A New World
If there was a world you had never been to, and it was safe. Would you travel there?
And if in that world there were answers to questions you have, and it was safe to investigate it, would you travel there?
This is a concept I’ve been playing with for a while. How do we go somewhere new without really leaving where we are? After all, most of us are comfortable where we are, yet at the same time displeased with how some things are in our life. How can we get the answers we want if we don’t understand the territory from which these questions arise? What is the benefit of traveling to an unknown land? It’s a risk! I could fall, I could break, I could die. This world I have never explored…it is a stranger to me. And it threatens all that I am today. Traveling there could ruin me, or maybe, it could rebuild me…?
The world is your body. The territory is your anatomy. The language we speak here is biomechanics.
Etched Into Our DNA
Too often, we are disempowered, not deliberately, but by societal circumstances. We are limited by our environments and our physical growth is what suffers. Maybe we didn’t grow up seeing expressive males or powerful women, and so we don’t understand masculine expression of the hips or feminine expressions through the shoulders. All of these family archetypes are etched into our psyches and brains! We pick up on our parents’ postures, habits, ways of coping and we mimic them without even realizing. Basically, we can unconsciously lose or gain patterns in our body based on our environments and upbringing.
On top of that, the business of selling fitness and “health” has become about burning calories, moving fast, and going hard (the “more is better” mentality). Modern day marketing peddles vanity, sex appeal, and looking good naked. Being healthy is equated to looking good naked (it doesn’t make sense!). Our western model for healing the body has become isolated, ignorant of the body’s complexities. We have begun to prioritize quantity of movement over quality of movement. The surgeon believes that to cut is to cure. The yogi thinks to stretch is to alleviate. The trainer thinks heavier weights are the answer.
And maybe all of these things are right, but then again, maybe they’re not. Maybe it has nothing to do with stretching, or strengthening, or cutting. Maybe there’s more to the body than meets the eye. Is this so far fetched?
HEALTH, The Future Of Fitness
What if the answer lied in breathing and tissue conditioning? What if it was as simple as moving yourself in various planes of motion, at different speeds, and in different environments? Imagine if all of your training and exercising could be amplified by adding some intentional joint motions to your daily practice? What if you prioritized posture, alignment, and spinal integrity? Would you feel better? Would you perform as well? What if instead we focused on health of the joints and quality of the movement? I suspect we’d see happier bodies, ones with more adaptability and options available to them. We would have bodies that could break free of unconscious conditioning and inefficient postural habits.
Translation, access to more patterns and shapes.
This world, your body, can teach you all about yourself, and help navigate you on a path toward health. When you listen to your body, and learn about your anatomy, you start to peel back layers of behaviors, emotions, reactions, psyches subconsciously and unconsciously wired into you being.
You live with a posteriorly tilted pelvis, and compressed lumbar spine. Have you ever experienced an anterior tilt or what it means to decompress your spine? Your “frozen shoulder” is actually just a gleno-humeral joint that is stuck in elevation, protraction, and has an upwardly rotated scapula (the culprit is the hyper-tonicity and hypo-tonicity of certain muscle tissues). Your neck hurts because of a back problem, and your back problem is actually a breathing and diaphragm problem. Your knee pain has to do with pelvic floor stress, and your hip pain has everything to do with your medially rotated, laterally tilted, and anteriorly tilted femur (which is driven by the shift in your pelvis). I’m no expert, I’m just a teacher with hunches who studies biomechanics.
Teaching Your Brain: Neurological
Imagine if all you needed to do was unwind certain tissues, and wind up other tissues. What if the answers lied in doing less and creating new space to feel more. Your training might have more to do with cognitive training than physical training. Maybe your solution has more to do with low-frequency vibrations, instead of high-vibrational tones. Undoing the old and redoing the new.
Rebuilding your old body into a new body.
The brain is programmed to take the path of least resistance. It doesn’t like change, after all, in order to change it takes more work than to stay the same. Yet we also know about the brain’s resiliency due to its neuroplasticity. It has the ability to reshape itself, form new neural pathways (neurogenesis), create new synaptic responses, redefine pain and discomfort, organize thoughts, and so on. The brain has got to be conditioned and taught how to function in this new world you’re traveling to. Its old behaviors and ways of being have to only be reserved for survival, but otherwise suppressed so that new perspectives can be fully absorbed into the nervous system. The mind has got to be trained first and the body in tandem!
Your body holds tension, and it keeps you a prisoner in whatever shape it chooses. And inside of those positions are behaviors, feelings, and habits that may or may not serve you. You have feelings of anxiety, feelings of annoyance, obsessive and compulsive behaviors, angry and irrational reactions. It isn’t you though, it’s your body.
Imagine A New You
What if your body, your home, the only place you inhabit 24/7 already had all the answers? And all you had to do was explore this new world with willingness, consistency, and awareness.
Your growth lies just on the other side, beyond the ocean and over the hills. Your next level of possibility is only as far away as you choose to believe it is. Whether its performance, injury prevention, aesthetics, or daily functioning, your body can teach you and take you places you’ve never been.
Before you can change you have to speak biomechanics. Imagine if it were only that simple…I’m here to tell you, that it is.
A new world awaits.
