IOL Strength and Conditioning

Remember watching Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, how he clenched his jaw muscles rhythmically, looking oh so cool and you either wanted to be him or wanted your boyfriend to have a squared-off, hardworking exactly jaw like his? Think of that intense-jaw look now, from your adult perspective. Do you see the same thing, or do you see a person too tense, habitually beating the heck out of an aching jaw?

Whether Clint did that as part of his Callahan role or if it was or is a regular part of his life, I haven’t a guess. But I’ll betcha a similar habit and plenty more like it are buried in your structure, and that of your family and friends. In fact, I’ll wager a few of those idiosyncrasies are clever little bits you picked up from your dad and mom, even from your grandparents if they were around the house when you were a young’n.

We now know some of those handsome and not-so-handsome habits can wreck havoc on an aging body, and some of you reading this are well aware of a dull ache that’s getting worse, pounding to get your attention.

Here are a few examples to get you pondering:

• Shoulder hunched up on one side
• Head tilted (hello, Horatio) or rotated
• Chin lifted – chin up! Meaning excessive cervical lordosis
• Pelvic tilted too far in one direction, forward or back
• Duck foot on one side, or both
• Resting your weight on one leg, never both
• Crossing knees when seated, unable to sit with your feet flat
• Tensing the jaw, grinding the teeth
• Sucking in the gut, never relaxing the abdominals
• Resting on your heels or the outsides of your feet
• Walking on your toes
• Arms crossed over your chest, shoulders internally rotated
• Tight hold on the computer mouse when reading a webpage
• Left foot always leads or right foot always leads, staying a fraction of a second longer on the lead foot each step

Each one of those, and probably a hundred others like them, can add tension to your body, and often cause a cascade of affects up, down or crossing the body, sometimes enough to set the whole configuration askew.

Strictly from a functional body standpoint, realize how you habitually hold the parts of your body can contribute to – if not be the main factor of – your mobility problems. These are the type of things we need to address in order to fix an aching back or a messed up shoulder or elbow. Sounds bizarre, but it’s true.

This isn’t a discussion about body language; it doesn’t matter where the habit came from – not the psychology behind it, whether it was a headtrip or a habit you copied from you dad when you were a child or your favorite actor from your teen years, or perhaps a compensation for a long-forgotten injury. Instead, I’m only pointing out there are things you’re probably doing that are detrimental, or will be as time carries on.

We get what we train, that’s what it boils down to… not just in our workouts but even more in our working and resting postures that take up a lot more of the week than the training. Then we go to the gym and train in those faulty positions to strengthen up the tilted, rotated, hunched-up structures.

A lot of our mobility problems require work, strengthen up this side, stretch out that – tease our joints into moving better over the weeks or months of a concentrated rebuilding plan. It’s so valuable and effective, and well worth the time we dedicate to corrective exercise.

But listen here: Some of the problems contributing to a troubled overall is a case of Just Stop Doing That.

Having a trainer move you through a joint mobilization program or a masseuse go to work on your soft tissue is fabulous. But it’s not enough. This stuff is of the “daily importance” variety, and none of us are rich enough or have enough time to trot across town to get that kind of hands-on help. We need a program to follow at home, something that requires cheap or free tools and that can be done quickly, pre- or post-workout as needed.

In the forum and around the internet we’re picking up more and more pieces of the puzzle, and for a lot of people practice makes perfect… the picture’s getting clear. Others, though, need guidance: What’s a foam roller?; what’s it do and how do I use it? and what’s joint mobility? isn’t that the stretching I did in high school? are common questions we hear, and maybe these are questions you’re wondering right now.

Nick Tumminello, a trainer and educator at PerformanceU, set out to document two main pre-workout programs he uses with his clients (and what he suggests they do at home on off-training days) to make this material available to those of us without hands-on guidance. His two Secrets dvds, Secrets of Self Myofascial Release and Secrets of Self Joint Mobilization, answer the questions you have, and add a few twists to the mix for the somewhat educated.

This is done in a live setting; an athlete goes through the pre-workout rolling as Nick instructs so we can see how the movement is done correctly while we listen to his coaching.

Covered, from the bottom up: plantar fascia, gastroc/soleus, illiotibial (IT) band, piriformis, low back, adductor, quadriceps, tensor fascia latte, groin, lats, posterior shoulder, and chest and shoulder.

Because I already knew most of the rolling techniques of the Myofascial Release dvd, the Joint Mobilization held my attention better. Still, I got a few valuable tips, ideas I hadn’t seen before as he introduces foam rolling and other self-massage implements, tips and warnings and when to use which tool. This is the best foam rolling demo I’ve seen, including other dvds and a couple live sessions at conferences.

Secrets of Self Myofascial Release, 25 minutes, $29

I’m very [read: extremely very] into joint mobility, and have been reading, watching and practicing variations of joint mobility exercises about a year, long enough that I’m pleased to see unusual stuff a bit off the beaten trail. You should see my hen-scratching as I scribbled bits and pieces—and stickmen—while Nick explained his joint mobilization moves. If you’re not already doing joint mobility, this dvd offers all the basics, plus a few real golden keepers.

Covered, after a short pre-mobilization trick: ankle mobility (3 techniques), T-spine mobility (4 variations), shoulder mobilization (3 exercises), hip mobilization, (2 options), closing with two shoulder and hip coordinated movements that I’ll be adding to my daily mobility program. These… these were outstanding! Here’s a look at one of them.

Lest you think I’m completely in the tank for Nick, I do have one criticism and that’s price. To be fair, it’s a trend that’s growing industry-wide in which a 30-minute dvd selling for $49 fits right in, but I just don’t agree with it. Still, the material is original, and that’s a lot more than I can say for a number of other pricey dvds.

These are quality educational pieces, especially for readers amped and ready to start but having no instructions. If you regularly do the exercises and foam rolling shown on these dvds, you’ll be all set and ready to train well… for a long time into the future. Good job, Nick.

When I saw Anthony Carey was presenting at the IDEA convention, I knew in advance it would be a real highlight for me. His book, The Pain-Free Program, is an outstanding contribution to corrective exercise self-help, and really had an impact on my early steps in getting to pain-free movement. I was eager to hear him in person and to watch him interact with the crowd.

Snipped off the top of his session handout, we find,

“Limitations and dysfunctions of the hip joint result in a transfer of responsibility to the lumbar spine. The lumbar spine is not designed to work the way the hips do, so the outcome is often lower back pain. Recognizing the contribution of the hips is key to long-term function and back pain prevention.”

I think most of us are starting to get the hint, but let’s get a little deeper into the material. Here are the bullet points from my notes, in no particular order.

• Functional anatomy is more complicated than cadaver anatomy, ie Gray’s. The way the body actually works is different than it appears. For example, the hamstring curls the leg up, but functionally its purpose is much more useful.

• The maximum rotation in the lumbar spine is 8-10%.

• Hip flexion equals lumbar flexion; lifting the leg (hip flexion) causes posterior tilt. Hip extension equals lumbar extension.

• Hip ABduction equals ipsilateral lumbar flexion. Hip ADduction equals contralateral lumbar flexion. Hip AB-ADduction is excessive frontal plane movement—frontal plane hip tilt.

• A normal pelvis rests in 5-10% anterior rotation (toward the front). Sagittal plane deviations are excessive anterior rotation (more than 10%), posterior rotation (to the back) and asymmetrical rotation, meaning one side rotates forward, one side rotates back. Asymmetrical rotation doesn’t dissipate force on impact.

• Frontal plane deviations include hip adduction (elevated) and leg length discrepancy.

• Hip internal rotation equals lumbar rotation toward the involved hip. Hip external rotation equals the opposite (away from the involved hip). This is rotation on the transverse/horizontal plane.

• Corrective exercises for sagittal, frontal or transverse plane deviations should work the planes that need attention, establishing normal range of motion in all three planes. Additionally, train stability of the hip musculature at all ranges of motion and stabilize the lumbar spine when the hip is moving. Include in the program foam rolling, static stretches and dynamic stretches.

• 85% of disc bulges are posterior lateral, meaning they bulge to the back of the spine, not the front, and to the outside.

• When you have a sciatic nerve problem, don’t stretch the hamstring. That makes it worse.

• The sciatic nerve passes under, over or thru the piriformis muscle under the glute maximus.

• Tight hip flexors decrease hip extension and pulls on the lumbar spine during walking, contributing to pain for even the sedentary person who walks 2,000-3,000 steps per day on average.

• If a person has an elevated hip, look for a low shoulder. You’ll also find a short waist on the high-hip side.

• When a hip is in internal rotation, the knee is internally rotated and the foot is pronated; in external hip rotation the knee would point out, with the foot supinated.

• Hips need mobility and stability equally. Don’t just think mobility.

• Average hip rotational range of motion on a clinical testing table is 90 degrees of external rotation and 70 degrees of internal rotation. This is completely different than useful range of motion, which depends not only on mobility, but also on stability.

• When working on joint mobility, look for quality of movement and don’t over-fatigue. Stop before you’re exhausted with the movement.

• Bonus: If the arms are pulled forward in the overhead squat, look for tight lats.

• Bonus # 2: In cases of fibromyalgia, work on posture. That will help with the pain.

Again let me recommend Anthony’s The Pain-Free Program to anyone with recurring back pain or who has determined he or she has problems in the hips. It’s exceptional in helping the reader discover where to start and how to progress. The exercises are well explained, with photos to pull the whole thing together. Exceptional book, grab a copy… read it… then DO THE EXERCISES. That’s the only way it works, eh?

You ever notice when you add an overhead arm reach to a kneeling stretch, the stretch deepens? Why is that do you think? Adding a left arm extension to a right glute stretch puts the left lat into play, sending stretching fire into the glute. What might have happened here?

Those of us newer to the corrective exercise side of training are beginning to understand a left hip problem might show up as right shoulder pain. How can that be?

Behold our beginner’s introduction to the muscle and fascia pathways known by some as myofascial slings, by others as myofascial meridians or flexibility highways.

Fascia is the connective tissue that holds us together. The slings are stretches of fascia connecting muscles in a length of which a tug on one end reflects up the length of the line to the other end. If there’s any obstacle in the length, be it a tight muscle, a triggerpoint, tight fascia or a faulty neural connection, the entire sling will lose its ability to function optimally. If the originating problem is serious, the muscles along the sling are pulled out of whack, and this is how a faulty muscle on one side might display itself as pain on the other.

A couple of the lines run as we might expect: the superficial back line running from underfoot, up the legs and spine, behind the neck and over the skull; the superficial front line at the top of the foot to the front of the legs, up the rectus abdominis, along the sternum and to the sides of the neck.

Still pretty logical is the lateral line, which runs up the sides of the body from the outside of the ankle, up the sides of the lower legs to the iliotibial (IT) bands, through the tensor fasciae latae (TFL) and glutes to the sides of the obliques, the intercostals and the strong muscles of the neck.

After that, things get a little screwy. The spiral line, parts of which are also called the oblique slings, runs along the outside of the leg, then crosses over the body at the hip, where it moves over to the opposite shoulder. Along this line, it also moves from the back of the body to the front. Problems arise throughout the myofasical sling network, but crossing from side to side and posterior to anterior is where the most baffling problems crop up.

Let’s say we have a length of fascia wrapping the TFL at the outside of the right glute of our favorite bench presser. Its lower connection passes through the IT band to connect to the outside of the calf, where in this particular guy there’s a nasty triggerpoint that’s been in place for, oh, maybe a year. (That’s not at all uncommon, lest you think otherwise.) Things are getting worse, and the outside of the calf hurts. The IT band is going to be tight, but unless our guy rolls the outside of his leg over a foam roller, he might not even know it. Moving up the chain, this tightness is pulling on the TFL, which in turn is pulling on the remainder of the sling above, only in this case, it’s a cross-body line, so our guy’s got himself an aching left shoulder. Who’s going to connect the right calf with the left shoulder? Not this powerlifter; he’s going to whine to whomever will listen (and some who won’t), quit his bench pressing, start icing the shoulder and chewing on Aleve.

The experienced corrective exercise specialist isn’t going to discount the possibility of a shoulder injury in a bench presser, of course, but in the process of sorting out the potential causes, cross-body stretching and strengthening running from head to toe is going to be one of the clear options of treatment.

It’s complicated, but in a funny way, it’s kind of simple. We’re sure to be talking about this in the forum and reading about it more and more on the ‘net in the next few years until eventually we all know it as well as we know our hamstrings from our quads.

The most accessible work in this field today is Thomas Myers’ book, Anatomy Trains, however the concept of myofascial slings dates back to the 1920s. Unfortunately, medical science at the time didn’t pick up on it, setting us back in our understanding of how the muscles work in concert. Had this research progressed forward since its original discovery, many of us – and certainly all athletes – would have passed over decades of bodypart training in favor of training how the body actually moves.

A lot of dull pain could have been alleviated along the way, no kidding about that. We’re late to the party, but getting up to speed is relatively easy. Let’s talk some slings, shall we?

After a particularly involved corrective exercise discussion in the forum, or via email after a blog post on recovering joint mobility, queries pop up about how to find local help with fixable dysfunctions. The desperation is understandable: Can’t someone just tell me what to do so I don’t have to study a bunch of anatomy?

At this point in the fitness and wellness industry, it’s almost an impossible question. If you get yourself in the right hands, anyone from a personal trainer, a physical therapist, a chiropractor, a physiatrist, Feldenkrais practitioner or Rolfer can sort out the movement problems of a live person in about an hour. In allopathic medicine, it would be the physiatrist, but they mostly work with patients in pain; I’m not sure what the response would be if you showed up with no symptoms, wanting to know how to fix your problems.

The thing is, finding the right person is real iffy, pretty doubtful, in fact. In the next few years, more and more people will be practicing using these assessment techniques, but we’re just not there yet. And, of course, each body is incredibly complex, so a person without a good deal of experience will have the basics, but the more subtle structural issues may go unnoticed. It really takes a good eye, a lot of opportunity to look at people, and a lot of patience to carry them through the trial and error process as they learn their craft.

For that reason, my first recommendation for a reader looking for local assistance would be Rolfing, because their regime is a systematic, ten-session, bottom-up process that covers the entire body, including the deeper parts we don’t usually think about. By the time the ten weeks are over, the fascia that contributes to holding things like feet tilted or arches dropped, hips twisted or tilted, abdominals tight, neck stretched, etc etc etc, has all been loosened, and the recipient has been retrained out of his or her faulty postural habits. For now, Rolfing is my initial recommendation for a full-body makeover when a local specialist isn’t a sure thing; if you can find a KMI-trained practitioner, so much the better — this is structural integrity similar to Rolfing, but with two extra sessions, all twelve based on the body’s myofascial slings.

But Rolfing takes a ten-week commitment, and the work is paid out of pocket. Shifting a 40- or 50-year-old back to feeling like 20 is priceless, and hopefully some readers and forum members will decide to go that route in the months and years to come. A slightly less reliable option is myofascial release therapy such as that taught by John F. Barnes in Sedona, Arizona. The reason I called it slightly less reliable is without the Rolfing treatment structure, the client is relying on the therapist’s good judgment. In many cases, this will be faster and possibly better than Rolfing because the person may have one very specific need the Rolfing program doesn’t get to until a later treatment, but that the MF release therapist can target on the first session. The downside is some people have a better eye than others, and if your therapist happens to be an other, you may end up chasing your tail a little.

A cheaper and shorter-term option is a near-local practitioner. How about this? Find a corrective exercise expert within driving distance; head down the road and make a long weekend of it. For a reasonable fee to cover a couple hours’ time, you could walk away with your current dysfunction evaluation and list of the exact exercises and stretches that will convert your ailing body from aching to fully functional. A couple months of dedicated effort and you’ll feel reborn.

Here are the options on my current list. I’ll update it from time to time as I discover more corrective exercise specialists. Feel free to drop me your name and link if you work with individuals with assessments and corrective exercise programs, or if you have suggestion for this list. I’m at ldraper@davedraper.com.

Find a local Rolfer

Find a local KMI-certified practitioner

Find a local Feldenkrais practitioner

Find a local myofascial release therapist

Gray Cook and Lee Burton have a program to train personal trainers and physical therapists in screening; find a certified Functional Movement Screen specialist.

Dr. Eric Cobb has trained practitioners in Z-health, right up our alley.

Pete Egoscue has a few clinics where they also do this work.

Paul Chek has trained practitioners in corrective exercise.

Another option: MAPS Certified Orthopedic Manual Therapists, a program developed by Australian physiotherapist Geoffrey Maitland, who appears to be expanding upon Rolfing practices similar to Tom Myers’ KMI stuff, combined with joint mobilization.

If you’re shopping for a personal trainer in the phone book, the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) has an advanced specialization for corrective exercise. It appears they offer no online directory, however the initials the trainers will use is NASM-CES.
By state:

Alaska:
Juneau, AK, Corey Pavitt, D.C. at Pavitt Health and Fitness

Arizona:
Scottsdale, AZ, Josh Henkin at Innovative Fitness
Chandler, AZ, Patrick Ward
Chandler, AZ, Keats Snideman
Mesa, AZ, Michael Lovegren

California:
Palo Alto, CA, Mark Reifkind
Santa Cruz, CA, Suzie Lundgren
San Diego, CA, Anthony Carey at Function First
San Diego, CA, Justin Price at The BioMechanics
San Diego, CA, Todd Durkin’s team at Fitness Quest 10
San Diego, CA, Jason Karp
San Diego, CA, Milo Bryant
Montrose, CA, Lenny Parracino
Pasadena, CA, Zac Marshall
Danville, CA, Clay Hyght, D.C.
Santa Monica, CA, Core Performance Center specialist
Santa Rosa, CA, Lana Pacheco
Venice, CA, Howard Skora
Visalia, CA, Justin Levine
Los Angeles, CA, Jacques Taylor

Colorado:
Greenwood Village, CO, Greg Roskopf does similar work with his Muscle Activation Techniques

Connecticut:
Hartford, CT, John Izzo
Middleton, CT, Andy Moses

Florida:
Orlando, FL, Chuck Wolf at Human Motion Associates
Tampa, FL, Brad Kaczmarski
South Beach, FL, Tom Furman
Boca Raton, FL, JC Santana’s Institute of Human Performance
Jacksonville, FL, Giles Wiley

Georgia:
Columbus, GA, Bill Long
Kennesaw, GA, Bill Sonnemaker

Illinois:
Evanston, IL, Evan Osar
Naperville, IL, Nicki Anderson
Chicago, IL, Robert Lardner
Chicago, IL, Adam Wolf

Indiana:
Indianapolis, IN, Bill Hartman or Mike Robertson
Evansville, IN, Kyle Kiesel
Evansville, IN, Phil Plisky
Indianapolis, Robb Rogers’ group at St. Vincent’s Performance Center
West Lafayette, IN, Cody Sipe

Louisiana:
Mandeville, LA, Charlie Hoolihan at the Pelican Athletic Club

Maryland:
Towson, MD, Dan Cenidoza
Baltimore, MD, Nick Tumminello

Massachusetts:
Winchester, MA, one of Mike Boyle’s trainers at MBSC
Hudson, MA, Eric Cressey and his guys at Cressey Performance
Woburn, MA, Aaron Brooks of Perfect Postures
Boston, MA, Peter McCall
Natick, MA, Eric Beard

Michigan:
Adrian, MI, Gary Gray’s team at the Gray Institute
Gary Gray is at the forefront of this industry and has provided much of the training used by others in the corrective exercise and performance fields.
Pontiac, MI, Bob Budai and team at Functional Strength Training

Minnesota:
Woodbury, MN, Brad Nelson
Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN, Joe Licht
White Bear Lake, MN, Mike Nelson

Missouri:
St. Louis, MO, Tracy Fober at IronMaven

Nebraska:
Omaha, NE, Mark Snow
New Jersey:
Freehold, NJ, Charlie Weingroff at CentraState Sports Performance
Hewitt, NJ, Perry Nickelston
Montclair, NJ, Gordon Waddell
Fair Lawn, NJ, Martin Rooney at Parisi School
Montville, NJ, Eric D’Agati at One Human Performance
Manasquan, NJ, Jon Messner
Medford, NJ, Keith Scott and crew at Breakthru Physical Therapy

New York:
New York, NY, Ming Chew
White Plains, NY, Anthony Renna at FiveIronFitness
Manhattan, NY, Chris McGrath
Brooklyn, NY, Annette Lang

North Carolina:
Raleigh, NC, Tom Dalonzo-Baker and his crew at Total Motion Release

North Dakota:
Minot, ND, Adam T. Glass

Ohio:
Columbus, OH, Andrew Lyons
Dayton, OH, Shane England, Chris Kissel and Angelene Moore at Personally Fit

Oregon:
Newberg, OR, Dewey Nielsen at IPT

Oklahoma:
Edmond, OK, Dustin Rippetoe
Edmond, OK, Jay Dawes at OneEighty
Talala, OK, Jeff O’Connor
Pennsylvania:
Pittsburgh, PA, Brett Jones
Yardley, PA, Kareem F. Samhouri
Shenandoah, PA, Tom Deebel, D.C.
Swarthmore, PA, Bruce Kelly

Tennessee:
Nashville, TN, Dave Whitley
Nashville, TN, Ward Williams

Texas:
Austin, TX, Andy Twellman
Austin, TX, Diane Vives
Austin, TX, Adam Davila
Houston, TX, Paul Yost

Virginia:
Danville, VA, Gray Cook or Lee Burton

Washington:
Seattle, WA, Tim Vagen

Washington, DC:
Washington, DC, Tanya Colucci at MINT

Wisconsin:
Madison, WI, Jon Hinds
Germantown, WI, Dave Schmitz

Canada:
Mississauga, Ontario, Jim Reeves

There are hundreds, possibly even thousands of qualified corrective exercise specialists who aren’t on this list. If your trainer is missing, please do not consider this a comment on his or her work. In fact, if you’re getting good guidance on fixing dysfunctioning joints from a specialist not on the list, please drop me an email with his or her name and a link.

A couple of recent conversations with friends made it clear my “How to Get Hip Mobility” post a few weeks ago was interesting, but still too advanced for a beginner at joint mobility. Let’s try this again from a remedial point of view and see if we can’t get a few more hips in motion. Before we get started, those truly interested in getting this mobility job done should first re-read the original post (link above); there are important points in it that won’t be repeated here.

What we’re doing involves a little bit of stretching of tightness, a little bit of strengthening of weakness and a whole lot of neural reprogramming, that brain-to-muscle connection that gets shorted out the longer the area has been locked down. Be it from the trauma of a sports injury, car accident or simply lack of use, as the joint gets less motion, the brain learns to work around it to get the job done another way. A big part of a joint mobility program is to renew lost neural pathways, and sometimes this works fast and feels miraculous. I pray for one of those AHA moments for you this week, because just one is enough to keep you in the hunt.

The biggest problem you’ll probably have — the biggest problem I had and what seems to be most troublesome for Dave — is making the movement smaller, slower. Where neural learning happens is in the small, slight movements, particularly at the beginning of the action. Yet as weight trainers we have a need to push harder, to make something happen, and instead of getting something new, we fall back into habitual, prime-mover action and nothing is gained.

When you settle down into smaller movements, you’ll get frustrated, annoyed. If you stick with it, you’ll notice the motion smoothing out in the tiny subtle beginning of the movement. A movement that originally was jerky and amplified your feeling of klutziness soon becomes effortless. Once you feel that a single time, the imagery will carry you through the rest of the beginner joint mobility frustration, sort of how a nice golf swing brings you back for more misery.

Here are four hip mobility exercises to get you started. Practice these daily for two weeks, then you’ll be ready to move over to the other exercises on the hip mobility menu to address the muscles surrounding the pelvic structure.

What I most want to get across is to simply do the movements — don’t try to understand why they’re suggested, don’t pay any attention to knowing the anatomy… just move the joints. The movement of the hip joints will probably be short and stunted and unfulfilling. Do them anyway, daily for two weeks, and I promise you the difference between day one and day 14 will explain everything you need to know.

Tabletop stretch:
Stand about torso length from the kitchen table or countertop. Bend at the hips, knees straight but not hyperextended, and put your hands on the table surface. Move your feet as needed to achieve a comfortable bend at the hip joints and a long torso stretch. Hold the stretch for a minute.

Kneeling hip flexor stretch:
Kneel on one knee, putting your knee farther back than a normal straight-to-the-floor position. The other foot will be in front of the forward knee, and the torso will be straight. Once in this position, you’ll quickly feel the stretch in the hip flexor region of the kneeling side… you know where we’re going with this. If the hips are extremely tight, this is the final position for now; build up to a 30-second hold on each side. If that position isn’t difficult, increase the stretch by lifting the arm on the knee-down side. From there, should that not be enough of a stretch, shift your overhead arm toward the opposite side.

Side-lying hip flexion/extension:
Lying on your side, bend both legs as if sitting, but with the top leg a bit farther behind. Grab the ankle of the top leg with the same-side hand, stretch the quad lightly, then move the leg forward and back in a small, smooth motion. Make this as effortless as possible, with the leg loosely swinging. Rest whenever you need to, and after one of those rests move the leg up and down so the knee moves closer and farther from the floor. Repeat the sequence on both sides, at least 20 reps of each, but more if you have time.

Standing femur circles:
Stand tall; stick one leg across the body to the opposite side and make small circles with the foot outstretched to the side, then reverse direction. Move the foot to the front and repeat; shift the foot to the outside and repeat; continue to the back and repeat the circles on both directions. Change legs and do it all again. Remember, these are femur circles — you’re moving the top of the leg bone in circles around the inside of the hip socket; you’re not circling the knee or ankle, the knee and foot are just going along for the ride. As you begin, the circles will be small and the hip will fatigue quickly. Happily, these small muscles strengthen fast.

Now it’s time to move on to the full hip mobility program.

One last thing: You don’t need to understand this for it to work. Let the doing happen now; the understanding can come later.

You’re not going to believe this: I found another four pages of notes from Chuck Wolf’s IDEA presentations in Las Vegas. If you’re just arriving, you can catch up here at part one and here at part two. We’re going back to bullet points because of the volume. When you bump into a statement that catches your attention, a simple google search will fill in the gaps.

I mentioned earlier Chuck hammered his priority of training in multiple planes of motion, and nowhere was it more evident than during his discussion of the functional spine. You’ll see that throughout the following thoughts, a bunch of gems comin’ up.

1) Walking – gait – occurs in all three planes of motion. The hips move in the sagittal plane to propel you forward, in the frontal plane as you move from side to side (weight moving from one leg to the other) and on the transverse plane as the hips rotate. If there’s a problem on any plane, there’s a problem in the gait.

2) To help sort out the cause of and solution to chronic back pain, consider first in what plane of motion the pain occurs, bending forward and back, side to side or rotational.

3) In your back stabilization exercises, include something in all three planes. Front planks are great, but they’re not enough.

4) The proprioceptors that tell the brain where we are in space work when the muscles are lengthened, and don’t work when they’re shortened. Bent-forward walking, such as often seen in older adults, shortens the muscles, causing poor proprioception… that is, bad balance, increasing the chance of falling.

5) 80% of non-impact injuries occur due to lack of control in the transverse plane. In your program design, include rotational work, and do it before your linear training.

6) Calves turn on the abdominals during gait; they’re the neural switch. Inactive calves or the feet not fully involved means weak abdominal action.

7) With excessive kyphosis, look for posterior hip tilt and fix that before working on the kyphosis. Stretching the pecs and strengthening the back won’t work until the hip tilt is addressed.

8) The lumbar spine is controlled in large part by the psoas and the adductors. Make sure the psoas and adductor length and strength matches right side to left.

9) You need good hip extension in order to have good back extension.

10) If you lose thoracic spine extension, it’s hard to rotate.

11) Sciatic nerve pain can be caused by a pinch in the lumbar spine or glute weakness, inactive glute and tight piriformis. If relief is provided by reaching one arm overhead, start at the chiropractor for attention to the lumbar spine. Otherwise, roll the piriformis over a tennis ball (remember, the knee must be bent to access the piriformis), and work glute strength and activation.

12) Strengthen foot musculature to provide relief of piriformis problems and sciatica.

13) Your isolated stability exercises (planks, bird dogs, etc) should be done first, before moving to integrated movement patterns.

14) Chronic muscle tightness is a sign something is wrong. If it keeps happening, you have to figure out why. Muscles tighten up in response to instability at a joint.

15) Since mobility without stability creates a vulnerability, the body tightens up in protection. This means we have to strengthen opposing muscles in order to gain nearby flexibility, for example strengthening the hip flexors to loosen the hamstrings.

I triple-checked: This wraps up my notes from Chuck’s IDEA presentations. Now that we’re done with the notes, I’m ready to go back for more. Three tremendous seminars, outstanding stuff.

We’re going to stall a little longer on Chuck Wolf’s IDEA presentations because when writing last week’s post, I forgot I’d made notes all over his handout sheets, and I’d forgotten how brilliant his handouts were under all my scribbles. We’re going back to the bullet format for more tips, any one of which might strike a nerve down one of your aching bodyparts.

1) Tight muscles are weak muscles. When muscles weaken, they get tight. Think strengthen before moving directly to the instinctive stretching.

2) Tight hip flexors or adductors cause anterior pelvic tilt. This in turn will lengthen the abdominals, causing suboptimal abdominal loading, leading to a loss of force production as the spine cannot fully extend.

3) Adequate range of motion is required in the foot, ankle, hip, pelvis and thoracic spine in order for the abdominals to fire.

4) Don’t neglect stretching and strengthening the feet and toes. Most of us have chronic tightness in the muscles of the feet. When this happens, the feet lost the ability to absorb force, causing trauma, torque on the joints and reduced propulsion.

5) Tightness in the forefoot, calves or hips will shorten the stride length.

6) Stretch your hip flexors and same-side calf at the same time, not separately. You want them both equally flexible.

7) Drop conventional rubber tubing shoulder rehab. The range of motion is limited; it disassociates the humerus from the scapula; it doesn’t involve the lower extremities; and the scapula doesn’t clear, creating a bony barrier.

8) Where the pelvis goes, the low back will follow.

9) Abdominal region function: decelerates spinal extension, lateral flexion and rotation; decelerates anterior pelvic tilt.

10) Abdominal region action during gait: decelerates pelvic motion, decelerates shoulder motion, lengthens to create elastic energy.

11) At the ankles during gait, eccentric loading (calcaneal eversion, dorsiflexion, tibial internal rotation and forefoot abduction) must occur maximally to recruit glutes.

12) The segments of the spinal regions (lumbar, thoracic and cervical) all have a different degree of range of motion, with the lumbar spine having the least. This is the reason modern corrective authors suggest limiting our lumbar rotation, and why most have removed exercises such as the scorpion from their line-up.

13) In gait, as the foot hits the floor on loading, it goes into pronation. It’s loading, stretching, absorbing and decelerating eccentric action. As it begins the unloading, it shifts into supination as it shortens, propels and accelerates in concentric action.

14) In standing, reaching overhead will create a neutral foot with no pronation or supination, increasing quad involvement and decreasing glute recruitment. In single-leg standing, reaching to the same side will put the foot into supination; reaching to the opposite side will force pronation. If you have a problem getting your foot into one of these positions, practice the appropriate side reach.

15) Check your feet for calluses. If you have calluses from other than an ill-fitting shoe, you probably have a faulty walking pattern. A heavily callused heel with a smooth forefoot indicates a heel doing all the work; a callus on the bottom of the foot, on the big toe, at the metatarsals or on the outside of the foot indicates a deficiency in the way the foot hits the ground. Use the calluses as a guide to correct your gait or, farther up, how your hips are moving.

Bonus: In every session Chuck hammered single-leg balance and lunges with a variety of reaches: overhead, side (high, even and low) rotational from the hip, low reaches. Over and over he had us doing medicine ball lunge reaches. Tri-planar action is his number one gig, same deal with Fraser Quelch. There must be something to this, something we should stop and consider.

This is a guy who wants us all to have this information and who loves to teach. Many thanks to Chuck for the stellar presentations.

Want a little more? Here’s part three.

Five hours with Chuck Wolf covering function, assessment and program design for the shoulder, foot and spine left me with a pile of notes to ponder and thoughts to share. Rather than do a lousy job of explaining in a blog post material that requires book-length copy, photographs and hands-on demonstration, I’ll compile what were the most remarkable tidbits for easier sharing. From one-liners to longer, here are some of Chuck’s finest mindbenders.

1) When looking at shoulders in terms of the joint mobility/stability stack, we need to split up the shoulder girdle because the scapula requires mobility, while the shoulder joint requires stability.

2) Muscles are stabilizers first, then movers.

3) Proprioceptors are triggered when the muscles are lengthened.

4) All muscles, all joints work on all three planes of motion, including the foot.

5) If you can’t get good dorsiflexion of the foot, you won’t get good knee flexion.

6) Aside of a traumatic injury, the site of an injury is usually not the problem. Check the joint above or below.

7) The glute on the side with the least ankle mobility will be the less active one. Ditto low toe mobility.

8) The leg press uses little glute action because there’s no foot or ankle function.

9) If you have a problem putting your heel in a pronated position (reverse heel guarding), you can force the action by standing on that foot and reaching out in a side reach with the opposite hand. Same side reach will bring a heel from pronated to supinated.

10) Arms overhead will trigger a more neutral position of the foot.

11) If you have a tight calf, work subtalar joint mobility to loosen the calf and regain ankle mobility.

12) Your toes need exercise, too. In particular, the big toe needs good dorsiflexion.

13) If you’re pigeon-toed, your problem begins at the hip.

14) With pronated or supinated feet, if it’s a structural issue (including stretching of the ligaments), orthotics are needed permanently. If it’s a functional issue, it can be fixed: Change shoes; increase foot and ankle mobility; increase big toe mobility and correct walking pattern. Even if orthotics are required, plan on lifetime exercises to strengthen the ankles, feet and toes.
15) Don’t talk on the phone when walking. It messes up joint rotation and core activation head to toe.

16) A shoulder injury effects movement action from the top down. No body movement is normal when a shoulder injury is present, including walking or running.
17) If your stride length is shorter one side to the other, it indicates a tight hip on the opposite side.

18) To test single-leg internal hip rotation, stand with the big toe of the test leg down on the floor. Move the loose foot around the toe to test. Go slowly so you can pay attention to the first point of tightness in order to target the best correction.

19) If you lose frontal plane motion, you lose rotation, and lose glute function.

20) Joggers and bikers have tight hips in the frontal plane and need work to open up the hips. These people need transverse plane programs, and no sagittal plane exercises.

21) Tight IT bands do not need to be stretched more. Instead, you need to identify the cause. Excessive anterior tilt? Weakened, shortened glutes, tight hamstrings? Fix the tilt, fix the foot to activate the glutes, train the transverse plane and a life-long IT band problem could be cleared up in a couple weeks.

22) When you stretch, don’t stretch the muscles, stretch the fascia – the myofascial slings. Think fascia when stretching.

23) With plantar fasciitis, look for a tight, weak glute(s) and tight hip(s), and work to fix them. Work on calf flexibility and ankle mobility on all three planes; stretch and massage entire foot to loosen. Massage toward the heel, not away.

Bonus: In the lateral (side) lunge, don’t bend forward at the hips. Keep the toe, knee and hips lined up to work the glutes. Memory trick: Stack nose, knees, toes.

Ready for more? Here’s part two.

At our IOL Bash event last weekend in Scranton, PA, folks who knew I’d spent the first part of the year with hip mobility being one of the top goals wanted to know more about the process. Once I discovered there was a problem, what did I do to fix it?

It was a priority, thus we’re talking about a lot of effort, meaning doing hip mobility work at least a couple times a day. Patience is key, because with immobile hips, there’s not much movement, and the exercises feel, er… stupid. I went from locked down hips — about as immobile as one can be and still be walking — to fairly mobile, and in the process rid myself of chronic back pain and at the same time regained joy of movement. It was more than worth the effort, a great payoff and highly recommended.

One thing before we get started: The mental aspect is a big component often forgotten. Many of us hold our lower abdominal region tight — suck in your gut, right? — and that certainly contributes to our pelvic immobility. You’ll have to purposefully relax your pelvic region in order to get your hips mobile when you’re walking down the street.

Another key to help you get started: Learn where you hips are. If when told to put your hands on your hips you find your hands on the sides of your waist, you’ve got it wrong. The hip joints we’re working on with our mobility programs are at the top of the leg, where the long femur bone rests in the hip socket. This is not to say we don’t need pelvic mobility; we do. The thing is, you’re going to get pelvic mobility out of hip mobility work, but if a beginner at mobility targets the top of the pelvis, what’s probably going to happen is lumbar rotation, not pelvic or hip mobility. So focus on the actual hip joint and save yourself a backache as you’re starting down the mobility path.

To make sure you keep this up long enough to see some progress, and to grab a little pre-workout activation in the process, do some of your hip mobility exercises before your workout. And absolutely do some hip mobility along with some foam rolling on your non-workout days to keep things progressing. Those readers with desk jobs will get double benefit by doing hip and thoracic spine mobility work after sitting all day, and if it’s possible to do a little at other times during the day, so much the better. Sitting is the absolute worst possible thing for optimal hip mobility.

If you combine strengthening the small muscles with stretching the tight ones, for example using the arms-overhead lunge stretch, your hips will begin to loosen up within a couple weeks. You really will feel the difference.

My full list of hip mobility exercises used to free up locked-down hips follows. Why don’t you pick four different exercises and do them daily this week; pick another four for daily use next week and continue changing weekly until you’ve tried them all. By then, two things will have happened. First, your hips will be more mobile and there’s a reasonable change your nagging backache will be gone. Second, you’ll know which exercises were hard for you; those are the ones you’ll want to keep after until the movement is fluid and easy.

One of my favorites is one-leg hip circles. Stand tall; stick one leg across the body to the opposite side and make small circles with the foot outstretched to the side, then reverse direction. Move the foot to the front and repeat; shift the foot to the outside and repeat; continue to the back and repeat the circles on both directions. Change legs and do it all again.

As you begin, the circles will be small and the hip will fatigue quickly. Happily, these small muscles strengthen fast. Hip circles were originally suggested by Dr. Eric Cobb over at Z-Health, and are also taught by other joint mobility proponents.

Your other selections follow:

Hurdle stepovers from the front, facing the bar
Hurdle stepovers from the side, side to the bar

Side-lying leg swings, forward and back
Hockey groin stretch

Lunges, lunge backs, side lunges
Dynamic kneeling hip mobility

Step-ups, step-downs
Single-leg deadlifts, hands supported

Standing leg swings, front to back
Standing leg swings, side to side
These are done standing near a counter top where the hands are placed for balance; the swing is small — not energetic; if the low back moves, the swing is too long.

Hip rockers
Hip bends
Hip circles
Hip thrusts

Holds at the bottom of the squat, done at the corner of the kitchen counter, one hand supported on each side

Stability ball side to side hip extensions
Medicine ball Heismans
Quadraped hydrants

Internal and external hip rotation: side-lying clams, hip abduction/adduction (feet against wall, body on floor), a femur rotation move with the legs upright against the wall, and a pilates move: body on floor, legs raised with a small ball between the feet, opening and closing at the knees

Pelvic clock, a Feldenkrais movement pattern

Another great full hip motion for which I have no name: From a side-lying position with the left side on the floor, put your right foot upright, a “standing” position on the inside of the left leg. Lift the leg straight up a bit, the knee moving toward the ceiling. Then begin to turn the leg over toward the left — it feels a bit like unhinging at the hip socket. Continue lifting and turning in a coordinated effort until you touch the top of your right knee to the floor next to your left leg. Then reverse sides and try with the left leg over toward the right side. Note if both, either or neither knee touches the floor, and if the movement is smooth or jerky.

Some of the hip range of motion exercises – leg circles being a great example, or the pelvic clock – may have a part of the circle “missing” – your circle isn’t round. It’ll feel stupid and you’ll want to discontinue the exercise, but if you stick with it, the smaller muscles will strengthen, you’ll gain more control of the movement and the circle will round out. Bravo! It’s small things like this what will contribute to that miraculous day when your back pain goes away for good.

The most unusual and perhaps most effective thing I’ve learned in all this is to slow down and to make the movement smaller. That’s how we can really feel what’s going on, where the action starts and ends, where there’s a hesitation or a “dead spot,” and then we can start sorting out the origin of the problem.

That’s the thing with hip mobility — there are so many things going on that allow, stop or create movement. We think of it as a ball moving around a socket and forget all the muscles, tendons and ligaments that contribute to making the motion happen.

The hardest part is figuring it out. Fixing it is easy, sometimes ridiculously easy.

If you’re a visual learner and want to see some of this in action, I got a good introduction to hip mobility from John Izzo’s Free the Hips dvd. Here’s a preview:

Be sure to read Mike Boyle’s Understanding Hip Flexion, too.

Bonus material:
* Listen to Caroline Blackburn explain some of what we’re working on fixing here.

* Run yourself through Boris Bachmann’s hip and hamstring mobility drills

* Rope or band stretches: Hamstring, groin, IT Band (cross body), quad (facedown, pull back), ankle, calf and knee

Dave’s newsletter last week spurred a lot of questions about hip mobility in general and an elevated hip in particular, with readers asking how to recognize the problems in themselves, and what to do to fend off the back surgery Dave eventually needed.

When I first met Dave in 1984 he had the elevated hip; I noticed his stiff, one-sided walk a long time ago. He says he’s had it a lot longer, but doesn’t remember when it started. I had an elevated hip — one hip higher than the other — for at least a couple of decades, that I know for sure.

Here’s the thing: It wasn’t until this year we learned it wasn’t a structural deficiency and that it could be fixed. I’d never heard of such a thing, and I suspect that’s true of most of the readers, and is the reason I’ve been nagging at this joint mobility and corrective exercise stuff all year.

In some cases there’s an actual leg-length discrepancy; usually it’s a functional issue, not a structural issue. Only about one in six people with a higher hip have a physically longer leg; the rest have an elevated hip that can be fixed in fairly short order. Muscles on one side are pulling the hip up, while muscles on the other side are weak and unable to offset the stronger side. We do weight training around here to make things stronger; this should be easy enough to fix, right?

If you look in the mirror at the top of your pelvis (that spot where we erroneously put our hands when we put our hands on our “hips”) and think one side looks higher than the other, you may have an elevated hip. If you’re unsure, take a couple of photographs — straight on, not at an angle, front and back shots. Print them and use a ruler to draw a straight line if you can’t tell for sure by looking. Better yet, take the photos in front of something straight, a window frame for example, to help you see level. In a clinical setting, the modern rehab folks will take photos with a grid background, full length with the patient wearing nothing but shorts or shorts and a bra top so they can really see what’s going on.

Once you’ve determined one hip is higher than the other, have someone measure your legs with a tape measure from the top of the anterior superior iliac spine (ASIS), the front of what we wrongly call the hip, to the inside of the ankle bone. If there’s a discrepancy of more than a quarter-inch, go to a medical doctor or chiropractic physician for an x-ray — that’s the only way to know for certain if the actual bone lengths are different.

Structural issues should definitely be addressed, usually meaning an elevated shoe on one side, to limit the problem so it doesn’t contribute to a cascade of whole-body pain.

Most commonly you’ll find no difference in leg length and can go to work on fixing the elevated hip on your own.

Why it’s worth the trouble fixing it is the list of other problems that tag along with an elevated hip. We can trot along fine with this in our 20s, 30s and maybe even 40s, but in my experience and in Dave’s, trouble is just around the bend after that.

Picture a skeleton hanging from a rod. Now visualize pulling on one hip to lift it higher than the other. Is it obvious in your imagining that other parts of the skeleton have to shift to allow that to happen?

That’s exactly what happens in real life, too. When the hip comes on up one side that leg gets a little shorter on the way to the floor, and upwards, the spine bends a little toward the opposite side, making the waist a little shorter on the elevated side and putting the person in functional scoliosis. It’s not structural scoliosis, where the spine is permanently bent, it’s functional and can be fixed.

It also means it will stay that way if not fixed, indicating a future of back, hip and leg pain for the person who’s either uninformed or unwilling to step back from their training long enough to fix what could eventually be a serious physical issue. If the sufferer ignores the pain long enough, maybe he or she will need back surgery such as Dave’s, getting another chance to go back and fix the functional problems after recovery from a major surgery.

With an elevated hip where one side is higher than the other there’s fascial or muscular tightness pulling the spine, and weakness on the other side allowing it to be pulled. We get regular massages or work on self-myofascial release with a foam roller and a tennis ball, add a little stretching and over time the soft tissue normalizes, the pulling stops and the spine goes back into its normal alignment. This is quite common… just most of us haven’t known that before.

We then work to balance the endurance strength of the two sides so that normal posture becomes easy to maintain.

This would also be the time to sort out any pelvic tilt and rotational issues to bring the pelvis back to its optimum position of a *slight* anterior tilt, which puts the spine in a mild lumbar lordosis, exactly where we want it.

At the same time, we would be working on joint mobility, especially in the hips and upper spine. In fact, this is exactly what Dave began working on this past week as part of his back surgery rehab. The more mobile and freely moving those areas are, the easier it is for the postural muscles to hold us in good static positions.

Here’s a review of joint mobility and foam roller rehab programs. I hope you’ll take some time with this and treat it seriously even if you don’t have an obvious hip elevation, because free moving hips is the key to easy movement now and into the later decades. If you do find an elevated hip, here’s how to get started fixing it.

A number of comments by IDEA lecturers at last month’s conference, as well as tidbits hidden in articles here and there, lead us to question the general nature of what’s been considered a cornerstone of corrective exercise: Is “lengthen or loosen what’s tight” really the right way to go?

There’s new attention to older techniques, and with today’s knowledge, smart therapists are learning each stretching method works on different issues, and that some stretching can be effectively applied to specific muscle groups and not to others.

For example, Eric Cressey describes a segment of a recent Bill Hartman lecture wherein Bill distinguishes shortened muscles from stiff muscles. What he’s saying is stretching a muscle just because it’s tight may fix the problem, may do nothing, or may even make the condition worse. Expanding on that, he goes on to tell us even if stretching is called for, we still need to know what caused the problem in order to determine what type of stretching will serve us well—long duration static stretching, shorter static stretching or dynamic moving stretching, for example.

Then we get over to Paul Chek, who’s been writing about this for years, where we find his explanation of tonic (postural for enduring stability) vs phasic (power for movement) muscles. Each type of muscle contains a different percentage of fast- and slow-twitch fibers, and according to Paul, each will respond to a different method of stretching.

When you get to the end of Paul’s suggestions, you’ll discover his number one premise: “If it’s not tight, don’t stretch it!” Continuing the quote:

“If you complete the typical general stretching routine, you will simply be loose and out of balance, while not stretching an out-of-balance body and simply exercising just results in a progressively tighter, potentially brittle out-of-balance body. Neither is optimal for your health or performance!”

And over to Lenny Parracino, who suggests a range of stretching to include holding a stretch over a triggerpoint to neurodynamic and neuromuscular stretching in addition to our traditional stretches. He also points out the need to sort out the reason for the problem to determine the best technique. Quote:

“Why are there so many stretching techniques? Because they all work! All stretching techniques are based on neurophysiological and mechanical principals. Once understood, the assessment and stretching program can become individualized.”

Now Greg Roskopf, the guy behind Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT), is outspoken against automatically stretching to lengthen tight muscles. Quote:

“Muscle tightness can be a representation of the body protecting itself from instability. … The associated tightness is just a symptom for some other underlying cause (weakness). Thus, without fixing the problem (muscle weakness), the tight muscles cannot relax.”

He’s mostly talking about isometrics in tensed positions to rebuild central nervous system-to-muscle neural connections. I only saw a two-hour presentation of his at IDEA and didn’t get more than a general overview; interested trainers should look at one of his MAT Jumpstart programs, three two-day workshops that explain the theory and demonstrate how to find the weaknesses—the assessment portion—and which muscles to contract to strengthen the tight area, which will usually be the antagonists.

Here’s another opposing viewpoint: Hands-on Feldenkrais therapists never move into tightness. Instead, practitioners stay in the areas near the tightness where the body feels “safe” and in fact, much of their work begins on the opposite appendage in the case where, say, one shoulder rotates well and the other does not. The Feldenkrais worker will spend the initial time on the shoulder that functions well to remind the brain of the optimal range of motion. After work there, the restricted shoulder will be attended, but in the free-moving range and only slowing moving into the tightness over time.

In Total Motion Release, the creator, Tom Dalonzo-Baker, again follows some of the Feldenkrais-like principles by using properly working joint and muscle pairs to teach good movement to the poorly working, areas most of us would naturally stretch due to chronic pain or tightness.

Using my recent history as an example, when I started this rehab process in January, along with “strengthen what’s weak,” which still holds solid by the way, I took “loosen what’s tight” fully to heart.

A) There are several spots I’ve stretched and stretched and stretched, yet months later there’s been no change.

B) On the other hand, one single stretching session during which pretty much on a whim I waited out the lengthening process and tight chest muscles that had been pulling my shoulders forward for literally decades loosened up over the course of half an hour and has stayed that way during the months since. Once lengthened, this area seems to have remained in its longer, optimal state.

C) Finally, there were a couple of spots I overstretched — too long, too often — and lost some stability I had to work to regain. Too long equals weak; we need both mobility/flexibility and stability, and sometimes it’s a fine balance between them.

There’s a lot about stretching that we don’t know, or better yet, that hasn’t been put forward in a simple template for the casual trainer. But the sharp guys are getting close for us, and when that happens, look out because a large percentage of our recurring physical pains will be easily fixable.

Justin Price, a corrective exercise specialist and former IDEA personal trainer of the year, was a main attraction for me at this year’s conference. He’s one of a few guys who had an enormous impact on where my training interest has traveled this past year. (Until Suzie Lundgren, ace Feldenkrais practitioner, came along, the folks who’ve been generating this year’s corrective exercise obsession have all been men).

I had two IDEA conference sessions with Justin this year, so let’s cover those together: Keys to Successful Corrective Exercise Design and No More Back Pain; Getting a Grip on the Lumbo-Pelvic Hip Girdle. He also taught myofascial release, but I’m pretty good with a foam roller and a long list of tough implements, so I passed on that in order to take another class I had my eye on.

Let’s get at the easiest tips first, in no particular order:

1) You know that tennis ball you’ve been using underfoot? Justin wants you to quit fooling around and retire that in favor of a golf ball. Ouch is right!

Oh, and 1-A: Work on foot and toe strength.

2) Ease your way from running shoes and cross-trainers into flatter shoes over time. The heel lift in our traditional trainers is causing a lesser version of the problem high heels cause in women who dress up for work. That raised heel changes the dynamics of the skeletal system from the heels all the way up, causing potential trouble every joint along the way. The “ease your way” part is a warning to make the change slowly so the spine can adapt to the new position. Jumping right into a flat shoe full time will just give you a different pain instead of, or maybe in addition to, the one you have now.

3) If you sleep on your side, put a pillow between your knees to help loosen the hip socket. Otherwise we spend the nighttime hours in constant internal hip rotation, not the best way to train the body toward good habits.

4) Don’t cross your legs when sitting. It’s the easiest way to sit when our hips have an excessive anterior tilt, which most people have, but it makes the problem worse.

5) Move around more if you have a job that keeps you seated. When we sit, we train our glutes to be inactive. Inactive glutes lead to a lot of problems, one of them being anterior pelvic tilt.

Most of us have excessive anterior tilt of the pelvis; Justin’s estimation in a room full of fitness professionals who were in far far better shape than the average American was 85%. Not many of the attendees admitted to being in pain that day, to which Justin noted they (I wasn’t one of the claims to pain-free) still have a dysfunction that hasn’t yet reached the pain threshold. Fix it now, before it’s a chronic problem or causes accelerated aging.

Tip: If your feet are over-pronating, it means you’re in excessive anterior tilt. I have it right here in my notes that Justin used the word “always.” Over-supinating indicates excessive posterior tilt. I, to be difficult, had one of each prior to this year’s focus on corrective exercise.

Many people – again, myself included – have been diagnosed with scoliosis, a slight or severe bend in the spine, and even more people have it and don’t know it. But as it turns out, unless it’s of the severe variety, there’s a real good chance it’s a *functional* scoliosis the body created as a compensation for lack of hip mobility.

If that’s the case, you can fix it by regaining your hip mobility and re-aligning your pelvic girdle. I’m living proof – it took a few months, but it worked: The scoliosis that I was diagnosed with about 40 years ago no longer exists. No kidding: It’s gone.

That leg length discrepancy you think you have? Only about one in six people have a physically longer leg; the rest of us have an elevated hip issue that can be fixed in short order. This, too, I can personally verify.

As you can tell, me sitting in a Justin Price lecture is part education, part reinforcement, part reminder. Getting two sessions in one week is all parts beneficial.

Personal trainers interested in learning more about hands-on structural assessments and corrective exercise recommendations will find more in his Fundamentals DVD set.

Fitness conferences like the IDEA event in Las Vegas last month, originally created for group exercise instructors, have come a long way from the 80s’ aerobics classes toward providing material for the information-hungry personal trainer. Today’s presenters are extremely knowledgeable, and the trainer who won’t learn from them are few and far between.

Put your toe in the water: Those readers here in California within easy driving distance can cheaply expand their knowledge of the corrective exercise and movement pattern fields next month at Mindy Mylrea’s FitFest 08, September 26-27 in nearby Los Gatos.

In fact, the casual fitness enthusiast would have a great time participating in the classes and sitting in on a few lectures, as well — think of it as a major-league fitness bootcamp class.

I’ve put together a sample session line-up for a personal trainer who hasn’t been to a conference like this and might not know where to start. Look here:

Friday, 12:00-6:00pm
Session 1: Best Workout with Mindy Mylrea
Session 2: BOSU Ballast Ball with Rob Glick
Session 3: Nutrient Timing with Len Kravitz (or Group Xtreme with Corey Sobas; this one’s a toss-up depending on the attendee’s interest)

Saturday 7:00am-5:30pm
Session 1: Pick something you’ve never tried for a morning wake-up workout
Session 2: Keynote with Skip Jennings
Session 3: Movement Science and Corrective Patterns with Yoga with Robert Sherman
Session 4: Medicine Ball Training with Robert Sherman
Session 5: Lactate Threshold Training with Len Kravitz
Session 6: Assessments: Imbalances and Corrective Movements with Robert Sherman

Now, of course, if I was just going for the fun of it, I’d choose sessions using implements I’d never used or hadn’t been taught how to use, like a BOSU or a variety pack in one of the sports training classes, where they’ll use tools such as kettlebells, med balls, bands, tubing and such.

Speaking of cool tools, Mindy’s conference last year was where I first met Marc Lebert, the guy who designed those nifty Equalizer dipping bars I later ordered. In fact, if you wanted a set and hadn’t yet pulled the trigger, you can get a $10 discount when ordering from the Lebert Equalizer site by using the coupon code 0807LD.

Friday single-day price is $119; Saturday one-day cost is $139; both days is $189. As a personal trainer who needed to choose a single day, Saturday’s the big-payoff day.

If you need to update your CPR, they’ll do that, too, on Friday evening, $29.95 for a two-year certification. Trainers needed continuing education credits will be offered CECs for both ACE and AFAA.

Take an extra fifty – there’s a trade-show expo where all the toys you play with that day will be sold on discount. The expo is open to the public for those who need a stability ball but don’t have all day to spend goofing around at the conference.

Grab the 11-page registration and session description pdf here from Mindy’s conference page.

Tuesday, July 8
Tagging along with 5,000 personal trainers and group exercise instructors is a good way to run a normal person ragged. It’s been a dozen years since my last visit to IDEA, and in the years between, I’d forgotten how fast everyone moves at these things. From the bowels of the Las Vegas Convention Center to the far side of the Hilton, including a jog through the restroom and a swing by the session-handout print station, 12 minutes flat. The organizers allow about 15 minutes between sessions, and that’s because these folks don’t need any longer.

A couple of those 12 flying minutes include a race-walk outdoors between the two massive structures a few times each day; I’d also forgotten the heat of 112 degrees. That’ll bake some sense into ya.

An all-day session, The Cutting Edge of Function, on Tuesday with Fraser Quelch, the guy who’s behind the programming of the TRX Suspension training, was a perfect introduction to the week’s selection of functional assessment and corrective exercise programming classes. He’s an outstanding instructor who described movement from the ground up; the entire day kept me attentive, with his discussion of multi-planar training being the highlight.

Wednesday, July 9

Gyrokinesis Group (workout), Emma Kingston
Start the day with a workout, isn’t that how it’s supposed to go? My real plan for the week was to soak up a dufflebag of corrective exercise tidbits to share with interested readers. In workout selection, for the heck of it I chose modes of training I’d never tried. In the case of Wednesday morning, I’d never even heard of it and had absolutely no idea what to expect. Gyrokinesis turns out to be a form of joint mobility. I’m really a fan of joint mobility and the class was good enough. Nothing special, but an okay way to wake up the day.

Keys to Successful Corrective Exercise Design, Justin Price
Justin’s real terrific at this stuff, and I signed up for two of his presentations this time around. He’s the guy who spoke at a workshop in February over in Santa Clara, who, after I asked him a question about Nike Frees (he’s no fan), told me my feet/hip/thoracic/shoulder/neck dysfunctions could take me up to three years to get sorted out. Instead of hating him for life, I went back for more. You should, too, if you get a chance to hear him speak.

Alphabics Ultimate Relaxation exercise (workout)
During the long lunch break (they leave big empty time slots for big-bucks expo shopping), I filled my time with promo sessions. This day, I have to admit, I snuck out early. It’s the only session that triggered that slippery action this year – all the sessions I chose were bang-on perfect for what I needed. I suppose I could have taken a nap in the back, but the music was too much and I bailed.

Assessment and Reaction-Shoulder Function, Chuck Wolf
Now let me tell you a little about Chuck Wolf: What a prince! Smart and generous, too. I’d never heard him speak before and very quickly knew his three sessions on my schedule were winners. As I go through my notes from the week, his suggestions for shoulder training will be at the top of the list for sharing with you.

Stott Pilates Jumpboard Interval Training (workout), John Garey
Jumpboard training was a kick; this was another of the try-something-new workouts, and it was a blast. I could see myself stumbling through a Pilates reformer workout, definitely. For those who haven’t even as much as a clue as me, the reformer is that machine with the padded board and all those springs. Between rebounding intervals, I got a taste of deep core training with the feet going one direction and the arms under stress from another. Very nice, I like.

Thursday, July 10Barefoot Core Workout (workout), Annette Lang
Arrive a few minutes late and jump right in, oh yeah, that’s how to really set your guts on fire. And as long as you’re in place, stay there for 75 minutes and do nothing but core. My sides ached for the next three days.

Assessment and Reaction-Foot Function, Chuck Wolf
We’re back with Chuck for session two of the three-parter, wherein he dissects the function of the feet, leads us up the legs and toward the hips. Most of us pay no attention to our feet, and Chuck would like to change that. He’s pretty convincing; I’ll be attending to the foot musculature, and will try to talk you into that, too.

Comprehensive Trunk and Spine Conditioning, Kevin Dunn
Now here I’m coming up a little short. The intention of this blog post was more one of personality, to give you a general feel for the event and its sessions. In a lecture entitled “Comprehensive Trunk and Spine Conditioning” you’d think there’d be a bunch to say, but here you’d be mistaken. Still, I remember a couple of ah-ha moments, so stay tuned for those after the scribbles get sorted out of my notepad. I did take a lot of notes.

Gliding and Bender ball (workout), Mindy Mylrea
Lunch workout number two, where I scurried across the mileage to watch my old pal, Mindy, share her energetic magic. She’s a kick and a half, and I adore watching her work the crowd. Then I slid out the door to get to a second lunch session, Paul Chek, who was speaking at the other side of the convention center in a conflicting timeslot. Bumping into Mindy a couple hours later, I was busted: Eagle Eye saw me leave before the workout. Amazing, 200 people in a hotel ballroom, and Mindy knew I was gone. You have to laugh.

If you’re in central California and would like a grin, too, Mindy’s FitFest 08 is the last week of September in San Jose, where she and a bunch of her peers will be presenting much of the same material as seen at IDEA.

Functional Exercise, Paul Chek
I cannot tell a lie: I went to this session to get a feeling of Paul’s personality at least as much as to hear his material. He’s everything I was expecting, and that’s a lot in one package. Here, too, I took good notes that you can expect to help me sort through later. Paul has made a huge contribution to the course our industry has taken, let there be no mistake about that part.

Assessment and Reaction-Back Function, Chuck Wolf
Part three and we’re done: Chuck works up the torso from the hips to the chest by way of the back. Now here’s a funny one – he apologizes for repeating the material on planes of motion that he’d covered in an earlier session. Forget that, it took me all three tries to begin to make sense of it, and I’ll be studying it a whole lot more before it gets ingrained. This was my last session with him, and in my head, we’re buds by now.

Stott Pilates Group Sculpt (workout), Moira Merrithew
Wrapping up the day on Thursday with a Pilates workout, again with the idea of trying something new, I slipped into this workshop given by the creator of Stott Pilates. It was a sculpt class using a couple of two-pound toning balls, and as a never-before-pilates participant, I expected to be floundering. Instead, I had no problems, and while I’m well aware there are some extremely fit Pilates enthusiasts who could put me in the ground, I have to say, my regular weight training and kettlebell work put me in a better position for Pilates than Pilates would have done for weight training. The woman next to me, a competitive bodybuilder, shared that opinion. Again, we’re talking about a sculpt class, not a core training class, which I haven’t yet tried and am certain to be fried when I do. What I’m saying is people looking for muscle building would be better suited using some weights.

Still, the toning-ball rotator cuff segment was absolutely outstanding, and in fact, I did it again at home this morning. That part’s a keeper.

Friday, July 11

No More Back Pain — Lumbo-Pelvic Hip Girdle, Justin Price
A Justin Price lecture first thing in the morning, what a way to start the day. Friday started an hour later (I guess they thought the alcohol would start flowing a little faster by Thursday night), so no pre-lecture workout, which was fine because my torso was still singing from the 75-minute core intensive from the previous morning. This workshop covered hip rotation, tilt and elevation (after his signature foot assessments that no lecture goes without), and every person in that class wished to have another couple of hours to glean a bit more JP brain matter.

Assessing Our Assessments, Greg Roskopf
Greg Roskopf is the guy behind the MAT program, Muscle Activation Technique, which we’ll be talking more about as time goes by. For a year I’d been wondering what the heck he was doing, because it’s pretty hard to tell from the write-up on his website. Essentially he’s working with range of motion assessments, same as a lot of folks, but that’s where the similarity ends: He’s flipped the “stretch what’s tight” rule and it becomes “strengthen what’s tight.” There’s more to it, as you can imagine, and we’ll get to that later.

High Performance Swiss Ball, Paul Chek
Today we get to see what made Paul famous: Swiss Ball. And he’s good on that thing, make no mistake. I can assure you, chances are real good your stability ball form is, er, lacking.

What the Hips Lack…Hurts the Back, Anthony Carey
Coming to this corrective exercise umbrella for me came because of years of low-grade back pain. It never got terrible, more like it was… always. Anthony’s book, Pain Free Program, was a key to relief. (Well, actually, it was me faithfully doing the exercises he suggested, so he can’t have all the credit.) I was really looking forward to his wrap-up of the week of study, and he didn’t disappoint. There was a lot of material presented that I’ll be using here in the blog in the coming months. He’s a winner, for sure.

As I sort through my notes and session handouts and run through an expected excessive amount of trial and error, we’ll look at some of the presenters’ theories to apply them to our earlier discussions of corrective exercise. We’ve got a lot to learn, but things are coming together nicely. And heck, we never want to stop learning. Brain function tops all.

Expanding on our earlier discussion of human planes of motion, today let’s take a look at a few other common movement terms that are a touch out of range of most of us traditional gym rats. We’ll keep it as brief and simple as possible so you’ll have a cheat sheet for reading some of the more advanced corrective exercise articles found on the ‘net, stuff that’ll might turn around that aggressive aging process.

Prone vs supine
Prone is lying face down; supine is face up.

Superior vs inferior
Superior means closer to the head; inferior means closer to the feet.

Medial vs lateral
Medial refers to nearer to the center; lateral refers to farther from the center.

Posterior vs anterior
Posterior is toward the back; anterior is toward the front.

Distal vs proximal
Distal means farther from the torso; proximal means closer to the trunk.

Extension vs flexion
Extension straightens a joint; flexion bends the joint.

Supination vs pronation
Supination and pronation are used to describe action at the feet or forearm. In the feet, supination refers to excessive outward action; pronation refers to the ankle turning in. With the forearm, supination refers to turning the palm up; pronation refers to turning the palm down.

Medial vs lateral rotation
Medial rotation turns toward the center of the body as in internal rotation; lateral rotation turns away from the body externally.

Inversion vs eversion
Inversion turns the foot in; eversion turns the foot out.

Elevation vs depression
Elevation means upward; depression means downward. These terms are most often used to describe faulty scapula position, too high or too low.

Protraction vs retraction
Protraction moves a joint forward; retraction moves it backward.

Adduction vs abduction
Adduction brings the limb in toward the body; abduction moves it away.

Dorsiflexion vs plantar flexion
Dorsiflexion at the ankle is to bring the toes toward the shin; plantar flexion points the toes away.

Joint mobility vs flexibility
Joint mobility encompasses the ability of the joint to move through it’s full range of motion; flexibility is about muscles, not joints, and is about lengthening to optimum.

Stability vs mobility
Stability is the muscle, tendon and ligament action needed to hold a joint in position; mobility requires the correct muscle action on one side of a joint and the necessary muscular flexibility on the other to produce full movement through a joint’s range of motion.

Activation vs dormant
Activation means an action to trigger a muscle that’s not firing well; dormant refers to an inactive muscle group, at varying levels from fully inactive to fully engaged.

Tendons vs ligaments vs fascia vs myofascia
Tendons connect muscles to bones; ligaments connect bone to bone; fascia is connective tissue that covers soft tissue from head to toe, superficial to deep; myofascia is fascia covering muscle

Lordotic vs kyphotic vs lordosis vs kyphosis
Lordotic is the curve of the spine bending to the front; kyphotic bends toward the rear; lordosis describes too much lumbar curve (toward the front); kyphosis describes too much bend at the thoracic spine (to the rear)

Bilateral vs unilateral
Bilateral refers to both sides of the body working together; unilateral is one side alone

Concentric vs eccentric
Concentric shortens the muscle; eccentric lengthens, ie in biceps curls the concentric action brings the wrist toward the shoulder; eccentric returns the weight to the side

Isometric vs isotonic
Isometric changes the muscle tension without changing the length; isotonic changes the muscle tension while changing the length

Origin vs insertion
Origin of a muscle is the stationary attachment site of muscle to bone; insertion is the mobile attachment end site

Primer mover vs synergist vs antagonist
Prime mover is the main muscle that carries out an action; synergist assists the prime mover; antagonist performs the opposite action

Planes of movement — Sagittal vs frontal vs transverse
Sagittal refers to forward or backward; frontal (aka coronal) refers to side to side; transverse refers to rotational — more on planes of motion here

There ya go. The simplest movement cheat sheet on the ‘net.

Monday was Day One of my return to regular weight training after six months of corrective exercise rehab. Most of my forum pals can’t fathom why I would consider taking that much time away from the gym, and truthfully if I’d have known in advance it would take that long, I wouldn’t have done it.

At least, not until something decked me, which once you see the list you’ll realize was about to happen. Talk about a train wreck!

Tired of daily back aches and knowing there wasn’t an actual injury causing the problem, I decided at the first of the year to take a month and try to figure it out. Six months have passed, and take a look at the list of nagging niggles that are now either completely gone or at least mostly gone and fading fast.

Chronic pains that I’d had for months, years or decades – note the past tense:

Joints hurt, especially in the morning
Lousy posture, real lousy
Head tilted to one side slightly
Couldn’t turn head to the right very well
Twinge in the neck when turning head left
One shoulder raised
Internally rotated shoulders (palms facing rear)
Right shoulder ache
Impingement pain under left scapula
Elbow ache
Wrist ache
Thumb ache
Upper back ache
Lower back ache
Scoliosis (functional not actual)
One leg shorter than the other (functional not actual)
Shifted from leg to leg when standing, due to hip pain
Habitually stood on one leg with hip jutted out
Achilles tendonitis
Heel pain (resulting in a closet full of perfect left shoes and worn-down right shoes with costly insoles and heel lifts)
Dropped metatarsal, both feet
Duck walk (toes pointed out)

How did those get fixed? Surprisingly easy:

Worked mobility of all joints
Stretched some spots
Strengthened others
Worked out the triggerpoints littered throughout

I’m still waiting for a few things to settle in; that part takes a while. There’ll be a day of blissful pain-free motion — like I’m really moving well — then a day of lots of popping and shifting of the joints, or even a day of reminder of the old chronic aches. Following that will be another day or two of childlike movement that reminds me why I veered off the mainstream and onto this corrective exercise course.

I’m fully convinced most everyone who trains who has regular muscle and skeletal pain and those who get injured often in training, can make themselves feel better by a dedicated joint mobility program and by fixing relatively easy structural imbalances caused by one side being too tight and the other too weak.

It’s a pain in the rear because there aren’t too many people around — the personal trainers and the medical pros — who can do a hands-on analysis and simply tell us what to do. As this field grows enough that we can pop by the clinic and get a personalized exercise and stretching assignment, everyone will be doing it… for sure, because it works, and sometimes fast.

Obviously we can’t fix everything, but I’m 100% sure we can make things better. I’m also absolutely certain this past half-year’s effort has halted any arthritis that may have been developing due to poorly moving joints. In fact, let me give you a hint here: That thoracic spine of yours that doesn’t move very much is a nest for your growing arthritis. Get after it while you can!

My project for July: Are pain-free noisy knees fixable? We used to say if there was no pain, it was no problem; just ignore it. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe it means the knees aren’t tracking as well as they could be. I’ll let you know what I find out, and if somehow these crunchy knees go quiet, I’ll holler out with your fix-it instructions.

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.

The way I figure it, the movement pattern and corrective exercise experts began their study of human motor patterns through the work of Moshe Feldenkrais. He’s the guy who started this trend back in the ’40s, although he didn’t live to see it hit the athletic world, or for it to trickle down to those of us on the fitness side. Of course the new generation of teachers expanded on his efforts to include strengthening weak areas and stretching tight ones, but the underlying idea of how the brain makes the body move began with Feldenkrais a long time ago.

Today’s rehab leaders probably don’t talk about the Feldenkrais influence much because most of their readers would think it sounds like some kind of voodoo magic; yesterday was my second class, where the six of us rolled around on the floor as the instructor pondered out how we first taught ourselves to crawl.

Pretty out there, but no less true, and the movement pattern guys who re-teach us to squat will often remind us of how a baby learns to squat, and how the body originally built stability on top of great mobility. Somewhere along the line, we lost it, lost the mobility and eventually forgot the movement pattern.

Here’s an example of both. Over the course of about 35 years, increasingly bad posture that began in my teens had my thoracic spine not moving, about as close as you can get to immobile while still moving around town. Daily effort on a tennis ball peanut, plus plenty of careful and consistent exercises brought my T-spine mobility from really poor to pretty darn good, so much progress that I was confident on that score. Yet the back pain remains solidly in place, and I’m still tinkering around with new ideas such as movement awareness.

During my first Feldenkrais class two weeks ago, as we were doing a sort of spinal wave movement, the instructor crouched in front of me and held my neck in her hands, immobilizing it. Suddenly I could no longer do the spinal wave… everything stopped. She told me later her effort was to trigger me to begin using the spine, that my upper back was moving as a block, rather than in smaller vertebral segments.

What had happened was over the course of my corrective exercise work, I’d gained exercise mobility, but not much natural movement. Mobility does not necessarily mean motion!

From the Feldenkrais point of view, and I’m certain most of the corrective guys agree with this, once mobility was compromised, the brain skipped over that area and found another way to bend and move the back. The other way is very likely one of the causes — probably the main cause — of the chronic back pain that triggered this whole rehab progression for me in the first place.

Not only do you have to regain mobility, flexibility and stability, you may have to relearn how to use it. This was quite a revelation to me as it occurred, made small today when put into words. The few readers who have made progress in the corrective arena, yet are still in pain may find it useful to ponder this the next time you’re lying quietly on a foam roller.

Introduction to Feldenkrais Movement Awareness Class:

We’ve got a dozen lengthy articles here in the blog, and another fifty or so threads in the rehab/corrective exercise section of the forum dedicated to sorting out our various physical dysfunctions. Let’s do a quick recap to bring it all together into a sort of introduction to fixing pain caused by a poorly functioning body.

Often we’re in pain here or there; other times we just don’t move as well as we used to. Everyone we know says, “Ah, getting older,” as if we’re not supposed to be able to move our joints after we hit our forties. The field of physical therapy has begun to develop new ways to teach people who to move again, and their work is expanding into the training rooms of pro and collegiate level sports and trickling down to us. Those methods give new life to beaten-up athletes and middle-aged desk jockeys alike, and somewhere in that group slides the likes of you and me.

Once on the structure and movement rehabilitation path, each time we find another problem we discover it’s connected to something else, another weak or tight or immobile or inactive bodypart that’s not working as it should. Sometimes it’s so confusing or overwhelming we want to give up, but usually before we get to that place we’ve had an amazing success… enough to keep us eagerly and greedily searching for more.

Because every body is malfunctioning to a different degree, and there are so many joints and muscles that might be involved, it’s pretty much impossible to tell you how to get started. Still, let’s take an overview, possibly enough to get you started on your own path to rehabilitation. Each bolded point below is a link to more information on that topic; when you get to one that intrigues you or sounds like something you’re having a problem with, click over and start your journey there.

• Joint mobility and stability—joint movement, encompassing both the ability of the joint to move through its widest safe range of motion, the ability of the nearby muscles to cause that motion, and stability, such as at the knee, low back, neck and elbow that have a short range of motion and the need to be stable
• Muscle flexibility—muscle lengthening, whether it can move to its full structural range, or if it’s instead shortened to a less than optimum length
• Hip mobility—tightness of some muscles and weakness in opposing muscles keeping your hip from its natural ability to move
• Pelvic tilt—anterior (tilts to the front) or posterior (tilts to the back); you may even have both
• Hip rotation—internal or external rotation; we need both, but in balance
• Strengthen weakness—discover and strengthen lesser muscles that are overpowered by larger surrounding muscles
• Fix the feet—if foot problems aren’t fixed, the structure will never be fully sound
• Activate muscles—waking up a muscle group that’s not firing well
• Thoracic spine mobility—optimal freedom of upper spine movement
• Pectoral flexibility—releasing tight muscles in the front caused by our forward-positioned lifestyles, creating poor upper spine position and mobility
• Core stability—the enduring power of the deep abdominal muscles that control posture and stabilize the spine
• Foam roller—a dense foam cylinder used in self-massage of the legs and torso, and even for the front delts, triceps and forearms
• Triggerpoints—adhesions in muscles or between muscles and tendons that cause surrounding muscles not to function well

Now let’s move over to the forum and get you some help sorting out your next step. Click here to review the topic list of our prehab/rehab and corrective exercise section; you’re welcome to join the conversations in progress, or to start a new topic with your personal concerns. Note: You do have to register and be logged in to post in the forum.

Want to skip all the reading and just get started? Here’s a three-week workout plan for those who don’t care much for the theories, and just want to get started on corrective exercise rehab work.