How do you sleep?

The position that you sleep in has a great effect on how you feel during the day. The best of choices is to sleep on your back with no pillow. No pillow? A lot of this stuff is about ideals and it would be best if you lay on your back without a pillow to elevate your cervical spine too much. If you sleep on your side, you do want a pillow but not one that allows your head to tilt incorrectly in either direction. There is much more involved with proper sleep position but to start just tune in to what you do and try to notice if it has any bearing on how you feel when you wake up.

Let us know what you find.

Walking- Who Am I?

It is a simple fact of life that no two people walk alike. I recall an interview with Dustin Hoffman in which he explained how he couldn’t find the character for Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy until he found his walk. Our walk defines us. Our sense of self is as manifested in how we move through space as it is in our DNA.

Perhaps more than anything else, the main goal of the FitzGordon Method is to help you get to know yourself. Let’s start with a simple question: do you know how you walk? Do you understand the way you move? Is your gait fast or slow? Is it easy or aggressive? Not until you can identify these traits can you try and understand why it is you have them in the first place. Our program is about unlocking your patterns by first identifying them and then making an effort to change them, to take on new patterns by choice.

So then, the first order of business in the FitzGordon Method is to acknowledge that you have a walk all your own. Once you’ve accepted that fact, you can begin to get to know it. One way to do that is by looking at the way others walk, examining the myriad differences in step and gait and posture. This will help you gain a clearer picture of your own movement patterns.

The Psoas and Flexion

The Psoas is the body’s main hip flexor which is why it is the main muscle of walking but it plays a deeper maybe more important role as a flexor. Flexors are muscles that bring one body part closer to another one. Flexion’s relationship to the nervous system is through our fear response. Our sympathetic nervous system, the system of excitation, from which stems our flight or fight response, manifests through flexion; like all animals in the wild when startled or afraid we automatically react. The psoas is involved in each of these reactions.

Watching Walking

Most of us are not taught how to walk. We simply stand up sometime between nine months and a year and a half and begin walking. We get plenty of positive reinforcement but not a lot of instruction.

Start watching the way people move down the street. You can learn so much from watching the way people walk. And if you are lucky enough to be spending time in a park these days, watch people run. It is scary but can be incenttive to learning how to move better.

Compensation

The body is designed to work and walk in a specific pattern but it doesn't take much for it to lose its way. Even in utero events are conspiring against us; positioning in the womb, birth trauma, and our first breaths can affect our movement and posture long before we have control of our own destiny. Add to that the day-to-day reality of a life lived amongst others and machines and it becomes easy to see how our aches pains and injuries make finding ideal alignment difficult.

If your car gets a flat you are not going to go very far because the other tires can't get invloved to help. The body doesn't work in the same way. For example, if the inside of the foot falls into disrepair the outside of the foot will begin to help and you will keep on walking. The problem with this is that the outside of the foot is then compromised in its original purpose, because it has now taken on two roles instead of one.

This kind of compensation is going on all over the body, but it doesn't need to be a bad thing. Think of yourself as a detective. Start to explore the way you walk and try to think about why things are moving the way they do. Does one arm seem to move more than the other while you walk? In your best posture is one shoulder lower or higher than the other? Can you think of why this might be?

It is very easy to go through life accepting your posture for what it is. You can walk the way you walk and reach your dying day without much trouble. But you can also rebuild your self in an image of your choice. We can learn to undo many of the compensations that have brought us to where we are.

It starts with simple awareness. Begin to take note of where you ache, what moves where. What seems right and what seems wrong? Most interestingly, begin to watch those close to you. You are your parents and siblings. Take note of the similarities and differences. Begin to watch strangers as well. Try to see how they move and try to develop a sense of what seems right and wrong. Get to know yourself and the deeper meanings of the body will be revealed.

Six Packs

The cultural arena of our body is a fascinating one. We have so many compensatory patterns due to the way we feel and look. We tuck our pelvis because we think our butt is too big, we hunch our shoulders to hide our breasts or lean over constantly because we don’t like being tall. There are many more to add to this list but I am really fascinated by the desire for six pack abs. Our society lives in worship of the sit up or crunch, thinking it is an express train to beauty.

The rectus abdominus is a pair of muscles runs up and down connecting at the pubis at its base and the sternum and three ribs at its top. These are the muscles we refer to as the “six pack”. The body has interesting and different ways of compensating for dilemmas of length and space. The length of span between the pelvis and the ribcage is really too big for one long muscle to provide support. As a result we have tendinous insertions that fall between what are actually ten small muscles. We really build ten packs but we only see six of them.

This pack is formed when we make these individual muscles big enough so that they essentially pop out from the tendons that surround them. Muscle is designed to stretch while tendons are not. While this might look good to some, I’d like to take a moment to explain the nature of what is happening to your muscle. Blood flows through muscles, passing through and around the endless number of fibers that make up an individual muscle. The way we build muscle is by creating micro tears in the muscle fibers and as they heal or repair the body overcompensates in a way, replacing the damaged tissue and adding more, for protection against further damage. As we continue to build a muscle, the fibers need to have somewhere to go and they begin laying down on top of one another. As more mass develops the layering becomes denser. At a certain density blood flow will begin to become inhibited.

There is nothing wrong in making this choice to build hard muscle. It is just important that we have a clear understanding of the consequences of the actions we take.

Walking Dogs

The genius of cross training is that you work the same muscles in different patterns and along different pathways. The muscles required in chaturanga dandasana in yoga are different from the muscles used in traditional western push-ups. It is great to work on both.

If you want to build dynamic strength and stability in your shoulder and rotator cuff, I highly recommend getting two dogs. They should be a minimum of 60 pounds as adults and it is imperative that they be poorly trained.

You will be amazed not just at the way they will be able to yank you to and fro but at they way your muscles will work to stabilize the body against these forces.

Good luck.

Who Am I?

Who do you walk like? Do you know? We learn in a number of ways but a young child does much of its learning by imitating the people around them. And that is not always a parent. It could be a sibling or even an aunt, uncle, or grandparent. I think we imitate most those we bond with. Unfortunately, Uncle Jimmy might have a winning personality but he could also have been in a car accident that left him with a limp for his young nephew to emulate. If you have parents or siblings that live in the same area as you, you should hang out with them watch the way they walk. If you have home movies I suggest you go watch those and see where you come from, who are you and why do you what you do physically. Become a detective of the body and start to decipher the history of your patterns. Let us know what you find.

Walking...

Our move from being quadrupeds to bipeds has not been an easy one. Our Genus, Homo Sapien Sapien (the one who knows he knows) is only 200,000 years old. In the grand scheme of things we are babes in the woods. The problem is that modern man doesn’t walk any better than his primitive ancestors.

The move from down to up has brought a whole host of problems that haunt us each day. Our relationship to gravity, nature’s most powerful force, has been rearranged. Throw in the fact that we learn by imitating the poor posture of our parents and just for good measure add the rise of technology and the addictions to our desks and sitting for terribly long periods of time. It is a wonder we can walk at all.