Introduction to Natural Movement

Introduction to Natural Movement                                                          As many of you know, I’ve been doing some research on movement. I have been a real believer in movement as long as I’ve been studying and practicing massage. Recently, I have been following a bio-mechanist named Katy Bowman. She has done numerous podcasts, blogs and written books on movement and alignment among other topics related to the human body. She is my hero. She speaks to the differences of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to our own under-nourished diet of poor movement. A life filled with all sorts of different movements versus a life we live spending most of it sitting in a comfortable chair or seat. She says we have disease of captivity. Katy uses orca whales to illustrate her point. When an orca is in the wild, it swims in any number of ways and with different speeds and varying distance to forage for food. When in captivity an orca only swims in a circle. Thus their fins flop over. Their tissues collapse. (Most of us has seen the movie Free Willy). Katy shows us that we are also at risk of tissue collapse and calls it diseases of captivity and how our habits are “casting” our bodies unnaturally. So, I’d like to introduce you Katy. A List Of Body Casts Body cast rhymes with podcasts, of which I’ve done about 50 in the last 8 months. On most podcasts I have been discussing this idea of how immobile we are–how it’s not only that we exercise or don’t. The very habitat in which we dwell is preventing full use of our body. When I talk about “body casts” I use the analogy of a cast on a broken arm to illustrate a familiar example of how immobilization brings about tissue adaptations. For example, after wearing an arm cast for some time, you’re likely to experience not only a decrease in muscle thickness, but a decrease in the length of your muscle as well. But it’s not only loss. In muscles that are casted long, they have to adapt by increasing in length. Which in turn skews a joint’s range of motion. And it’s not only muscle tissue adapting. Connective tissue grows between muscles forming a sort of internal cast between unmoving parts. Some casts (as in the case of shoes or a belt) are made of physically present “walls” that prevent a structure from moving through a full range of motion. In other cases a body is cast by a reflexive reaction to input. A good example of this is how the muscles in your eye will change shape in response to focusing on what’s in front of it. A computer screen doesn’t “hold” your eye lens in the way a cast holds an arm, but the reflexive behavior of the eye “holds the position” of your lens all the same… To read the full article, follow this link: http://nutritiousmovement.com/a-list-of-body-casts/ Also, Katy has an awesome book called Move Your DNA, which explains more on this subject. It also gives simple corrective exercises that can help correct our alignment and give us better range of motion and more. Good stuff. I find it pays to really be attentive to our habits and activities. Things we do on a daily basis as well as those new activities we introduce our bodies to every so often. More movement and different movement to all joints is really the key. Knowing is half the battle. Move on, Jennifer