. The anatomy book says that the glute extends, abducts and externally rotates the hip. With the hip in this position the glute must be short in all three dimensions and so to stretch it we simply flex, adduct and internally rotate the hip.... a spectrum of opposites.

AND YET in the human gait cycle the hip rarely attains these two three dimensional shapes, what this does mean is that for the vast majority of a stride, the hip is not doing either of these two described motions..... but it is doing what it needs to do in order to accommodate the required position of the whole body. In these moments it is doing any three of six available motions....

This suggests that in the other phases of the walking cycle, the glute must be lengthening in some dimensions of hip motion while shortening in others (since it is only fully short or fully long at just two moments).

For instance you can fully shorten the glute by extending, abducting and externally rotating your hip and then simply change one of the movement dimensions to be the opposite (say hip IR) and all of a sudden you are now asking the glute to do something weird (/different?). Or not ... since glutes and hips have been doing this since the dawn of mankind when man started walking upright and moving around the planet.

Muscles simply respond to bone and joint motion... we should focus our attention there and worry less about the tissue. Tissue is compromised only where joint motion is limited. And the full tissue expression is available when joint capacity is optimised.

My Closed Chain Biomechanics of the Lower Limb course invites you to start looking at many more muscles to better understand them in this way as we overlay them onto and dissect the motion of the bony anatomy so we may glide effortlessly through life 😃

05/16/2020

Why don’t we try and re-frame plantar fasciitis for you
If you think this is you, then very simply consider that it’s a result of your foot bones not moving as they should and the result of this is perpetually compromised underfoot tissues.

A flat foot with a low arch means that the tissue underfoot is LONG. Many people call this ‘tight’. And when you hear the word ‘tight’ you instantly want to stretch it - but the problem is: it’s already LONG 🙇🏻‍♂️

You may also have been told that the muscles are weak. They aren’t weak, they are under-stimulated. Under-stimulated by the lack of bone motion going on down there.

You may have a really high arch, in which case the muscles underfoot are bunched and crampy. You may be advised to roll it with a lacrosse ball (😖 - not by me btw). The main problem here is, yep you guessed it that those bones which are stuck in a high arch position cannot move into a place that reduces the amount of compression taking place on the underside of the foot. The only way the tissue is going to regain its lively, buoyant, tissuey and useful sense of self is if we get those bones moving.

A foot whose arch can BOTH fall and rise with every foot step is a foot who’s plantar tissues can BOTH lengthen and shorten. In such a foot there is unlikely to be any hint of plantarfasciitis as the tissues recover their elasticity and blood is allowed to flow and pump through the area.

I say unlikely because on many occasions I have also had super mobile feet with p/f (doesn’t mean they are being used very well) that have been unresponsive to foot based treatment and almost always the person has significantly lacked spinal mobility in flexion and extension.

A spine that is flexed and cannot extend is as bad as a foot that is flat and cannot rise. In this case the two speak to each other loud and clear.

In What The Foot I described a condition called “Nobody-ever-moves-me-itis”. This is basically that....

So if you have plantarfasciitis let’s just get your feet moving, pronating and supinating and also get your spine moving. I’ll show you how to do both in my Wake Your Feet & Body Up programmes.

05/09/2020

Your foot is a tripod. This means it adopts three points of contact to stand upon. In a perfect world, this would be your 1st metatarsal head (big toe knuckle); 5th metatarsal head (little toe knuckle); and your heel. But so often it isn’t. And yet...
.. There is always a tripod 🔺

Here’s the interesting part. The biggest tripod under your foot is naturally the most optimal tripod as described above. Any other tripod is always a triangular shape of lesser size .

🔺So is your weight in your big toe knuckle and not in your little toe knuckle or vice versa?
🔺Do you miss your big toe knuckle out and use the end of your big toe to meet the ground? (Green lines on image above)
🔺Is it your middle toe knuckles that bear the weight of your body mass? This makes for a very narrow tripod (blue line on image above) and is often noticeable by hard skin under these areas. Hard skin is a good indicator of where you spend your time in your feet.

🔺Anything less than a sub-optimal tripod adversely affects your whole foot and whole body’s joint mechanics. It leads to a distortion of the foot shape causing compression in some bones and tension in some tissues. Such things are then ‘diagnosed’ as syndromes, itis’s, or labelled as weak, flat, stiff, dysfunctional etc. All because you lost your tripod? 🤔

🔺It’s worth finding out, isn’t it? And getting to the bottom of a very simple solution that can bring your tripod back towards optimal and set the base, set the foundations upon which you can begin to set your body free again. 🤗

People talk a lot about pronation and supination (or being pronatED or supinatED), interestingly observation of the foot bones movement tells us that without an optimal tripod, you will not be able to do (or be) either. So it’s really a first port of call for getting your feet moving 🦶 😃

04/30/2015

Client came in last week with primary complaint of hip pain from a fall 1 1/2 years ago. Oh, and 25 years ago had a bad inversion ankle sprain on the same side. No movement whatsoever in that foot/ankle. Here is her email from last night:
Hi Suzy
It was so good to see you - better than good... Which is why I am writing. I am completely out of the woods here. I had to do quite a few of those exercises - including the full one you were doing with me - for the first three days then it just disappeared. Like I snapped into line. My leg is coming under me and I don't feel like I'm going to trip, not limping and it doesn't hurt anymore.
Anyway - I think I am needing to cancel tuesday with you because I have a client from out of town that needs to get in and I think I don't need to come in for now.
I consider this miraculous

Thank you Gary Ward, Chris Sritharan, Anatomy in Motion

02/15/2015

02/11/2015

A high school nearby has a small selection of this equipment. Sometimes I take a group over to play - no instruction, just see what happens. Invariably, some fun and a lot of laughs.

02/05/2015

Intro There is absolutely no one size fits all squat position. If you don't believe me, you are in for a treat. This article will help show you why athlete comfort should dictate squat width, why s...

12/17/2014

Dooley Noted: 12/17/2014 Everybody on the planet seems to know where the psoas muscle group is located. Medially, the psoas fibers are nearly indiscernible from the diaphragm?s

12/17/2014

It all starts with the foot, a game changing philosophy in human movement eliminating pain and maximising human potential