Alignment, Load, and Tempo

Chapter 1

Perception and Proprioception

My name is Brent Anderson and founder of Pollstar polarities and it is always fantastic to be back here at Peloton anytime and today, especially being from California and now living in Miami, we don't have drought anymore in Florida. I mean there's no such thing as a drought. We have delusion and hurricanes and floods, but we do not have drought. So coming out here, I was excited to see that it's actually raining and I know how desperately you need water in California. So it is a blessing. I love to be in places when the right thing is happening in the right place and so you are here. I'm here, it's the right time, it's the right place on plot these any time and I'm excited to be with you.

We're going to talk about a really exciting topic and it's one that I've been looking at a lot because I'm very interested in how we can facilitate acquisition of movement with greater ease. And I want you to think for a second is when you're teaching pies or you're practicing pilates, how often we try too hard or we misunderstand a portion of what's being asked of us and we do the wrong thing over and over again. Or that we keep trying to do this, this, this thing that we have a perception of. And so we're going to talk a little bit about perception. We had talked a little bit about proprioception.

We're going to talk about how some three basic tools that I'm going to present today in this workshop, alignment, load and velocity can help us better understand what our real outcomes are. What are we really wanting our clients and even ourselves to participate in, to be able to experience. It's all about the experience. And so I always like to start my presentations off with a y and the y is the big reason of why we do everything. And when we understand the why's, then it makes it a lot easier for us to process the what's in the house. Would you agree? Like I really want to make a difference in the world. I really want to influence people through healthy movement and change their behavior in a way that brings them greater health and greater happiness that we know comes through movement and participation in life.

And so that's where we're looking at how do we improve that movement efficiency, how do we improve energy conservation? I think sometimes over the last 50 60 years, we think of exercise as only exertion. We don't think of it as energy efficiency or energy conservation, and we live in a world that is burning our energy all day long, so not necessarily body fat energy, but it's consuming us. So we live in that limbic mode. We're burning, thinking, worrying. We have to worry about what's on the phone.

That one of the most beautiful things about being in applies anytime. My phone is off for the next four hours and I am, I am so excited. Hope your phones are off too. Please don't look at your phone while you're doing my workshop at home. Okay, turn that phone off. This is one of the first lessons but it improves our energy conservation and so we really want to teach people how to move efficiently and effectively.

It's not just getting from point a to point B, it's going to point a to point B with good energy and with with vibrancy in life. We want to increase the ability to participate. It's interesting in the World Health Organization they had the IFC model which is international classification, ICF model, international classification of function in health and inside of that was the first time that the World Health Organization identified function and abilities, not just disabilities and as part of the factors that influenced that. One of the ones that are most important to me is participation. What do you choose to participate in? What's the most important thing to you? And that's what I asked my clients, what do you believe you should be able to participate in that you currently are not participating there? And they'll give us a long list of all of these things, these activities. I really want to coach my daughter's soccer team.

I want to be able to hike Kilimanjaro, I want to be able to go skiing and I want to be able to go paddle boarding and I want to do all these things without pain, without discomfort. And then there's a very important question. How much is it worth to you to be able to participate in those activities? How much is it worth to you to participate in those activities? And a lot of times I'll get the answer, ah, I'd give anything to be able to do those things.

And it's like anything really, you're willing to give anything to be able to do that because in the shape you're in right now, it probably is going to require everything for you to be able to participate in those activities. It's not impossible, but you can, and I think this is the hope that we install in our clients, is that when they choose to participate in something that they're not participating in now, it creates an objective or a hope and hope brings joy. So there's a sequence. We see this all the time and people coming into us as they start participating in certain level, all of sudden they realize, well, I'm able to do that now. But since I haven't, I'll do that. I've met other friends who are thinking of going skiing and in the winter and so I'm gonna start getting my body ready to participate in skiing activities.

And so now they take their body to another level and their mind to another level and it continues to open the door. And when I created the funnel, the cone model of Health and my dissertation, one of the things we made sure mathematically was at the mouth of the cone is an infinite representation, meaning that we cannot put a definition of optimal health on there. Only you can define what your optimal health is. Now there is a finite definition at the peak of the cone, which is death. So death is always a finite peak in this realm, at least that that's, that's the end of us in this realm, right? But that mouth of the cone is open and infinite.

And so we never take away those opportunities. So to me, increasing the ability to participate in life is probably one of the greatest whys that we do. What we do, we enable people to participate. Nothing more important than that. And the last one is just to be happier. We think that when people do their plots, these classes and yoga classes and [inaudible] classes and Feldon Christ classes and work out and go running and do all these activities, they are happier. They say it to us, they come up and they go, oh my gosh, I haven't been this happy for so long. It feels so good to be moving again and to be participating. So we know the why's and now we look at the what.

So what systems are we teaching as plot teachers is moving teachers that is facilitating us to be more efficient. And I you notice that I've put the muscle skeletal system last, I put it last because I think we put too much emphasis on a muscle skeletal system teaching. I think when we understand the nervous system a little bit better and we're going to talk about that as it pertains to alignment, load and and tempo, we're going to see how the nervous system is equipped to adapt and to learn and to acquire movement patterns that are much more efficient, much more effective, and the retention is much, much higher. The mile fashion system is a very big part of that. Do you know that inside the mouth actual system that it is considered now the single greatest proprioceptive organ in the body.

It used to be thought of the skin being the single greatest proprioceptive organ in the body, but it's now thought that Fascia, the connective tissue of all cells, bones, liver, heart, stomach, intestines, skin, all cells is the greatest proprioceptive organ in the body. And so if we can understand proprioception and we can understand how do we allow the body to do its normal thing of communicating to itself, how do we use alignment, load and tempo in the fascist system, in the nervous system to create the learning experience rather than thinking we're going to tell them exactly where their joints or their muscle has to work or how much it has to work. And this is a learning process. The novice teacher is not wrong, but the teacher is going to be fixated on muscles and bones because that's what we learn. Our basic anatomy teaches us muscles and bones. This will not be a muscles and bones workshop. I want to acknowledge it. It's important but it's not where we're going today.

Today we're going to be looking at the other things in particularly the appropriate receptive system. And then if we think of the mission of Joseph Plautus, this sort of brings a lot of this together for us. So this is nothing new and it's where I want to tie back into what we're doing. It plot is any time and how we're bringing Joseph's original concepts. And thoughts and theories deep into our training. And Joseph said, physical fitness is the first requisite of happiness.

Our interpretation of physical fitness is the attainment and maintenance of a uniformly developed body with a sound mind. And here's the important part, fully capable of naturally, easily and satisfactorily performing our mini and very daily task with spontaneous zest and pleasure. I love those words. I think the words are fantastic. One, one of the words that jumps out at me right off the board is spontaneous and I think of complex natural movement needs to be spontaneous. We cannot be thinking of, Oh, do I breathe in or breathe out here? Do I pull my belly in or do I live my pelvic floor up? Am I pushing with my calf? Am I using my glutes to squeeze?

To be able to do a complex movement in the answer that is, no, you cannot be in that space. Now, it might be where we learned there's not really a right and wrong. It's more of a skill of where we're at. So in the beginning, let's say we have a client that's completely turned off. They have no idea what hip extensors are, how to get their pelvis in the right place. It might require some isolated training for them to learn how to wake up those parts of their body. But our ultimate goal always is spontaneous organization, always, always, always. And I think that's important.

We don't want people walking around holding their bellies in, lifting their pelvic floor and walking around like robots. And unfortunately we've gotten fixated on this concept of core control and maybe a wrong way. We've gotten fixated on it as being something that we're holding. And if we go back to what Joe's talking about here, does he mention anything that resembles holding or tightening or freezing or squeezing in this definition of movement? Not at all. Right? There's nothing in there that represents that. A uniformly developed body. And if he understood proprioception back then and the fashion system, the uniform he developed bodies where he's talking about, that's the alignment.

If the alignment is correct in the fashion, it can communicate correctly to the nervous system of how to organize naturally and efficiently in our movement. And when we do that, our cells are happy ourselves, have consciousness and those trillions of cells are vibrating happiness all the way through because they have a balanced load going through them and they're getting it. They're communicating. There's this vibration going through in these people are going, I don't know how I'm happy. I don't know what's going on, what's going on in my body. I feel so good. I feel energy. And what they're feeling is balance. They're filling a balance development of their body which communicates to a balanced development of mind and spirit. And that's how they manifest. So we see it over and over and over again.

It's not because they're recruiting their pelvic floor muscles or because they're recruiting the transverse abdominals. The word perception becomes a very powerful word for us. I like it because, um, it sorta correlates with our reality, doesn't it? What we perceive as our reality. I want you to think for a second of the last time that maybe you are looking at buying a car or you were looking at buying a bike or you were looking at a business or you're looking, maybe you are pregnant, whatever you were interested in that time, how everything in the world seemed to reflect around that.

So I always tell the story that Lizette and I were sort of focused on the mini Cooper for awhile. Right? We still love the mini Cooper, nothing against mini-cooper. We still love it. And it was funny that we had ended up buying this Johnny Cooper works version of the mini-cooper. So that was like the souped up version of the mini-cooper. So it had like BMW brakes on it. It had an extra a hundred horsepower. It was really souped up. And as we drove around the neighborhood, I should say as I drove around the neighborhood, again, I sort of noticed every other mini Cooper that was in the neighborhood.

And I noticed also that none of them where the Jonny Cooper works. I noticed that too. So I'm driving around and all of a sudden I see a Johnny Cooper works driving through my neighborhood. I start stalking them, like who dares brings in and Johnny Cooper works into my neighborhood. I'm the Johnny gripper works in the neighborhood. But you realize that we become fixated on the things that we're interested in.

And this is true all the way down to the emotional behaviors. So when we start projecting our perceptions on others, things like, you notice how everybody's so sad this week? Did you notice how everybody's so angry? All the drivers in Miami are so bad? You know, why is everybody lying? So many liars? Right? And typically when I even hear that coming out of my own mouth, it's like, okay, Brent, look in the mirror and you're going to see the line, the anger, the sadness, whatever you're projecting on each other. Based on our perception, our perception becomes our reality.

People who have limited experience have even more of a distorted perception of reality, right? So the more that we understand, the more we experienced, the more foods we taste, the more smells we smell, the more temperatures we experience, the better judges we become of something that might resemble reality. But usually it's just perception. And so perception is very important. So how do we use perception for us in our ability to be able to help people? So the definition from the library in the dictionary says the ability to see here or become aware of something through the senses. So we have all these senses in our body and that's where perceiving, right?

So we have these radars up in there. We're feeling these things we're seeing, we're hearing what do we hear? What do we not hear? I shared this story the other day in our educator meeting that there was a young man that I met at, um, at a cafe and he was telling me how he had sort of found God and that he had been very agnostic at best. Prior to this family was very religious and he sort of left our religion and he become a sound engineer. I was working in a sound engineering lab and getting his master's degree in engineering. And he said one day he was removing all of the sounds that he recognized and then he was left with new sounds that he had never heard before.

And he started thinking about how many billions of sounds has he not heard. And then for him that was ominous. It was like, wow, there's gotta be something bigger than me that is fully aware of what I just experienced. And I think of some of the research I saw, national geographics and my butterflies and their eyes and how many rods and cones they have and that they can see. Like, I dunno what it is, I don't want to give you bad advice, but it's a lot more than we can have different forms of lights and energy. And so it's what helps them be attracted to the flowers to be able to pollinate the flowers and to get the food that they need. But the ability of what they see is thought to be so expansive compared to what we see in our limitations. And so what we are is based on what we perceive.

I went through a very spiritual sort of meditation years ago. I was finishing up my dissertation back in 2005 and Carol Davis gave me a book and Carol Davis said, read this book on your vacation. It'll help you, you need it. And I did. And um, I can't even remember the name of the book, but it was a meditation, small little book. And the first thing I had to do was write down all of the perceived expectations that you believed were in your life of you from all other people, right? So you're going down this list and going, well, grandma expected this from me. Mom expect this from me. My Dad expected this from me, my brothers, my sister, my wife, my children, my friends, my students, my professors, my, you know, the hole is going, employees, licensees, all these things that I felt had expectations of me. It was a list of 400. It took me four hours to build this list.

And then I thought I was done with the meditation. I was like, good job. And the next chapter is now take all those expectations and imagine that there were layers of clothing or costumes and now your job was to take each layer off that perceived expectation folded up nicely. Return it to the person that gave it to you and continue to do that until you get down to the very minimal amount of layering. And what I found was as I removed, removed, remove these layers of costumes and clothing and all of these expectations cause you've got imagine 400 layers. I was like this a good moment I could already breathe and all of a sudden started coming down.

It was very interesting and I think there's this human nature, but as I got down to the last five or six, which really were the most crucial ones, they were like my wife, my mother, my father, maybe a brother, um, my children. And as I got down to those I got nervous and a little scared because I wasn't sure I was going to like who I really was when I took those expectations away. It's a very interesting phenomena, but our perception, our perception, as I took out those last layers, it was the first time in my life I really felt embraced by the universe, by God. I felt embraced that I was accepted for who I was as I am in that moment, the good, the bad, the ugly, whatever else comes with the package. It was, it was okay. Right where I was in the now, and I think this is something that we create for people in movement that has consciousness and awareness. We bring awareness to their body. We bring awareness to their alignment.

We align their perception with reality and the next thing they start having these types of awareness experiences where they start realizing I'm in the, now I'm present, I'm losing judgment, I'm accepting who I am. Some of the synonyms that go along with perception, I love them and I just think of words. I love words. I love what words come from, I like the roots of words is that Latin root, where's it come from? But things like awareness and consciousness are synonymous with with a perception and we use these words all the time in our pilates and Yoga, teaching awareness and consciousness, awareness and consciousness. The next one is a beautiful words.

Appreciation and appreciation is one of the most powerful words where when we can express our appreciation for the things that we enjoy in life, the things that we have the people in our lives, the, the rain today to appreciate that instead of being frustrated about it, to appreciate the time that we might have in a traffic jam to be able to think about something else and turning the things around, looking through a different set of glasses because it merely is a perception and then understanding and knowledge grasping concepts, right? The comprehension of things. How, what is it like when you comprehended the first time, what it meant to be actually long gave it and they go, oh, that's a different feeling. And what was it the first time you realize the breadth could happen in three planes of movement? What was it like the first time that we had comprehension of integrated movement through our bodies and the ability to flow. Our arms don't even have to move like joints and bones.

They could move like energy and light, right and sound waves and they can move in sequence with sound waves. So if it was just hinges, we would move like robots, but we have much more capability of moving than that. So all the flow that we have doesn't look like there hinges in the elbows and the wrist and the shoulders. It's an integration of movement, apprehension form, formal Cognizant's like really putting it together and going, Aha, I understand what it means to be in optimal position for bridging. Aha, I understand what it means to be able to disassociate at my hips. Finally I own it. It's mine. I own that.

And then we continue to refine it. So these are, these are just words, but they're words that are powerful for us in the English language in particular of how we can understand things. Perception is part appropriate. Ception. Proprioception feeds perception. What we feel in our body, in our joints, in our tissues, in our skin, give us information of what's going on. If we don't move and we don't move in all planes, we lose information pertaining to our reality. Does that make sense? So I love going to the gym.

I've been going to the gym a lot lately. I don't know if it looks like it or not, but I've been working out and I'm always impressed. Sometimes I just stop when I'm tired and I just watch people who are fixated on working on one part of their body. And every time I see them they're only doing biceps and triceps. And there's this one guy, he has like this really small head and he has these huge biceps and sort of skinny shoulders. And I'm like, that's not a balanced development of body. And they lost that.

The poor guy doesn't have an awareness of where his head or his back or his legs aren't space only his biceps. So his, he's now moved his concentration and his center body into his biceps instead of being in somewhere in the center of his body. Right. So his, his perception of the world is going to be very skewed. That makes sense. It's going to be bicep based perception. So he will go around, he's looking to everybody with his biceps and he's absorbing information with his biceps, right? And he's like, oh look, another big bicep. My bicep is bigger than your bicep. Right? So their frame of consciousness is altered.

So part of the definition here, it says in the second line, proprioception is the product of sensory information supplied by specialized nerve endings termed as mechanical receptors, transducers, converting mechanical stimuli to action potentials for transmission to the central nervous system. So these mechanical receptors in our joints and our tendons and in our Fascia, the Golgi, Oregon's the interstitial tissues, the Piscean and all these different organs that receive pressure or tension or pull or gravity orientation or giving information to our central nervous system of where we are in space. That's, that's the most amazing part of who we are as human beings is that this is all happening unconscious. It's an unconscious perception that's going on. The proprioception. We are not thinking about it. But you know, if I come over and I take your arm and lift your arm up and your eyes are closed, you're going to say, my arm is up, it's gonna be yes, your arm is up because you have an awareness in your body or the arm being lifted up. Mckenna receptors specifically contributing to appropriate perception and also turned proprioceptors and can be found in muscles, tendons, joint fashion and skin. So I just like to bring that in, that when we're looking at alignment and we're looking at load and we're looking at this communication, right, it's communication with our perception.

So we have all these informations coming in. Now if those information's coming in are misinterpreted, they can create problems. So for example, pain. Yeah, it is an interpretation of proprioception, right? So the nerve endings get pressure somewhere. It comes into the brain and the brain says, prior to love, do we have to worry about this message coming in? And the of love goes, well, hell yeah, you do. Don't you remember when you fell off the cliff and hit your head on that thing?

You almost died. Yeah. And so then he goes back in, the prefrontal lobe goes, well then I'm going to make sure that they heard. So the Thalamus then goes, okay, pain. Right? But if we don't understand it, we don't see it. We don't feel it. We don't interpret it. We continue on until something makes sense to us. Like, Hey, look, there's blood coming out of my leg. Right? And there's all kinds of beautiful stories about this, of how people's perceptions are skewed based on their interpretation. Now, I'm a typical guy, according to my family, right? I come home, I open up the refrigerator. I just want a cold can of lukewarm. I don't drink alcohol, but I just want a cold can of Lukla. Right?

And that's just soda water. For those of you who don't know what the clause, the crux, I guess is how you say it. If you wanted to say it in English, and I'm refined, I say the quad, and I usually have a six pack of it on the second shelf in the refrigerator off to the right. So I come home, I opened the frigerator and Nola [inaudible] sounded like, hmm, this time I'm going to bend my knees because my wife says I sometimes forget to bend my knees and look inside the refrigerator and I don't see [inaudible]. So I'm like, mmm, hey, Lizette. And I could hear in the back of the house, what? Uh, where's the L'Aquila? She's like, it's in the refrigerator. I'm like, I don't see it anywhere and I can hear in the back of the house this and she gets up and I can hear footsteps coming out and she comes out, she opened the refrigerator, it's right a six pack in the middle, on the top shelf in the front, not even in the back. And she's looking at me like, are you blind? And it's like, yes I am. Because I expected them to be on the second shelf on the right. So anything in the middle, on the top shelf did not register in my historical prior lobe or print prefrontal lobe telling me that that's lukewarm. I saw, who knows is a hammer or something. I don't know what I saw this, but I didn't see it as my drink. And we do this all the time.

We only see this thought about 4% of the matter that is around us. That's what make sense out of about the 4% and it's funny, one of the first things we make sense out of is the human face and the human faces reactions with early child development. I have a friend that is a pediatric neurologist, is specialized in cognitive disorders like um, um, autism. And he said that one of the first thing he does at four or five months is he goes up to the parent and he goes to take the baby and he looks to see if the baby looks at the mother or the father before going to him. If the baby does not look to the mother or the father or the caregiver before going into him, he determines that as an early stage warning of autism or cognitive disorders because a three, four month old child should be looking at their parents face, looking them in the eye and looking for signals of distress.

So one of the first things they can observe, and that's even when you're like you have a sister in law that comes over, like you really don't want to hold in your baby, but you know it's the right thing to do socially and so yet the baby is like, oh yeah, of course. It's like that face right there, right? The baby knows that face is bullshit and the baby starts crying as soon as it goes to the sister-in-law, right? Not because the baby's afraid of the [inaudible] because the baby recognize the bullshit face of the mother or the father isn't that powerful, that three, four months that they're already recognizing that now there's high tech artificial intelligence now that knows how to do that. There's marketing software where they put up a, you know, an advertisement and they put a camera up. Now it's out of Miami, actually this company, and it can pick up to 30 to 60 people at a time. It can tell a proxy within four years of your age, your gender, your nationality, whether you are happy or not happy or disgusted with the ad and how many seconds you look at the ad simultaneously.

So immediately they can tell the advertising agency whether it please or not. So you talk about artificial intelligence of, of perception, but the reality is is that's one of the first things we're born with. We can look at people and we can see face recognition and know now in autism and Asperger's disease, they have a hard time processing those kinds of things. They don't understand. They can't process that. That person is being sarcastic. Really. They don't understand that versus really right. They don't understand the difference of those two things.

Even the voice and donations are the facial expressions and so these are all misinterpretations. They heard the same thing. They're ear felt the same sound waves. The eyes saw the same visual light, right? Their skin in their appropriate perception felt the same body waves coming from somebody but they didn't interpret them the same. And when we're teaching people to move, it is exactly the same.

Everybody perceives things differently. So how do we facilitate people to be able to start perceiving things that are closer to reality and who made us the reality judge in the world, right? How did we become the reality sheriff of alignment? I'm gonna have to give you a ticket, man. You have a little Chi posies and your head is about five degrees to forward to your shoulders. That's going to be $180 because I and the posture sheriff, I'm the judge. Yeah. I'd rather be the judge and the sheriff even.

Can I have you stand up ma'am? Turn around. Uh, your honor, this woman has been found guilty of poor posture in public. Right? But what makes it right? What makes it wrong? That's what we're going to be talking about. Is that fun? Is this interesting to you? Do you want to know more? Do you want to know how to be the sheriff? All right, so how do we teach these systems to be more efficient into organized subconsciously like a child learns how to move, right?

We don't teach children to be conscious of their movement. They just are. And they're clumsy at first and they fall down and they trip and they bang their head. I bumped my head hard this morning. I don't know why. In this one bathroom in the hotel, they had this glass shelf sort of tiny right over the toilet, right in front of the trash, so every time I go down and put something Trashcan, I bumped my head. As a bald guy. It's not good to bump your head right, you can see it, but the idea is that how do we teach unconscious movement? How do we teach people just the let the nervous system do what it's supposed to do? How do we do that? And that's where we came up with the idea of alignment, load and tempo.

I believe that when we approximate towards ideal alignment, you do not have to place somebody in ideal alignment. You approximate towards ideal alignment. As long as you're going in that direction, you're going in the right direction and efficiency is going to follow. It'll be more efficient to be going towards proper alignment and going away from proper alignment and proper alignment is not neutral. Proper alignment is whatever you're participating in running has an alignment different than golf, different than modern dance, different than somebody who has to crawl underneath a car and fix an engine.

Alignment varies based on participation. It's not this, this is alignment, but we have to be able to look at somebody and say, are you able to be in your most efficient space while you're participating in this activity has. If you are, then you are aligned, not the other way around. Sometimes we try to say, I want you here and now you're going to participate in this activity. Um, I can't move but I'm in neutral. Yes, you are. Good. Now Bend over and pick that up. Put your socks on in neutral. Yes, in neutral. Um, I don't think I can. I can only Hinze this far. I can't reach my socks and I can't reach my feet. But you gotta stay in neutral all the time.

And I would look at these ridiculous blogs in our profession. They get so carried away. And so, pardon the expression, but Nazi on neutral. That is just the fact they don't understand neutral. What they're really talking about is an optimal alignment for the activity and that's what we're going to talk a little bit about and then load teaches our nervous system how to work in any alignment that we're in. If we're in bat alignment, load will still stimulate a proper response to maintain the desired activity.

Do you not think for a second that just because you're not aligned correctly, that your nervous system will not respond appropriately? If your objective is to stay vertical and still continue that activity and you have poor alignment, the nervous system will figure it out. People that posture are not falling down. They just are being inefficient. They're creating patterns that potentially can lead to injuries.

They're losing alignment and congruency and joints. It potentially can cause pathology. That could become a problem, but the nervous system will figure it out. So think of how glorious it is that if I can understand the activity, want to participate in and I understand my client's body, then all I have to do is try to bring that closer to an ideal position in their movement in participation is going to be more efficient and less injurious, right? Less pathology, more joy out of the movement. That makes sense. And then tempo is a story that I can't wait to share with you, but I think that tempo is the teacher of really having spontaneous natural movement. When we start playing with tempo, we take it out of the brain and we put it into the nervous system.

Tempo changes that, right? It takes from being unconsciously pushing Myron through space to, I got to go fast and I have to be able to do it in a way that in art can be here. You cannot hit a baseball consciously coming in at 80 90 miles an hour. Impossible. There's no way that you can say, oh, the balls we listen from his, I'm going to get my arm back, I'm going to prepare, I'm going to swing my hips around and I'm going to bring my body around. No, it's way too late. There is a full reaction that is already sprung.

This can happen on the release of that ball and the best baseball players already know by the way that pitcher releases the ball. If it's going to be slow, fast slider, curve, whatever it's going to be, they understand ahead of time, they know and that's why their body naturally will come in a little bit cause they see it's coming off. It's already emotion and they're adapting in fraction of a second. That's faster than consciousness. You cannot consciously make that adaptation.

So we who are not experienced at swinging their baseball are not going to hit the ball. We're going to miss the ball because we need practice to be able to do that. Tempo gives us that practice. We change tempo, we create spontaneous organization. That's cool into workshops. See you guys later. Just kidding.

Chapter 2

Swarm Theory

So objectives of this workshop. We really, that's just the beginning.

I was just giving you a little introduction before I give you some meat, but the objectives workshop is that through alignment, load and tempo, we'll be able to do the following, increase efficiency of movement, right. We said that's one of the, one of the wise, uh, improve the spontaneous ability to participate fully in the movement. I think that's important. We want people to understand that they need to determine what is participation in their life. I tell this story often of, uh, two female patients that I have both in their mid to late eighties. One of them came in with a shoulder impingement and she was really struggling and she was complaining while she was having physical therapy.

One of the therapist and I stopped and I said, you know, man, what's, what's going on? She goes, well, he's killing me with this physical therapy. And I'm like, well, what's the problem? She goes, I can have my arm up over my head without pain. And I said, do you have pain somewhere else besides here where your therapy? She said, yes. I said, where? She goes at home. I said, when she goes, when they get the Coffee Cup off the second shelf, I said, any other time? She goes, besides therapy, no. Alright, why don't you move your cup onto the first shelf? She gets this little look on her face. You're an F and, G, yes.

Walked out, paid me my head or an 80 bucks in a way she went, problem solved because her choice of participation was they get a Coffee Cup off the second shelf. She did not have anything else in her life that was requiring more movement of her shoulders than that. So for me to force her to be uncomfortable and to suffer when that wasn't her ambition was a little ridiculous. Right. My other clients, same age, actually a year older, is an avid golfer and she spends a lot of money to be able to maintain herself in the state that she can go off. She's had multiple back surgeries, pacemaker, um, she spends three days a week and poor therapy. She has politeness, she does physical therapy. She works with her golf pro, she eats right kind of food. She stimulates her brain appropriately and she golfs once or twice a week just to be able to maintain her ability to golf at their level. Same Age.

She chooses to participate at a very different level, very different client, right? Nothing to do with age, having to do with what we choose to participate in, increase the ease in movement. Right? So just how easy can we make it? I think sometimes we keep thinking we want to make movement hard. I'm going to use excise because it's a really hard exercise. It's like make that hard exercise easy for them. If they have good mobility and good control, they can do anything.

They can go through any range of motion against any kind of resistance. We just have to train them and then understand the appropriate amount of energy necessary to move successfully. I think this is a really good point. Sometimes, you know, we don't know. I'll admit a lot of times, I don't know how much does he know? Somebody's like, well, how many sprints do you put on? I don't know yet. I really don't know yet, but I'm gonna make a good guess. It's a pretty fat person, heavy legs. I'm probably going to put two reds and a blue on there for feet and straps just to counteract the weight of the legs and the poor abdominal control.

And if that's not enough, then I'll put on a yellow or I'll extend the sprain to the half spring mark just because I need to be able to put the right amount, the appropriate amount of springs on there to be able to give them the experience of load at the right level. So we're going to talk a little bit about that, like how do we know what's the right amount, how do we make that energy expenditure the right amount for what we want to do right now? Shelly power is amazing. It teaching, making hard things easy. I mean she has this reputation, but I swear she could take the excess that I like the least and she can make them really fun and pleasant and get it so that they come out just by changing where we organize the movement from and what energy we use to do it and how we align ourselves and where we believe the load is coming from. And when you shift those things, all of a sudden something that looks hard becomes a lot easier. Alignment can be correlated with swarm theory of any, have you ever heard of swarm theory? So we look at a school of fish, right? And you see him just all together or the pods of dolphins or the birds in their flocks flying through the air. The docs, especially at this, like the ones that really amazed me are the small birds I'm chairman with there.

They just, they dive and they move. And you can almost like a black cloud flying through the year. They're so big swallows or I don't know what they are or something like that. But an s starling. Yes, yes. And, um, recently Lizette is going through her masters degree in architecture. And so she was writing a paper of how swarm theory affects architecture and Effects Organization of cities and urbanization.

So for example, one textile company opens up in a certain part of Brooklyn and then another and another and another another. And they all follow these same patterns of these rules that apply to swarm theory. And I was thinking, wow, how can I apply swarm theory to movement and how do we, how do we do that? And the quote was similar to a swarm of birds or insects with school of fish. One theory has shown that there are individual rules. Remember this word, individual rules that must be followed to ensure that an animal does not fall out of alignment with the others and can be fluid and agile. And so I started thinking about what, what are the three rules is it has to be really simple to the individual.

It can be complicated. It can't be all the things that we think and exercise has to contain. It has to be spatially related. That's what we've talked about proprioception. And I came up with three rules that I'm hypothesizing would create swarm theory for human movement. The first one is the direction of the movement. Where is the direction of the movement going in a roll up?

Where is the direction of the movement going? Right? So you can sort of imagine the body and the direction of the head and the body going into this role or position in Swan or a mermaid. What direction is the body moving in Mermaid? What are the movements that are taking place? What's the direction? So I think when we teach direction of movement, that's one of the first things that we can do to get everybody moving together, right and space.

And then the second one is that there is a center or focal point of movement. So the center focal point, a movement typically is going to be the axial skeleton and that central axis of the axial skeleton. Again, that does not mean that it is in neutral spine. Right? Then necessarily mean that. It could just mean that it's in that nice ax, elongated position, whether it's going to flection, extension side bending or rotation. It doesn't matter. And the third one is three dimensional space awareness.

Now when you're in a group class, for example, right? There's this relationship that you can't get too close and you can't get too far away from somebody. So I have a prop that I want to do that. So I want to have you to stand right here for a second. Doesn't matter which two. Yeah. Now what I'm going to do, because I'm going to tie you guys together with a theraband.

No, not too close. Okay. Cause that's part of the rule, isn't it? Part of the rules. We maintain this three d space. Now you can't get, oops, that wasn't a very good night. And Brett, we'll do a little half sheet. Been there. I should hold on this one. You you're not. That's the whole idea. So, so what I want you to appreciate here is I want you to walk around in circles, but don't have any more tension than that on your body. It matter does it?

[inaudible] so you're keeping the attention the same wherever you go. Now let's try a little differently. Let's have you turn around inside the circle so you're back to back. All right. Identify the tension that your attention. Now start moving around and see if you can keep the tension the same.

This is cool. Find the tension. Where's the tension? Is it the same now? Yes. Good. Okay, so that's one rule of space of how far apart or how close you can be. Right? So now let's remove this or leave that there. Let's just try something else now turn back around facing each other. We'll see how far that elastic band stretches. Now go far apart. How far apart can you go?

Can you go this far apart? Can I get this on your belly too? All right, good. Now walk around in a circle. So one is you can't get any closer. And the other is you can't get any further. There's two different rules being applied here. You have an elastic property saying you can't go further out that way and you have a concrete property of the wood telling you can't get any closer than you are right now. Can you feel the two properties working together?

So now close your eyes and go around in a circle. And this is what the birds are doing. They understand this space. Keep the space the same. Keep the feeling the same on your belly. Even appreciate the diameter of the circle, right of the dowel so that it has equal pressure on your skin, around your belly. Change Directions, walk forward and backwards. All right, and open your eyes. Excellent job.

So you sort of get the idea that when we understand spacial rules, even with your eyes closed, you are able then to work and heightened other senses that were unnecessary, right? There we go. Good. Have a seat. Other senses that were necessary to be able to maintain the rule. Now how do we create that inside of the body? How do we create that sense inside of our own body? How can we tell if this was inside of our rib cage? Right?

So if we bring the skeleton here and let's say that we just had a theraband that had this much tension right here inside the rib cage, right? So when I inhale and exhale, there's a spatial awareness or one between my vertebra and a Xy FOI process, right? Or something around my ribs for the full expansion, right? That's what our proprialceptive system does. Yes. The dowel was life, your bones. So if I'm in a position on my hands and knees, my femur is telling me how close I can get to this table, but it's not telling me the tension that I need to create in my body. Right?

How much is the right amount of tension? Am I creating a red therabands worth of tension? Stretch 25% I have no idea. Right? But it's going to be the right amount and how do I know that? Because it feels good and it feels efficient.

Right? Does that make sense? It's a hard concept to grasp at first, but when you really think about it, we're built inside like the two of you were working together in harmony. It's like it's just like our body. The front, you were like the front and the back part of the body. The inside, the outside, the front, the back, the top, the bottom has that kind of stuff, facial rule of tension and compression. And when we heightened our awareness, you close your eyes, you could feel that space and you can still feel and know what was going on.

That's the awareness we want to heighten inside the bodies of our clients and ourselves. All right. How are we doing? Any questions out there? You can write me a question. You always do. Yep. Great. Is it in relation to your own or is it swarm theory is a great question. The question is, is does swarm theory pertain to you as the individual inside your own body or does it pertain multiple bodies? And the answer to that is yes to both. Right?

I think when we look in in again, um, when we teach the movement class that correlates to this workshop, we'll be using swarm theory concept to be able to let you feel between yourselves, the space that you're inhabiting in relation to ship to the space of the others. And because you're following these rules, you're going to be sensitive and feel how much bending happens in mermaid, how much flection happens in bridging, how much extension happens in Swan, right? Because you're going to be conscious of the other four people in the class. And that's going to be, we're going to be working on now is the individual, our tissues act. All of our cells are like the swarm, right? So our cells are like the birds and they have to have space between them.

And we have proprioception to tell us what our body's doing on the inside. So if I can feel the bones and the ligaments and the tendons and the Fascia and the muscles and the skin and the organs and the nerves all talking to each other and they're saying this rule of yet bring things close to the central axis, maintain 3d space around, then my quality of movement is going to be greatly enhanced as an individual. But it's nothing compared to when it's tied into a group. If you want somebody to really learn how to synchronize appropriate movement, it's in the group and it's done by simple rules. So if you get too complex in your sort of vomiting out a bunch of images and cues, you'll often lose the synchronicity of the group.

And this is something I've been playing with a lot. I've been um, you know, mostly and I travel a lot and the, in November I was in Japan and I had a group of 450 people in a mat class. And so first of all I had to translate in second of all, I had to get 450 people, a lot of novices moving together. And so it was like this huge challenge for me. It was like I really wanted to create this experience. And so I created some of the basic rules based off of this swarm theory paper that Lizette had written.

It was amazing to see all 400 450 people moving synergistically in something like sidekick where they were the space in between their legs was ideal and their energy and their arm, the length their head just by following some of these rules that we created. We explain the rules beforehand and then we give the image of the exercise and looking out in the crowd. There were three or four that were really struggling with it, which makes me think of something that we see quite often in people who do not have that sense of awareness of proprioception. The same way I was talking about cognitive disorders that they don't perceive facial recognitions. They don't perceive social spacing like when it's appropriate to be close to somebody.

Something like Asperger's disease or autism where it is a sensory interpretation dysfunction and there's something similar to that with movement. It doesn't have to be put on the same level, but it's the idea of awareness. Like I sorta bring out the statement, I'll say, if you notice that you're the only one moving in that direction, you're probably doing it wrong or incorrect timing. And then I thought, you know, that's probably not a good word to say cause wrong is a bad thing to say. So let me rephrase that. You are not listening with your body to what everybody else around you is doing.

And when you can shift to that, that listening, feeling, noticing whatever word vibrates with them, then you're going to see them synchronize when they're in their own world and they're just like side kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick. And they're not aware at all of what's around them. They're not playing the game with everybody else. And so they're the bird that gets knocked out of the sky or the fish that gets eaten by the shark, right? Because they don't have that social awareness.

But it's amazing to look at the quality shifts in a group when they abide by the simple rules. Let's talk. What is another quote I have on swarm theory says the flock is clearly a field phenomenon defined by precise and simple local conditions. This is where we tie the local conditions. It has to be inside the person. They have to know the rules. If they understand the rules, then they can participate and relatively indifferent to overall form and extent. So the, the bird and the ants and the fish are not thinking of the pattern that they're making in the sky or in the water on the ground that are going, oh man, if I, if I don't keep this space spaceflight, everything like bad, we're gonna lose score or we're going to get in trouble, I'm going to fall the air. No, they don't think about that because the rules are defined locally.

Obstructions are not catastrophic to the hole, right? So what happens is they're going the same direction. All of a sudden there's a tree, they go right over the tree because it's about the spacing, not about the perfection. So when there's imperfections and other things in the way or wind, it'll change. Um, variations and obstacles in the environment are accommodated by fluid adjustments. That's the same way the human body has to be.

We have to be fluid in our adjustments to our movement. We step off a curb and all of a sudden we weren't expecting that curb. Can our body absorb the motion of that curb so early and continue to move through space more than a formal configuration? The field condition applies an architecture that admits change, accident and improvisation. It improvisation, and I love the word improvisation because all of our movement, in reality, when we're walking around the world and we're doing things, we're not conscious of it, right? And so when things change, this is why a lot of times dancers who often are the most conscientious movers are the clumsiest people in the world, right? Being one of them.

Because we just sort of moving, all of a sudden we run into a wall or we hit our head on something and we're just not thinking about it because we've become so reliant on our proper receptive. So just to tell us where things are, but we're used to working on a smooth stage and obviously you take away that environment and we're not used to having a rough rock or a step or curb in our way and we ended up tripping over it. And this is my favorite part. This last line, it says, it is an architecture not invested in durability, stability and certainty, but an architecture that leaves space for the uncertainty of the real. And that's a powerful statement, right? We can apply this to our life, we can apply this to our spirituality, which we don't separate these things. We can't separate these things. It's ridiculous to think that we could even potentially separate the physical from the mental, from the spiritual and in life.

If we can understand certain things that guide us through and allow us to be participating in life's flow, then we're going to be a lot happier. If we can't participate, we're not happy. It just is that simple. You participate, boom, we're good. And the one who is adaptive the most and agile the most and can breathe in the most directions and do all those things. Rock on. You're going to be the happiest person because you're agile and you're gonna be able to survive the changes and the obstructions that come in life's way, the diseases, the cancers, the family deaths, the divorces, the, the bankruptcies, all those things.

You can't separate them. They create this and we have the one who can do this and move around and maintain that space with society is the one that survives alignment. So we're gonna play with this a little bit right now. Um, what I want you to doing is, um, I've demonstrated it. I would like you to each have that experience of that spatial, that direction and center in the space. And we're going to do it with a dowel in the theraband and you're going to do it facing each other and then you're going to do it facing away from each other.

Eyes Open and eyes closed, right? With a different person. Good. All right, so let's give that a try. You should be trying it at home with your partners. Find a partner. You just need a Dow and a theraband and see what happens. All right? So remember the rules. The rules are whatever you're feeling when you get into the position, you maintain that feeling while you're moving around. Okay? So whatever you mean, then when you close your eyes, it's a little more challenging.

But now rely on the sensation of the Dow and you can put the dial on your leg in between each other. You can do something where it's gonna say the leg has to go forward and back. You can do something interesting like that with a theraband keeps you the feeling of coming close and the Dow. Keep shooting the sense of being away. And while you're feeling that, I want you to think about in the inside what's going on inside your body? What are you feeling inside this? Pushing you away and pulling you together.

Okay, got it. All right, we'll be back in a minute.

Chapter 3

Swarm Theory Lab

So feel the tension first. Just get to a place, you sort of feel the tension and you can identify it. Then with eyes open, just change space of walking sideways, forward, back circles. Doesn't matter. Yup. All right. Now once you've done that, we're going to now take the theraband. You keep going. Yup. They're going to take the theraband off for a second and you're going to walk around with a dowel between you. Just the doubt.

We won't do the combination yet. That'd be the last thing we do. That'd be the the push pull me rule. Yes. Good, good thinking. All right, so now decide where you want to put it. The Belize usually a pretty good one. Cause the abdominal wall and I think of the belly button, that sort of your center but now push into a Jace and not that you sort of feel the like your body lines up, right? You feel you get sort of tall. Yes. Yep. And now do the same thing where you can spin around, you could get a job or you can just scoot out of it.

Like just take it down around, here we go. Whoa. Walk forward and back. Oh, there you go. Find an anchor. Yeah.

And then just appreciate her walking around in circles for back sideways. Trying to keep the pressure the same. Now this is less forgiving than the theraband. So yeah. Yeah. [inaudible] now remember, you want to try it with your eyes closed. Once you show, you've got to figure it out. Why do I want to go lower? I want to ground yourself. I Dunno.

Center of gravity. Low. Okay. That feels good. And you're going to do it. So one of you has the eyes closed and one has eyes open if you wanted to. Alright. How about I take my clothes? Okay. Okay.

Now, okay, you're good. You know I'm going to [inaudible] now, why don't you to work from the central access and get taller. So Juliana especially, feel that central axis and feel the body parts. Now listen guys, circle. We're going to organize a little bit. So think of the whole system now.

So central axis things come closer to the central access to the long gates. I'm gonna wait, it's harder for me. It's [inaudible]. Yes, I'm sure. I'm sure you will because it's, Yup. Now Circle, turn around and put it on your sacrum's. In my bad, if you drop it a little lower, you can squeeze it between the upper glutes and so I'll hold onto it.

Okay. Go ahead. And sort of like the pan of the air conditioning mechanic holds his pen back there. Oh, okay. Okay. I'm following. Yeah. Try not to talk to each other. Try just a [inaudible]. Yeah.

I can't make a lot of noise if it falls, you got it. But you'll realize it pretty soon you start getting in sync with your partner and it's not nearly as challenging as it was in the first round. [inaudible] easier. This is one for me is the interesting. The other way was way harder. Well, why do you think that is? A bony landmark versus a soft tissue?

Yeah, and even like [inaudible] walking in [inaudible]. Yeah. All right. Excellent job now. Now this is what we're going to do. This is the fun part. I'm going to take the dowels away. Wow. You're gonna look at each other and get close to each other facing each other.

And you're gonna touch one hand. Okay, one hand. Yeah. Now from there, just being aware of thinking of the push pull sensation, the rule of the theraband, like the tension in your hand, pulling away from each other or the bones pushing towards each other. So you're gonna feel that sort of relationship in there and you have to let it be as gentle as possible to be able to fall off. As you're listening with the hands now the eyes will be closed.

You can determine which one of you will be the leader and which one would be the follower first. Right? But the eyes are close. Feel that push, pull energy between your hands and then see how light you can make the push, pull energy, and then the leader will start moving the hand and the circles or up and down, or even moving the bodies walking. You could anything you want to do, but just controlling that space, you can do the body to those. Fine. Absolutely. Because you're feeling, you're communicating the energy through the touch. Right? Okay. And I'll add things like, can you give direction? Like we would with a dance where I would say, I'm going to take you forward or backwards and fill the space between your bodies for this day and the same to that hand, but also feel the pull of it right without grabbing the hand.

It's actually the energy between the hand. That is the push pull. That's what you're trying to create. [inaudible] now switch who the leader is, Sandra. Oh, that's it. Nah, that's it. Good Guide and lead one's listening.

Alright, listening. Listening, listening to your hands. Perceiving body space. Push. Pull tension as if the dowel or a portion. The Dow is still between you as if theraband was still around your waist. Can you create that space just by what you're feeling in the hands without words.

Listen to what I'm saying in my hands. You create your own language. There it is. There it is. That's all right. That's all right. You got a 10 CC and relax. Good. All right, so open your eyes. Good job. Now, last thing I want you to do is I want to convert this theory into your own body as an individual, right? So now it's just going to be rolling down and rolling back up. But I want you to think inside of your rib cage and inside of the pelvis you have the energy pushing out and you also have energy drawing in.

So you don't want to have so much stiffness that you roll down and you don't want to be so soft and floppy that you can't roll back up, right? So the objective of the movement is direction. Rolling down direction, rolling back up. We're looking at approximating close to central axis and we want to have articulation. So we're thinking of that space. So see if you can maintain the space through the body as you roll down and take your time to do it. Fill that space all the way through the ribs coming down into the belly, the pelvis into the hips, taking a deep breath.

Again, reverse that spacing. What's going on front to back? What's going on side to side, what's going on from the inside? How's that spine aligning back up into that central axis all the way back up into the head of the neck. And we could play a lot more with our budget. The idea of making reference to direction, internal spacing, external spacing, filling the poor and the push creates a space is we appreciate that and become more sensitive to it. The movement flow gets easier and easier and easier no matter what the movement is, no matter what the direction is. All right.

Chapter 4

Alignment

So we just had this experience of primarily between people, right? And then the very end we had experienced that was more individual. And the question often comes up is, you know, does one proceed the other is one necessary for the other to be better? And the answer is I don't know. I mean, I really don't know. I, what I see is that the element of peer control, which might be the idea of the school of fish or the swarm of birds, the flock of birds, right? The swarm of bees is that it creates an order in how our body moves through space. So when we move with people who move better, we often become a better mover. Um, and I think that's sort of the benefit of being in a group. If you can think of, I want to see if I can move my spine in the same direction as that person leading the class and I want to see if I can keep my spacing, for example, is my arm in the right spacing and my body when I go into mermaid compared to, you know, collapsing down and not having that awareness now listening.

So I think seeing and trying to replicate has an advantage. But again, remember what the rule is was it wasn't just trying to mirror, it was like can I create the sense of space in the direction that I'm moving? So you would never see, for example, a behavior of collapse by these rules. You would never see a body collapse into a position going into flection or collapse into extension because it would be violating those three basic rules, direction, things, drawing into center and opposition pushing out from center. So it's that space when we do it between people, it's the same thing.

Now I have my space between you and me and I have something that's pulling us together and something is also pushing us apart. And I'm listening to both of them, just like the dowel and the theraband, they're pushing and pulling us apart and, and uh, together. Right? And that's the feeling we want to have in our body. That's the connectedness that we talk about. And sometimes we confuse connectedness with the word core control.

You know, connecting could just be, I want to be connected between my upper body and my pelvis in my movement. That connectedness would be the epitome of control. And that to me is what core control should be defined is that its connectedness, appropriate connectedness between torso and pelvis is core control. It is not a Max voluntary contraction of abdominal back muscles to stiffen or to block it unnecessarily. It brings us to the next point of tools to be able to achieve alignment.

And so we have a couple of really cool tools that we can use. Um, to me one of the most powerful ones is breath. So we're going to talk about breath. Actually long duration is the other one we've been talking about about that. Bringing body parts close to the central axis. And then the last one we'll talk about is alignment goes to this joint congruency.

So how do we get the joints to be in their optimal place for that desired movement that we want to participate in? So breath, one of the cool things about breath is breath occurs in all three dimensions, right? So we have an anterior posterior displacement of breath. We have a lateral displacement, right or left, and we have a superior inferior displacement of breath. Now because of that, that is going to create the ability to adapt or to modify the body according to the movement needs. So if I'm moving into flection and I want to maintain that space between the front and the back of my rib cage, right? And I don't have the ability to move posterior and my rib cage, I could use breath as a facilitation tool as if I was filling up the cell posterior, like blowing the air into the cell to get that space to open up in the back.

Or I could use it coming forward with an inhalation, right? To bring that chest space into your poster and keep that relationship. So I'm just maintaining that relationship because breath has allowed me to have that movement. So when I watch somebody breathe in, they only have movement in one plane, then I know that there'll be limited in their movement as well in the other two planes. And this is why breath becomes a tool, not the rule, right? It's a tool, not a rule.

So if I'm doing footwork and I'm pressing out and I'm taught that I have to inhale and I press out or exhale and I press out, but I am an accessory breather. There is no effect whatsoever on my movement other than a negative effect by accessory breathing in that pattern. I'll repeat that. Okay. So an accessory breather, it's just going to be the superficial, right? So like the smokers breathing, that's tokers breathing stuff. Smokers, we, it's legal in California now. Um, but the idea is that it's that pursed lip sucking area is gonna use accessory breathing that has little to no effect in the connectivity or the movement of the rib cage in relationship to the pelvis. And so just making the rule of in how when you press out or Xcel or you press out and the opposite when you come back in, the reformer does not have an effect on the quality of that movement.

Right? Mean it has a negative effect because it's not going to be agile and adaptive to the movement. But as soon as I teach thoracic and to your post tier displacement through our exercises, so roll up in Swan and mermaid, all of a sudden now I've expanded my three dimensions and now I have the ability to move in those directions and use my breath to facilitate it. So it becomes a very powerful tool to allow the torso to be aligned over the pelvis in movement. And that's my judgment call. If I don't have the breath expansion in the anterior posterior plane, it is going to limit my ability to move into extension and flection in an actual elongated position.

Do I need to repeat that one more time? Okay. I mean it's a, if I don't have anterior-posterior breathing right capabilities, it will limit my body's ability to maintain that alignment between that connectivity between the rib cage and the pelvis. Inflection and extension activities. I will end up hanging somewhere probably in my neck and in my low back. Right? And those would be movement faults that we would identify. How do we treat those, teach them how to inhale and exhale in anterior and post to your plane.

If I do not have lateral breath, that will limit my lateral flection or at least the axial on creation of lateral flection, right in the coronal plane. So just as I see it being a limitation, I could use those breath tools to facilitate movements. Y can create lateral flection breath to be able to facilitate movement in the coronal plane. And the same thing with rotation. I need the movement in all three planes to be able to have a successful rotation of the torso. So my ribs have to be support and mobile to be able to move in all three planes.

That makes sense. Right? And you see what I'm saying? So breath becomes a very powerful tool for us to be able to facilitate alignment. Alignment of the tourists over the pelvis is dependent upon mobility of the torso. Mobility torso is dependent upon breath. Okay. Any questions on that?

Sometimes it's sorta hard to get our head wrapped around it, but it's the connectivity that we're talking about. If the rib cage cannot be continuous in its movements, we're not talking about neutral, we're talking about any plane and movement that the body, your spine moves in. That connectedness is dependent upon thoracic mobility and thoracic mobility is dependent upon breath capacity in the different planes, so it's a great tool for us to be able to work on somebody who does not have alignment between the thorax and the pelvis. A lot of people ask why? How do you know when somebody is not connected between the thorax and the pelvis?

And to me that's a really easy one to spot and I just call it the hinge. I'm either going to see a hinge in the neck and I'm going to see a hint in the log back, or I'm going to see the shoulders retracting or coming up towards the ears as a compensation for the lack of fluidity in that sagittal or that coronal plane. Okay? So anytime we see a hinge in the spine, right, or a hinge in the hips or a hinge in the neck and the head, we lose that fluidity as if there were tubes and there was fluid in those tubes, and as soon as you lose that fluidity, you've pinched the hose. Right? Now you have lost that connectivity in that actually long-dated position that we're talking about. Okay? Complex movement requires spontaneous breath.

This is a blending statement from anatomy of breath. It's one that I love because if you think about it, if I'm going to do an advanced movement and I'm going to spin around, it's like when are you going to tell me to breathe or exhale? Right? So I'm going through that movement. I come down, I come up, when is my inhalation exhalation happening? The more complex the movement, right? The more spontaneous of breath has to be, okay, if I do not have mobility in all three planes, then my movement cannot be spontaneous.

That's why breath is so important in all of our movement, movement, awareness training. That makes sense. Like if we don't have that mobility in those directions, then we cannot spontaneously brief and then we cannot participate fluidly and efficiently in complex movements. And our goal is to be able to participate in complex movements axial on Geisha. So Eric Franklin said ideal alignment is when the external body parts come as close to the central axis as structure permits and the center of gravity is low as structure permits. What I love about Eric statement here is the phrase that structure permits.

So somebody with scoliosis, somebody with severe Kyphosis, somebody that has a pelvic torsion, somebody that has a leg length discrepancy, somebody is missing a leg, some it's in a wheelchair. Uh, all of those situations can participate in ideal posture for them. I think that's a powerful, powerful way of looking at these. They do not have to look like the kindle and kindle book of ideal posture. It is individual and it is when their body parts come as close to central access as their structure permits and their center gravity is lowest structure permits. And that is the tool that we use when we talk about axial on vacation.

So one of the things that I look at acts elongation is what is the direction of the axial skeleton. Does every understand the axial skeleton? So it's going to be the head, the spinal cord into the pelvis. That's the axial skeleton. And so that direction of that skeleton, wherever it's going to go, you can sort of think of it, you know, as a flexible, right? Articulating surface. It can move around. But it's the axial skeleton. So our movement often should come from the axial skeleton. Whatever things we're doing, it's like that's where the movement, that initial movement, that rotation flection extension is going to come from the deepest central axes of that axial skeleton. Okay.

And then number two is do the external parts come as close to the central axes as possible? So we're not losing space. Our rib cage is not flowing out. Our bellies not hanging out. Our bottoms aren't sticking out, right? We pull them in the sense of being as close. If I'm going to do a pure a wet or I'm going to turn or a golf swing, I don't want to lose a lot of my axial alignment.

I want to maintain that asco alignment when I'm running. I don't want to be all over the place. I want to bring my body in Nice and tight into that space to be able to conserve energy and to reduce ground reaction forces. When I'm lifting heavy weights, I want to really stay in that vertical line because I don't want to have my spine have been sheer force blowing out disc or hurting other parts of my body. So you get idea on the activity. Axial direction, right?

Where's the access going to be moving towards and whatever movement we do and bring in external body parts close to that central axis as much as structure permits. So somebody with a severe scoliosis, somebody with a malalignment can still participate wholly with their body in improving their alignment. [inaudible] joint congruency. So this is the last one here that I talk about, but it's the pathway of movement, function and movement dysfunction. So when we think of congruency, congruency is alignment, right? It is the process at which the joints are optimizing their contact surface. Now as we change positions, so if I'm in a hands and knees position has a very different contact in my shoulder joint in hip joint, then if I go into my hips extended or I come down into a pushup, right? Those will change the color and see of those joints, right? Those congruencies change.

They're still optimal for the desired movement. So sometimes people think if I just need the optimal coverage, then my hip would never move. I'm just going to keep the coverage in optimal coverage from my hip. And then you're working your fused in that position. No, you're going to move that joint. It still is going to have mobility and it will have less coverage when it goes into external rotation and when it's in a neutral position.

And it's interesting that the joints deterioration typically is on the cartilage that does not articulate. So if you do not move, you lose articulating surface in that area. So a loss of can grow. UNSEE means that you're not articulating on the back part or the anterior part and the lateral part of that joint. If you're not articulating there, you're probably having degeneration there. So joints need compression, decompression, they need congruency and they need movement in all planes to maintain joint health. And that's why in [inaudible] in Jared tonic and yoga, the idea is that we take the hips and the knees and ankles and the spine and the pelvis and the neck in all planes of movement in all directions.

Now the problem is because of Sedentary Ism, we are plagued with shortenings in different parts of our bodies. So for example, we don't put weight through our ankles anymore in a squat. So we lose the deep squat. We sit in a chair all day, we lose the hip extension and hip mobility. We sit at computers and phones and we lose thoracic mobility and extension. So very simply we can go back and we often do something.

We call our 80 20 rolled of the down and dirty five impulse store. And that is we just focus on, you know, if you don't know what to work on and somebody's working on Dorsey flection, the ankles, hip mobility and thoracic mobility, you're probably going to correct 80% of their movement dysfunctions and improve the alignment in a way that's going to allow the joints to be healthier, not just the joints I mentioned, but the neighboring or peripheral joints to those restrictions. So for example, if I do not have Dorsey flection in my ankles, then my knees are going to take the bulk of the load. And so I'm going to start having knee problems even though the knee problem is because I have a loss of congruent and mobility in my ankles. So when we're teaching people to move, we create a sensitivity to their alignment and their joints of where they go.

And we do have to have a strong biomechanical knowledge of these joints. We cannot accept the fact that we just follow intuition. If we see somebody, and this is where our screening comes in, which by the way is our employees any time, but go through the screening and you can identify where you see a loss of congruency. So it might be you can't get hip extension, you don't have Dorsey flection ankles, you don't have shoulder organization or range of motion over your head. Any of those types of restrictions that you've lost, whether they're structural or strategic are going to manifest in other joints and other tissues as potential pathologies and pain generators. So that's why this is really important. If we understand alignment from the standpoint of length, axial length, and we understand it from breadth mobility to allow us to have that thoracic mobility and then we allow understand that from joint congruency, we're going to be able to have a body that is capable of managing load, which is our next topic. Okay, so you get the point that if the better alignment we have, the better we're going to be able to efficiently incorporate load whatever we decide the loads going to be. Okay.

Any questions up until now on alignment? Any of these points on alignment. I think this is my last slide on alignment. Yeah, so let's summarize alignment with what Mark Comerford talks about. Mark said that pre-training should be facilitated in a pain-free posture or position. Well, who is the best at creating a pain free posture or position? Yeah, we are right. I mean in the pilings world, think about it even better than in yoga or in other other mind body work is that with the equipment is I equipment we can modify to be able to create the best.

What happens if I have a man that comes in and they're so restricted in their head so far forward and they're in their eighties and you lay them on the reformer? Do you do do anything different with them? You just let them struggle with their head hanging back like that and the reformer. What do you do? You lift their head up, right? You build it up enough that they can relax into the machine so we can create that pain-free place for their posture to work from. Now over time, what should be happening to the tissues. As we continue to load them correctly, their posture should start to change and we should see them needing less and less support in their head or the person that can't sit with their legs out in front of them. So we started lifting their bottom up, but we don't want them always lift their bottom up. So we always allow them to gradually get more and more range until they can sit on top of their hip and on top of their leg. So the idea is that in the politesse environment we had the perfect place to be able to modify the alignment so that the load is not damaging to them.

And we'll talk about Deming in the load, but the alignment is what we're talking about here. Okay.

Chapter 5

Load

Something I wrote up is just when aligned or unaligned, the nervous system, the mal fashion system, the appropriate set of system will create the appropriate amount of stiffness for the anticipated load. So even if we're malaligned the nervous system and these other systems will still create the ability to do the task. Now that that is not necessarily good because if we're malaligned and are carrying heavy loads, we're going to be inefficient in putting torx through joints that eventually are going to break down and have some kind of disruption. Pain pathology stop us from participating.

So our goal is always to continually strive towards that optimal alignment. Even if we think they'll never get to two, you know, maybe they have such a severe scoliosis or a malalignment or a kyphosis that we think we're never going to get them to this ideal picture that we see in the kindle and kindle book of posture. But can we get them towards that? Can we get them halfway between there? Can we get them a little more vertically oriented? Because that will minimize those unwanted stresses cause the system will see control. The assistants will do that automatically.

The most efficient organization of the body and nervous system is when we are optimally aligned for the activity that we choose to participate in simultaneously with the load. So that's saying that, you know, however close we can get to that alignment, moving in the direction of optimally aligning somebody. The spontaneous load is going to be more effective. Okay. A couple of the ways, thinking about it. So load, we ready to go into load? Okay. So load variation is one of the things we do best in Platas we are so good at load variation. This is what we do that really once you learn it, you could do it on anything, right? So it's like I was in the gym the other day and I just saw a pulley system and I thought, you know, I can't do that particular exercise without assistance.

And so I use the pulley system to help me do the exercise. And they had the pull up bar and they had the one that had the um, weights underneath that will help lift you up. And so, you know, I started where I had 60 pounds and then down to 40 pounds assistance. That concept of assistance is what we specialize in. So when we think about in the machines, we put our feet in straps, the straps are assisting us in what we might not be able to do against gravity. Maybe you can't hold your legs out here and do movement out in front without having you know, your back lose its alignment or putting sheer force in your back or causing hip pain. Right? And so we can use a certain amount of springs, but the progression of that exercise would be to increase the load.

So in our instance on the equipment, a lot of times increasing the loaders by decreasing the springs, not increasing the springs. Decreasing the springs allows us to do that. We are varying lengths of levers so we often can put straps around the thighs or we can bend the knees or we can shorten the levers in our activities to make it so that doing a dead bog versus doing, you know, a crunch or the crossover and those kinds of things that are much more intense exercises that we can do by just changing the length of the lever, doing a teaser with bent knees versus doing a teaser with straight knees. Right. If you get the idea that when we understand that concept of using length of levers and amount of assistance makes a lot easier. We also can vary the orientation to gravity. So there was a table in the early days of rehabilitation, New York for polio called the gun three Smith table.

The gun three Smith table was very much like the Cadillac or the these chappies table and it was designed where it had ropes and straps and chains that came off of it that after polio, if you could, you'd have what's called a trace of a muscle contraction. So remember in the muscle manual medicine world, you have a rating score of zero to five. So five would be a normal contraction against gravity able to resist force without breaking that. That contraction of four as you can lift your hand against gravity, but you couldn't resist a force on top of that. A three is you couldn't go against gravity, right?

So a three was where you started seeing people in the trapeze table are they can lay sideways, the arm would be suspended by a leather strap and they could move their arm in this position, but laying on their side, right? So they didn't have to hold the arm up against gravity to let the arm up and down, but they were moving it through the ranges of motion to move from a three to a four. Well, this is going on in New York the same time that Joseph PyLadies discovered the trapeze table, right? So it's around the same time, not saying that one did one or from the other, but it's just amazing how great minds were trying to figure out how do we create movement and some of these more complex patients that don't have the, you know, don't have the ability to do it against gravity. And that was the idea of the cage on the trapeze table was to be able to fight against gravity in the very early stage of strengthening conditioning. If you think about all of the mat exercises have a modified version pretty much on the trapeze table, it's pretty cool, right? So most of the things that we do roll up Swan, um, you know, a lot of the extension exercises all have a holding the legs up against gravity.

I'll have exercises that are on the trapeze table that are meant to be assistive. So we have this perfect playground in the plays equipment to be able to very load, and it's the very load that allows us to pick the right load on the alignment. So if their alignment is not great, we can minimize the load and get them to start working with a modified alignment and a modified load. As the alignment gets better, we can start increasing the load better, better, better, more load load, create spontaneous organization, right? So let's try a little experiment, right? Let's just sit on the edge of your boxes, right? And imagine that your disc in between the vertebra are a little tiny balloons and let all the air out of the balloon. Okay? Now we're going to pump those balloons up.

Okay, we've done this before in plot. He's anytime land [inaudible] [inaudible] all the way up, right? Good. Now you fill that nice pumped up. Let your arms come across your chest and just rotate gently in a rotation side to side. Right now imagine take your arms out to the side here. Like this. Hands in front. And imagine now that you have a Kettlebell or a gallon of milk in your hands, do the same thing, right?

Notice what happens and release them. Grab them, release them, rabbit and relaxed. What was the difference between a five pound Kettlebell or a gallon of milk in your hand and nothing? How did your body react? So as soon as you had the image of the weight, you felt a stiffening, right? And you felt a little bit decreased in the range of motion, right?

That's normal response to load. Now, the fact that you've all either carried a Kettlebell or a gallon of milk, you know what that feels like in your body automatically did that, right? And so when you let go of it, it relaxed and got easy. This is what we talk a lot about. The volitional muscle contraction interfering with the quality of movement. So if we do the same preparation this time, I'm telling you, lift your pelvic floor up, draw your abdominal wall in.

Bring your ribs in Nice and tight and now rotate, right? Can you feel it? Let's try it. Lift the pelvic floor up. Draw the abdominal wall and squeeze the ribs in and rotate, right? So we use the same muscles, but the quantity of those muscles is not proportionate to the desired activity or the perceived load. Okay, so that's why it's not. Some people have called me a muscle hater.

I heard somebody call me a muscle hater. I love Mussels. I love the whole neuromuscular system. I just don't pretend to be as smart as the neuromuscular system. And so I believe there's better ways to let that smart system do its job and that when you increase the load, it will automatically increase the right amount of tone and stiffness in the body. So rules of load as the load increases, segmental movement decreases, right? Especially in the spine.

Even in the joints, we don't go to extreme ranges of motion without having good congruency and control. If we do, we end up losing control and we have things like sheer force. So power lifters work very hard to be able to minimize, to have a lot of stiffness around their spine and minimize the sheer force. That's where Stuart McGill comes in and he bashes PyLadies for saying that there are core control exercise because to him, core control is tied into power lifting or repetitive heavy lifting where you would need to have a significantly high intra abdominal pressure and you'd be pushing out into your abdominal wall to be able to have the greatest intraabdominal pressure, which would minify minify minimize sheer force between the Vertebra. Okay. And the same thing would be true with the joints in the legs below. Okay. So sheer force we want to avoid and tissue failure, we want to avoid.

So if somebody doesn't have good tissue response and Wolff's law says tissues respond to the load applied. So if we aren't loading these tissues and then you load them, they're more likely to fail. We need to be able to load the disc and load the ligaments and load the cartilage and load the bones. That's why bone density disorders like osteoporosis, usually a, not just a nutritional deficiency, but it's a low deficiency. We didn't load those bones enough in our teens and early twenties and by the time we're in our sixties and seventies the bone density is too low and now it restricts us from participating in certain activities, right?

We have an epidemic of bone density disorders in our, in our environment now, the appropriate amount of stiffness for the anticipated load. This is the same. We've been using employees forever. It comes from Bandera back in the, in the early eighties and nineties where he talked about how stiffness needed to match the load. If I'm golfing, how much stiffness do I want when I'm doing a golf swing? A lot or a little, a little right? But if I'm lifting 400 pounds in a dead lift, how much stiffness to I want all of it. I want all of it, right? And I still might not have enough if I'm not conditioned or prepared with my tissues to handle a 400 pound or a 200 kilogram squat. The bond theory in yoga ties into this. This is Simon Borg, Olivia, his work in the anatomy, physiology of yoga. He's a physical therapist. Out of Australia that was raised up a Yogi and his work is very good and he talks about how the bond that is a co contraction and the co contraction response to load.

So what we want to do is we want the load to be taken up in our elastic tissues, not in our plastic tissues. What I mean by that is we'd rather see the load being taken up in our muscle tenderness fashional tissues and not necessarily in the ligaments or the cartilage or the bone. And so when we train ourselves, we train ourselves by these natural load co contractions. If we're aligned correctly, then the coke and traction were organized around the joints that need to be stabilized or controlled. So that movement can happen in a congruent fashion. So load creates Koch contraction around joints to maintain congruency through the range of movement.

If the loads too much and we don't have good motor planning, then we lose congruency and the load now becomes harmful to the plastic tissues, meaning the ligaments that capsule, the disc, the Munis Guy, the labor rooms, et cetera. Does that make sense? So typical injuries happen from a poor assumption or anticipation of load. It's the imbalance of that. You think lifting of something lighter and it turns out to be heavy and that is the, that breaks the, the tissue, right? It's not when you're prepared and you anticipate correctly and with something we do every day doesn't seem to create tissue damage to us.

When it's something that we don't anticipate and it catches us off guard, then it's a problem. Years ago I worked for ups and ups had a weight restriction of 70 pounds, right? So 70 pounds, this whole truck, my job at night was to empty or load these trailers. Why not? I completely emptied out a trailer by myself and I was coming back into sweep it out and then I saw a little tiny box sitting in the middle of the truck, the trailer. I'm like, how did I miss that? And I just bent over really quickly to pick it up. And it was a 70 pound box of led pellets.

I was thinking it was something light that had fallen off the top that didn't weigh anything and it literally hurt my shoulder and my back. Not because I couldn't pick up a 70 pound box, but because I anticipated that it was a lot lighter. I always joke and say, this is Karma coming back to me because as a teenager I glued a quarter down to the floor in the super glue in the mall and I got my kicks out of watching people think they were just picking up a quarter and actually hurting themselves and breaking fingernails and other things, thinking it was something that weighed, announce and instead it weighed the weight of the world. Right? Um, Luna Karma is a bitch, dude, even with you, right? And then our mechanical receptors we trained to tell us this is a thing. Movement teaches us where our limits are. People who are novice in going to the gym and novice to employees in novice doing yoga and novice running and novice dancing, novice going to jobs that are heavy lifting, do not have the proper motor programs and do not have the appropriate ception intact to tell them, hey, you're getting close to your limit on those tissues.

If you load anymore or do any more repetitions or go any deeper in the squat, you're going to fail the tissues. And because they don't have their proprioception yet, they don't have that feedback. They blow through it and then they have the trauma and then they have the pain. That's usually the way that it works. Somebody who is well trained in movement, and sometimes you have to go through that trauma once or twice in life to appreciate that message that's coming from the body. Hopefully not too much right? But it does happen.

So those Mckenna receptors are there for a reason and they help us to give us information the same as the Fascia through that, the body. So what I want you to do here is just to, you know, think of, um, let's, let's just have you stand up for a second and you can do this at home, but let's just stand up for a second. And I want you to just be in what a posture you would be in normally, right? And just like you were sitting down, so don't try to correct your posture, but now let your arms out straight in front of you and hold those arms out for 30 seconds. Four, five, six, seven, eight 10 1112 and it's not that it's impossible to do, but I want you to just to feel how much work is working, how much load is loading, what you're feeling through your arms. We're at 20 seconds now so you can start filling in a little bit of weight, right? You can start feeling like, oh yeah. And I feel my deltoids, I can feel it working 26272820930. Okay.

And then rest your arms down and just reflect on what kind of load did you feel in your shoulders. Just standing up normal. Now going into a very bad posture, right? Really slotting down and knowledge arms up and hold them there for 30 seconds and you're already can feel right. The difference, one, two, three, four, five, six already, right? You feel about more low than you had at the end of 30 seconds, right? So in this position, we've just stick out a little bit longer and see what happens. You can see immediately the body's able to hold the arms up.

However you're feeling, how much more work does the body have to do? And you're already at an end of range here. Believe it or not, because of the Slouch, your shoulders can't go up much higher. So if you were to try to play volleyball or a tennis stroke or swimming from this position, the likelihood is you're going to impinge the structures underneath your chromium and relax. You know, that feels like, right? You show how much work you did to hold those up this time. Let's create that image of pumping up the disk, right?

So sh all the way up to the neck. And then now lift your toes up and push the toes down and lift your toes up and pushes those out and really notice and enroll the feet out. Roll the feet in, out in, out, and sway the body forward. Sway the body back, sway the body forward, sway the body back and find that place right in the middle of that area. And now lift your arms up and just notice how there's almost no tension now just by finding a little better center than we did even just standing up in the beginning. And it's like literally your arms can stay in this position for a lot longer now, right?

We can get there a lot easier just because we sort of centered our body again over our feet and grounded the feet and we got the spine pumped up and it's like the amount of work now is not even close to what we were doing before. Okay. We weren't relaxed. So the idea is that anywhere along the line the body is going to figure out how to organize itself. So when we were in the poor posture, you could feel the back in the front and the neck in different muscles working a lot harder, a lot more energy because the fascist system was not at its advantage. That makes sense. Is What Joseph talked about, the balance development of the body. So if I'm here and I'm shortened in front and I'm lengthened in the back and I'm trying to lift my arms up, I don't have the advantage of all the fashion tissues drawing the shoulder blades down, they make it very easy for my arms to photo.

Right. Good. So we understand that alignment load, we got those two down. Have a seat.

Chapter 6

Tempo

So velocity is the last one. And to me velocity is powerful because velocity and load, the rules of them are inverse.

So the idea is that as the load increases, velocity should decrease, right? And we also know that the greater the load, the less the velocity, the higher the velocity, less the load. And when we look at the appropriate set of fibers and the type three and type four interstitial receptors, these proprioceptive fibers that are in the fascia tie into our autonomic nervous system. So when we move, when we create this movement is velocity of movement. It actually affects our autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for digestion, blood pressure, pressure control, creativity, and thought procreation. All of these things that are about managing things like our immune system, our ability to resist disease, all of that ties in to movement.

So when we're moving and changing velocity, these type three and type four fibers are able to communicate to that system. When they're moving, they're telling our body, it's okay. Very powerful tool. So we see this inverse ratio here. The velocity and load are opposite of each other. One going up, one going down. So the faster I want to move, typically I'm going to have a little bit less velocity, less amplitude of movement, and vice versa. Now we look at tempo. Tempo is, it's not the same thing as velocity.

Tempo is how we change the rhythm. So tempo is more related to rhythm and rhythm of movement is an integration of movement. So impasto, that's our movement integration principle. That is this idea of how do we tie it in to something with purpose. So speed of the movement changes the neurological organization, right? Because it has take into consideration of things like momentum and thrust, right? So I'm gonna throw or I'm going to swing, or I'm a golfer, I'm going to kick. There's a thrust that will initiate. The faster I go, the faster my thrust and the beginning has to be.

And then it's momentum that creates the power, right? So whether I'm throwing a punch or I'm swinging a golf club or a tennis racket or swinging a baseball bat or picking something up or paddling, whatever I'm doing, it also takes any consideration. Acceleration, deceleration. So in muscle physiology, we talk about local deep muscles as being the stiffeners. So they stiff in the body in anticipation or preparation of movement. The global muscles are going to be the accelerators and the decelerators of the force of that movement. So in the momentum can accelerate.

And then as soon as I come to that middle point, I'm now in deceleration mode. So if I do foot work really slow, I don't really have an acceleration deceleration. But if I put the jump board on and I started jumping with two and a half springs, that's really fast. Now my organization is very different than doing footwork, right? It's completely changed the tempo of doing a hundred slow versus hundred fast.

The difference of doing beats slow versus fast. So one of the things we want to do in our programming, our design is to vary the tempo as we vary the tempo. We changed the neurological learning of the system and the nervous system. As we look at what we want to participate in, get sensitive to being able to respond quicker and quicker and spontaneous to the loads and the activities we're choosing to participate in. So you can see how it comes back.

Full circle is that in the beginning we can be working on alignment and modifying the load. And as we started getting closer and closer to ideal alignment and ideal load, we can then start playing with tempo. And the lawsuit's appropriate for the activity they want to do. A tennis swing is pretty fast. A golf swing is pretty fast or an a baseball is very fast.

So if you just do slow motion work all the time with your clients [inaudible] all right. You're never going to educate them to have the spontaneous natural movement somewhere. We have to vary the tempo to be able to challenge them to let their nervous system learn efficiency and that whole fashion system now to be able to operate off of the laws of anticipation, right? Based on the activities that we practice. So a child falls down the first year trying to pick up dolls and trucks and toys and balls and pretty soon they figure it out and they learn how to do it.

We're not telling them what to do. We're not saying, so time tried to keep your center of gravity between your feet, the weighed by 60% and the ball of the foot and they're like, you know, 12 months old, 14 months old. It's like, Okay Dad, all right, but that's not the way it works. And animals are the same way. Animals even faster, so they have to respond. The load, the anticipation, the protection, the safety, the desires, the motivations. These are the tools that we can use to be able to facilitate correct organization. We have to get away from thinking that we're going to teach them how to use their muscles to move their body. We teach them to move their body and their body teaches our muscles how to work efficiently, right? It's just swap it around.

Keep it really simple, right? If you're not sure what to work on and work on the ankles, the hips in the chest, you'll probably be right. Last two things. I cannot reiterate them enough. I put it on three times on each control. Control, control, end, efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, tempo teaches us how to control and it teaches us how to be efficient. So anything we're going to do over and over again like running, right?

If we're going to go running, you cannot be any efficient and change your alignment and change the load while you're running because it will break you down. You have to be consistent and you have to build the tissues up to handle the tempo. Right? So on Ronald t, you've heard one yet to talk on plot is any time, if you haven't, you should. Um, the idea is that that tempo, that cadence that we do has a unique load response to our tissues as it pertains to ground reaction for us. When we understand that cadence changing from the one 2130 that we might be doing to one 80 all of a sudden we become lighter, more efficient running animals. That ties into our bipedalism as human beings.

Having a right to locomote running is something that's innate in us. If we run with really padded shoes and high hills, when we go out and we run a slow jogging pace, that is not a normal way to run. If you went barefoot and tried to do the same running form, you would break down and stop immediately. You would find that walking is a much more effective way of locomoting than jogging. If you want to move faster, you need to run. And if you want to move faster than that, you need to sprint.

Those are the three human forms of movement. Likewise, any activity we participate in, right? We need to be able to sort of figure that out and learn that it's control that we won in piles. It was called Control [inaudible], right? The science of control. It doesn't mean maximum control. It didn't say maximum contraction, it didn't say exhaustive contractions to control movement. It was the efficiency and control g of spontaneous movement that was appropriate for our many very daily tasks and it always brings back to our principles inside of the PyLadies.

So alignment load in tempo are great tools for teaching the nervous system, how to organize spontaneously, efficiently, and naturally, which is what Joe taught us. Allow the propioceptive system in the body to teach the body proper and efficient organization for the activities of our client's choosing. Now this is really important. Sometimes we do not let them make mistakes and feel the difference between one versus the other. So the feeling exercise that we did today, the observation and listening, these are great tools to do with your clients as well as say, you know, put a stick between you and see if they can be sensitive to the pressure of the stick or put a right theraband around you and see if they can be sensitive to the poor or the attraction of the theraband. Can they feel these things in their own body?

And rather than saying that it's right or wrong, just ask them what they notice and what happens if you try this position with the same exercise. Oh, that feels a little more efficient or a little easier. Oh Great. You might want to try it that way instead of the other way. Because our goal is to be efficient. Now when they come to us, they don't know that our goal is to be efficient from the exercise world is says world is not efficient. Exercise world is Max voluntary contraction to exhaustion to be able to burn out and have, you know, these, you know, bodies that look like the bodies we all want to have. Right. And that's okay. You know, it's all right to be a crossfitter. It's alright to be a powerlifter, it's alright to be a bodybuilder.

But what we want you to do is we want you to do it with alignment and with the proper load mechanisms and to be able to do it the right speed for the appropriate activities. So you see crossfitters have speed demands on them, right? There's time demands. They gotta do so many deadlifts, so many pull ups, so many pushups, how many burpees they go move a tire so many times so far. And so when they fatigue and they're doing the activity and they've now lost their alignment and they're keeping the load, the same is when the tissues breakdown. So they're at a tempo that's too fast, exhausting their ability to maintain alignment. The load is still the same. That load is constant, but their tissues cannot handle the load and they break down. The activity in and of itself is fine.

But if your body and you don't have the awareness inside and you're not listening to what your body is saying, then you are a danger to yourself. That's the big difference. That's where we come in. We might not be the end are maybe, you know, they want to do crossfit and they want to be in those competitions. That's fantastic. Joe loved stuff like that. He loved boxing and grappling. You know, if you were to assign park corps or something like that, he would have loved Parker or you know, all the circle Solei.

He would love that. And the idea is is it's not that it's extreme, it just prepare your body to be extreme, prepare your body to handle the alignment and the load in the tempo that's demanding on the body of that activity that you choose to participate in. If you don't choose to participate in, you don't have to worry about it, but it's only if it's on your bucket list and you do. Mobility is necessary for proprioception, right? So this is why mobility is so important to perception. If Mobility is reduced at fair and information from the appropriate sectors is likely to be negatively affected, resulting in less awareness.

So sedentary ism decreases. Proprioception, decreased proprioception, decreases awareness, decrease awareness leads to depression. I mean, we're talking about quality of life. We're not talking about those. Provide a successful movement experience that exceeds the client's expectations. Take in places they've never gone before safely because you understand alignment and load in tempo, whole body commitment. Joseph said to achieve the highest accomplishments within the scope of our capabilities in all walks of life, we must constantly strive to acquire strong, healthy bodies and develop our minds to the limits of our abilities, self-confidence, poise and consciousness of possessing the power to accomplish our desires. Right?

Participating in what we believe we should be participating in with renewed, lively interest in life are the natural results of the practice of [inaudible]. We go back to our roots as PyLadies teachers. Our roots teach this to us. We have been distracted. We deviated our course to try to meet the needs of fitness and rehabilitation instead of staying on quality of life measures and understanding that when we participate fully in life and we have a healthy balance developed body that is able to listen to itself and is able to know when it's fatigued and know when it's at. Risk is the body that's gonna last longer in the buy that lasts longer and is healthier and more aware is going to be happier then we achieve happiness for is not real happiness. Truly born of the realization of worthwhile work, well done.

How do we feel when we successfully participate in the things we had to work hard in to be able to do it with the gratification, enjoying the other pleasures flowing from successful accomplishments with its compensating measure of play and resulting relaxation. The balance in life we need to provide people with the balance and life will finish with the same thing we opened up with physical fitness is the first requisite of happiness, our interpretation of physical fitness as the attainment and maintenance of a uniformly developed body with a sound mind. Then the important part, fully capable of naturally, easily and satisfactory performing are many and varied daily tasks based on what we choose to participate in with spontaneous zest and pleasure. It is in our polarities DNA. Everything I've talked about in this workshop comes from the root of our plot is DNA. It is about creating spontaneity. It is about balance in life. It is about balance between work, play and rest.

It is about the idea of good nutrition. It's about the good idea of sleep habits. It's about getting fresh air, fresh sunshine, being outside, playing right and having a body that's capable of doing its many very tasks on a daily basis. We have good tools to be able to do that. Ultimate goal. We change the world. We change the world through healthy movement. We impact the world through intelligent movement. So with that, I will completely conclude this workshop unless you have some questions, any questions or comments at home you can always write. I try to do my best to answer you back.

I appreciate your comments. I do read all of them. I don't always answer all of them, but I do read all of them and I appreciate them. It's a pleasure being here. It a, the plight is any time to studio and we'll look forward to seeing you in the movement class and other workshops from great teachers all around the world on polite is any time. This is Brian Anderson signing off.

Chapter 7

Mat Workout

Hello, my name is Brent Anderson, uh, founder of Pollstar piles. And it is great to be at piles any time.

And today we are going to be practicing some of the concepts in a movement class from the alignment load and tempo class that you can apply in your classes as well by just applying some of these simple concepts and principles. So let's get started right away. I'm going to have you laid on your back with the knees, bent the feet flat on the ground. And I want you just to appreciate the floor. And so a lot of times, um, you know, we don't appreciate the feedback and the information coming from the floor and we look at this contact surface, this ability for the mat to give us feedback.

So I want you to think of what parts of your body are contacting the mat. And again, there's no right or wrong, just being sensitive, listening, feeling, noticing. Where did the shoulder blades hit the mat, the back of the head, maybe some of the ribs, the Sacrum, the feet. Is the weight more in the hill? Is it in the ball, the foot, and change things around a little bit as you sort of Xcel and gravity changes, but the body readjust a little bit and sort of feel the shoulder softening or smiling across the front of the chest. Notice the back of the neck lengthening.

Feel the space of the ribs softening down in the mat with a breath without forcing anything, just using that word allow right. And then place your hands on your pelvis and just sort of notice where your pelvis is in space. Temptation is sometimes to squeeze the butt together, so go ahead and feel it. That feels like squeezed the butt together and feel the pelvis tilt up towards your shoulders. So that'd be one extreme. And then completely relax the bottom and tilt the pelvis forward, 24 the back coming off the mat a little bit to exaggerate it and fill the back coming off the mat and then let it come back down.

Let's just go that extreme a couple times, both directions. So filling that sort of unwanted and pollster, at least their posts to your tuck and then take it all the way forward anteriorly and just allow that transition back and forth. And as you do so, decrease the amount equally in the two extreme directions until you feel like the pelvis is in a really optimal place for you. Right? So it says two in the anterior and posterior tilt and just sort of listening to where's that place that you feel the least amount of tension. Now it's important to notice. This might not be neutral for you. You might have tissues imbalanced that tell you that your most comfortable place is a little bit posteriorly tilted or is a little bit interiorly Tilton.

But we're going to start from here because I want you just to be aware of where is the place that your body feels the least amount of resistance. And then once you've sort of figured out that space in the pelvis, bring the hands up to the lower rib cage and just taking a deep breath and feel like the elbows are going to slide on the floor towards the walls, right to the side. And as you exhale, the ribs are going to soften down. Yeah, shoulders become heavy and wide and just sort of notice where you feel the tension. Do you feel the tensions in your arms? Do you feel the tension in your chest or your shoulders? Right is a hard to create that horizontal space in your body to feel the collarbones reaching out to the side and again, using the floor as our feedback is telling us information. And then at the hands come down to the side of the mat, palms down.

Now from here, let's just go into a simple pelvic clock. Very easy. And again going into the anterior posterior tilting of the pelvis. But this time allowing it to pull the spine completely all the way up to the head, just looking for that connectivity. So as the pelvis goes and here the Chin is gonna jet and as you go post here, just the opposite, you're going to feel that sort of roll in of the spine. And the key here is you want to use as little force as possible.

So you really want to make it relaxed. Let go the hips, just it's right there. Very simple, very simple. And for you I want you to continue to feel a little bit more towards the end here. Tilt to sort of let go and deep and the socket of the hips and you can stand back and forth as little effort as possible. Yes. And then relax. Find that place again where you feel the least amount of tension and now tilt the pelvis to the right and to the left, the knees as if they're on a coat hanger suspended to the ceiling and the pelvis tilting in a rotation to the right and to the left. And again, just noticing how far up the spine does that pelvic rotation reach. Does it go all the way up into your neck or up into your eyes even?

Or does it stop at the base of the ribs? And these are the kinds of questions we want to know in ourselves as we listen and reflect on alignment. Now, what happens in your breathing as you do this? So let's say that you're inhaling as you tilt the knees to the hips to one side and exhale to bring it back into center and inhale, where might you send that breath to expand the mobility in the rib cage, typically to the opposite side. As you rotate, you're going to breathe into that opposite rib and exhale to bring it back to center. And I'm gonna allow you to move the knees side to side. So you're going to keep going now and let the knees sway. So a nice way and you get all the way over until just the shoulders on the ground. Stay there. Yeah. So raising the should be to the right side.

Swarm theory. Here we go. Taking a deep breath into that left lung and gently draw down the rib underneath the armpit and then work your way down the ribs where the tissues are going to pull the legs back up into the neutral center position and then let the legs come over to the left and inhale into the right lung, expanding the ribs on the right. Yeah, and then when you're ready, send that rib down one rib at a time, all 12 of them until they pull the legs back up. Finding that connectedness and you'll find that you might have areas where there is not connectedness. This is where we talk about alignment, right? We want to connect the rib cage to the pelvis and it's not that it's wrong, it's just exploring until you can find that connection. Exhaling sending the left rib down, bringing the legs up. Finally, connection on the diagonals. Take it to the other side.

Remember we're exploring all planes of movement and we're looking to see if we can always draw a, find the connection back into the neutral. Yeah, let's do one more to each side. Inhaling into the lung, excelling, drawing it down. And a lot of times I'll start slow like this just to be able to get the awakenings. We talk about tempo, we're going nice and slow. Now let's play with the temple a little bit so that the knees come up nicest three feet together. Palms go out a little bit wider cause you need a little bit wider to control the temple.

So from here we're going to go to the right in here on the left. Exhale, bring the knees back up. Stay with me on the pace to the left and up and to the right and up without stopping in the middle. Go right to the left and up into the left without right. Stopping in the middle, sorry and back up. Let's go a little bit faster. Notice as you go faster, your range is going to decrease and that's okay.

Control it, right? You'll feel the spring load on and the spring comes off and you notice that it's a different muscle set that is working to be able to do it at a different pace. Let's go a little bit faster even and back. Yes. Good. Find that pace left, right, left, right last one. And relax. Feed still together. Take both knees and open them in the butterfly position. Yeah, and just observe from your peripheral vision. How far out are the knees?

Right in that really relaxed open position. You'll notice one side might be a little different. One side might be a little higher when hip more restricted. Now close the legs and keep the left knee point up to the ceiling and see if you can keep that pelvis in the rib cage in its organization and just let the right knee drop out to the side. Bring it back up the left leg out to the side. Bring it back up and right and left and right and left and right and left.

Now let's pick up the pace on this one. Right up. Left up, right up, left up, right up, up. Notice the difference when you change the pace and relaxed. Stop there. Let's go really slow. Let's take four counts down with the right foot. One, two, three, four and up. Two three, four, left down, two, three, four and up. Two, three, four and right. Two, three, four, two, four. Last one, two, three, four. Up and change the load. Bring the right leg up to 90 degrees, left leg up to 90 degrees. Same idea, right knee is going to drop out at a four. Count to the right. One, two, three, four, up to three. Four.

Make the appropriate adjustments of not going so far that you can't control. So the load increased. Can the pelvis maintain the alignment? You might not be able to take it so far away from center if the load increases. Now let's change the tempo with it. Let's go right down and up. Left down and up, right down and up.

You notice it quicker actually is a little bit easier on this one for you to control. You're not going as far and you're able to feel a little bit of momentum and recoil to stabilize the opposite side. Keep that going one more time and left and relax at the legs come down very good. So you can feel a difference between tempo and low. Just with a very simple exercise that we could play with those ideas in the body. Right?

So now what I want you to do is you're going to scoot towards the center of the room with the knees still bent till your toes are touching the toes as a person across from you. So you're going to stay on your back. It's what's that? Yeah. I just come all the way down your knees. You're get in a comfortable position, but your toes are going to be touching each other should be down the word. So if you guys, if you scoot down a lot further this way it's perfect. Yeah. So if you don't have somebody to do this with at home, you could put your feet up against the wall because the wall will also give you some the same feedback. But if you have somebody, not only are you giving feedback, which you're also receiving feedback, so toes against hose, right?

So we're going to do the bridge from here. So just position yourself. You have enough knee flection that you can do the bridge. Know it makes sure there's enough knee flection to do the bridge get and now just for the toast touching each other, you're going to be able to roll up in bridge and CG and feel the same energy aligning yourself with your partner as you roll up into your bridge or roll in the pelvis up and you can almost feel the weight between the toes on each other. What's going on? Take a breath in, up on top and then exhale and roll down. Now part of the alignment here, we talk about ankles, hips and thorax.

This one we're looking at the hip alignment, so what I want you to try to find as you roll up into your bridge symmetrically, the two of you, each on each side feel the sacrum pressing through the hips as the ribs drop a little bit down towards the unit with this nice planar line and feel the amount of energy in each other's feet. As you're in that position. That's what I want you to notice. That's what you should be matching to do that. Like your knees, have the theraband between them and you feel the theraband between them like we did in the workshop and now roll down and your bridge still filling and respecting that space. Pauling you together respecting the amount of energy between your toes. Come all the way down and then feel the relaxation.

You can even feel each other's inhalation, exhalation, all the way down to the toes so that connectivity is continuous, right? Let's try it again. Taking a breath to prepare. Deep breath. Exhale the therapy answers to pull the knees together. The sacred drive up through the hips, the way it goes into the shoulders, the shoulders are wide. You taking a nice deep breath. You feel that line across the front of the hips and as you exhale, you feel the knees still being attracted towards each other as you roll down one vertebrae at a time. Very nice. We'll do that one more time together.

This time I'm not going to talk. I want you to do it on your own. No peeking. See if you can feel it and just feel how things change on the toes. If you can match, you should feel the change of energy that you recognize. Now as they push into the floor, you should feel when the breath is taken. And then exhaling, feeling the spinal and down. So you're actually teaching each other.

We're going to do one more of those cause I think it's worth doing. Yeah, let's try it one more time. Listen to each other. Even listen to the breath and then exhale. Rolling up together. Feeling the knees, the toes. Create that spacial awareness. Feel that length across the front of the hips. It's symmetrical person to person. And then feel the shift in the energies.

You start to roll down and relax. Very good. All right. Now from here, I'm going to have you just grab the back of your knees and roll up into a modified roll up. Yeah. Just roll yourself up. Yep. Okay. And sit right towards the front of the mat there. Your feet will be on your mat. Yup. So you're not so close. Good. And from there, we're now going to do a visual in a spatial awareness of the modified roll down.

Right? So when you're in that position, you're sort of looking at each other, right? And you're gonna feel the energy fill that as that therabands connecting the two of you. As you roll down. Now we can start with a partial roll down and just even working on our timing going away from each other. Right? So let's sit up nice and tall and imagine the theraband is connected between your sternums, right? So you're nice and tall, the heads nice and space and initiate. Remember the axial alignment is going to be going from the sit bone that Cox six all the way up to the crown, the direction of the movement is going to be in deflection.

The space is going to be the pushing out in all directions and also between partners. So fill the spacial rule of being pulled together and pushed apart at the same time, right? So looking at your partners nice and tall, taking a deep breath breath is going to be your cue. And as you exhale, begin to initiate the direction of the spine. Moving back. Yeah, let's just go halfway and use your hands to assist. And then from there, take a breath in. Exhale, match each other's energy. Match each as energy sitting up nice and tall.

You should both get to that top position at the same time. Imagine now all 12 thoracic vertebra are connected with their own thera-band, right? We're going to start with the lowest one first. So you're going to take 12 away from 1211 away from 1110 away from ten nine eight seven is about halfway down, bringing seven back together. Eight together, nine 10 1112 brings us up into sitting again to the lumbar. Okay. You really try to get, we're going to try to go down to l to right, so we're going to start again, starting with l two now, so l two just above the belly button. So we're going to take that direction. Pull the belly button away from your partner, then the 12th rib, the 11th rib, and continue to send the ribs back and even up underneath your heart, going down to t five good starboard t five and then bring it back up.

So we got five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 12 one, two three, four, five. We're going to go all the way down, all the way up now watching each other and it's going to be really easy cause you're connected to each other. The feeder heavy. If they come off the mat, it's okay, right? You're just going to control the roll down. So a deep breath in. Starting now with the sit bones rolling back or five or four l three Oh two l warranty, 1211 0987654321. Beautiful. How are you doing? Okay.

I know it's easy, but the idea is feeling the energy of that is really cool. Bring the knees up to 90 90 put your hands behind the knees. We'll use them at the same time and let's see if we can be aware. I'm going to call it. But you're going to be moving into the same way where the energy is reaching between you and your partner.

So the direction of the movement now is the head is coming up first through the cervical spine, through the ribs. The ribs are continue to reach back. The feet are becoming heavy. Reaching down towards the Mat. Use them as your levers at them. Be Heavy. Continue to let them be heavy. Yes, and they continue to articulate up into the therabands, pulling the rib cage back together again. Let's go a little more fluidly now. So we're going to roll back into a roll down. The fee can come off. If they want. Rolling back, the ribcage pulls back from each other.

You're separating that tension between each other. It's like you're really helping each other and they're going to taking a deep breath and exhale and roll up. Same thing. Fee come head comes up. Fill that role in. Fill that space. Think of the ribs going back up underneath the heart. Fill the help of your partner with it.

Now I'm going to give each of you a theraband. You're going to straighten your legs out. We're going to do a full roll down, full roll up. Do I have enough therabands here? We'll see the ones who get the grain. Get a little more help. Right? So grab hold the one. Yes. Thank you. Let's see and have you let go of it. You're going to smack each other real tightened up and get a little bit of tension on it, right?

So now give yourself a little space with it, right? And as you roll down, it's going to probably come down sorta to your pelvis as you roll down, but you're going to help each other, right? So let's start sitting up nice and tall and feel that length sort of pulling away as you collectively move down into your roll down. Think of where the alignment is coming from. Yes. To not let go that there been take in a deep breath and taking a deep breath. The temptation of doing that is just too great.

I'd have my one hand or my eye and the other hand over my crotch, right? Yeah, that's right. Roll it up. And you realize you don't need a whole lot more than a little bit. There have been, right, which really tells you you don't need anything. It's all imagined. But why we can't do a roll up. It really is just in our imagination and anxiety.

So let's make this even easier, right? So let's just sing as we rolled down, right? So you know what I like to do and you can talk it out even to just eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, right? It's just controlling the voice coming out. Is the air controlled. So deep breath in and we're going to go from eight to one, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two and taking a breath. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Good. Now let's play with the whole alignment concept, right? So we're thinking of direction of movement.

Axial length, right? Body part's going to come as close to the movement of the central axis. This is where it gets a little interesting because my central axis is moving back into flection. My ribs are also going to be moving back into flection. So don't try to bring them in here and roll back.

They're going to be moving back as well. So feel right. We talked about the breath pattern. The ribs have to come back to flex. All right, so let's give that a try. Deep breath and we'll start with eight, eight, seven. Send the ribs back only so hard. Four, three, one a little bit quicker. Take a deep breath in. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Deep breath in. Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Last one. Come up. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Now let's get rid of the Theorem Mans.

All right. Create that imaginary connection between yourselves. You have it right? Where's the initiation? Where's the axial line? Where the body parts moving as it pertains to alignment. Saying deep breath in eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two. Uh, there we go. You can do it. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Good and rest. Very good. All right, you get the idea. Now let's take the hands behind going into a leg. Poor position. We just want to create and drive home. A couple of messages here, right? So in a leg pub position, but let's start with bent knees and let's start with the idea that we want to create alignment now into the lower extremities, particularly the hip joint, right? So we're going to come up into a bent knee leg, poor position, right? So you're just going to bring that sacrum right up yet, right in between. Yes.

So what I want you to feel here is when we talked about how do I know when somebody is lost in alignment? So drop your hips down a little bit and show me what bad alignment would be or, or incorrect alignment. Right? So when we are that hinge, and now see if we can get rid of the hinge without arching the back. So you're going to send a pelvis up? Yes. Very good. And then from there, can you lift up one leg and then the other leg? Yep. And down and switch. Just marching. Just marching, right? The hips up a little bit higher. You can do it.

I want this up higher. Yup. Now, not such a high step, but let's do a quick step. So it's going to look like this. Watch me. You're gonna come up and you're going to be here and you go, all right. Yes, yes. Keep driving the sacrum temple fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast and relaxed. Hands Down and real like, straighten your legs out in front of you. Ah, stretch out those hamstrings a little bit now.

So you get the idea and we sort of think we can go through advanced exercises, but then we think like, wow, if I can't get hip extension and control tempo that's just running, we're just running in horizontal position instead of vertical position. Okay. So a simple alignment of just getting the hips into extension. That's a pretty powerful tool. Okay. How about you cross your legs in front of you and roll over into plank position. [inaudible] and let's just hold the plank position for a second. Look at your neighbor.

All right, so just sort of look around and see what everybody's doing and you know, do your sacrum's drop down through your hips a little bit. Okay. Can you find that position? You're sort of hanging on the fashion, the front of the hips a little bit, but supporting from the ribs underneath back of the neck is long. And just play with that. Now go into extremes, right? So, you know, drop it down to low carefully and then bring it up too high. Right? And bring it back down. And what you're going to notice is a sweet spot there that if you bring your head over your arms a little bit more like him for a little bit, it's almost like, you know, you can feel the Fascia holding your body up in that position and then press yourself back into a pike. So butts up in the air. Yeah, so pike and then go right into your plank.

Hit that position. Nice and strong. And Pike and plank. Remember we're doing swarm theory. So if you're out of sync with your neighbor, you got a problem. And Pike and plank and Pike and plank. Now hold the plank position and from here, just run with your feet, right? That, that's it. That's it. That very close. It's more like look at your neighbors yet Chris has got it. Juliana's got it. Knees stay straight. You stay straight. Hips are down, hips are down, hips are down. Get those hips down and relax. Let your knees come down. Good. Sit back and just stretch. So again, it's interesting to me that, you know, we consider are difficult exercises of things like teasers and rollovers and Jack Nights and those kinds of things. But you know, a lot of the things that we want to be able to do as far as coordinating and alignment are really simple things.

And I think sometimes when we're at home, we're doing his exercises, we're watching, you know, it's like, it's okay to spend time on some basic exercises we were doing every day. We're going to do the same exercise that we did in plank, but now we're going to slap the shoulders right and try to move as little as possible, slapped in the shoulders. Okay, let's give that a try and see what that feels like. Okay. You can do it. Yup. This one is this one. Yes, that's, yes. The one, um, you gotta start with your right arm first. Actually, you'll be opposite of the person in front of you.

So just mirror the person in front of you, right? Who's going to be the leader? You go, there you go. We got it. Let's good. Listen and relax. Very good. Good, good. So again, looking at, you know, alignment has to deal with Lowe's. So what we've done is we create alignment and then we went to a load by going to a single leg or a single arm or we want to tempo by increasing the speed of what we're moving with or playing with, right? So again, what has to happen if you're falling over the place, you know that we're going too fast or the loads too high, right? Or you don't have good enough alignment to be able to load the nervous system.

That makes sense. So it makes it pretty simple. So from here, now let's go right into a mermaid position and we're going to face forward and that's all go with the left leg in front, right leg to the side, right? So left hands is going to be down on the mat and let's play with this space in on this one, right? So just feel like your legs are in good spacing and look at the person in front of you, sort of see how you're sitting with each other, right? And then you're going to put the left hand down onto the mat. And what I want you to just soften that elbow a little bit and feel yourself pushing into the mat with your hands so the elbow is going to bend towards your body and then bring your right hand behind your head. Now sending that right elbow up to the ceiling. Yup, and bending to the left. Now look at the person in front of you.

Those are two of you in front. You are the leaders, so even if you're doing it wrong, you know others are going to follow. You're doing it wrong. But here's what we're going to do. We're going to play with the concept of alignment. So where's the direction? The direction is in left side bending. Where is the alignment? We're bringing the body parts close to the central axis, so that means that the left rib cage is gonna lift up the right cage.

Rib Cage is going to open the front and the back are going to come together into that plane of glass. Now take a deep breath into the right lung and reach their right up, up opposite of the left arm pushing down. So just create that a little bit of our position. You're doing it right. I'll smack you if you weren't. You got it. Good. Excellent. Now come back up.

Bring the right hand down to the mat or even grab your Shin if you like. But down on the mat, being the left hand behind the head. And this one's going to be a little more challenging cause we're going against a fixed direction, but we're going to send that left elbow up to the ceiling that the right elbow bent in. And again, look at the person in front of you and see the concept. Where is the direction of the movement? Is the and its longest possible configuration for right side bending the ribs opening up on the left. Are they lifting underneath?

Are the elbows moving opposite of each other in the coronal plane? Yes. Good. So now we've done is we've just created a nice homogenous movement between the six of you and now we're going to go for flow. So we're going to come over to the left with the right hand stretched out into a normal mermaid. Can they come all the way over? Yup. And then come back up all the way over to the right side.

Keeping the arms along. There we go. So keep the flow. Let's go a little bit faster and right and left. See if you can create the flow of the arms matching the space, the rhythm, the alignment, and the tempo. Let's go a little bit faster. The ones in front are the leaders yet everybody else has to follow.

Okay, last one. And relax. Very good. Come and tall. Sitting position. Hands behind your back. Yup. Behind on the ground. Lean back, lift the legs up and switch the legs over to the other side. Yup, you got it. Good. And now you're going to put right hand down the mat, left hand behind the head. And we'll do the same thing we just did to the left side.

So elbow bends into the body a little bit. Left elbow up to the ceiling. You're going to learn from the past, right? So you've already learned it already. Looks better. We're aligning the direction of the movement is going to be in the coronal plane to the right. We're thinking of the body parts coming closer to the center axis.

Where's the shoulder and the ear space? The headspace. Yeah. Keep it going. Breathing into which lung? The left lung makes it a little bit easier for yourself and bring this up to the ceiling. There you go. So it doesn't have, this doesn't have to go down. Just let this come up. Yeah. Good. And then we're going to go over to the left side. So bring that left hand down to the Shin. It'll help you out.

Same idea. We're staying in between these two pains. Space here comes together. Direction out through the top of the head. So it's that axial line, body parts come close and expanding. Movement is going out laterally. Drop this elbow into the body a little bit. Yes. Deep breath into the right lung.

Yeah, fall two more times. And then we're ready to go with the seaweed image going side to side, to the rights and to the left. Nice and flow into the right and to the left, to the right, to the left to right a little bit faster and left right left. See Weed in the ocean. Toss side to side. There we go. Just like outside today and go last one and relax.

Very good. Rotate to your right. Going into quadriped position, hands and knees. All right, from here, let's bring the knees directly under the hip socket. Yeah, so it's going to be about maybe six inches between the knees. Yeah. And I want you to now think of the floor that you were laying on and see if you can recreate that alignment in space.

So if you were laying on the floor, where is your head? Your shoulders should tell bone. Where is this space between the floor? Where is the space around the ribs? Can you find the right rib location?

Can you create a 90 degree fold in the hips? All right, or the knees underneath the hips or your knees behind the hips. All right. The head nice and long. Feel that disassociate. Disassociation the hips because this is the same thing, but now we're not having the feedback coming in from the floor. So the alignment now has to come from the inside. Now here's the trick.

If I had your ribs wrapped circumferentially with a theraband, could you breathe in and expand that theraband in all three planes without changing the central axis? When you exhale, could you bring it towards the central axis in all three planes without changing the central axis? So the head, the spine, stay in this same place. Yeah, we're gonna let that come down a little bit lower there. Yeah, go ahead. Continue. So the spine stays the same. The breath expands. Yeah. Good. That's it. Now from there, still with that breath, when you inhale, hinge back on your heels. As you exhale, come back up over your hands.

Seeing if you can maintain the alignment in the spine. Really hinge in the hip so you can only go as far as your hips. Let you go back before your pelvis starts wanting to go into a posterior tilt. Find out where that place is. If I put a hot cup of tea on your sacrum, who would not want to spill right now?

Let's try something a little different. If you take your knees out wide feet together, do the same thing and see how far back you can go. You go back a little bit further because you have more hip range of motion and then come back up and notice. Try not to collapse or let that low back increase in lower doses. Just keeping the same relationship for you. I want you to stick your bottom lid there. That's what I want.

Am back up. [inaudible] that's the space and don't over recruit that. Yeah, it is good. [inaudible] good and back. Now bring the knees together and the feet out. Don't have high expectations. Listen to your body and see if you can identify where is it that you can hinge back without losing the alignment to your spine. Internal rotation is not very kind to neutral spine when you go back into flection. All right, so I don't want the pelvis to rotate yet.

Okay. Not that there's a problem. Problems to do it. I just don't want it right now. See if you can find that place. So you're really isolating that internal rotation and flection in the hips. Can you feel the difference? Right?

The range of motion is telling you that you can't go back so far and then come back and go into the neutral one where your knees are hip width apart and your legs are parallel. And give it one more shot here. Going back. Yep. Good. And then come back up and you sort of notice how the different joint position of the hip can change the position and the stressors on the back. So think of laying on your back. When you ask patients to do things like hip circles and leg circles, are we really asked? Are they able to keep that alignment in that position?

Now coming up into the quadro pet position, stay there. Give your hands a little rest and just look at me for a second. So from here, now we're going to go into circles around still keeping the spine in as close to the neutral position as we can. And then back. So now we're going to make the movement a little more complex, right? But still try to keep it so I don't want to see this happening or the head dropping down. Really do our best to sort of keep in the spine in neutral, moving around our hips and our shoulders. Okay.

Back in the neck as long we're still creating that space in the rib cage and around the spine. Some of that opposite tension going on where the ribs are pulling in close to the spine and just go as small little circles to begin with. And then civ you make them a little bit bigger and then notice if there's any difference going right to left versus left to right. And it's amazing that when you get a little more pure in your alignment that you notice your limitation seems a little bit easier, right? You feel like just where you might find there's some restrictions in certain areas and when we just blow through those areas in some of our other exercises, we miss the benefit of doing that exercise. Always go back to basics. Always try to find them.

Me Go back the other direction if you haven't already and make sure the shoulders are part of that movement too. You're going over your shoulders and back over your hips. Good. Let's do that two more times. And that last one, I'm just going to have you come up into a high kneeling position. So walk your hands back and come up into a high kneeling position.

So from here, funny enough, we think that we have the alignment of our body up on top of our pelvis, but the temptation is always a pelvis is going to be a little bit hinge back, right? So let's play the same role now, right? So we want to be able to have the hips open in the front so that sacrum is going to have to push forward. But the ribs as if you were laying on the ground are going to have to come back a little bit. So we're creating that axial length and just trying to find that space and then let it go back into a more collapsed or relaxed position. Just let it go back to where you would stand. Right.

And just notice the difference of where the body is in [inaudible] in space. See if you can correct it. So get the pelvis opening up through the hips and the ribs drawing back to the length in the spine. [inaudible] good. And then relax. And what you should notice is that every time you relax is going to be a little less and less shift, right. So we're going to find that position again. Hips push forward, slide back, and then relax and see if there can be less and less shifting in your relax.

I see some good positioning now. Now from here, hens, the hips cock the toes underneath. Yep. And just sit back towards your heels. Keep in the spine, in the vertical position as you bend through the hips. Yes. Good. And then rise back up into that top position. Let's just do that a couple times and feeling the ability now using as little muscle as possible. It's like the bones are sort of pushing you through. Yeah. And as you're just finding that vertical alignment, so the ribs and the sacrum sort of come towards the central axis that we talked about.

Can you feel that and see if you can do that with as little muscle as possible. So you sort of feel the bones moving into the alignment on this. Next one, you're going to stay up. So go down and come up and from here, right now, bring that left foot in front of you in a 90 degree position. Yep. Good. Good. Yup. And then take it back down. Sit back on the hills, come back up. Bring that right foot forward. You want to try and do it as little shifting as possible.

They should go to sweep right through. Bring it back underneath you. Stay tall, and then hinge back. Come up tall, sweep left. Sit back and sweep bright a little bit faster. Now you find the position. Sit back, sweep, left and back. And sweep, right. Good. And back. Now fill the lifting, getting [inaudible] taller and taller. Good. And back and up and down.

Last one left. Last one, right. And relax. Very good. So now what I'm gonna have you do is you are going to sit back to back with a partner. So those of you that are facing this direction, just sit very back to the back end and you're in the front. Scooch your mats up to theirs. Yep. And you're going to put your back up against their back.

And we're going to do a little listening activity here, but you're literally going to try to get your bombs together and your shoulders together. Yup. And what I want you to feel here is just like the floor, we're going to create alignment now in a long sit position and we're gonna change the direction. So the people facing the parking lot, yes in the parking lot are going to roll forward inflection. The people facing the ocean or the back are going to follow them into extension.

Yeah. So let's give it a try. Flection. Everybody goes that direction and then push back up into your partners to stack them back up and then reverse the direction. So this side goes into flection. You stay in extension with them. So now direction of movement all the way through the ribs and the spine. So see if you can keep that can grow and go the other direction.

Including the head, including the back, and you're sort of supporting each other. If you have to use your hands to support your partners, that's fine too. Like you can push into the mat so they're not too heavy on, you don't want you to strain yourself should be fairly light. Right. You don't want to put too much weight. You just want to feel and communicate into their space.

Fine. At least right now. Come back up. We'll do one more to the parking lot and one more away from the parking lot. That's it. Yeah. And help each other like really feel like you're filling that space between each other. Last one away from the parking lot.

Now we're going to make this even more fun. Bend your knees. Yeah. And let them be separated a little bit so you have a little space between your legs. So legs a little wider. They're about shoulder with the part of the hip with the part. And we're now going to grab [inaudible] arms. Yep. So interlock arms. Yep. Yep.

You got it. Ah, eh. There's always a dominant in every group. It's like who holds their hand this way? Who, who wins? I'm the man. I get a hold of like this. I don't hold hands like this. I only has like this.

Now this is a social exercise as well. Alright, so from here, now we're going to do the same thing cause you have your knees in front of you to support you, right? And you have your feet to push into the mat. So we're going to bend towards the parking lot, but the person on this going to actually lift their bottom up off the mat, try to keep the contact on the spine so you're not losing the contact on the spine. You're just coming up a little bit and then back down and switch. Right. Keep the contact and try to keep the congruency without losing too much and you have to make some adjustments. That's fine. That better Juliana? Yep. Yep. So you're not really lifting, you just barely hovering off the mat. You're like pulling them up there. It is good. Not so high, just a little disengagement supporting each other. Talk to each other.

You can keep it down. And I have to come up quite so high. So keep your bottom down, down, down, down there, right there, right there, there, and then come down. And then she's going to come up just that same place. It's more like you're sort of sliding out. That's high enough. Yeah. Back Down. Good stream movers. Fill that hip, drop down, drop down. There it is. I want that feeling. Yes. Yes. Okay.

Now still in that position you can come up into neutral seated position. Right? And let the legs straighten out a little bit. A little bit. Not a lot. And he's done bent a little bit, but we're going to do spine twist, seated spine twist. Right? So you can't both rotate to your right. It won't work. So it depends is dominant. So, oh, you're right.

You are going by the same direction. You are so right. My correction go the same direction. Everybody to your right. This is the only place that works. Slide your arms out. So it's like your hands are in touch with each other. Yes. Oh, that looks beautiful. Whack each other in the face and the others. Yep. All right, and go to the left and do the right. Good.

Now temptation's going to be to side bend a little bit. See if you can keep that nice vertical line and go, Yep. Good vertical alignment. I like it. And back to the right. Yes. Why? I mean it's getting close. He does have a few more minutes to make our points here.

[inaudible] but notice how the feedback provides you with the information, right? You, we assume that we're doing the right thing, but till we get the feedback we realize, oh yeah, let's see how that works. Last one. Can you straighten your legs and open them and let's try the saw. Ooh, yeah. Same thing. You're just going to be doing opposite saws. Yep. Okay. We call this the seesaw.

You're going to rotate to the right and dip towards the parking lot. The parking lot, parking lot. Tip towards the parking lot. Let's do it all together. Everybody rotate, right? Dip towards the parking lot. There you go. Come back up to center, rotate left and go towards the parking lot again. Okay. Now we're going to come back. Keep the head in a good position there. Yep.

Now rotate, right. Go away from the parking lot. Oh boy. That's delicious. And up and rotate. Left and away from the parking lot. See if you can keep alignments that sit on, shouldn't come off that mat. Let's do it again. Turn going towards the parking lot.

[inaudible] let just spines talk to each other. What's going on in there? Help each other out and rotate left. Don't want a whole lot of side bending. I see a lot of side bending going on. Do the, let's see what's going on. Now you're going to go away from the parking lot. Rotate, right? Go Away.

Oh, a boy. Here we go. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it now. That's true. Okay. Come back up and rotate and going to the parking lot and the parking lot. Stay on that center axis and your little Maurice there, Juliet. There it is.

[inaudible] that's good. It is. Or he knows the difference on that one. Where do you fill that? Who's, who's giving the resistance? Well, I'm pulling on, well, you didn't have too much resistance going this way, right? [inaudible] nice and easy. So I'd probably be a hip if done in the hip. Can you talk to each other and tell each other where you're feeling that?

Okay, this feels good. Yeah. Awesome. All right, well let's finish up with our famous sidekick and see if we can synchronize ourselves. So let's have heads towards the parking lot facing that direction, right? So a heads this way. Okay. On your right side. Yep. You got it. Let's come up on the forearms.

Create the axial length energy still with a little side Mannings here. Between the panes of glass, you fill that alignment and look at and feel right now is the energy matching in the room between yourselves, right? Can you create that? It's going to be a curve of the spine, right? A little bit of left side bending and the neck and the head are part of that curve coming up. The shoulder spacing in the neck. Does that look similar to each other? Can you find that?

What about the Dorsey flection in the ankle? Good. Right? Find that energy. Send the leg energy. Now from there everybody lift the left leg up and down and up and down and up and down and up. Halfway down circles going forward and down and around and forward and down and around and forward. Listen to each other forward. Five, six, seven and reverse. And you go, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight. Stop right there. Side kick without kicking the person in front of you. Ankles.

Flex forward with the inhalation and back with a point and forward and back and forward and back. Feed off of each other. Forward, back, forward, back, forward, back, forward, back pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump and again and back. Last one and reach. Leave it there. Take the left hand, reach up towards the head of the person in front of you. That height, right? That's the angle. The left leg reaches opposite ribs are lifting away from the floor as you're reaching through that so you get this nice space, leg straight. Good.

Taking a deep breath. Look at your arm placement in relationship to the placement person in front of you. Yep. Taking a deep breath, you're going to make the sound of a bee buzzing. Zero so there is no more air. And then roll over onto your left side facing me. Roll up swarm theory. All right. Now who are the leaders of the swarm?

Who's creating direction of the swarm? Got It. So let's find that plane, that energy, that length. And when you realize everybody's looking at you, you tend to perform a little bit better as well. Isn't that funny how that happens? Dorsey flex. The Eagles are in a good position. Lifting the right leg up and down and up and down.

Little faster on this side and down. Up, down, up, down seven. Okay. Eight small circles forward and right. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven and reverse. And one, two, three, four, five, six sidekick. Here we go. Forward. Okay, back forward, back, forward. Can I go faster and front? You gotta follow me? No, me, stop. [inaudible] we're going to do it right. Cause this is what we're talking about.

Alignment with between ourselves. Everybody forward, back, forward, back faster. Listen to me. All right. That's it. And double pump on the next one. Dada. Dada, Dada, Dada.

Paul's. Paul's. Paul's Paltz. Paltz, Paltz. Paul's. Paul's. Paul's. Paul's. Paul's balls. Last one. Leave it back. Take the right hand forward. Set the height for everybody on that front row. Yup. Yup. Reaching for their head. Get the arm down. Okay. Where are you at? Right. Tied into the arm of the way across even your palm palm. Go.

Yes. Good. So you find that energy. Look off the person in front of you reaching, taking a deep breath. [inaudible] just keep going and getting longer. Longer ribs coming towards the central axis. Tell there is no more air and then roll over onto your tummies. We'll finish up with swan. All right, hands to the side. Give me a priest.

One pressing up to the lowest ribs. So hands go have the hands go right next to the chest. So they should be about t for heighth, yet the elbow slide down. Now what's the direction of the central axis extension, right? So let's create the extension. The body parts are coming closer to the central axis cause we know what direction we're moving.

And so come up to the lowest rib and then your sales back down and back. Up and back, down and back up. And I'm coming up into a full slung, one under the knees without collapsing in the back. Full length. Come up in the knees, is the head part of it all the way out and lay it down. So thighs, hips, belly, ribs, chest head. Same thing coming up, head, chest, ribs, belly, pelvis, thighs and down. [inaudible] I'm going to get ready to do a swan too.

So who come all the way up rather than to do it together? A single swan two you're gonna release, roll down, come back up and catch ready and release and down and up and catch. Release and down and up and catch. Very nice. Release and down and up and catch. Release and down. Going for three. Here we go. Prepare yourself.

We're gonna do three rocks on three. One, two, three and down and up, down, up, down, up and catch. [inaudible]. Nice. Let's do it again. One more time. All together. The last one, if we can nail it on three one followed Christie two and three and down and up, down, up, down, up and catch [inaudible] and sit back towards your heels. Prayer, stretch. Give yourself some love. Very nice. Yeah. All right, so when you come up from that position, let's just have a quick power for the sake of our community out and PyLadies anytime land as well as here.

These are just some samples or examples of how we use the concept of direction of the central axis. Drawing things closer to, we talked about changing tempo, we played with velocity a little bit on some of them. We looked at load, so we notice when we went with single leg on some of these exercises that it became a lot more challenging if we did single leg alternating with heavy load and sped it up. Then it even got more challenging. If we lost alignment while we were trying to do the load, we noticed it got more challenging. So you can take very basic exercises. And if you focus on the three items of alignment, load in tempo in that order, you'll realize how it changes the quality of the movement. And that's what we're looking for. So when we see that in a, for example, when you were doing the, um, uh, coming up from this position and trying to really get that pelvis up into the position, you know, how hard was it to get that straight line or the bridge and then being sensitive to the other people around you in the class. So even if you're watching from plot is anytime land and you're all by yourself in the house, you're watching the, the, this becomes your reference. This is what you reference off of.

So you want to have the same timing as what's going on in the class. As a teacher's teaching, you want to have the same energy level almost as what you're seeing with the people in the class, the same direction, the hands and the arms. And you'll notice that when we pair it up, a lot of truth comes out when you pair up because you think you're doing something, that you're staying right on your central access as you're rotating and you realize you're coming away over to the side or you're leaning and those kinds of things. And so it's a good way to get a reference. And that's why we always encourage you that are doing the training at home to make sure that you'd go to a professional. Um, it might only be once a month. That's all you can afford and once every couple months.

But getting that feedback is so crucial to being able to really focus on alignment and how to gauge yourself on how much load should you really be doing and what classes are appropriate for you at this stage of your training or conditioning. So we hope that this just brings a little bit of some common sense to our training and keeping it simple, but understanding how important that central axis and alignment is. And we've talked about alignment being that vertical axis, the body parts coming close to the central axis. And then sending that direction, right? So we're sending in the direction and we're trying to keep the space and the energy, and that's what we played with a theraband.

The same way you can sort of feel that between yourselves, you can also feel it inside yourself. So focusing on what we feel inside our body and having that increased awareness makes us all worthwhile. So if they enjoyed some of the tips and some of the ideas and you can apply them in your other classes that you're taking applies anytime or anywhere else in the plotters world. And look forward to seeing you again on plies anytime.