a moving target

 

A Good Reminder as you move forward:

It is exciting to know that as you move through this program and complete your 28-day plan, you are very likely moving better and more authentically than you have for a very long time – perhaps ever.

As someone who’s focused on aging well and extending your healthspan to be as long as possible – which includes moving well and becoming stronger – I believe that when you are MOVING WELL and authentically and practicing all of the skills you learn here consistently, you’ll soon feel better, be more confident, and ultimately enjoy life so much more! 

In other words, you’re going to love the way you feel and will want it to last, forever!

Put another way…

  • When the stabilizer muscles are doing their job stabilizing, and…
  • The prime movers are doing their job moving us, and…
  • Our joints are able to move freely through an appropriate range of motion, and…
  • When muscles are strong enough to resist and transfer the forces inherent in running and in other sports…

GREAT things can happen!

The main thing we need to remind ourselves of routinely as we move forward is this:

IT IS A MOVING TARGET.

What do I mean?  

  • If you love riding your bike, remember when you sit on the saddle for a while or even if you spend lots of time in a chair or at a desk, how you move and feel the next day, and the day after that, is likely to have changed. For example, your hips tighten and that tightness changes how your butt muscles function and also impacts your posture. 
  • As I mentioned, when you sit in your car or at your desk for hours on end, how you will move in the hours AFTER that marathon desk or driving session, changes.
  • Simply put, compensation (the recruitment of inappropriate muscles to perform a task, such as stabilizing your pelvis) patterns are easier to fall back into. 

Think of it this way: Imagine if you were to “lightly” sprain an ankle, or strain a muscle in your leg, your MOTOR CONTROL and STABILITY changes, very often far from the actual site of the injury or issue. You will move differently, in many ways, on the heels of what might “seem” like a very minor “tweak.” Again, compensation for that injured area, can turn your movement from authentic to dysfunctional, in one fell swoop.

  • If you were to exercise intensely and experience some post-exercise discomfort and soreness after that workout, the “pain” may impact how you move following that session.
  • Simply put, pain and injury CHANGE how we move. They alter MOTOR CONTROL, which is another way of saying your stability changes.

The bottom line, from one day to the next, life happens. We’re busy, we’re outdoors playing, or inside working, and as a result, we might not be moving in quite the same way as we did before. 

There is no guarantee that a neutral pelvis today, ensures you will have that same neutral pelvis, 1 week, month, or year from now.

In other words, and to summarize…most of us will never reach a point where we can say, “I move well now, so I don’t need to think about that anymore.”

The first and most important thing to do is to be AWARE. Good authentic movement is a moving target.

What to do?

Depending on what you are doing, how you are living, and what is happening in your training, you could be one step closer to injury than you might think, due to those potential changes.

If you “tweak” something, for whatever reason, accept that you ARE going to have to go back and RESET core stability and motor control.

The solution will be to TAKE IT BACK to the BASICS and reset authentic movement, such as:

  • Return to basic pelvic stability, abdominal bracing. Authentic movement happens first, with the most basic of movements.
  • Tadasana, aka Mountain Pose: Relearn and recommit to what it means to stand tall, neutralize the pelvis, and bring posture back into proper balance.
  • Wall Slides: Very few exercises can do a better job of resetting t-spine mobility, a neutral pelvis, posterior muscle strength and anterior muscle flexibility, and a basic squatting pattern.
  • Remember that you really have NOTHING from a training standpoint, IF YOU don’t have healthy muscle tissue. In other words, where it is painful to rub, massage, or touch an area of your body, could be an indication of tissue stress/trauma, and perhaps compensation. Take care of your soft tissue!