Good movement can make a whole lot of difference in your life! Understanding how to mobilise and stabilise your body will definitely help you feel better in your body day after day. But what is good movement?
We want to be able to mobilise, stabilise and be adaptable in our movement. Take one example, when we need to grab something that has fallen under a table, we want the process to be easy. We don’t want to have to pull a funny face as we bend down, or make funny noises because our body feels tight and restricted. We want to be able to get on the ground without thinking about it, we want it to be as easy and automatic as scratching your nose.
The aim is to have a full range of motion in our joints, to control that movement with strength and have the adaptability of the fascia (the connective tissue, primarily collagen, beneath the skin that attaches, stabilizes, encloses, and separates muscles and other internal organs) to allow that movement to happen but also to have our neurons firing so that the movement happens in an automatic and coordinated motion.
Your friend is moving house and you offer to help. While moving heavy furniture are your movements efficient? That means are all your joints joining in to help out with the load put on the body? We are built in a way such that our different joints allow us to distribute the ‘stress’ throughout our body. But in our everyday life we start compensating and moving sub-optimally. We override our brain to move in a way that may help right now but not long term. We are finding that quick fix when there is actually a more beneficial long-term solution.
In other words, today’s lifestyle is set up so that we mostly do the same things over and over again, moving in often the same movement patterns and finding ever more ways to move less. However, we NEED variety in our movement! We sit far too much, we get a walk or a run in, but these movements are all in the same plane of motion, that is forwards and backwards in extension and flexion (the sagittal plane of motion). This way of living decreases our adaptability to move in the variety of motion available to us. We start to compensate and change our automatic movement strategies. We will execute a movement even if it isn’t optimal for our body.
Basically, we need to learn how to coordinate in any range of motion with controlled mobility. We need to have stability and mobility in the different areas of our body. We need to have a
Stable neck
Mobile upper back
Stable lower back
Mobile hips
Stable knees
Mobile ankles
Stable feet
Mobile toes
The stability and mobility in these areas get disrupted in people’s bodies for a variety of reasons. When we think about where the most common ‘pain’ symptoms are we think about the neck, the lower back and the knees. These are all areas that need to be stable. We need that coordination to be able to be mobile in one area to help stabilise another and vice versa. We need to learn how to coordinate every range of motion.
To learn more and improve your stability and range of motion join me in my daily online classes. Every week we work on different ranges of motion, muscle groups, body parts and so much more. This will help you find your initial range of motion and work from there to build the foundation to feel amazing in your body.
I want to help you move more optimally on and off the mat, to feel great every day and leave the mat with that buzzing feeling, full of energy and with a clear mind, having only focussed on your body and self during the class.
I want to keep sharing with you my knowledge and experience learned from my teacher and mentor Lara Heimann, a physical therapist, as well as many other great movement specialists in the field.
So, come and explore with me every day how our body moves and works and let's all feel AMAZING.