I used to be very flexible. I still kind of am. But it’s weird. It’s a slow grind to get my hands to the floor in a forward bend, but I can still bust out a middle split anytime, without warming up, provided I’m wearing stretchy pants (and I’m ALWAYS wearing stretchy pants because I made excellent career choices).

Back when I was training to be a dancer, being able to do a split cold was a useful thing (or so I thought…).

For the degree of comfort and freedom with which I could inhabit my human body, this was not a useful thing. Not useful at all.

However, I would be ignorant to blame my problems on my flexibility. The fact is I made dumb choices. I lacked respect and awareness for my body, and did not value honesty in my experience of it. I did not listen to my body. And I did not have patience for when I wanted something to change about it.

Flexible as I was, I was trapped in my body.

Well, you live and you learn. Sometimes the hard way.

I learned that my body feels much better when I don’t stretch. So I don’t stretch anymore because I consider myself not to be a complete idiot.

So… What’s your point, Monika?

“I should stretch more.”

“I never stretch, that’s probably why my body feels so tight all the time.”

“I do the hip stretches, by they just keep tightening back up.”

Sound familiar?

Stretching and mobility work are a popular go-to when something doesn’t feel right in the body.

Back in my dumb(er) days, my left hamstring felt really “tight”, so I stretched it daily, for months. Then, I strained my left hamstring while I was stretching in jazz warm-up one day. Pretty dumb, eh? Well, I was only doing what I thought was right based on the information I had, and I thought stretching would set me free.

My client came in the other day saying that his shoulder felt “tight”, and, “can we do some stretching for it?”.

Another client comes in every week with low grade back pain that she describes as “tightness” but that it’s fine because she just stretches it out with yoga (to which I question, if that “works” then why do you show up every week with the same back pain?).

In the case of the “my shoulder is tight” client, his shoulder didn’t need stretching (because the area in which he felt discomfort was locked long, not short). But we did a thing that I labelled a “stretch” (to get him to him trust me), and afterwards, when he felt better, I then explained to him that it wasn’t actually a stretch and why what we did worked. That’s my sneaky way of getting around arguments over movement paradigms: Don’t take it from me, just fucking feel it in your body.

My point is that stretching will lengthen a muscle, but it doesn’t necessarily teach that muscle anything. In the words of Chris Sritharan:

“We’re not trying to stretch a muscle, we’re trying to give it something to do.”

I want to make the case that how much motion a joint possesses, aka, stretching things to increase flexibility, is less important than other factors, like, understanding the context of the movement, the intention for the movement, the timing and ratios of movement, and the specificity of the movement to your body’s needs.

If flexibility and stretching were the solution to the body’s problems, then contortionists would never have issues. Ever. But they do. Explain that for me with stretching logic.

I want to make the case that before trying to provide more novel movement experiences and manual therapy we ask better questions. It more useful to ask questions like “why is it tight?”, and “what movements am I avoiding?” than “what stretches should I do?”.

In fact, this blog post sprung from my feeling exceptionally insufficient at the skill of asking questions.

What’s the truth about what the body needs at this moment? Is that muscle feeling “tight” because of length or shortness? And what will set the body free, at this moment in time, from the habitual things it is doing that are keeping you “tight”?

Set the body free

In my mind, the body craves freedom.

Stretching may or may not be part of the process, but the end goal is to set the body free.

Freedom to move the way you want to. Freedom to sit on a plane for 10 hours, and not be crippled fro days afterwards. Freedom to take risks with your body without fear. Freedom to take up a random sport and have the basic body mechanics to perform it without injury.

Freedom is having options.

My favourite definition of freedom is from Krishnamurti’s book Think on These Things. I feel that his definition applies particularly nicely to the body, too.

Per Krishnamurti, freedom means:

Not to want to BE anything more than what is. To be free from ambition. Acceptance of the “tightness” or soreness or whatever our bodies are experiencing. Not seeing the body’s limitations as a drag, but as something to be curious about and explore.

A state in which we are are not acting out of fear or compulsion, not needing to cling to a sense of security or protection. Sometimes we stretch out of compulsion and fear, because it makes us feel like we’re doing something useful when we don’t know what else to do. That’s what I did with my hamstring.

Not to operate based on traditions or do something just because other people are doing it. It is often part of the tradition of various sports/movement forms to do things a certain way, i.e. stretch a certain way, warm-up a certain way, and so we keep doing things that don’t help us simply because it’s the way things have always been done.

To be able to understand who you are, and what you are doing, moment to moment. Moving with awareness, not just mindlessly going through motions. To be aware of all the moving pieces of your body, and even to be aware of the parts of your body you are less aware of…

And, not just to be able to do or say whatever you want, or go wherever you wish, but to understand what is happening, and why. Without awareness of how your body is capable of moving, and NOT capable of moving, freedom is not possible. An example is a client of mine who ignores when her elbows hurt, yet she performs exercises that make her elbows hurt, just adapts them by moving around the issue- bending her elbows when they should be straight, flexing her spine when it should be extended. Even though this is keeping her stuck with sore elbows, she would rather do this than face the issue and understand the root of it. Another example could be an elite level gymnast who can move in ways that most people can’t, but by choosing to be extremely mobile and highly skilled mover, what other, more fundamental options has she limited herself of that may be keeping her below her true potential? The same is true for being stuck in any specific posture or trained way of moving.

Freedom, therefore, by this definition, is more related to understanding than it is to acting. More awareness, less “solutions”.

I believe this is a massive tenet of the Alexander Technique. As Laura Donnelly, my friend, a dance teacher, and Alexander Technique teacher (also my editor for Dance Stronger), recently wrote to me in an email (as it relates to people wanting a quick fix to be free of pain):

‘…They want something “to do” to “fix” what they perceive is wrong. Not understanding that the thing they think is “wrong” is likely just a loud communication from the body. They also don’t understand that sometimes what they need “to do” is “not do”.’

BOOM. Before jumping on Google for the latest stretching/yoga/mobility flows, just stop what you’re doing and check yourself. Go quiet in your body. What’s it actually telling you?

As expressed by Byron Katie in her book Loving What Is,

“I don’t let go of concepts, I meet them with my understanding and they let go of me”.

The same holds true for the body as for the mind. Meet the body with your understanding, the information you receive will set your free (if you do the dang work!).

The most useful information you can have about your body is:

Where am I? Where am I not? (your center of mass is where?)

How can I move? How can I not move? (what ranges, planes of motion can I/can’t I access?)

Where are joints stuck open? Where are they closed? (compression/decompression based issue?)

What is locked long? What is locked short? (muscle tension or shortness based issue?)

In Anatomy in Motion we use a systematic process to find out the answers to these questions: What movements and positions the body is and is not currently accessing. But it’s not a process of “doing”, it’s a process of “checking in”.

But to make sense of this information, we need to know what our context for understanding it is.

What the f**k is my body telling me?

Information is useless if we have no context for it.

Check out this flow chart I drew:

So what do I mean by context and intention for movement?

Let’s talk context first.

Whether you’ve got missing parts, extra parts, or fused parts, gait happens

What I love about Anatomy in Motion is that the context is so clear, specific, and relevant to human bodies: The gait cycle. The perpetual movement cycle of a closed system.

Before we did any other learned movement, we taught ourselves to walk. It was hardwired into our brains. We didn’t have to watch anyone learn to walk and imitate them, we just did it because it is a part of being human.

Soccer is a trained skill. Dance is a trained skill. Walking, on the other hand, is a context we all inherently understand at some level. Whether your number one hobby is, like mine, nerding out on gait mechanics, or you take it for granted on a daily basis that you have legs, we all “get” walking on an unconscious level because we’ve all put in the time teaching ourselves to do it.

What blows my mind is that with each step you take, every joint in the body has the chance to move in all three dimensions. Every single joint action your body is capable of performing happens in the time span of two steps. If that doesn’t blow your head off… go read something else.

That said, walking isn’t contemporary dance. The total range that each joint goes through isn’t that big, it just needs to be big enough for whatever the demands of your life are.

In gait, many joint actions happen on a very small scale- like the total movement of the tibia per step, which is something small like 10 degrees. That said, every degree of motion matters. If one degree changes, everything else has to adapt to it. And I would argue that the ratios with which joints are moving against each other matters more so than the total range of motion they possess.

This is why stretching to get more flexible doesn’t always help people move better.

Muscles react to joint motion, and if we don’t change the timing and ratios of the joint movements themselves, the muscles will not get the stimulus to do something different. They will stay stuck short, or long, or cranky, and stretching won’t change a timing issue.

I am a good example of this. I used to be a lot more flexible and move a lot more shittily. Life was not better when I was more flexible. Just because I had 180 degrees of hip flexion didn’t mean it was coordinating in the appropriate ratios at the right times in gait. In fact, my hips had no fucking clue what they were doing.

May 25th 2017 marks the day I discovered what real, honest hip flexion feels like. How the heck have I been walking for all these years bypassing hip flexion? Never. Going. Back.

Stretching doesn’t teach timing.

What’s more important: How much my hips move, or how they move in relationship to everything else? There’s that context thing…

You can lie on your back and pull your shin towards your face, but that won’t necessarily teach your hips how to flex and hamstrings to load in context of ideally timed gait.

Let’s talk timing and ratios.

Timing?

Timing infers understanding of when a particular joint motion should happen in gait (or any movement pattern). If we know when it happens, we also know what other joint actions should be happening at the same time. And so we can change the timing of joint motions by coupling them together with other joint motions that should be occurring at the same time in a given phase of gait creating a whole movement experience.

The body, genius that it is (much more intelligent than our conscious minds which got us into trouble in the first place), is hardwired to recognize a useful movement pattern, and will naturally choose the movement option that feels most efficient. This is Gary Ward’s 5th law of motion from What the Foot: The body is hardwired for perfection.

Ratios?

By ratios I mean how much one joint will move compared to other proximal joints within a given context (and moment in time).

For example, in the transverse plane, at no matter which point in the gait cycle, the talus, tibia, and femur should all start their journey of rotation- internally or externally, at the same time.

However, the talus has much less potential movement than the tibia, and the tibia less than the femur, and the femur has less movement than the pelvis sitting on top. While all joints are moving in the same direction, there is an ideal ratio for how much each bone should be moving against the other for optimal efficiency.

What can easily happen is the joint(s) with the least amount of available motion can lock up, and other structures move more to make up for this. So is there an issue with timing or with a ratio? They are same same but different. An issue with a borked up ratio is going to result in a timing issue.

Meet Person X

To go deeper into this example, let’s say that as Person X walks, they have a talus and tibia with no rotation, a femur with just a tiny bit of movement, and a pelvis and spine that rotate way too much to make up for it. Maybe this is causing the individual some hip and back discomfort, limiting their squat depth, or something like that. This is a hypothetically scenario, but actually, Person X is a real person I’ve worked with who has a tight back and limited squat depth.

So what do we do?

Before we start to stretch and mobilize the ankle and hip, and stabilize the pelvis and spine (the standard approach), we want to consider how we can help the body to redistribute the ratios of movement in these joints in a more ideal way in context: How do these structures coordinate in gait, and how can we change the timing?

Let’s ask the flow chart questions for our person X example:

Context: Gait

What is the incongruence? (What’s the raw information?):Talus and hip not externally rotating to re-supinate the foot while spine and pelvis rotate too much.

Where is it happening? The primary structures involved are the talus, tibia, femur, pelvis and spine (but we still want to zoom out and consider the whole body)

When does that happen? (in the gait cycle): “When” refers to a phase of gait. The talus is not externally rotating from it’s pronated state which begins to happens in the transition phase of gait (aka mid-stance for non AiMers), and continues to do so through to toe off. So our “when” could be transition.

How is it happening? (what does the global strategy look like? What’s the exchange?): Whenever person X takes a step, the foot doesn’t supinate from a pronated state. The talus doesn’t externally rotate, the femur doesn’t externally rotate, and so it looks like a spine rotating back and forth as the leg is stuck rotated internally. The talus and femur have exchanged movement for the pelvis and spine.

Why is this happening? (intention for limited talus/femur ER): This comes from the individual’s history. Person X experienced an inversion sprain to their ankle a few years ago, and, because rear-foot inversion and external rotation always couple together, externally rotating the talus into supination is associated with past injury, making the ankle feel vulnerable. So to make gait possible, the clever body has decided to change the ratios: Instead of talus externally rotating into an unsafe space, the pelvis and spine will rotate instead. Useful short term to protect the ankle, not useful long term for the compensating structures. Not a liberated experience of the body.

This leads us to another key aspect of understanding movement: Intention.

Intention for movement

Movement does not happen for it’s own sake, there is always a goal, as is the case in Person X’s locked down talus: Protect the ankle!

I reach my arm out and grasp onto a cup of coffee, not for the sake of moving my arm, but because I wish to drink the coffee to bring my sludgy, morning brain into a state of greater alertness, aka baseline (I am sad that I need coffee to get to baseline). I care more about the sensory experience of having coffee that results from the arm movement than I do about the arm movement itself. No coffee, no arm movement.

This is true for all movement.

Why would the body choose to lock down a joint, like Person X did with their talus? Why did my left hamstring get so dang tight? Because it is serving us in some way. If it wasn’t, it would happen. These solutions, however, can become our problems if we leave them long enough.

After an injury, the intention of a movement strategy is often to protect a vulnerable area. But it can also be because of a learned movement pattern that was useful in a sport, or a habitual way of moving and holding one’s self for any number of reasons.

To go deeper into WHY the body is doing what it is doing should be a prerequisite for stretching anything. But I never learned that until it was too late.

Things became much more interesting for me when I started thinking this way. The word “compassion” also came to mind. A challenge to really understand the experience of each Person X in front of me. To really understand myself.



The level of WHY, after all, is where all the good, interesting, change making, liberating stuff happens. At every level.

Conclusions?

I think there is so much value in getting deeper into this philosophical space. Not everyone will agree with me on that, and I was even told once after a movement session I held (for the IADMS conference last October in Hong Kong) that I was being too philosophical.

If we are not inquiring into our thought process behind helping people to change their patterns, then we are missing something huge. We are missing compassion. We are missing the desire to really understand the people who are trusting us with their bodies.

Helping people to set their bodies free requires helping them to develop an understanding of how they are moving and holding themselves. This takes patience and honesty. It takes, on my part, an understanding of the intention behind the way they are currently moving, and to do this, I must ask better questions. I must be clear on the context, and specific in how I provide an experience for them to access ways of moving that they currently are avoiding.

As Gary Ward once put it:

“[AiM is not] novel movement. I see AiM as a specific investigation of the whole system, which when scoped out should give you the information that helps you 1) understand why the person has X pain, and 2) help them be rid of it”.

I feel that I had to write this blog because the ideas I wrote so strongly about here are the very things that I currently am not doing well enough. I get so caught up in trying to read someone’s structure and find the solution that I forget to ask “why are they like that in the first place?”.

Meet them with your understanding…

The other day I worked with a lady who had a spine that was completely laterally flexed and rotated to the right. I thought I knew right away what was happening, when in time that happens, and what I wanted to do with her, but I realized only after our session I didn’t ask why. Our outcome was successful- her spinal curve straightened up within a few minutes and her pain decreased, but what now? Without knowing why that happened, where do we go from here?

Or maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the story isn’t important. But this doesn’t ring as true.

I suppose my conclusion, and lesson for myself is to slow down and ask more useful question.

Ask “why”.

In movement, and at all levels of life.