Injuries suck. There’s no other way around it. You may never become truly bulletproof, but if you understand the injury equation, you can tip the scales in your favor. Here you’ll discover the hidden costs of injury and how to effectively maintain health and body integrity.

The Injury Equation

Injuries often catch us off guard, appearing through seemingly random chance. Some people get injured, and others don’t, right? You could cross your fingers and hope for the best, or you could begin to truly understand the injury equation.

The thing is, injuries aren’t random happenstance. An injury occurs when you overload the stress capacity of a tissue. It’s essentially a junior high math inequality. Injury = Demand > Capacity. But although the equation may be simple, the cost of an injury is anything but.

Integrate crawling into your warm up routine to keep your shoulders strong and mobile.

The Cost of Injury

An injury can throw you for a loop when training. But derailed training in the short term is only one piece of the puzzle. Consider the competitive athlete who may have a scholarship or paycheck on the line. In these cases, the focus may be to return to sport as quickly as possible, but this rush can have unforeseen consequences. Having one injury often sets an athlete up for re-injury, as high as a 50 percent repeat incidence, according to one study in the Journal of Athletic Training.¹

Repeat injuries aren’t the only issue. You can literally learn pain as a pattern if you aren’t careful. If you aren’t careful in handling injuries, you may lock yourself in a cycle of chronically painful movement. And it gets worse. Prospective studies show that having a joint injury in youth sets the stage for increased risk of osteoarthritis later in life.² If your knees aren’t up to snuff now, they’re going to be really cranky in thirty years. These acute injuries you shrug off now can lead to chronic issues down the road.

Those are the purely physical aspects of injury. We can’t neglect the huge psychological burden. Physical injuries are associated with lower self-esteem and higher levels of depression and anxiety^.3,4,5 If you identify with your physical practice (and you do to some extent, or you wouldn’t be here), then an injury can literally take you away from yourself.

When you’re injured, you’re not simply looking at a short-term musculoskeletal problem. You’re looking at potentially long-term dysfunction in the whole human system. So much for “No Pain, No Gain.” If you’re concerned with systems health, you need to take a smarter look at the injury equation.

Prehab, Don’t Rehab

Western medicine has given us a wealth of information and support, but it often takes a reactive role when it comes to injury. We deal with an injury when it occurs, but we do little to prevent injury in the first place.

The common approach for injuries is the old RICE method standby (rest, ice, compression, and elevation). We reduce the demand. We take time off. We idle. And in some circumstances, that’s the right thing to do, but it ignores the whole “capacity” part of the equation, the preventative part. Rather than only reduce our demands, why not intelligently increase capacity?

How to Build Capacity

We may not like to admit it, but we’re pretty soft in our training. Most training occurs on flat surfaces with extra traction. We pick up conveniently shaped objects. It may not be easy, but it’s certainly simple. The typical training environment offers relatively little in terms of movement complexity. And complex movement may be your best bet for increased tissue capacity.

Rather than train solely for ideal scenarios, you also need to train for the situations you don’t want to be in. Sport and life are messy. Rarely will you find yourself in a perfect setting. And if you aren’t adequately prepared, you hurt yourself.

So how do you intelligently build this capacity and tip the scales in your favor? It begins with an upgrade of your current hardware, making sure that your joints and muscles are working properly. After you make sure things work nicely, you can take this living machine for a drive. Get out of the routine. Explore unfamiliar and varied movements like crawling, climbing, rolling, and roughhousing.

If you’re looking for a good place to start, I recommend checking out MovNat founder Erwan Le Corre’s four-week MovNat primer. The program will help you train natural human movements that improve your tissue capacity, slowly but surely tipping the injury equation in your favor.

Here’s an example of a workout in the MovNat primer program:

• Stepping Over x 4: Perform dynamically, avoid counterbalancing with the upper body. Switch sides.
• Stepping Under x 4: Perform dynamically, avoid rounding the back. Switch sides.
• Lateral Figure Four Sitting Reverse x 4
• Assisted Squat x 8: Hold at the bottom and bounce softly a few times before standing up.
• Split Squat x 4: Keep front knee stable, switch sides.
• Deep Knee Bend x 4: Maintain a tall posture.
• Deep Knee Bend Stances x 4: Hold stance for about 10 seconds each time. Maintain a tall posture and stable ankles and knees.
• Medium Kneeling to Tall Kneeling x 4
• Deep Knee Bend to Tall Half-kneeling x 4: Switch sides.

Lateral Figure Four Sitting Reverse:

Train for Long-Term Health

When an injury occurs, it goes beyond a short-term musculoskeletal issue. It can become a chronic, whole-human problem. Your best bet is to prevent injuries from occurring in the first place. You can do this by increasing your capacity for stress across the whole body, exploring naturally complex and inherently human movements. You need to reclaim your natural movements if you want to remain a happy, healthy animal.

More Movement Practice:

• From Rehearsal to Reality: How to Train For Chaos
• 3 Reasons the Ground is Your Body’s Best Friend
• Set the Foundations: Include Balance Drills in Your Workout

References

1. Yang J, et al. “Epidemiology of overuse and acute injuries among competitive collegiate athletes,” Journal of Athletic Training, 47(2012):198-204.

2. Gelber AC, et al. “Joint injury in young adults and risk for subsequent knee and hip osteoarthritis,” Annals of Internal Medicine, 133(2000):321-328.

3. Leddy MH, et al. “Psychological consequences of athletic injury among high-level competitors,” Res Q Exerc Sport, 65(1994):347-354.

4. McGowan RW, et al. “Athletic injury and self diminution,” J Sports Med Phys Fitness, 34(1994):299-304.

5. Pearson L, Jones G. “Emotional effects of sports injuries: implications for physiotherapists,” Physiotherapy, 78(1992) :762-770.

Photos courtesy of MovNat.

The post Injury Prehab With Natural Movement appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Your Purpose In Training

So what are you training for? We all have our reasons:

• For aesthetics
• For health
• For performance
• Just because (my personal favorite)

Strength training can certainly move you toward your goals, but at a certain point you reach the point of diminishing returns. At a certain point, getting stronger won’t actually help you do more in life. By all means get to that point, but then it’s time to shift your emphasis elsewhere.

Consider a jiu jitsu athlete. A baseline of sport-specific strength is critical, but beyond that they’d be best served by emphasizing technique and stress management. Or how about the busy dad weekend warrior? Strength training can help him be more capable and more resilient, but beyond a certain threshold he’ll likely want to prioritize mobility and playtime with his kids.

How much strength do you need? You need to be strong enough to live the life you want with a bit of extra buffer for those “oh, shit” moments in life.

Take a moment to reflect. What are you actually training for? Many of us cruise on autopilot and don’t give this question the thought it deserves. Spend a few minutes jotting down a stream-of-consciousness answer, then keep on reading.

The Vacuum

Here’s the elephant in the room that many strength enthusiasts seem to miss. You don’t live in a vacuum. Absolute strength in a crisp, controlled gym setting might not actually prepare you for the real world. I’ll admit that front squats and muscle ups are super satisfying on their own, but I’ve yet to find a barbell or ring-shaped object lying around outside the gym.

Consider the tasks you need to accomplish on a daily basis. You’ll spend a fair amount of time getting from point to point on two legs, so it might behoove you to give balance a bit more emphasis. You’ll have to carry the occasional unwieldy object up a flight of steps, so coordination and odd-object training might come in handy. You’ll be fighting to stay upright in the ever-present field of gravity, so prioritizing mobility and dynamic alignment will reap huge rewards. We can zoom out a bit further and bet that you’ll be interacting with other people frequently, so dive into some partner practice. Roughhousing, contact improv, or cooperative games all teach us how to better relate to the people in our lives.

The point is this: strength training can help you live the life you want, but for most of us it serves only as a means to an end. Overemphasizing strength often leads us to miss the forest for the trees, limiting the real-world applicability of our training. Be your own yardstick. Get clear on what you really want from training, and don’t let other people’s goals and standards define your practice.

The post How Strong Is Strong Enough? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

These “improv rules” are pretty simple: Notice more. Let go. Use everything.

Let’s unpack each.

Notice More

Body awareness gets a bad rap as woo-woo or superfluous, but it has a huge impact on how well you can move. The simple act of bringing conscious attention to your physical sensations has myriad benefits, ranging from reduction in pain, to improvement in motor control, and perceived sense of effort.

The fundamental benefit goes even deeper. Awareness creates space for choice. When you notice you’re cold, you can choose to put on a sweater. When you notice it’s getting dark out, you can choose to turn the lights on. When you are aware of your butt getting numb and your back aching, you can choose to move, or not.

But awareness gives you, as somatic educator Moshe Feldenkrais said, the dignity of choice. Whether you act on it or not is up to you. Awareness just gives you the opportunity to turn off autopilot and consciously find new and better ways of moving.

The simplest way to start noticing more in your body is to go through a “sensory scan.” Try this out: right here, right now, and notice what you can see. What can you feel? Hear? Taste? Smell? Which of these are easy to sense, and which are more unfamiliar? These physical sensations are how your brain makes sense of the world.

Let Go

It makes logical sense that holding onto excess tension is bad for mobility. But most of us make our way through life with an unnaturally high level of neuromuscular tension. Chronic stress, injury, trauma—each of these causes us to clench ourselves a bit more, and this has a nasty tendency to accumulate over time.

As you start to notice more in your body, it gets easier to let go of excess tension. Check in with your shoulders: are you hunching them up by your ears? How about your jaw? Are you clenching it? Are you holding your breath? As the hip kids say, let that shit go.

Keep in mind that this is not a one-and-done situation. It takes conscious effort to release excess tension (as well as addressing why we’re so tight in the first place).

Use Everything

This is a biggie for many of us. We don’t often move enough, or move all of our body parts as much as we should. A common example is training in shoes, which effectively locks a quarter of the bones in our body into a more-or-less fixed position.

Or we train without moving through the full range of motion of our joints, thus telling our bodies, “Nah, you don’t need to keep that range of motion anyway.” This only reinforces the vicious cycle of immobility. See, our bodies make specific adaptations to the demands we impose on them. If we fail to use all of ourselves in our full range of motion, it’s no wonder we struggle with mobility issues.

Notice more. Let go. Use everything. And revel in a body that works the way a body should.

The post What Improv Theater Teaches Us About Mobility appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Can your six-pack halt global warming? Will your gains save the polar bears? Maybe not, but your training can actually make the world a better place. An endorphin rush and the warm-and-fuzzies? That’s a winning combination in my book. Let’s explore just how to make it possible.

Be Strong To Be Useful

In MovNat, we talk about the idea of “be strong to be useful.” In essence, we’re looking past the debate over what is or isn’t functional, and examining what movements get things done in the real world. If your training doesn’t make your life markedly better, what’s the point?

Let’s take it a step further: does your training improve the lives of those around you? Can you help a buddy move a mattress to his new apartment? Are you able to haul a load of firewood for a camping trip? All show and no go is a bad way to be. Clearly, being able to get things done efficiently and effectively beats the alternative.

Please don’t over-complicate this. You can safely lump these practical skills into two categories:

• Move your body from Point A to Point B
• Move an object from Point A to Point B

Things like walking, running, and jumping would fall under our first category, and things like deadlifts, heavy carries, and drags would fall under the second category. Conveniently enough, these skills will give you a pretty killer bang-for-your-buck on the strength and conditioning side of things too.

So you get a lot of what we’d call “traditional” benefits (cardiovascular health, body composition changes, etc.) with the added benefit of having pretty clear practical carryover into real life.

Strength Isn’t Hypothetical

Don’t get me wrong, some folks take this “practical fitness” thing too far and spiral off into hyperbolic examples. Surviving the zombie apocalypse or some other doomsday scenario is nice and all, but your movement can actually make the world a better place, right here and right now.

I don’t care how hypothetically capable you are. I want to know how much of an impact you can make on the world around you. Let me give you an example.

On a typical day I’ll head to one of the local parks for a couple of hours and put my mobility and natural movement training to use. As I walk or run the trails, I keep an eye out for trash.

Getting to litter can be a challenge all on its own: you may have to squat and crawl, balance along a log, or jump across stones in a creekbed. And after an hour or so I’m sweaty, worn out, and I have visual evidence of making the world a better place.

This is how I choose to stand with Standing Rock, and with our broader ecology. It doesn’t take grand gestures, but words alone don’t do much. We live through action, not intention.

A post shared by Chandler Stevens (@chandlerthemover) on Nov 28, 2016 at 7:28am PST

Stewardship is radical in its intention, but simple in its execution. It simply the deliberate act of leaving things a bit better than when you found them. That’s the heart of the practice of somatic ecology. Every moment is a game, a dance, a moment of possibility ripe for the taking.

You can make both yourself and the world around you better, in one fell swoop. It just takes a bit of deliberate action.

The post Be Strong to Be Useful appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Our spine is beautifully engineered to help us navigate the world against the ever-present pull of gravity. That’s the main challenge we’re always trying to overcome. The way we do it is through an organization called tensegrity, essentially a balancing act between elements of tension and elements of compression. Older, rougher models of tensegrity think of your muscles and connective tissues as tensile elements and bones as compressive elements, but we now know that this balancing act exists on a cellular level as well. This concept is illustrated beautifully in the “bioflow anatomy” concept developed by Dr. Andreo Spina.

In a nutshell: everything is connected in the body (even at the cellular level).

When Things Go Wrong

But this balancing act can get skewed pretty easily. Certain bits get out of alignment or carry unnaturally high levels of tension. Chronic stress, excess time sitting or standing, repetitive movements, and emotional trauma can all influence how and where we get ourselves out of whack.

When this happens, it can lead to aches, pains, and even a loss of control over the affected areas. This triggers that nasty cycle we mentioned earlier, called sensory-motor amnesia. Sensory-motor amnesia works roughly like this:

1. Muscles engage when they don’t need to, and they forget to let go.
2. These muscles fatigue and accumulate lactic acid, leading to sensations of pain.
3. This pain blurs the communication between your brain and the affected areas.
4. With little-to-no communication between brain and body part, tension accumulates even further as a protective mechanism.

You get the picture.

What Do We Do About It?

As we’ve talked about before, any change in our quality of movement requires a big-picture approach, including the “neuro,” the “physio,” and the “eco.” We have to take a look at interventions that will impact your neural functioning, your physiological makeup, and the broader context you put your body in. Each plays a huge role in how well your body moves. Below, I’ll walk you through a quick exploration of each side of the equation.

The “Neuro” Side

We’ll dip into the world of somatic education to tinker with the nervous system a bit. As you go through the following processes, it’s important to practice with awareness and curiosity. Mindlessly going through the motions won’t make things better. Tune in, and get acquainted with what sensations you notice in your body. That’s the raw data our nervous systems use to make movement.

What we’re doing here is primarily a learning stimulus. We’re teaching the nervous system new ways of organizing your body relative to the pull of gravity.

The “Physio” Side

Next, we need to provide a physiological stimulus to spur the desired adaptations we’re looking for. Now I don’t know you, but if you’re like most humans these days, you could benefit from some focus at the top and bottom of the chain. We often accumulate a whole helluva lot of tension in the neck and ankles, and we lose mobility in those areas.

Keep in mind: physiological adaptations occur at a much slower rate than neural adaptations, but if you incorporate the following movements into your daily practice, you’ll see marked benefits in a wide variety of movements.

The “Eco” Side

No exercises here. Just the no-BS truth. How did your back get so messed up in the first place? The big, bad gap. It’s the gap between what a human animal is built to be doing on a daily basis, and what you’re actually doing on a daily basis. There’s no way to sugar-coat it. You need to move more, in more ways. Even the most dynamic of us engage in vigorous movement for only 5% of each day.

As I’ve written about before, the simplest way to incorporate more subtle movement into your day-to-day routines is to spend more time on the floor. Sit on the floor for a meal, to check email, or to watch Netflix. You’ll naturally find yourself moving more in little ways, and that adds up over time. Need some inspiration for how to get started? Check out the #reclaimthefloor hashtag on Instagram for beginner variations and progressions.

Address the Factors of Your Back Pain

There we have it: a comprehensive look not only at the short-term issue of back pain and immobility, but also the long-term context that led you here in the first place. We have to tackle the neurological, the physiological, and the ecological factors that contribute to these issues.

It’s not an easy pill to swallow, but if you want to make a change in your body, you simply have to make a change in your life. 

The post A Head-to-Toe Approach to Back Tension appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

When people try to address psoas issues, conventional wisdom says one of two things.

• You have a tight psoas. Roll it out and stretch it. You’re a piece of meat, after all.
• You have a weak psoas. Strengthen it. Leg lifts ad nauseum. Because you can outwork dysfunction if you push hard enough…

Let’s bring some sanity to the psoas. To clarify the problem at hand, we should begin by understanding what it is we’re working with.

The Most Complicated Muscle You’ve Never Heard Of

The psoas is a pretty intricate piece of equipment. The psoas major attaches at each vertebrae of the lumbar spine (and the bottom vertebrae of the thoracic), before winding its way down through the abdomen to attach at the lesser trochanter of the femur. Essentially, it’s a bridge between the upper and lower body. It comingles with the connective tissue of the diaphragm and the surrounding lumbar plexus, a major nerve hub. With so much going on, it’s easy to see that when something goes awry, we’re setting ourselves up for trouble.

So what does the psoas do? Depending on the person you ask, you’ll hear 15 different answers. Some folks say it primarily acts as a hip flexor. Others claim its main role is that of spinal stability. Others give it a more esoteric function. I say: yes, yes, and yes, because it does a bit of each.

One of its earliest, most primal functions is coordination of our Moro reflex. The Moro reflex has three distinct parts:

1. Global extension, a reaching out
2. Global flexion, a pulling in
3. Crying (typically)

When we break this down we can see how crucial psoas function is to each step. Organizing the spine, coordinating the hips, facilitating the breath…if we have a sticky psoas, these functions can’t proceed properly.

A Soft Reset for Your Psoas

You might be asking: so what? I’m not a baby. Ain’t nothin’ scares me.

Here’s where it gets interesting. You can think of this as a generalized response to trauma, one that helps us negotiate threats to ourselves. When it’s inhibited, that energy gets bottled up. We get stuck, physically and emotionally. The following daily practice will help you release excess tension psoas, no stretching or strengthening required.

Rather than stretch (adding tension to an overly tense system), a far better approach is to release. We can do this through something called a constructive resting position. Check out the image below:

As you can see, there’s support beneath the back of the head, and the support of the floor along the length of the spine. Any time we want real release, we need to provide the necessary support to release into. The floor is a perfect container for this. As we’ve talked about before, spending more time on the floor has marked benefits, affecting everything from neuromuscular coordination to how much tension you carry. To make the most of this, get in the consistent habit of spending 5-10 minutes a day in this position. You’ll be amazed how powerful an effect this has.

And there we have it. A properly organized psoas is a powerful thing. After each session, tune in to your body and notice what you’re aware of. Can you sense shifts in tension? In alignment? Has your mood changed? Think of this as a soft reset for your body, and make it a daily practice.

The post Release Tension With a Psoas Reset appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Use Self-Directed Practice

More and more evidence points to self-directed practice as the most effective way to learn and perform new skills, from suturing¹ to punching.² We probably understand this intuitively. When we’re practicing something according to our own schedule and level of enjoyment, we’re more likely to stick with it. There’s something innately gratifying about taking ownership of our training and practice. Play is intrinsically self-directed. You go until it stops being enjoyable, and then you switch to something new.

Introduce Constraints-Based Exploration

When playing with our quality of movement, we need more guidance than simply “do better.” This is the value of introducing constraints. Adding a constraint to a movement (for example, balancing a book on your hand while rolling from back to belly) forces you to bring your attention to an external focus. It gives you a specific task to accomplish, one that gives you instant feedback to whether or not you completed the movement successfully. We also know that an external focus of attention improves performance relative to an internal focus.³

Include Variation

We’ve talked before about the benefits of variation in your movement practice. More so than rote repetition, variation in our movements is critical to the learning process.⁴ No toddler reps out Turkish get ups to learn how to walk. They constantly explore novel variations on how to organize their bodies for the ultimate task: balance in the gravitational field.

So How Do We Play?

This seems like an odd conversation to have, doesn’t it? When did we forget how to play?

I find the simplest way to bring self-direction, constraints, and variation into my practice is to work with time blocks rather than sets and reps. Within a given time block, how many subtle variations can you find in your squat? Can you change up your stance? The bar’s position? How many quality repetitions can you get in a 5 minute window?

How many ways can you find to get up and down from the ground? How many ways can you enter a handstand? The options are limitless. Yes, it takes a little bit of thoughtful creativity, but the benefits to your quality of movement are well worth it.

Figure out your movement:

What You Feel Says More Than What You See In Movement

References:

1. Safir, O, et al. (2013). “Self-directed practice schedule enhances learning of suturing skills“. Canadian Journal of Surgery. doi: 10.1503/cjs.019512.

2. Halperin, I., Chapman, D. W., Martin, D. T., Lewthwaite, R., & Wulf, G. (2016). “Choices enhance punching performance of competitive kickboxers“. Psychological Research, 1-8.

3. Wulf, G & Su, J. (2007): “An External Focus of Attention Enhances Golf Shot Accuracy in Beginners and Experts“. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport.

4. Carey JR, et al. “Neuroplasticity promoted by task complexity”. Exercise and Sport Science Reviews, 33(2005):24-31.

The post The Perks of Play to Better Your Movement appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The way you move and the way you look depend entirely on the context you put yourself in, day in and day out. In this episode of Out On A Limb, we’ll talk about what this means for you.

(Spoiler alert: you really need to move more.)

The post In Movement Context Is Everything appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Movement Matters

In “Movement Matters,” Katy takes us on a winding ride, along the way exploring her main question:

What if we can make ourselves, our communities, and our planet healthier—all at the same time—by moving our bodies more?

She lays out a compelling case, and along the way she challenges us to think bigger about our conception of movement. Every page encourages us to rethink our assumptions and perspectives through compelling scientific explanations, relatable anecdotes (like, she’s actually funny), and intensely deliberate language.

“Movement Matters” will help you reframe not only your movement, but the words you use and the life you choose.

Everything Moves

What really shines about this book is how Katy applies a “movement lens” to so many facets of our lives. The underlying theme is that we are a part of nature through and through, and as such we follow the same patterns and rules that the natural world does. Our problems—from myopia to achy joints to disconnected communities—all seem to crop up when we act as if we were somehow separate from nature (and the movement required to exist in it).

However, the title itself may be misleading. Yes, it’s a book about movement, but more importantly it is a book about awareness: awareness about our choices, and awareness of the assumptions we use to make those choices. In Katy’s eyes everything lives in context. Our bodies reflect the context we put them in. Our language reflects what we do and don’t do.

Hell, even our scientific research is influenced by our sedentary culture. As she says herself: she used to write as a bioMECHANIST, concerned with the mechanical loads we do and don’t give our bodies. This book is a distinct shift to Katy as a BIOmechanist; her focus is rooted in the interconnectedness of the natural world (humans included).

A Word Of Caution

As such this can be a harrowing line of inquiry. We’re swimming in the deep end here. The book itself is easily accessible, but it raises challenging questions. It leaves you uncomfortable at times. Katy calls us out on just about every line of BS we’ve settled for in health and fitness and opens our eyes to the imminent solution: move more, and in more ways. She’ll be the first to admit: this runs counter to what’s considered “normal” in our culture. A movement-oriented lifestyle (you know, the kind humans lived for millennia) is distinctly abnormal these days. But we shouldn’t limit discomfort to our training stimuli. Growth happens at the edges, and “Movement Matters” will challenge you to grow.

Katy sets the stage perfectly in the introduction:

“You have a role in the ecosystem, and it’s not a static position at the top of the food chain as you were taught. Your role is a dynamic one, critical to all the other living things on this planet.”

In “Movement Matters” you’ll find radical new clarity on how to fulfill that role in a meaningful way. Do not expect a list of exercises or go-to movements. Expect to shift your perspective. Don’t expect an easy read. Expect an engrossing one, one that will leave you not only a better “mover,” but a better human animal.

A review to help mobilize your muscles:

Myofascial Release: The Right Tool for the Job

The post Movement Matters – Changing Perceptions of Fitness appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Let’s start by tackling three common myths about this beast we call posture.

There’s No Such Thing

That thing you call posture? Well, it doesn’t really exist—at least not the way you think it does. See, there’s no static position that is inherently good or bad. That perfect posture you’ve been chasing is going to continue to elude you because it isn’t real.

Our ideas of perfect posture are based on the outdated, cadaver-oriented view of anatomical neutral. We seem to think that if we stack our bony bits one on top of the other, then we’ll balance perfectly within the gravitational field. But it just can’t happen that way. What the biomechanical model misses is the fact that your body is constantly in motion. You aren’t made of muscles and bones. You’re made of cells. And you better believe they are constantly shifting position in response to the forces at work around them.

Your Posture Doesn’t Matter

It sounds good in theory, right? Poor posture must lead to poor movement. But posture is just a shape you put your body in. And the shapes you put your body in are only bad if you lack the ability to change those shapes. By all means, tip your pelvis and hunch your shoulders, but only if you can actively un-tip that pelvis and un-hunch your shoulders.

As long as you can still maintain voluntary control over those body parts, it really doesn’t matter what position you put them in. We run into trouble when we lose the ability to move those body parts. That’s what makes “bad posture” bad.

Posture Isn’t Fixed Consciously

Tuck your chin. Shoulders down and back. Stack your ribs. Flat back. What happens when you stop thinking about fixing each of these cues? If you have to constantly think about correcting your posture, you’re missing the point.

Consider how laughable it would be for any other animal to double-check its alignment before, during, and after physical activity.

The thing you call posture is shaped by a tremendous number of forces, from your mobility and neuromuscular tonus, to your social and emotional health. Thinking that a few corrective exercises will fix it is short-sighted and myopic. If you want to improve your quality of movement, if you want to find more ease in your body, then it’s time to start moving—and living—like a human animal again.

Trust your body to handle itself:

You Aren’t as Fragile as You Think

The post Your Posture Isn’t the Problem appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Our nervous system loves three things more than anything else: safety, function, and variety.

If we want to optimize our performance, we must first establish safety in the nervous system so that it will allow us to do what we want. We must then allow our bodies to move with efficiency and efficacy. And then we need to get a little crazy and introduce some new variables to keep ourselves challenged and dynamic.

When we do all that, we’ll be able to find a new level of performance and joy in our practice.

The post Shift Your Perspective on Your Body appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

You, In Context

Ok, so you’re tight, stiff, and achy. How did you get here in the first place?

We’ve talked before about the SAID principle. It’s the idea that your body is constantly changing and adapting in very specific ways based on what it’s coming up against.

• You fatigue muscles and stimulate tissue adaptation.
• You eat plenty of healthy fats and trigger beneficial hormonal responses.
• You meditate and create new neural pathways.

The things you do with your body shape it on a cellular level. But the SAID principle extends beyond that. It takes into account the big picture context of your life, including your habitat and the people you associate with. Remember: those things affect your behavior too.

So if you want to get your body feeling looser, you have to examine this big picture. I think of this context as a “somatic ecology.” Our bodies and minds are in an ever-changing, adaptive relationship with the world around us. And within that dynamic we have three key areas we can explore: the “eco,” the “neuro,” and the “physio.” Each offers us a way to improve our mobility and sense of ease.

The Eco

Take a look at your current environment. Do you spend much time outside? Are you trapped in a chair for the bulk of your waking hours? Do you encounter much variety in the surfaces you walk on?

These things matter.

When we put our bodies in rigid, unchanging environments, they become rigid and unchanging. One of the easiest way to bring more mobility to your body is to intentionally change up your environment:

• Find more excuses to spend time on the floor (even just sitting on the floor to check email).
• Make time to get your body outside.
• Explore how to make your habitat a little less comfortable (excessive comfort got us here in the first place).

Doing so will gradually encourage new behaviors and force adaptations throughout your body.

The Neuro

It’s undeniable that a big part of your tension stems from the nervous system. It puts the brakes on movements that it views as dangerous. The nervous system is looking out for us, and it doesn’t care whether or not we can do the splits. It cares about survival.

The first step to take here is intentionally downshifting. Stress will sabotage your mobility faster than anything else. Relax, dude.

• Take time each day to breathe (think of it as a soft reset).
• Tune in to what sensations you notice in your body.
• Be present with your movements (it makes a bigger difference than you think).

The Physio

Here’s the heart of the issue. At the end of the day, stretching is just a compensation for a lack of movement. Move! You don’t need to overthink this one. Your body is begging for it. It needs movement as much as food and oxygen. Little bits of movement throughout the day make a much bigger impact than an hour of exercise ever could.

Your breath is the key to everything else:

Connecting to Training and Life With Your Breath

The post Still Stretching? Think Bigger appeared first on Breaking Muscle.