IOL Strength and Conditioning

Last week, the half-way point in my ten-week introduction to Feldenkrais movement classes, I decided to spring for an individual therapy session. It was both an enjoyable experience as well as a breakthrough, so let me tell you about it.

In the group lessons, about a dozen women and one brave guy spend about an hour and a half on the floor, sometimes face up, sometimes face down. The instructor in this case is a woman who knows as much as any doctor about how the muscles work together and what input each bodypart needs from the others to do its job.

Using as little verbal guidance as possible, and even less visual — but as much as necessary — she runs the class through a list of tiny movements designed to remind the brain how to use more muscles. She doesn’t exactly tell us how to do it; the purpose is to use the micro-exercises to trigger a brain response, not for her to explain the action.

For instance, at the beginning of the session, the raising of an arm may start at the shoulder; at the end of the class the whole of the back beginning at the opposite hip will get in on the action. Little by little, more muscles at work to move the arm, the point being less fatigue and less pain when the body movements are optimal.

Now this may sound silly, and to a visitor watching but not participating, it must look as goofy as all getout. But I’ll tell you, I leave these classes moving very smoothly, very nicely for about a day, then sore all over the following day. We’re using muscles in these small, targeted exercises that usually don’t get much use, and it’s enough of a pain that I’ve had to schedule my regular training around the class instead of the other way around.

After a few classes, I began to get clues about which areas are giving me the most trouble, the thoracic spine and the hips… still. Since the instructor had seen what I can and can’t do, it seemed like a good time to schedule an individual session.

I expected her to walk me through a list of personalized exercises, but that wasn’t how this treatment turned out. Instead, it was hands-on, her moving my joints through their full ranges of motion with me on the table, passive.

Let me tell you first off, it was very pleasant, and the range of motion was a good deal better than I can perform on my own. This was joint mobility at the highest level; Moshe Feldenkrais again ahead of his time.

How about the results? That’s the real issue, and more than just that post-session afternoon, during which I *floated* around town doing errands.

Once home, I try my most important test — on the floor, face up, to gauge how the hips rest: flat. What’s that again? FLAT, that is to say, hips resting evenly on the floor.

Now I’m stunned, not quite believing what I’m feeling. I’m about six months into a corrective exercise, rehabilitation phase designed to fix a number of issues, the most difficult of which was an anterior tilt in one hip and a posterior tilt in the other; one hip shifted forward, the other back, which flat on the floor means one rests heavily as the other barely touches. That day — last Thursday — they rested evenly for the first time in twenty or thirty years.

Today, six days later, they’re still even. I’m nervous to write this, but I will anyway: This problem seems fixed. You notice I’m still too chicken to write that it IS fixed. But I think it is.

Here’s what I think happened. I spent the past months strengthening the back of one side and the front of the other, and lengthening the front of one side and the back of the other. All the prep work was done; the imbalance had been fixed. It just took the Feldenkrais practitioner to move the joints through their full ranges of motion — farther and smoother than I’m able to do using muscle action — for the brain to recognize the mobility.

It sounds as far-fetched as … I dunno… astrology, maybe. But I’m here to tell you, those hips are even, and I wasn’t able to do it alone.

It’s been frustrating to do all the right work, really attentively, with little or no results. Ugly work, one side getting one program and the other side a different one, with nothing to show for it these months later. Then, all of the sudden… poof… I’m done.

I’m wildly guessing here, but I wonder if it’s not a case of how long the problem was there, the duration of the imbalance. If it had only been a recent development, those oddly tilting hips, the corrective exercises may have worked alone, and I’d have been telling you of that success long ago.

Perhaps if you’ve had a problem for a long time and have worked the appropriate corrective exercise program diligently with no results, maybe, just maybe, you’ll experience a miraculous correction with an individual Feldenkrais session.