Move to Live Yoga and Boutique Fitness Studio

07/24/2023

Question for you to think about, NOT to share: When was the last time pain kept you from doing something you wanted to do? Being really honest with yourself, how much did you really miss the thing you did not do?

07/22/2023

I am "never" going to say don't lift weights or do other resistance training. However, anectdotally as a 60+ woman who has done resistance training since the early -mid 1970s as part of competitive swimming programs. I chose universal weight machine classes for school PE because it made me a faster swimmer and fit into my twice/day pool workout schedule the best. My commitment to a weight training and gym schedule ebbed and flowed through my adult years, but I always came back to it.

Now long post-menopausal I have seen clear evidence of muscle loss for quite a few years, but I am convinced that stronger quads, hamstrings, biceps, etc. are not what is most likely to help me avoid frailty as I age. Helpful yes, for sure, but is it balance, stability and proprioception that will help most, in my opinion. Bigger muscles won't make it easier to avoid falls if I have crappy balance, instability in my hips/knees/ankles or have to look down to see where I am placing my foot with each step.

Because I have been a fitness consumer my whole life, and a provider for some of it, I get marketed to A LOT. And I see a lot of marketing around the concepts in this Washington Post article. You know pictures of really old ladies doing various barbell lifts. Great. Nothing wrong with it.

But please, please, please spend at least as much time on balance, stability and proprooception as you do weight/resistance training, because without those, all the muscles you gain lifting are likely, e.g. to be crumpled on the floor at the bottom of the stairs with the rest of you because you missed a step and couldn't get your balance quickly.

Any type and amount of weight training works to build strength and mass, whether people lifted heavy weights or much lighter ones

07/20/2023

To build real stability and mobility you have to focus on it. Sadly, other movement practices effectively teach us how to work around our instability and lack of mobility by moving faster and/or moving differently. Our bodies are quite happy to move in the easiest way possible and that is often not an effective way. We need to be accountable to ourselves to accomplish these goals because it is unlikely to happen consistently in a group setting. No criticism of group classes, it is just not possible for an instructor to see, comment, and assist all those in the class. This is super detailed work.

Try this to work on stability and mobility: balance on one leg without collapsing into it. Lift up and out of the standing hip. You will likely immediately feel the extra effort of the lift. Then raise the knee on the other leg and rotate it in the hip socket. Don't cheat the movement. Read the captions on each picture- there are two that have effective cheats and one that actually helps my hip stability and mobility.

07/19/2023

Strength doesn't make our bodies stable.

07/18/2023

What to do in Vegas when it is 115 degrees out?
Hip work, of course, on my travel mat in my air conditioned room! Air travel and sitting all day at the conference would leave me hurting if I didn't. Some targeted stability and flexibility work and everything felt better!

07/04/2023

I realized I had a problem after the third leg (of four) of my cross-country bike ride. My pain was focused in my hips, primarily in my right hip. I was lucky as it clearly could have been in my back and knees as well. In addition to cycling, I had been doing yoga, spinning and CrossFit for years. Few people would have described me as being weak or tight. But no one- including me- saw all the places where these weaknesses were lurking because I had become -over many, many years - very good at compensating. I finally started to see it in March 2022 when I was riding the Natchez Trace (440 miles from Natchez, MS to Nashville, TN) and one of the leaders was a professional cycling coach. He came up beside me on a climb and asked me "why do you collapse through your core when you climb?" I didn't know I did. I had the leg power to climb without my core and so I did. It was less efficient and poor biomechanics, but it "worked" so well I didn't even realize that is what I was doing. After completing the TransAm bike ride in October 2022, I was unable to ride. I was unable to do most workouts that had been my staples. I couldn't sit, including driving, without pain. Over the course of several months, I went to see 2 orthopedic surgeons, got physical therapy, and read a lot.

What was super-interesting to me was that riding my horse was not painful. Even though it was primarily sitting, the angle of my legs in my hip socket was totally different than any other sitting, and that started me on a new way of thinking. That path has reduced my pain to almost zero and I have better balance than I have had since I was a kid.

07/03/2023

Here is a short sequence to, again, isolate the movement of the leg in the hip socket and not more of the body get involved.

Warm up with a couple of cat/cows, making sure to keep your sternum parallel to the floor, not flaring in either position or in the transitions.

Let me know how it goes!

07/02/2023

Many of us have places in our body where we are locked up, where we can't/don't move parts of ourselves independently - for example, we have trouble twisting so that our shoulders are facing in one direction and our hips in another. If you struggle with twists, that is a great place to start and let me know if you want some suggestions about a variety of twists that can be incorporated into your daily routine in just a minute or two.

In this video, we start from a reclining twist and that becomes the focus for moving our legs independent of each other. One leg is unmoving while the other rotates in the hip socket while twisting. Start with very small circles and only let the movement get bigger when your pelvis is stable in the smaller ones.

Things to note:
--don't collapse your lower back at the start or when you twist. There should be room for one hand between your back and the floor. If your back is pressed onto the floor it is hyper extended and your deep core cannot fully engage. We want it active.
--don't let your ribs pop up to help facilitate the movement.
-- if you find your pelvis is rocking or wobbling, it is just a sign that the movement is one you need in order to be able to find stability. That is really good information.
--you may feel odd sensations, pops and thunks are common as your leg rotates around in the socket. It is normal.

06/26/2023

This weekend, I volunteered as ring crew at a working equitation horse show. I learned a lot about the discipline, which I am learning with Roði, but I also was on my feet, lifting and moving stuff around and walking all day for two days back-to-back. I would have been in a lot of pain a few months ago. I would have been feeling old and tired. My hips would have been screaming at me, my back would have had a few harsh things to say and my legs would have ached. Those feelings, ached and pains are what led me on this path of changing my movement mechanics. They led me to focus on waking up those long dormant muscles that had been overpowered by the bigger and stronger ones that, simply were not designed for the job I was asking them to do. After a very full weekend, and seeing just how far I have come, it is back to the mat for me! I do not want to lose all the progress I have made! I do not want to go back to that place where it was all falling apart! Onward!

06/22/2023

Goals:
1) stability in mobility, and
2)movement with stability

06/20/2023

Here is a video in which you can see how much more wobbly I am on my right (dominant/mobilility) leg than on my left (non-dominant/stability) leg. This is a great little practice that doesn't take very long at all.

I use my hands to monitor whether each side is staying the same length. You can see that when I am standing on my right leg, I lean more and collapse more on that side. That is my body wanting to "cheat" in the ways it has in the past. That hip is not used to providing stability. And it would prefer the easy way. When we isolate and focus on one movement in one joint, it gives us the opportunity to really explore what our body does easily, habitually, only with great effort, etc. That is much harder to do when lots of things are happening. So give this a try and see what is the same on both sides, what is different, what is harder on one side than the other and what is easier. And be sure to feel your leg rotate all around the hip socket. Use all the space. Unstick any stuck places by moving back and forth in little bits there and then resuming the bigger movements.

Also, I have been told I should smile more in these pictures. Apparently, I cannot coordinate both smiling AND moving. Pretend I am smiling please. I am really happy to be able to move in my hips like this again. It has been a very long time. I am just not able to smile. 🤷🏼

06/18/2023

Most of us realize that balance it critical, especially as we age. I am going to post some little balance sequences that are also important for hip stability/mobility, but first...

In yoga classes we iften talk about each side being different in various poses. For example, triangle may be easier with one leg forward than the other. We look at that with curiosity not a desire to "fix" it or change anything, just notice it. I agree with the curiosity part. But what happens if we could do something to make the more challenging, or stuck, or wobbly, or tight side less challenging, stuck, wobbly, or tight? If we notice and keep the same movement patterns they often get more ingrained, not less. What if we used that curiosity we nurture to loop deeply at the movement and work towards making both sides something approaching the same? When we are talking about balance, I think that is critical.

I have struggled to balance on my right side for years. I broke my right big toe in 2017 and it is often still painful. I thought that was "the" reason. I am also right-side dominant, so my thinking was that my stronger side was also my injured side, so I was basically screwed. I was recently talking to Meg Parkinson who is an equestrian coach, and she told me something that was an enormous 💡 moment in how I think about the two sides of my body and how to integrate them into a stronger, more stable whole.

She asked me to think about kicking a ball. Being right dominant, I would use my left leg to support my body and its movement while my right leg swung and (hopefully) kicked the ball, mangled toe and all. Same with my hands. When I write on paper my left hand stabilizes the sheet of paper and my right hand moves the pen around to write.

My balance wasnt worse on my right side just because of my toe injury, it was worse because in the normal course of life and movement its role was to do the movement, not to be the stabilizer. It was not up for the task. Conversely, my left side is generally less coordinated because it hasn't been expected to do that quality motor work. It holds everything together for the right side to do its job.

Our dominant side is generally better at mobility and dexterity.

Our non-dominant side is generally better at stability.

As with all things, we individuals are different, and these are not rules, but general principles.

But, generally, if we want to be more mobility, dexterity, and stability, we need to ask our dominant side to be still and strong in that stillness, while asking our non-doninant side to move independently and in isolation. So that is our next step.

Onward!