sympathetic/parasympathetic

We know that nerves tell muscles to move bones. But that is just a physical component of the nervous system. There is also an emotional side to the system as well. It is constantly working to maintain harmony in the realm of fear worry and safety. The Fear response plays a large role in our movement and postural capabilities. The main action of this response is flexion, so we return always to the psoas, the body’s main hip flexor. Any time we are involved with the sympathetic nervous system, the psoas will be involved, which is a fine thing as long as the journey into fear is balanced by an engagement of the parasympathetic system.

Here’s an example of a healthy interaction of the sympathetic (excitation)/parasympathetic (relaxation) systems. On a hot summers day you walk outside and your internal body temperature begins to rise. Your sympathetic nervous system notes this changes and instructs your sweat glands to go to work. As you begin to sweat the internal temperature begins to cool. As soon as it reaches the desired temperature the parasympathetic gets involved you stop sweating. This happy interplay is constantly going on in your body.

What concerns us is when something creates an imbalance between these two systems. This imbalance can register emotionally, posturally, energetically- but it will always involve the psoas. And such an imbalance, when it becomes chronic can lead to us getting stuck in the sympathetic system.

Level It

We are trying to learn to level three very important structures in the body. Three main boxes of weight sit above the legs: The pelvis, the rib cage and the head. We teach people that these structures are meant to be level. If and when they are level the deeper functions of the body can and will start to work better. It can be simply stated but it is a complex thing to achieve.

Our muscles all have an ideal length, tone, and home, called the Ideal Resting Length. We reach adulthood with our muscles developed in a certain way but that doesn’t mean they have been built in an optimal way. We set out to change that, developing muscle balance and tone through the whole body. When the above mentioned structures are brought to level, the muscles can begin to adapt to keep them there.

The IT Band

The IT Band, or the ilio-tibial tract, as it is sometimes referred to is a major issue for many people, especially runners and dancers. I'll be posting more on this in the coming months but for today I wanted to share what is for me a new insight. There are so many things in the body that we can accomplish muscularly in an effort to improve our strength, posture, and performance. The more I work with with this special part of the body's anatomy the more clearly I am realizing that it can only be helped be correcting our bony alignment. Only when the legs are in their proper place below the pelvis will it be possible to bring happiness to the IT Band.

In the Beginning

My work with walking began because as a yoga teacher I noticed that people would come into my studio with poor posture and movement patterns. They would do yoga for an hour and a half employing stellar form and alignment, and then leave class only to walk back into all their negative patterns. Something about this wasn’t right and I set about to find a way to help people take yoga off of their mat and into daily life. In doing so I realized that this could work for everyone, even people who did not have an urge to exercise.

It has been my experience that people simply don’t know how they operate. Most clients that come to me are experts in something and could probably talk at length about their given field. But very few could tell me exactly where or how their head is supposed to sit on top of their body. This is amazing to me as your general health has a great deal to do with how your head sits atop your spine.

The understanding of the body’s mechanics is a key component of our ability to change our posture. If you knew that your foot was meant to fall in a specific way and were able to feel that falling that way felt right and seemed to take stress off of your legs you might be willing to do it. There are many ways to learn. Once you know how something works intellectually you will be able to start to change and adapt your patterns immediately. That’s why a general understanding of anatomy is a key part of my walking program and an important tool in the effort to age gracefully.

The Arches of the Pelvis

An arch is a curved structure capable of spanning a space while supporting significant weight. When you have two pillars that fall towards each other and in the middle of those two pillars falls a keystone, we have an arch. The keystone of an arch is a stone or in our case a bone, that is thinner at the bottom than at its top, therefore wedging itself strongly into the pillars.

In the pelvis, there are three functional arches. I should say there are two arches and a buttress. The first arch is the two hip bones with the sacrum as the keystone. The second arch is the two pubic bones with the pubic symphysis as the keystone. Third arch, which is technically a buttress, is the pelvis falling into the two legs. Why it’s called the buttress is because there’s an angle here where the femur turns and the neck leads into the head of the bone

Let’s say we have an arch in space; if I put 20 pounds on that arch, it’s a strong arch. If I put 100 pounds it’s actually a stronger arch. The more weight you put on it the better. But what if I put that weight on it on an awkward angle? If the weight is at the front of the arch, the arch wants to tilt backwards, if the weight is to the back of the arch, the arch wants to tilt forwards. Only when we place the weight right on top of the arch are we going to find that proper distribution of weight.

That is why we need to get our legs under and our head over our pelvis. When the butt is tucked under too much there is no way the weight of the upper body is falling evenly into the arches of the pelvis. The weight falls behind the arches forcing the thighs further forward. When the legs are situated directly under the pelvis as per their design, energy transfers directly through our bones into the earth.

Is Your Head On Straight?

What is your head position right now? Are you looking straight ahead? Is your head turned slightly or tilted so that you are actually looking down at your monitor because the muscles of your neck are short and your head is tilting backwards ever so slightly. In all positions- standing, sitting, walking the head should be level with the ground. More specifically the eye sockets should be level so that you are looking straight ahead.

The position of the head and neck has far reaching affects. I might not be referring to you when I say that the back of the neck tends to shorten and tilt the head up slightly. But as you start to become aware of walking and posture you will see how many people live in this physical reality.

Tilted head syndrome affects so many things. Lets start with the nervous system. By shortening the deep muscles of the upper neck that connect the skull to the spine the nerves that help your body balance excitation and relaxation are impinged. Specifically, the nerves that affect relaxation are prevented from flowing freely. Your sinuses, which have no specific function (except maybe to lighten the weight of the head), are much happier when they are level. The vocal cords are most resonant when the chin is level to the ground. The releasing of the chin allows for a softening of the vocal ligaments, freeing them to resonate clearly. Try it. Listen and try to spot the moment that you go from resonant to nasal. As soon as the head begins to tilt we move into the nasal register and lose the clarity of voice that is available to us. Your sub-occipital muscles, the muscles connecting your head to the spine at the back are the command and control center for the spine. They work with your eyes to give guidance to movement and balance. If they are shortened as a result of this same head position, the relay of information is impeded and the effects move all the way down the spine. A tilted head affects the free flow of breath through the nasal passages.

Through these examples we start to get a clearer picture of why we carry so much tension in the neck, shoulders and lower spine. To reverse this process you must first become aware of it. Spend the next few days try to become acquainted with the position of your head as you sit, stand, and walk. After that the first step is simply to visualize the back of the neck getting longer. This is a long process that starts right now.

Relax Your Butt

All movement has an energetic pattern. Muscles are designed to move and work in specific ways, with each muscle having a directional flow that helps to guide us into proper alignment and allows for healthy movement. Unfortunately the opposite it true as well. Muscles that move in the wrong direction interrupt our ability to find proper form and mechanics.

In standing, our bones should bear a majority of the load with certain muscles helping to bring us into our bones so to speak. The bones hold us up and the muscles move us. The problem with most posture is that we get in the habit of using certain muscles to hold us up which tends to make those muscles very tight and often full of tension. Often when one muscle becomes dominant another muscle tends to become somewhat weaker or more lax. Specifically to what we are discussing here the buttocks muscle, which should be completely relaxed when standing up, tends to be engaged constantly and our pelvic floor, the foundation for all of our organs, tends to weaken.

The pelvis is in the middle of the body providing a center from which the legs move down and the spine moves up. The muscles of the legs and the trunk are designed to balance and enhance this separation.

Energetically, the buttock muscles should move down and the pelvic floor muscles should move up. Many people get this backwards; at least the butt part. Very often, due to poor abdominal tone our thighs move forward which forces our buttocks to engage to stop us from sinking too far forward. As a result our pelvic floor muscles tend to go get lax while the big gluteal muscle, gluteus maximus works overtime against its own best interest causing dysfunction in many muscles around it.

This big buttock muscle is what brought us to standing from all fours. If you imagine a four-legged animal, a dog or a cat for example, they have no butt because they don't have need of one. The gluteus maximus is an extensor muscle that, along with the hamstrings and others pulled the pelvis from horizontal to vertical. The energy of this extension is a downward pull into the legs and heels as the pelvis and spine is drawn upright. If you sink your thighs forward and feel what kind of tone that brings to the butt, you will likely feel it as an upward gripping action.

The muscles at the base of the pelvis also serve a different function in the quadruped than in the biped.. These muscles form a wall at the back of the body rather than a floor at the base of the spine. Upright posture is a radical and unprecedented shift. The pelvic floor muscles are called the levator ani, a group of three muscles that form a sling connecting all of the bony landmarks at the base of the pelvis; the tailbone, pubis and the two sit bones (ischial tuberosities). This sling or hammock supports the weight of the organs, helps to control urogenital functioning, and when properly toned helps to bring intrinsic support and stability to the base of the pelvis as the spine falls into the hips.

These imbalances, overworked butt and under worked pelvic floor, are at the heart of so much postural misalignment. We must learn to let go of our butts. If we can learn to retrain some of the conditioned patterns that have taken such a strong hold in the body, many physical, physiological and even psychological bonds can be loosened. Allowing the energy of the body to flow as it was designed is an easy way to bring big changes to your body and mind.

The Architecture of Healing

We must become the architects of our own healing. Life is traumatic. From the big trauma of being born and taking our first breath to the lesser traumas of day-to-day life we are here to be beaten up and to one degree or another develop an inner support system to heal. Like the pulsing of the heart and the ebb and flow of the tides, the body’s trauma/healing interplay is as natural as breathing.

Our world has moved in strange directions in the last half-century. Every year Americans are turning more and more to surgical fixes for their injuries and ailments. With every ache and pain we take an advil or alleve. We are a society of external fixes, in search of a magic blue pill that will fix what ails us. The shift must be towards self-care and a belief that no one knows your body better than you. Doctors, nurses and bodyworkers all serve a purpose. We need them to help facilitate our care and our health. But we have to take them off of the pedestal that we have created and become more pro-active in our own healing process.

What can and will fix us is easily found inside. We have a beautifully specific design that when embodied and enacted becomes a self-healing machine. Everyone knows what cancer is. Everyone knows what asthma is. Most people have heard of the word melanoma and can visualize a tumor but most people have not heard of the word psoas. Very few people know what the hyoid bone is. We are painfully familiar with external circumstances or things that work upon us when we’re really not all that familiar with the wonderful, magical body that we inhabit which can help us prevent so much of what ails us.

Our bones hold us up, our muscle move the bones after getting direction from the nerves. If the bones are aligned and the muscles toned, every movement you make will tone and stimulate all of your internal organs. Learn how your body works and discover that you are your best doctor. Cultivate a dialogue with your body that prioritizes instinct and trust. Get to know yourself. There is no better means to prevention. Be your own healer.

Piriformis Syndrome and Sciatica

The sciatic nerve is the longest of the whole body. The piriformis muscle is one of only two muscles that connect the legs to the spine. helps with externally rotating your leg, pulling it out to the side and extending it backward. It also helps to stabilize the hip joint. These two innocent functionaries of the body can get together to create two of our most common and miserable ailments: Piriformis syndrome and sciatica.

The piriformis is a short muscle that attaches on the upper portion of the greater trochanter, a knob of bone at the top of the outer thigh. It comes across the back of the pelvis to attach on the front or inside portion of the sacrum. The sciatic nerve is formed by five nerve roots from the lower spine and enters the leg by exiting the pelvis through a space called the greater sciatic foramen. It descends along the back of the thigh until it splits into the tibial and common peroneal nerve, which innervates the muscles of the lower leg. The tibial nerve goes on to innervate the muscles of the foot.

Sciatica is a condition where the sciatic nerve is compressed due to an issue of spinal alignment and integrity such as herniated discs spinal stenosis

Piriformis syndrome occurs when the piriformis muscle goes into spasm and irritates or compresses the sciatic nerve, which passes directly behind it. In an unfortunate 10- 15% of the population the piriformis muscle is pierced directly by the sciatic nerve. This isn’t a problem in and of itself; problems will only arise if the muscle becomes injured or goes into spasm.

Pain, weakness, numbness, and other discomfort along the path of the sciatic nerve -- often accompanied by low back pain as well as a shooting pain down the outside and back of the leg are the usual symptoms of either sciatica or piriformis syndrome. In severe cases the pain can radiate down into the heel, which is the ultimate destination of the sciatic nerve after it divides.

The head is like a bowling ball on top of the spine.

The head is like a bowling ball on top of the spine. Your average head weighs 8-12 pounds. If it is balanced directly on top of the spine and evenly over the shoulders its weight will put little torque on its muscles. Look around you at someone close by. Is their head on straight? Spend the rest of the day looking and if you find five people that have their head over their shoulders I’ll give you free classes to my yoga center.

The Psoas Major: Part 1

The psoas major, the body’s main engine of walking, is one of three muscles that make up the iliopsoas muscle group. The psoas major inserts on the back half of the inner thigh, comes forward to cross over the rim of the pelvis and moves backwards again to attach along the lumbar or lower spine. The iliacus muscle lines the inside wall of the pelvis and joins psoas major to form a common tendon inserting together on the back half of the inner thigh. Psoas minor is an interesting muscle that anatomy books will tell you it is present in only 50% of people and is slowly disappearing. Though this is technically true the body has many different connections, one of them being through fascia, a connective tissue that we will go into in future articles. So even if you don’t have this muscle it is likely to manifest energetically through the fascial lines of the body. Bodyworkers often refer to feeling this muscle whether it is there or not.

Psoas major attaches at six points, the back of the inner thigh and then five different points along the spine. The first four vertebrae of the lumbar spine, which is the lower back, and the bottom vertebrae of the thoracic spine; which is anything that includes a rib. (T12). As a result the psoas spans and affects many joints as opposed to the iliacus, for example, which only crosses the one joint where the leg meets the pelvis.

The psoas is unique for many reasons and over the course of posting we will cover all of them.

Walking is a means to rebuild yourself.

Walking is a means to rebuild yourself. Our posture reflects so much of our journey through life-- from imitating those who you bonded with as a child, to bearing the compensatory scars of accidents and injuries both large and small, and the primal, sometimes crippling effect that fear, our most primal emotion, has on our muscles and bones. It is an exploration that is both a physical and emotional as we confront the why of our movement pattern and physical traits. But there is danger on this path. To quote the German writer Geothe “Know myself? If I knew myself I’d run and hide.”

Get to Know Yourself

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. The 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.

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. Observe the way you walk. 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. I believe that gaining an appreciation for the hows and whys of the way we move can be an experience that is both fun and enlightening.

Moving Should be Relaxing

Every step of a healthy walking pattern involves a moment of engagement and a moment of relaxation. Ideal skeletal alignment should take a great deal of work off of the muscles. There is an opportunity with each step to align through your bones so that half of the body can release and relax while the other half engages to pull you forward.

Let’s look at the action of walking. In an ideal world standing up doesn’t take a lot of effort. It is a place where the bones should be able to take most of the load. In movement the muscle action begins. But try to imagine that in every step there is a moment where movement ceases and the bones are stacked directly on top of one another. This might not be so easy to imagine as so few of us live in this ideal world.

Notes on Movement and Breath

According to the body’s design, every breath we take should tone the entire organ body housed between our diaphragm and the base of the pelvis. If all goes to plan, with each inhalation, the diaphragm and pelvic floor will lower, the psoas will settle back with its extension, and the rectus abdominus will move forward allowing for the stomach, kidneys, intestines, etc to be pressed in and toned. Since all is balance, exhaling brings everything back to normal. In a way, each breath is equivalent to giving your organs an energizing massage.

If we breathe correctly, our muscles work like the finely tuned engine of an expensive sports car. But if any of these muscles are off – such as a tight psoas or a weak pelvic floor, our body becomes more like an old Dodge Dart, sputtering along all right, but liable to break down at any time.

The Body Works in a Specific Way.

It has been my experience that people simply don’t know how they operate. Most clients that come to me are experts in something and could probably talk at length about their given field. But very few could tell me exactly where or how their head is supposed to sit on top of their body. This is amazing to me as your general health has a great deal to do with how your head sits atop your spine.

The understanding of the body’s mechanics is a key component of our ability to change our posture. If you knew that your foot was meant to fall in a specific way and were able to feel that falling that way felt right and seemed to take stress off of your legs you might be willing to do it. There are many ways to learn. Once you know how something works intellectually you will be able to start to change and adapt your patterns immediately. That’s why a general understanding of anatomy is a key part of our walking program.

A Place of Ease

There is a place of ease where the body is upright in such a way as to minimize the muscular forces working to hold us up. As we learn to live there on a regular basis ease becomes a constant in our lives. Instead most of us live in the “forward plane” of the body. See for yourself. Stand up with the feet about four inches apart and just pay attention to how you hold yourself in space. Is the weight forward or backwards in your heels? Are your thighs forward of your ankles or right over them? If in fact you are ever so slightly forward (bracing against gravity) The whole front of the body will become engaged in an effort to hold you up. This is involuntary. Our nervous system exists to create and maintain balance (homeostasis) and if it can’t have true balance it will foster within us an illusion of balance even though the illusion is making our muscles work harder over time and leave us exhausted at the end of the day.

Walking is a six sided experience

Walking involves moving the body front to back, from side to side, and top to bottom as well. If the whole body is aligned the front is as open and broad as the back, your legs are rooted to the ground as your head lengthens equally towards the sky. Your side body gets involved because the arms are free to swing and there is a gentle rotation through the trunk. When we find this elusive balance the body and all of its systems starts to flow more fluidly. Movement is at the heart of all healthy living. Until the heart stops breathing we will never truly be still. Skeletal and muscular alignment determines in large part how well energy, specifically the flow of blood and oxygen, moves through the body.

The Psoas in Infancy

Allow me a word or two about babies. It is so easy to see the little blobs that lie before us just that. Cute little blobs to be cooed at passed around for others to coo at. But physical development in the first year profoundly affects our posture for the rest of our life. The journey that we all take to become a standing individual imprints many patterns that can easily follow us through life. If we don’t think at some point of changing them there is no reason whey they wouldn’t be ours forever. If you can buy into that idea let’s look at the process of early development and the awakening of the psoas.

In a baby’s first six months the psoas lies dormant because the legs are not called upon to bear weight. It is actually important that the legs don’t bear weight at this time.

Among the many fascinating details of birth is that when we are born we are far from whole in the sense that many of our bones are very soft and some remain that way for some time. Your skull is actually a series of bones that overlap as you squeeze through the birth canal. Over the first ten days of a baby’s life you can feel the ridges of these overlapping plates before they slip into their correct place. Another trick of the anatomy happens within the pelvis. The pelvis is made up of three bones- The two hip bones and the sacrum. But the hip bones in utero and for about anywhere from nine months to a year after birth are made up of three separate bones (Ilium, Ischium & Pubis). Over the course of the first year these three bones, which meet up directly in the center of the cup (acetabulum) that the leg bone sits into, fuse. I bring this up to elucidate a very important aspect of baby handling. The neighborhood where we have our studio is baby central. Any time you walk into a restaurant it is a given that you will see parents and children and very often you see very young babies being stood up on their feet and held aloft by their hands. I’m not one to proselytize in restaurants- that’s why I make these dvds- but the friends that I have remarked to about this discreetly always say how much it seems that their babies love the feeling. It is hard to argue against the look of glee that is on their faces, it must be an amazing feeling to be up at your mommy and daddy’s eye level and upright.

Imagine though if you never stood your child up until he or she could stand on their own. After about ten months- the time it takes for the hip bone to fuse- of sitting, crawling and exploring a child will pull itself up to sand for the first time on a solid hip and confident footing.

This is all a key part of natural psoas development. In the same way babies should never be sat up by a parent. Newborns should really spend as much time on their belly as possible if not being held and babies should be allowed to find their movement markers on their own. The act of sitting up is one of life first and most primal achievements. How great would it be if a child could find its way their on its own.

There is a real emotional component to this process. Lets say a baby who has never been sat up finally – at around six months- makes its way to sit on its own. It knows how it got there and in turn knows how to move back to square one. The inverse is that the sat up baby has little control over its fate.

There is a similar emotional connection to babies on their bellies as opposed to babies on their backs. A baby on its belly is a grounded object it might not be able to crawl yet but it can touch finger and toes to the floor and have a ground sense of a protected umbilicus. Babies on their backs are kind of lost in space unable to do anyting but flail their hands and feet to no avail.

Now these are all pet peeves of mine but they are very connected to the intrinsic development of the psoas. Like I said earlier the psoas lies dormant in infancy and awakens in the baby’s first movement from hands and knees to sitting. For many babies sitting up and beginning to crawl often coincide. And crawling before standing is the next key phase in psoas development. With crawling comes lengthening and toning that prepares the muscle help the bone to bear weight as the young skeleton makes its first forays into the world of standing. Creeping around the furniture can take a good while before the babies true first steps. And in that moment, truly one of lifes grandest, where we first stand on our own we witness the true awakening of our most important muscle, the psoas, which in many ways will never relax again.

Stick Your Butt Out

It is important in both standing and walking to stick your butt out. This simple statement seems to go against the grain of what many people want to think and believe is correct. As a culture we love to tuck our pelvis. Maybe you hurt your back and a physical therapist told you to tuck under to lengthen your low spine; or you’ve done too many bad fitness classes at the gym, or you simply think your butt is too big. For whatever of the many reasons the vast majority of people allow the weight of the spine to fall backwards through the sacrum tucking the pelvis under and taking the femur (thigh) bones forward with it.

Standing up straight, and proper posture really is as simple as that, requires a skeletal adjustment to allow your thighs to move underneath your pelvis. This sticking out of the buttocks is actually meant to relax these muscles and help us find deeper core muscles to hold us up. We are truly a tight assed people. We grip our butts in tension and frustration, which is a natural reaction but as with everything we tend to over do it. The femur bones falling forward in space results in a constant engagement of the butt and thigh muscles (quadriceps).

When standing the quads and glutes should be working as little as possible to let important core muscles function properly. When we walk the big buttock muscle gluteus maximus works as the back leg extends backwards but it doesn’t or shouldn’t need to hold us up. Butt gripping is one of modern man’s great dilemmas.

The release of the butt goes hand in hand with a shifting of the pelvis. The effects of this shift are far reaching. As the thighs move back and under the pelvis your legs will release differently in walking and you will feel a more even distribution of energy through the foot with every step. The shift of the pelvis into proper alignment accesses the correct curve of your lower back which brings instant support to all the bones of the spine. Your shoulders will lift up and back naturally and the head will find greater support at the top of the spine.

Release your butt and embrace a whole new realm of energetic possibilities.

Mechanics

It is as simple as trying highlight the connection between improved mechanics and healthier bodies. So many aches and pains and injuries are the result of not understanding the specifics of the body’s design. If you know how the body is meant to work you will get injured far less. The FitzGordon Method walking program grew out of a need to synthesize many forms of exercise and bodywork into our daily lives 24/7/365.

We all go to get worked on but don’t often do much work on ourselves. There is no aspect of bodywork or fitness that I don’t love. The alignment of yoga is subtle and profound but all too often it is done well in yoga class and left behind after the last om. The incredible number of running injuries that occur each year could easily persuade you to think that we are not meant to be jogging by the millions. On the contrary we are designed very specifically to run, only we are meant to do it with an efficient harmony of muscles and bones that can actually allow a marathon to be relaxing. Likewise, massage and other forms of bodywork are wonderful at relieving chronic tensions from the body week after week. But what if learning better alignment in posture and walking freed you from those chronic tensions and allowed the body to move with ease and grace without needing to be readjusted all the time?

It is important to believe in the ability to change. We are not very good at it. To paraphrase the Buddha- “we seek permanence in an impermanent world”. Our explorations into the body and its movement patterns have shown us that not only can we change our posture and walking patterns for physical benefit but also structural changes can bring emotional changes through a freeing up of the body’s nervous system.

Handstands

I have been looking for good video on the mechanics of handstands. The clip below is of an 18 year old in the Netherlands who is obsessed with doing handstands and learning parkour. I am more interested in watching handstands and watching people do parkour but whatever floats your boat. The thing to watch is the angle of his shoulders as they move past his wrists. This is the essence of the press handstand in yoga. Without a willingness to let the shoulders go past the wrists the body won't be able to find its way up. Kicking up always takes our shoulders past the wrist with momentum and they correct naturally when we are aloft. Watching the press handstand allows us to see the mechanics in slow motion. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlxx26hfU28

Front Lawns

I love the neighborhood where we live; beautiful houses, front lawns, gardens galore. It is also so sweet to see how many people are growing vegetables in our immediate area. Tomatoes are abundant, as well as many other herbs and veg. I think there is no better environment for raising a child in NYC and also for having and walking dogs.
But here is where it turns ugly. It is amazing to see how many people are obsessed with their lawns. Or more specifically not having dogs walk on them, let alone relieve themselves. What is up with that? As far as I can see no one uses their front yards. For all I know they are frolicking on the grass in their backyards but what about the front? These manicured lawns seem only for display and it drives me crazy. At least my dogs walk on them. What else is their function?
There is a company working to change all that. Here is a bit of the Edible Estates manifesto and a link to their website. They are looking for a lawn in New York City for their next project.

Edible estates is:
An attack on the American front lawn and everything it has come to represent. Edible Estates reconciles issues of global food production and urbanized land use with the modest gesture of a domestic garden. It is is an ongoing series of projects to replace the American front lawn with edible garden landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people. And, it is a practical food producing initiative, a place-responsive landscape design proposal, a scientific horticultural experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement, a community out-reach program and an act of radical gardening.

http://www.fritzhaeg.com/garden/initiatives/edibleestates/guidelines.html

Mirror Neurons

Mirror neurons have interested me ever since I passed out late one night after watching two outfielders collide rather violently during a Mets game. Caitlin, my wife, was eight months pregnant at the time and everyone thought that I passed out due to the stress of impending fatherhood. I instinctually felt otherwise. After reading about mirror neurons I thought I found my explanation. Below is a link to an interesting piece from NPR.

Scientists Say Neuron Provides Ability to Mimic

by Jon Hamilton

Morning Edition, July 5, 2005 · Thanks to a brain cell called a mirror neuron, watching Tiger Wood's golf swing can actually improve your golf swing. Mirror Neurons make it possible for people to learn complex motor skills simply by seeing others perform them. These neurons are also thought to be involved in empathy and early language development.

Gravity

Did you know that astronauts grow up to 2 inches while they're in space? When they return to earth they return to their normal height.

To some degree, the same thing happens to you every night when you go to sleep. When you lie down, gravity isn't pushing down on your vertebrae and the cushiony discs are allowed to expand a bit. Should you want to test this idea, measure yourself before you go to sleep and again when you wake up. You should find that, similar to the astronaut in space, you are taller by around a half an inch. As you go through your day gravity does its magic on your vertebrae and bring you back down to size.

Gravity is both our ally and our nemesis. It can wreck terrible havoc on the body when we are not aligned. The reverse is true as well. The more we improve posture and movement patterns to align with gravity the less toll our daily activities will take on our bodies.

Butt Gripping

I can't think of a better topic for our inaugural post. The Gluteus Maximus, the largest of our butt muscles is defined as an extensor of the leg and an external rotator when the leg is in extension. It is largely responsible for our shift from quadruped to biped and is the main muscle that helps us stand upright after bending.

Without going too much into the minutiae of the glutes, I will simply state that we grip it endlessly. Technically, when standing, the big gluteus maximus should be inactive. When we begin to move it begins to work.

If you are looking for an experiential assignment just check in with your butt over the next few days, especially when standing and exercising. Most people are standing with their thighs leaning forward in space- one of my main postural no-no's. The act of living forward in the thighs means your butt muscles have to work, and work overtime.

It doesn't take much to release your butt, but the first step is noticing if you grip it or not. Spend some time tuning into your posture and find out for yourself. One easy way to experience butt gripping is to consciously do it. Feel what this is like and then release it. Start becoming aware of both feelings and then feel which seems more appropriate.