Wow – days sneak by, don’t they. I was out of town, but want to catch us up on Katy Bowman’s Walking Advent.
Day 3: from Katy’s blog:
Walking provides many different “movement nutrients” but not all walking is equal, meaning the “nutrients from walking” depends on how you do it (joint positions used, speed, terrain, etc.).
The natural walking speed for a shod, healthy American adult walking over flat and level ground is about 2.8 miles per hour (Willis et al). However, in order to invoke walking’s fitness benefits (which are different than other benefits created from walking in other ways), you need to be walking at least 100 steps-per-minute.
The idea for today is to get a baseline – at what speed to you typically walk and, same question on a one-mile course. Walking fast is not the point, of course, but it is one of the factors in getting all the nutrients of walking that are available to us. If we have a baseline, we can slowly improve our time without resorting to bad alignment habits.
Katy Bowman continues her 24 days of walking tidbits for this Advent season.
In gait analysis there are two points of foot contact analyzed during landing—heel strike and foot flat (where the ball of the foot comes down to the ground), but really there are 17 joints between “heel strike” and “foot flat,” that should articulate to bring the foot closer to the floor. Today I want you to use them.
It’s Advent Season – and it’s gorgeous outside. Okay, it’s cold, but it’s clear and the mountains are beautiful. So I’m going to walk every day for Advent, and I’m going to work on helping my body be prepared for walking.
Get out and wish a tree Happy Advent!
Walking is truly what our bodies are best designed to do – to look for food, to find shelter, or in today’s day and age, get to our jobs, visit our friends, and keep our bodies supple and blood flowing. We NEED to walk – it’s not optional if we want optimal health.
Katy Bowman, my teacher and inspiration, is going to post some walking tidbits on her Facebook Page every day of Advent, so I’m going to link to them here. Katy is an expert in biomechanics and has a lot to say about how the way we walk either helps or hinders us. So let’s get out walking – but let’s ALSO learn more about the best ways to do it.
What? You don’t have a best foot? They’re both bad apples? You are not alone; many of us have problems with our feet. Actually, even those of us who don’t have foot pain probably have less than ideal foot flexibility and health. Consider this: your feet could be nearly as dextrous as your hands after all, your feet contain 25% of your body’s bones and muscles. Wow!
Well, we’re going to work with feet and lower legs this next Wednesday from 10-11 in class at Prosper Bodyworks, 213 Decatur Street.
In the meanwhile, I have two blogs I’d like to share from other folks.
One is from my friend Jennifer over at The Resilient Body. I love her blog, and she recently posted on Minimalist shoes. Check it out here.
Like Jennifer says, we can’t just go from wearing high heeled shoes or super ‘supportive’ shoes to minimalist shoes without preparing our feet and legs first – it can cause all manner of problems from the feet to the knees to the hips. That’s why we’re going to focus on increasing the strength and flexibility of the feet.
Another great post about foot health is by Katy Bowman, who uses Barbie in this post as the poster child for short calf muscles. Check it out here.
Katy Bowman has written a new book, Move Your DNA, which comes out this September. Katy is the developer of Restorative Exercise™ and everything she does is at least in some part education, even the promo video below.
Watching this movie will give you a great idea of why she developed Restorative Exercise™ as well as its aims. Find out why we need to move more, and move more naturally! I know that since finding Katy, my health has improved, so much so, I decided to become a Certified Restorative Exercise™ Specialist.
I’m excited to read more from Katy. She’s super knowledgable, and well, she’s also a hoot.
Hello everyone! It is a new quarter at Prosper Bodyworks where I teach my Restorative Exercise™ foundations class, and that means that the class date has changed from Friday to Wednesday. This means:
10-11 a.m. Wednesdays, Prosper Bodyworks, 213 Decatur Street, Port Townsend
is where you’ll find me every week. I hope to see you there!
I will be teaching a workshop in early Fall on how you can improve your digestive health through movement. Watch for it in early September.
Lastly, I’ve decided to include an instructional video with private sessions, so that clients can easily do their routine at home in a class-like atmosphere, where I cue them throughout on the alignment markers they have just learned – stretching smart and safe. If you were thinking of signing up for an initial private session, feel free to contact me and find out more.
Colossal, as usual, shared some art this week that depicts the human body in an amazing way. Check it out:
“Eye Heart Spleen is a body of work by English artist Camila Carlow, 13 photographs representing human organs sculpted out of wild plants and weeds foraged in Bristol. The plants were collected and assembled early in the day, so as to photograph them in the best possible light, and to keep them from wilting. This work invites the viewer to regard our vital structures as beautiful living organisms, and to contemplate the miraculous work taking place inside our bodies, even in this very moment.” (from SweetStation.)
This video shows a man who can utilize his finger and forearm muscles in ways most of us cannot, not to mention he uses it for dancing, which is amazing.
I can imagine if I had half that control in half my body, I could take over the universe! Don’t worry, I’d be a benevolent ruler. We would all practice these finger moves, and we could all have more control over our own universes. Check it out. And below that is a funny tutorial for tutting (and finger tutting). Fun.
I’m not with Thomas Edison when he said that the chief function of the body is to carry the brain around. But I am a bit of a brainaholic.
I love sitting around talking about philosophy and theology and Carl Jung and the humanities. When I go to the cinema I find myself analyzing the film instead of merely enjoying it, or actually enjoying it most when I can analyze it. I’m not calling myself a brainiac – that’s different. I am addicted to contemplation, whether the subjects are ‘meaningful’ or ‘useful’ or, and certainly this is more often the case, not.
So imagine my surprise when I found out my brain – this thing I love to use so much – could not even do silly easy things like turn off its own this-or-that muscle (psoas, quadriceps, etc.) And that it could not turn on certain other muscles – like virtually any of them in my feet. Hey brain, what’s going on? Did I spend too much time debating Cartesian duality (by the way, never on the side of Descartes) to notice I’d let my brain and my body split from one another in a lot of ways, just through misuse? If I argue whole being rather than Edison’s split, how could I have let this happen?
Well frankly, in our world, it’s pretty easy. Not to give myself a pass, but when medicine excluded physics, big bad things got rolling. I mean really – we are all subject to the forces of the Universe (Newton’s laws, etc.), so dealing with our anatomy and physiology and health and well-being without taking those forces into consideration is complete insanity. It’s like the split between mind and body – the split between physics and our physical selves on this planet just does not hold water.
In the soon-to-be-revealed Case of the Tight Kneecaps the culprit was (and hint, this is the same bad guy who is behind virtually all of our health problems): lack of flow. In order for our muscles to move our brains have to send the order. Motor units on each muscle receive the order and contract or lengthen the muscle to get the action the brain requested. Messages flow through the nervous system from the brain to the motor units – and it’s all a form of electricity. Here’s the rub. Muscles that aren’t the right length, for example muscles that have shortened through passive postural things such as sitting all day (or thrusting our ribs or carrying our pelvis forward ad nauseum) or muscles that are misused (like quads that have been holding a person upright for 40 years when that’s the job of the hamstrings and glutes), they don’t conduct electricity very well.
It all started in elementary school when I was put at a desk, sitting down for six hours a day. And from there to junior high and high school and then work and then college and then work again. (In my college’s defense, we did not have desks, but sat on couches and the floor while we talked about useless things. Man, I miss college!) A lot of sitting, not enough movement, not enough flow, bad electricity conducting, and there you have it.
So how did I realize I could not even control my own body? It was last year when I went to a Restorative Exercise class and was asked to raise and lower my kneecaps. What now? Do what? Easy peasy man. And then, even though I knew what I was supposed to do, nothing happened. “Lower your kneecaps,” my brain spoke plainly and slowly into the microphone (I imagine my brain like the captain on the bridge of a submarine), only by the time the order got to the engine room, it must’ve been gobbledygook or the engineers were on lunch break or something. Kneecaps not moving. Breakdown in the chain of command, people. (I love submarine movies, including Operation Petticoat with Cary Grant.)
Of course, our kneecaps can’t drop down if we are holding our quadriceps tight, and that was just what I was doing, had been doing no doubt for the last 30 or 40 years. So rather than do it standing upright, I leaned much of my weight against a wall, my feet out in front of me, putting my legs at an angle away from my torso, and tried again. It’s easier without the quads loaded. And finally, after something like 10 minutes, I figured it out. They lowered. They raised. They lowered. Just like that, engineers back on duty, bras loaded into torpedo chutes and away! (No really, see Operation Petticoat if you haven’t.)
Or at least look at KatySays about knees (kneecap release is near the end):
I’ll blog more about brain/body connection soon, but for now, I’m going to go move my body around and see what else it can remember how to do.
kinect 