Online Classes: Who Knew They’d Work So Well?

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If you’d have told me even just a year ago that I’d be doing the bulk of my teaching online via Zoom, let alone having success with it, I’d have thought you were nuts. And yet, here we are coping with this new reality, however temporary, in the myriad unexpected ways in which we have ALL adapted our lives, and our livelihoods. And here I am teaching several hours a week on Zoom.

To be honest, teaching by way of a conferencing app was not a new idea to me. Just weeks before things shut down last spring I was discussing doing that very thing with a client who was already looking for ways to both help me open up business ortunities and help himself avoid having to fight traffic getting to our office every week. What has been unexpected, and pleasantly so I should add, is that I’m teaching remotely AND having a great deal of success doing it.

Helping more than one client out of chronic, stubborn back problems stands out for me as a shining example of what kind of success is possible working via Zoom and the degree to which my therapeutic skills have developed to allow such success. Sure, having the ability to see bodies up close and in person and to provide hands on guidance are notable and significant absences from my sessions, but their very absence requires that both my verbal cueing AND my clients’ attention be that much sharper and more focused. Thus the very disadvantages of using the app foster opportunities that lead to better than expected positive outcomes.

Without a doubt the most unexpected positive outcome I’ve experienced thus far working online is the success I’ve had teaching group classes via Zoom. This has been unexpected for a variety of reasons. For one, just the fact that I have no real ability to see what students are doing on the screen of my laptop when I have multiple images up seemed an immediate problem when I started. Second, the near total absence of any real interaction with my students left me to wonder how much of what was coming out of my mouth and through the internet was really reaching people. As a Tai Chi teacher friend of mine put it, there’s no “chi” coming from the students.

When I started teaching groups on Zoom, I felt awkward, isolated and uncertain. But gradually I became used to the format, regularly pushing the boundaries of what I would normally teach in my in person group classes and regularly receiving feedback that ranged from the very positive to the positively glowing. As I began to see that not only were students getting something out of the online classes but were in fact getting A LOT out of them, my confidence grew and I began to find teaching online not only doable but fun and rewarding. Now I can say that for myself and for many of my students these classes have been one of the unexpected silver linings of this pandemic.

When I first started the classes, I asked students not to invite their friends and family to join for fear that anyone unfamiliar with my approach would be overwhelmed in the classes and much more likely to get injured. I still have this concern, but I’ve had very few complaints about injuries, even among the handful of students who joined us that had not had much experience working with me in the past. As a result, like so many things over the past 8 months, I’ve rethought my earlier position and have decided it’s time open the classes up to more people.

In fact, with the feedback I’ve gotten over the past few months I feel it would be a missed opportunity not to give more students the chance to “attend” one or more of the 4 online classes I offer each week. So if you or someone you know would be interested in trying a class, I’d encourage you to contact me directly via email for details on how to join and to address any questions or concerns you have with me beforehand.

You can access my schedule HERE.

And you can find my contact info HERE.

I have had students from as far away as London, UK take my classes, but if you’re in a part of the world that makes it difficult or impossible to take my “live online” classes, I do have a library of recorded classes available.

I also have an on-demand course called DNS & YOGA INTRODUCTORY SERIES you can take with follow up classes available. This is a great option for anyone with little or know yoga experience looking for a way to get started. You can access the course HERE or contact me directly for more information.

One of these days this pandemic will be over and things will start getting back to normal. Before that happens I hope you’ll take the opportunity, if you haven’t already, to see why students taking my classes are offering so much praise. So feel free to get in touch and make arrangements to take a FREE CLASS with me soon.

In the meantime, I look forward to “seeing you” in class!

DNS & YOGA 5 Class Intro Series – Digital Version NOW AVAILABLE!

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DNS & YOGA 5 CLASS INTRO SERIES –

NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE!

$108 – Buy Now!

  • The course is APPROPRIATE FOR BEGINNERS who are in reasonably good health.

  • This content of this course is intended to prepare a student of ANY LEVEL for practicing yoga in a way that is safe, effective and health promoting.

  • If you have concerns about whether the course is appropriate for you, PLEASE CONTACT ROBERT with your questions and concerns.

  • Anyone who pays the course fee is eligible for a discount on individual sessions (contacts me for details)

  • If you would like additional help during or after the course, I am available for one to one 30 or 60 minute sessions.

I’ve been teaching yoga now for over 25 years and have been studying and practicing yoga for closer to 30 years, and while I can’t claim to have made every mistake possible as a teacher and a student, I’ve certainly made my fair share. As one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had the privilege to study with, the late Swami Dayananda would say, when we make a mistake the mature response is to ask ourselves “what can I learn from this?”

Learning from mistakes

Answering that question in most circumstances is never easy, but in yoga it can be particularly hard. Yoga is challenging and complicated, and there are very few teachers who have the special combination of knowledge, experience, insight and skill to effectively guide students in the right direction. Thus a common theme during my tenure as a yoga student and teacher has been a failure to understand what I should learn from my mistakes, and therefore a tendency to keep making them.

I spent many years in a fairly advanced yoga class with a teacher who does have that special combination of abilities, but even in that environment I saw students who’d been practicing for decades making mistakes that I’d been making and that I understood needed to be corrected. Ultimately I realized that I needed to take a new approach to yoga if I was going to learn the lessons I needed to learn and find my way forward.

When I began studying bio-mechanical alignment I realized something very important about yoga. When we as students start learning yoga, typically in a group class with an instructor whose abilities are unknown to us, we bring all of our bad habits into the class. It’s up to the teacher to reveal these habits and provide us with alternatives to them. It turns out that very few teachers are skilled at doing this, not because they don’t have the interest but because they typically don’t have the right training.

DNS & Yoga

Upon discovering Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS) I realized I’d found a methodology that fit yoga like a glove. The early developmental movement patterns that DNS employs through specific postures and movements are not new to us. The patterns that DNS helps to reawaken in us have, for the majority of us, always been there. This means that the changes we seek in our breath, body and mind are to a great extent a revealing of what’s already there and don’t require us to learn something completely new.

Over the past few years I have been tirelessly developing an approach to yoga that is fresh and exciting while rooted in a place fundamental to who we are as humans living in the world. Every day I find myself not so much learning something new but finally grasping postures and principles that I’ve had bits and pieces for a long time but was missing the key piece I’d needed for the unifying whole.

Learning DNS while relearning yoga has been endlessly engaging and enlightening for me as a student and as a teacher, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to share it with you. This course is a culmination of decades of study and work. I hope you will consider taking it and recommending it to your friends and family.

 

What Are You Training For?

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by Robert Brook

To succeed with any training program I need to clearly define the goals of my training. If for instance I am training to run a marathon, then I can gauge the success of my training approach on whether I am increasing the distance I can run while decreasing the average time it takes me to run each mile. These clear goals allow me to track my progress and assess the efficacy of my training approach, perhaps leading to changes or modifications to my training to achieve my goals more effectively.

The goals of your average “work out” or what we might referent to as “self guided training” are often much less specific. I might spend time at the gym, go out running or attend my local yoga class because I want to “get cardio,” “get stronger”, or “be more flexible.” For some of us the goal might be as basic as “to exercise” or “to stay in shape.” And while there’s nothing wrong with the desire to simply “stay in shape,” my experience has taught me that this type of self guided training can result in…

putting our time and effort into training ourselves to perform “better” in ways that we may not intend or in some cases, even want.

To understand the reasons for this, it helps to understand what I mean by “training.” Training is any activity or series of activities we undertake to learn a particular skill and/or to prepare ourselves to perform well in either the activity we are training with, or in some other related activity. If I am training to be a better runner, clearly part of my training program should be to run, but I may also include other activities in my training such as jumping rope or stretching.

Training is typically done with intention, but it isn’t always. In fact, many of the habits we’ve manifested that impact our health negatively, such as the habit of internally rotating the hips – a major contributor to the development of hip and knee arthritis, are habits that we’ve inadvertently “trained” ourselves to do. Let’s say my workout is to go running for cardio, and when I run my hips internally rotate. This means my knees will roll in when I run, and if I keep running this way I may in fact succeed in getting cardiovascular exercises, but I will also speed the degradation of my knee joints.

With this approach to training, regardless of whether I intend it or not, I am effectively training knee damage, and the better I get at running, the faster I’ll wear out my knees doing it!

One of the biggest challenges of my work is not so much figuring out what movements or postures will help my clients improve their function and health, but rather just getting them into the habit of doing them regularly. Typically the obstacles to establishing a regular movement program are habits that have been established through years of training ourselves to do them. This type of habit can be mental, physical or a combination of the two.

A while back I started working with a new client who had come to me with a back problem. During a session I introduced some appropriate movements and postures to her, and our work together seemed to be going fairly well. But afterwards, when we were looking at our respective calendars to schedule a follow up, a red flag appeared – she said she didn’t want to schedule anything in the morning, not because she was physically unavailable, but because she had a daily routine of taking her time, drinking her coffee and cozying up with the newspaper, and she didn’t want to plan anything that interfered with that.

I had never had anyone tell me something like this before, and I suppose I should have been grateful for her candidness. No doubt all of us have routines that we cherish and are loathe to disrupt, but while I completely understood and respected the priorities she’d set for herself, I also understood that the impulses behind them were going to be very much at odds with the training that I was going to recommend for her.

She had trained herself to establish a routine that was so important as to make necessary changes impossible.

Sure she could do her movements in the afternoon, but I’d been here before, and I knew the mental habits I was up against with her would make progress difficult to attain. Sure enough our working relationship was very short lived.

While the mental habits that we’ve trained and established can be a major obstacle to success in introducing and training something new, physical habits can be just as big an obstacle. The best example with this might be the way we walk. Our gait mechanics are a complex series of movements that happen so quickly and more often than not, unconsciously, that any dysfunctional habits we have while walking are a significant challenge to correct.

The reason being that every time we walk we are reinforcing and re-training the dysfunctional habit.

A simpler example is squatting. Invariably when I work with a client who has knee pain and I look at their squatting mechanics, they will overload their knee joints and report pain with this activity. Squatting in some form or another is an activity we do over and over, all day long. If our squatting mechanics are flawed the stress to our joints due to poor mechanics will have a significant impact on the health of the knees and sometimes other joints such as the hips and the spine. Clients who squat by overloading their knees, which is most of them, are either unaware that they are overloading their knees or that there is any alternative to doing so.

Squatting for these clients is essentially “training knee pain,” and therefore if they are not trained to squat differently the habits they have trained will persist until they simply cannot squat anymore because of the pain.

What makes Personal Alignment Training different from many other training programs is the goal health and function over performance. This means that when you do a Personal Alignment Training session the goal of each session, primarily, is to improve your overall health and function. And while you will also get stronger, more flexible, more mobile and more skilled at the movements you are training, will never achieve these at the expense of your joint health or your health in general.

Personal Alignment Training sessions are training to be better at living a healthy human life.

Another important feature of Personal Alignment Training is that, at its most basic, it is training human movement. It may sound strange that we’re in the business of training people to move like a human being, but it turns out that this is exactly what works from a health and longevity standpoint.

We’re designed to move and to move in specific ways, and when we do move in these specific ways things tend to go well for us health wise.

When we don’t, well, things tend to go as they go for the many of us who have manifested movement based conditions such as chronic back pain or joint degeneration.

So the next time you have a few extra minutes, take the time to consider your exercise habits carefully by asking yourself the question – “WHAT AM I TRAINING FOR?” Then think about whether the time and energy you are putting into your training is really serving your goals or if it is, as is often the case, working against them. If you discover that your current training is in line with what your long term goals, then continue with that training for as long as that’s the case. If you discover a mismatch, consider changing your training program until it better aligns with what you’re after.

You might also consider scheduling a Personal Alignment Training session to help you!

 

 

 

Your Diaphragm is a Back Muscle!

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by Tiffany Turley

When you think of your diaphragm you probably think of it as something that helps you breath and not much more than that. But your diaphragm is actually one of your major back muscles! Because of its attachments to the spine, ribs and sternum, the diaphragm is integral in supporting the joints and disks of the back and in keeping your spinal column upright and stable.

How do we keep this muscle strong and healthy? Diaphragmatic breathing. When we inhale and the diaphragm contracts, it moves downwards, not upwards like we might imagine. This downward movement creates an expansion of the lower ribs, waist, lower back and front of abdomen. This expansion is caused by pressure that builds with the downward movement of the diaphragm in the abdominal cavity called intra-abdominal pressure (IAP).

Optimal IAP causes a relatively even, 360 degree expansion of the abdominal cavity. To visualize this, imagine a circle expanding evenly into an even larger circle. The inner circle is the abdominal cavity while the outer circle is abdominal wall. The optimal expansion of IAP sends a signal to abdominal wall, formed by the trunk muscles including many of the abdominal muscles, to gently contract against this pressure. When these muscles respond appropriately to IAP, the abdominal muscles expand (stretch) and contract (resist) at once. This response maintains the pressure so that your organs, joints and disks are protected.

A healthy back is one that is upright without excessive lordosis (arching in) or kyphosis (rounding out). When we consider the essential role of the diaphragm in developing and maintaining a healthy spine, it is abundantly clear that diaphragmatic breathing is a necessity for spinal health.

So why is it that so many adults don’t breath diaphragmatically? As adults we may adopt one of several different dysfunctional breathing patterns. This is mainly due to 3 factors:

1) Cultural ideas about posture and breathing:

It’s common for many of us to have been exposed to certain ideas and expectations regarding our posture. We may have been told we need to “stand up straight” or “open up our chest.” Dysfunctional habits such as pulling our shoulders back or taking deep chest breaths to improve our posture often manifest as a result of misunderstandings about how and why to improve posture, and these habits often lead to chronic chest breathing rather than diaphragmatic breathing.

2) Breathing in and out of our mouth

When we mouth breath, the air is not pulled down as deeply into the lungs because the diaphragm does not fully contract. Mouth breathing is not only shallow breathing, it also recruits the upper back and neck muscles and this can, over time, contribute to chronic tension in the neck and shoulders.

3) Tightening the abdomen to “flatten the stomach” and brace the lower back.

For those with lower back pain, tightening the rectus abdominus, or our main abdominal “tucking muscle,” might be relieving, temporarily. But remember, in order for you diaphragm to support your back you need to have the appropriate amount of IAP. For the right amount of IAP, your abs need to need to be able to expand on inhalation. Also remember that your diaphragm needs to be able to move downward to create IAP, and it can’t do that if your abs are held tight. “Sucking it in” creates a dysfunctional tension that will only make your back tighter and weaker with time.

So how do you strengthen your diaphragm in a way that is good for your back? Just like with any other muscle it takes practice to re-learn how to use the diaphragm properly and time devoted daily to challenging it and making it capable of responding when called upon.

A very basic posture called “3 Months Supine” is a great way to start improving the function of your diaphragm and restore your abdominal responsiveness. Watch the video below for some simple cues on how to perform this very powerful and fundamental posture.

Diaphragmatic breathing will change your life. It has changed mine.

For more instructional videos and supporting content, follow us on Instagram at robertbrookyoga.

Managing Seasonal Changes with the Ayurvedic Daily Routine

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I was speaking with a client a couple of weeks ago who remarked on how dramatically the weather had changed. “This morning it was 42′ in Mill Valley and last week it was 98′!” This got me thinking about the various changes that happen with the start of the fall season and how they affect our lifestyle going forward toward winter.

The change in temperature is significant. Fall is the season of vata dosha, and this wind energy is increased by changes of any kind, particularly toward cooler temperatures. When the temperature drops. it can increase vata in us both physically and mentally and an awareness of this can help up manage these affects better. Cooler weather also tends to lower our agni (digestive fire) and this can sometimes reduce the efficacy of our digestive system and lead to vata type digestive issues such as gas & bloating or constipation.

When vata is in balance it manifests as freedom and ease of movement, sufficiency of active and creative energy, comortable digestive health and an overall sense of enthusiasm and wellness while still enjoying sound sleep. When out of balance – typically when vata is too high, it can lead to more pain, less stability, digestive inconsistency, difficulty managing stress and sleep disturbance.

In California where early fall lands during our driest time of year, managing vata is even more crucial due the fact that this dryness, combined with cooler temperatures, tends to increase vata even more. When considering how to manage vata now or at any time during the year, it is therefore important to consider these two major causes of increased vata – cooler temperatures and increased dryness. When we understand that these two environmental factors are going to push vata dosha up, then we can also understand how to mitigate the impact of these factors with choices and actions that push them down – namely increasing moisture and warmth.

To balance vata dosta, regularity and routine are essential

But when the season is changing, that change itself can have a significant impact on the balance of vata dosha. Vata is increased by changes of any kind, and it is balanced by regularity and routine. So another way we can think about balancing vata dosha, at the change of seasons or really any time of the year, is moving steadily toward establishing helpful and consistent routines.

Ancient Ayurvedic texts outline a daily routine appropriate for anyone with any constitution called Dhinacharya. The texts describe what each of us can endeavor to do each day to help keep our doshas in balance, our bodies moving freely and our digestive system operating efficiently.

The ayurvedic daily routine

What I love about the ayurvedic daily routine is that it places the activities that we are already doing every day without fail alongside those that either we’d like to be doing but may not yet have worked into our schedule, or perhaps have never even thought of. For example, we already brush our teeth every morning, (presumably), but does each of us clean our tongues? None of us questions the logic of cleaning our teeth every day, but cleaning the tongue using a spoon or a tongue scraper is much less common and has some important benefits that far outweigh the extra 10 seconds it takes to do it.

Tongue scraping can help improve our sense of taste, reduce bad breath, improve dental health, and help stimulate our digestive system. Scraping the tongue is also a way to self monitor our health as it gives us the opportunity to look at our tongue coating and color. If our tongue coating is heavier than usual, for instance, it can indicate a build up of toxicity in the digestive system and this can serve an an early warning to us to take steps to improve our agni and lighten our diet.

Most of us know that regular exercise is a good idea and that at Alignment Lab we are advocates of daily movement. It turns out that just like bathing every day, the ayurvedic texts recommend exercising daily, before breakfast. This is a habit I adopted decades ago when I started doing yoga and one that I continue to this day. If you are struggling to incorporate a regular movement activity into your life, try thinking of it as something as fundamental as bathing every day. Then try doing some amount of movement, however little, every day in the morning, before the inevitable demands of the day derail your best intentions.

A couple of years after I graduated from college when I was working in a restaurant in Berkeley, I was talking with the owner who liked to give advice. Somehow the conversation led to a discussion of bowel movements. He was the first person who ever told me that it was important to have a BM first thing in the morning every day, and he advised me that drinking a glass of warm water first thing in the morning would help to establish and continue the habit. I literally started doing it the very next day and sure enough, I started having regular morning BM’s.

Years later when I learned about the ayurvedic daily routine, I learned that the ancient texts recommend drinking a glass or warm or room temperature water first thing in the morning, Also recommend – evacuating the bowels each morning. I guess my employer at the restaurant was on to something!

As one of our readers you’re probably aware that Alignment Lab offers a cleanse program, typically but not limited to the spring. One of the activities we recommend to our cleanse participants is a daily self massage with warm oil. This is one of the features of the cleanse that I generally get the most positive feedback on. Clients love the way a week or two of applying oil to the head and body makes their skin feel!

It turns out, daily self oil massage is also one of the ayurvedic daily routines, and one that is particularly appropriate for the fall season. Again, vata goes up with dryness and coolness. Applying a constitutionally appropriate type of warm oil to our skin, rubbing it in to facilitate absorption and strengthen the tissue, then relaxing and giving it time to soak in is about as ideal an activity for balancing vata as I can think of. It’s also a great way to preserve the integrity and quality of our skin going forward.

Managing fall seasonal allergies

Another challenge some of us face during the fall season is seasonal allergies. I’ve addressed this topic in a previous post, but I want to reiterate that managing allergies of this type is much easier if you understand the mechanism at work. We’re all exposed to airborne irritants that we have little or no ability to avoid. We may very well have sensitivities to some of these irritants, but we are equipped with tools to help us manage them.

Our nasal and sinus passages have hairs and moist tissue for helping to filter airborne particles before we before we breath them into our lungs, and these tissues also help hydrate and warm the air that we do breath in. Thus our body has a natural defense mechanism against airborne irritants in the form of this filtration system. But if our nasal and sinus passages dry out, airborne particles are not filtered as well and we are more susceptible to them. Dryness also weakens the nasal and sinus tissue and makes it more prone to irritation and reactivity.

Ayurveda and allopathy both recommend using a saline rinse to help keep our sinus passages clear and hydrated, but ayurveda adds a second step not commonly recommended in allopathy in which oil is applied to the sinus passages. The oil, typically sesame oil or a medicated oil with a sesame base, helps to build the quality of the nasal and sinus tissue and improve its ability to filter and resist irritation. At Alignment Lab we often recommend Banyan Botanicals Nasya Oil to our clients for this purpose.

The daily application of oil to the nose is also another of the ayurveda daily routines and it is one that highly recommend, especially in fall and winter. The regular application of oil will also help facilitate the removal of built up toxicity in the nasal and sinus passages, further improving their health and function.

There are many versions of the ayurvedic daily routine

Online searches will yield several versions of the ayurvedic daily routine, so feel free to take a look and expand on what you’ve learned from this article. Personally I’m a fan of Vasant Lad and The Ayurvedic Institute for their wealth of experience and resources. You can read their version of the ayurvedic daily routine here.

It’s likely not every one of the ayurvedic daily routines will speak to you, and if you’re anything like me you may find yourself wondering how you can follow all of the recommendations and still hold down and job and have a life. But keep an open mind. Even adding one or two of these activities to your day can be impactful and in some cases, even life changing.

 

 

Success in Yoga: Applying DNS Principles to Classical Yoga Postures For Better Asana

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As I continue to explore the various ways that Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS) informs my movement and that of my clients, I continue to be impressed with how well DNS complements my practice and my teaching of yogasana (yoga postures). Classical yogasana are varied and complex, but they are always informed by the movement skills we bring to them. If those skills are limited or flawed in some way, so too will the be postures. When our movement skills are intelligent and aware those qualities will also be expressed in our asana and they will help us to bring our postures to life.

Thus far, after more than 25 years of study and practice, I have not yet found an approach to yoga that complements my practice and my teaching and that facilitates deeper knowledge of the subject the way that DNS has, and there’s every indication that will continue. As my knowledge and understanding of alignment, movement and asana grows I hope to share more of what I learn with you in the form of the posts and videos that Tiffany and I are creating and making available here on our website.

The following video shows part of sequence I’ve been working on for a while now and one I’ve begun to share with many of you in our sessions. If you are unfamiliar with the content, this video is by no means a substitute for skilled instruction. If you wish to explore the postures demonstrated in the video, I would caution you only to do so if you’re already familiar with these postures and to avoid continuing them if you experience any pain or are recovering from an injury that would make such postures inappropriate. Of course feel free to contact me for help or advice!

A Deeper Look at Pelvic Floor Strength and How to Build It – Part 1

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A quick online search for “strengthen the pelvic floor” reveals a lot about how many of us view the pelvic floor and its role in our health and function. There are any number of recommended exercises for the pelvic floor, some that include products to assist you, and with most advocating an approach that involves isolating the contraction of the pelvic floor muscles. This approach can be helpful for building some basic awareness of the pelvic floor – an important component of developing pelvic floor strength. But this approach is also limited in that it fails to address the broader and more essential role of the pelvic floor in facilitating alignment and functional movement.

The Pelvic Floor Does Not Work in Isolation

The pelvic floor muscles coordinate with several deep muscles in the trunk in order to stabilize the lower trunk and maintain the integrity of the pelvic organs, preserving continence and sexual function. These deep trunk muscles work synergistically with the pelvic floor and include the diaphragm, psoas, spinal muscles and the deep abdominal muscles. Collectively these muscles act as a flexible cylindrical, called the Thoraco-lumbar cylinder or TLC, with the pelvic floor forming the bottom of the cylinder. In addition to the muscles themselves we have a fascial layer that acts as a web-like connection between them. This facial layer interweaves the trunk and pelvic floor muscles and helps give the trunk and pelvis its shape and tone.

Diaphragmatic Breathing is Essential for Pelvic Floor Strength

This fascial connection between the trunk muscles and the pelvic floor assures no individual muscle will work properly unless there is appropriate movement and engagement in all of the muscles that form the cylinder. In other words, the pelvic floor muscles never contract in isolation, rather they co-contract in response to the movement of the diaphragm and the subsequent abdominal response needed to support the trunk. This means that in order to strengthen the pelvic floor we must breath diaphragmatically, and to maintain consistent optimal pelvic floor tone we must breath diaphragmatically throughout the day and especially during any exercise or activity.

The Role of Intra-abdominal Pressure

When we breath diaphragmatically, pressure is created inside the TLC which is similar to the pressure created inside a ballon filling with air. This pressure is called intra-abdominal pressure (IAP), and under ideal circumstances the muscles forming the TLC all respond to this pressure by contracting against it. This response should be relatively equal throughout the walls of the cylinder and serves to contain,  maintain and regulate the IAP. Maintaining IAP helps us avoid stress on the pelvic and abdominal organs, spinal muscles and vertebral joints. Thus the pelvic floor has the important role of regulating IAP by helping to maintain relatively constant control of the cylinder, and in this way the relative tone of the pelvic floor directly influences the strength and function of the whole lower trunk.

If we do not breath diaphragmatically then we do not create proper IAP, and without proper IAP there simply cannot be the coordinated contraction of all the muscles of the cylinder necessary for trunk stability. In other words, there will be no response in the pelvic floor muscles if we are not breathing correctly.

Picture this: upon inhalation the pelvic floor widens to support the downward pressure created by the diaphragm. Then upon exhalation the pelvic floor co-contracts with the diaphragm and moves slightly up into the pelvis while the diaphragm moves back up into the ribcage. This coordinated movement between diaphragm and pelvic floor has a gentle squeezing effect on the spinal column and disks, keeping them plumb and lengthening the spine.  This protects the joints of the spine from wear and tear and prevents damage to the disks.

Before beginning any pelvic floor specific strengthening exercises, diaphragmatic breathing with correct intra-abdominal pressure must be mastered!

For some people diaphragmatic breathing may be challenging at first, particularly if there is a a lot of tension in the trunk muscles. For others, years of chest breathing and/or shallow breathing can also make the trunk muscles weak and the back muscles too tight, preventing the alignment of the pelvis and ribcage necessary for diaphragmatic breathing to occur. Very often in these circumstances the pelvic floor muscles themselves are too tight, and this tension increases the tendency for pelvic floor disfunction.

Signs of and Contributors to Pelvic Floor Tension

Signs of a tight pelvic floor include lower back pain, incontinence issues, prostate and or bladder issues, prolapsed organs, and impairment of sexual function. Typically a tight pelvic floor is accompanied by certain muscular habits that manifest in conjunction with the pelvic floor tension. Habits that contribute to pelvic floor tension include clenching the lower glutes, tucking the pelvis, and sucking in the abdominal wall.

We live in a busy, stressful world and all of us are subject to potential stressors daily. An overactive stress response, either accompanying or even caused by long term habitual chest breathing is another important cause to be considered with pelvic floor disfunction (PFD). In such cases an effective approach to stress reduction is an essential component to any remedy.

Many of us have jobs that require a lot of sitting, either at the office and/or in the car on the way and home again. Those of us in this group are especially at risk of developing pelvic floor disfunction because long term sitting increases pelvic floor tension. The employment of a standing desk can help in these instances, but a more careful look at how we’re standing, or sitting, is an important part of any long term resolution.

Ignoring calls of nature because of busyness or distraction can be yet another source of stress that directly contributes to pelvic floor tightness and disfunction in a very obvious way. “Holding it” can become a habit that should be taken seriously, especially if PFD has already manifested.

Less obvious but no less important a contributor to PFD are cultural influences and images that present alignment pattens that we may try to emulate. Patterns such as a military posture with its arched lower back and tight glutes, as well as images from the fashion industry presenting beauty in the form of female bodies with forward hips and tucked pelvises no doubt reinforce patterns in younger people who are already developing these patterns through excessive sitting and staring at screens. Limiting screen time and setting healthier examples with our own alignment and movement habits are important considerations when managing this issue with our children.

Even in the wellness/fitness industry we are regularly presented with images of “healthy” bodies with sucked in over developed abdominals that are bulging and tight. We must remember that muscles that are too tight are also too weak to be functional. In order for a muscle to function well, it must have its full range of motion and be able to both contract well AND relax well. This is important to keep in mind not only with respect to aesthetics, but also with respect to steps we might take to mange pain. Bracing with the abs to manage back pain or PFD, for instance, is one of many habits that may be contributing to rather than solving our PFD.

A psoas release is a simple yet extremely effective way to help to begin to release many of the habits that contribute to PFD:

Once you begin to breath diaphragmatically and freely throughout the day and you combine it with a daily practice of letting go of dysfunctional tension habits, you will be ready to practice more specific pelvic floor re-training and strengthening. Because of the inter-connected fascial webbing, strengthening your pelvic floor muscle necessitates the ability to feel and develop responsiveness to the co-contraction of the muscles of the thoracolumbar cylinder.

Since the pelvic floor muscles are hard to feel, it can help to have a basic understanding of their anatomy to visualize and increase awareness of them. The pelvic floor muscles connect the pubic bone to the tailbone and each ischial tuberosity (sitting bone) to the other, and these muscles reside in three detailed layers.

Again, pelvic floor muscles are part of a deep myofascial grouping (close to bones and deep in the body), and because they are deep within the body these muscles are hard to sense. The function of these deeper muscles can also appear more subtle than that of the large superficial muscles like the quadriceps or gluteals which are much easier to feel and to activate.

But the deeper muscles of the trunk contain a larger amount of proprioceptive nerves than the superficial muscles, and these nerves help our body respond to changes in movement and loads quicker than our superficial muscles can – even quicker than we can respond with our thoughts. This is why symptoms of mild incontinence often occur with quick motions like jumping, running, and sneezing. Each of these motions requires the deeper muscles to be strong and responsive in order to manage the increased loads these and other movements may place on the pelvis and lower trunk. Strong and responsive trunk and pelvic floor muscles serve to prevent excessive loading of the bladder and urethra which might otherwise cause leaking.

To help you feel how these muscles co-contract together, here is a simple exercise:

In part 2 of this post we will look further at how to further strengthen the pelvic floor with more dynamic movements that involve bending, lifting and walking. Stay tuned!

Genetics and Health: Why Diet and Movement Matter

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The other day I received an email from a good friend and client sharing a link to an article in the NY Times. The article discusses a recent study done with participants from an earlier study, completed in 2003, on the effects of exercise. This earlier study, done at Duke University and called “STRRIDE” (for Studies Targeting Risk Reduction Interventions through Defined Exercise), took several hundred individuals identified as sedentary and overweight and randomly assigned them to either a control group or one of two exercise groups. The two exercise groups included one that did “moderate” exercise, such as walking, and one that did “vigorous” exercise such as jogging. The exercise groups did their assigned exercise for 8 months. The control group did not exercise at all.

As you might expect, both exercise groups showed marked improvement in several health markers including aerobic fitness, blood pressure, insulin sensitivity and waist circumference, while the control group generally showed no improvement. For this recent study individuals from each of the groups were invited back to the lab for testing to see how they were faring. Those that agreed to come back were tested for aerobic capacity and metabolic health and were asked about their health conditions and medications.

Not surprisingly, those from the control group in the original study were even less fit now than they were in 2003 while those from either exercise group were still better off than the control group. Less obvious but still not surprising was the fact that those who had done “vigorous” exercise in the earlier study showed greater aerobic capacity than those in either the “moderate” exercise group or the control, losing on average only 5% vs. a 10% loss in the other two groups.

But what was very surprising to these scientists was that the “moderate” exercise group, who had only walked 3 times a week for 8 months during the earlier study, showed substantial improvement in blood pressure and insulin sensitivity compared with both the “vigorous” exercise group and the control group. NOW THIS IS THE MOST INTERESTING PART – these walkers also showed these lasting improvements to their health EVEN IF THEY HAD STOPPED WALKING AFTER THE 8 MONTHS! William Kraus, the professor of medicine and cardiology at Duke who oversaw the study suggested that the effect of exercise on our genes and our cells might explain the study’s findings.

I regularly have conversations with clients who ask me “is this problem something I can do something about or is just my age?” I always encourage clients to avoid chalking up problems to age, even if age might be a factor, because once we decide that some pain or loss of function is due to age then it places that issue into the category of “PROBLEMS I CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT.” Once a health issue is put in this category it robs us of the capacity and motivation to do anything to improve it, and there’s just about always something we can do to make things better.

I see deferring to genetics in a similar way. If we make the assumption that a health issue we have or might develop is due to our genes, even if our mother or father did have the same condition, then it hampers our ability to deal with it in the same way that saying a problem is “just because I’m getting old” does. As long as the problem is under the “CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT” umbrella then we’re unlikely to respond effectively.

Studies demonstrate, and pretty consistently I might add, that the health issues that most of us are dealing with or that we are most concerned about are caused by genetics only about 10 to 30 percent of the time. The other 70 to 90 percent of the time these health issues are caused by diet and lifestyle. Cardiovascular disease and diabetes in particular have been shown to manifest much more from lifestyle causes than from any genetic predisposition. Not only that, but it’s also been demonstrated that changes in lifestyle can influence our genetics so as to increase our genetic resistance to a chronic diseases such as cancer.

A 2016 pilot study done at The University of California San Francisco revealed that men with low risk prostate cancer who had decided to forgo treatment unless the disease progressed could improve the genetic markers for cancer by changing their diet. These men followed a diet outlined by Dr. Dean Ornish, and the men who followed this diet for 3 months saw some 500 genes change as a result. This included some tumor-suppressing genes that became more active with the change in diet, as well as some genes associated with increasing cancer risk that had switched off. The study did not set out to determine whether or not the changes in diet led to better long term health outcomes, but the changes in these men’s genetics were significant and promising.

Clearly our dietary choices are a powerful force for influencing our genes and any contribution those genes might make toward our manifesting a health problem, but what about our lifestyle choices? In her groundbreaking book, Move Your DNA, Katy Bowman argues for lifestyle, in the form of our daily movements, as a huge contributor to the health of our genes and their expression. She illuminates the important role of movement in gene expression by highlighting the difference between the genome and the mechanome.

The genome is the gene that we tend to think about when we think of our genes. This is the gene that resides with all our other genes in the nucleus of each and every one of our cells. This gene expresses itself by activating certain physical and/or functional characteristics that make us who we are as an individual. The mechanome is made up of this gene plus all of the exterior forces, many of them mechanical, that play a role in determining if and how a particular genome will be expressed.

To think of a gene as the primary actor in determining our health outcomes is like imagining some kind of stealth bomb in our body that will some day, likely when we least expect it, set off its charge and send us cascading toward some miserable end. Alternatively, the mechanome model presents a gene that is flexible and responsive to input, particularly movement input, and one that can, given the right input, just as easily contribute to a positive health outcome as a negative one. Therefore the amount and way we move, both a huge part of our lifestyle choices, can be a significant influence on our genes and how they influence our health and longevity.

Movement choices are like the dietary choices we make in that they provides us with yet another powerful tool by which to influence our health on the genetic level. In a recent post on yoga for health I discussed the role of mechanotransduction in movement and I describe how movement can be used to influence tissue health on the cellular level. Although I highlight yoga specifically in that article, yoga is just one example of an approach to movement that provides effective ways of using mechanotransduction to affect tissue health. Yoga is intelligent movement, but there are other ways of moving intelligently that can have similar benefits. Walking for instance, appears to have played a significant positive role in the gene expression of the “moderate” exercisers in the “STRRIDE” study discussed above.

It should be encouraging to all of us, and especially those of us who worry that our genetic makeup may be undermining our health and function, that the studies mentioned above show we can improve our chances of better health outcomes with diet and exercise / movement, even if we have genetic predispositions. These studies reveal that we needn’t be at the mercy of our genes and that we have it within our power to change our genes in ways that are positive and lasting.

 

A Case for Yoga: Improving Strength, Mobility and Overall Health

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As a yoga teacher I’ve been advocating for a proactive effort to increase flexibility in the body for more than 2 decades. Yoga is generally seen these days as a valid way of increasing flexibility, but not necessarily one that offers the complete complement of physical benefits regarded as essential for overall health and wellness. For instance, many yoga students feel they need to engage in other activities for cardiovascular exercise, such as spinning, Zumba or running, to keep themselves healthy. Yoga, it appears for these folks, is not enough.

A decade or so ago when yoga was still “the new kid on the block” in the fitness industry, it enjoyed a sort of “cure for everything” status that temporarily shielded it from the responsibility to deliver on that promise. Now that yoga has slipped from it’s peak of popularity into the ever expanding menu of fitness options, it is held to the same standards that other types of “exercise” are and its strengths are weaknesses as an exercise form, depending on the type of yoga or the skill level of the instructor, have become more commonly known and accepted.

One strength of yoga that appears to be gaining ground in the scientific community and with the public is its efficacy in reducing the effects of stress and as a contributing factor to overall health and well being. A 2012 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) found that, among the people surveyed who practiced yoga, 94% said they did so for “wellness-related reasons – such as general wellness/disease prevention or to improve energy,” with 82% of the respondents saying that it “improved their overall health” and 86% saying yoga reduced their stress.

I should point out here that the benefits of yoga reported above, along with other benefits reported for its positive effects on back pain, sleep, menopause, diabetes and other chronic disease and weight loss are mainly anecdotal. There is limited scientific support for nearly all of the claims made in yoga magazines and websites. But for some of these claims, such as yoga’s efficacy in building strength, the benefits are clear and undeniable.

The fact is, yoga postures done correctly place mechanical loads on our muscles, ligaments and bones in controlled and specific ways, and this type of loading, as dictated by the laws of our physical universe and the biological nature of our tissue, increases the load bearing capacity (ie- strength) of these tissues quite effectively. Without a doubt, yoga makes us stronger.

So if there is at least some evidence, even though mostly anecdotal, that yoga is good for stress reduction and overall health and well being, and clear evidence that yoga can be an effective way of building strength, then I would argue that latter is closely related to the former. The fact that yoga helps build strength is the reason that it helps with stress reduction and overall health.

This is because our overall health is largely defined by the health of our tissues. What are we but a highly complex arrangement of tissues and extra-cellular fluid (leaving aside the mind and the soul which are a subject for another time). We cannot be healthy and have a significant amount of unhealthy tissue in our body. Conversely, our overall level of tissue health is directly related to our overall health in general. The healthier our tissue is, the healthier we are.

So what exactly does strength have to do with tissue health? The answer lies in understanding our tissues on both macro and microcosmic levels. If for instance I want to strengthen my legs and hips I might choose to do more standing postures. The mechanical loads these postures place on the muscles and other tissues in my legs and hips will help these tissues handle loads better, thereby making them stronger. But what happens to the individual cells in the various tissues in my legs? I would argue that these same postures also improve the strength of the individual cells in the tissues that make up my legs and hips. This is due to a phenomenon knowns as mechanotransduction.

Mechanotransduction occurs when a mechanical stimulus is converted into a set of biochemical reactions and corresponding a cellular response. This cellular response can vary depending on the type of cell and stimulus, but generally involves enhanced gene expression and positive physical changes to the cell. Scientifically, mechanotransduction is a concept still in its infancy in terms of study and understanding, but the studies that have been done suggest that mechanical loads on the microcosmic level mimic those on the macrocosmic. That is, mechanical loads that make our muscles and bones stronger also make our cells “stronger” in the sense that they improve their adaptiveness and enhance their functional role in our bodies.

Therefore I’d suggest that “weight bearing exercise”, which is basically deliberate mechanical loading of our tissues, not only has the potential to build strength and resiliency in that tissue but also, as a result of mechanotransduction, similarly loads our cells and stimulates greater responsiveness and resiliency on the cellular level, improving the health of those cells, the tissues they make up and our overall health in general.

I place “weight bearing exercise” in quotations here because it can and does mean more than it’s common interpretation suggests. Sitting for example, can be a kind of “weight bearing exercise” in the sense that it places mechanical loads on the tissues of our hips and legs and, if done in the right way, has the potential to make them stronger and more resilient. On the other hand, sitting can and often is counterproductive in this regard because it is not done in the right way, or is done for too long, and will in this case damage tissue health by limiting mechanotranscduction and impairing tissue health.

This brings me back to the importance of flexibility, or as I prefer to think of it, mobility. Having good flexibility means having functional mobility which is the ability to mobilize the body in a variety of ways. Mobility allows me to move more of my joints and tissues through their various ranges of motion and this means a wider and more varied distribution of mechanical loads to more of my tissues. A major benefit of mobility therefore is the stimulation of mechano-transduction in more of the cells in more of my tissues and an improvement in the healthful expression of those cells and those tissues. Floor sitting done properly, for example, can be and effective way of improving the mobility of the hips, knees and ankles and can therefore promote the health of the tissues in the lower half of the body.

A less obvious benefit to functional mobility is the enhancement of my cardiovascular system. Improved and varied mobility of the body generally improves the mobility and more specifically the elasticity of my arterial system, helping to normalize blood pressure and reduce the effects of various types of stress on vessel walls. This particular benefit of functional mobility, which incidentally is facilitated rather well by regular and correct practice of yoga, improves the responsiveness and resiliency of my cardiovascular system and prevents chronic diseases related to it.

I’ve tried here to make a case for yoga as having the potential to be as complete as any other form of “exercise” for promoting and maintaining health. It’s reputation for helping mainly with flexibility and stress is a very limited view that fails to tell the whole story of its full potential. This potential, to literally enhance and maintain our tissue health on the cellular level, is open to anyone willing to spend the time and energy to learn it.

Strength Training: Open vs. Closed Kinetic Chain Movement

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At Alignment Lab we always encourage our clients to move more and build strength, but it is common in our practice to see clients who have developed injuries from working out at the gym with certain machines or when doing isolated exercises with weights. Many of the exercises these clients are doing involve movements that fall under the category of open kinetic chain movement (OKCM). In the interest of maximizing the health benefits of exercise and minimizing the chances of injury, we generally try to steer our clients away from (OKCM) exercises and guide them towards exercises that feature closed kinetic chain movement (CKCM).

What is the difference? OKCM exercises involve isolating a particular muscle and then challenging it with weight and or resistance by shortening (concentrically loading) the muscle. A classic example is the biceps curl, which involves picking up a weight, say a dumbbell or kettle bell with the hand, and then bending the elbow to lift the weight toward the shoulder. This exercise can be done with one or both arms, and in either case the hands are not fixed, thus the “open” kinetic chain.

CKCM involves movement relative to a fixed point. This means that some part of the body, usually a hand or a foot, is brought in contact with a stable surface such as the floor or a wall. Typically there is some amount of weight bearing involved to keep that contact point stable. The stability provided by the fixed point and the weight bearing promotes stability in the body where needed so that the exercise can be done with greater safety an efficacy.

In the example of the biceps curl, there is no fixed point. Every part of the body has the potential to move in some way during the exercise, and thus there is a lack of stability and a greater chance of strain. This exercise not only increases the chances of straining the biceps, but also the shoulder joint. Without the added stability of a fixed point the body will have a harder time keeping the humerus stable in the shoulder socket, increasing the chances of exceeding the load bearing capacity of the joint. In the end, we may end up with bigger biceps, but likely more wear and tear on the shoulders.

One solution to this problem with the biceps curl that is often used to improve its efficacy is to stabilize body by sitting on a stable seat and then placing the elbow of the working arm on a support. These changes do serve to focus the action of the arm more effectively on the biceps, but they do not necessarily make it more safe. The reason is that even though to some degree stability has increased, it has not increased in a way that eliminates potential impact on the shoulder joint.

Because there is a greater amount of force on one isolated joint, in this case the shoulder joint, this movement can easily lead to strain in the tendon of the bicep attaching to the shoulder joint.  This is because mechanoreceptors in the shoulder are not well activated in this exercise. The mechanoreceptors help us feel joint position, and if they are not activated it will be more difficult to sense whether or not the shoulder joint maintains functional alignment. If the exercise is done without a functional alignment in the shoulder joint it may result in an injury.

It is important that we continue to challenge our muscles and their ability to bear weight, but preferably not at the expense of our joint health. Open kinetic chain movement (OKCM) exercises tend to increase this likelihood. Closed kinetic chain movement (CKCM) exercises on the other hand provide an opportunity to increase our strength with much less chance of injury.

While the primary difference between a CKCM exercises and an OKCM exercise is that CKCM exercises feature movement relative to a fixed point, another equally important difference is that CKCM typically feature some approximation of the joint due to the weight bearing on the fixed limb. This means that pressure, usually caused by the weight of the body, pushes the arm toward the shoulder joint, soliciting a stabilizing response in the joint. A great example would be a side plank. In this exercise one hand is fixed on the floor, and the shoulder on the same side gets approximated by the weight of the body. This helps stabilize the shoulder joint and facilitates healthy rotational movement (abduction) around the joint.

CKCM exercises have several features that account for their improved efficacy relative to OKCM exercises. First, the increased joint stability in CKCM allows for better eccentric loading of the involved muscles. Eccentric loading means that the muscles involved contract and lengthen at the same time. When a muscle contracts while lengthening, sliding motions are introduced into the fascial sheets that cover muscles groups and individual muscles. This sliding of the fascial sheets adds lubrication, nerve stimulation and a protective barrier against injury.

Another feature of CKCM is that it involves the motion of muscles across multiple joints. This means that these movements go beyond the isolation of one particular muscle, unlike many of the OCKM exercises commonly used in strength training (such as the biceps curl). Moving across multiple joints requires a complex synchronization of different muscle groups and therefore not only works more muscles but works them in tandem with one another, promoting strength in a functional way.

In addition, when movement occurs across multiple joints with many muscles involved it facilities co-contraction between muscles and this co-contraction, it turns out, is a more efficient way to to bear weight. When muscles co-contract with other muscles, the load is distributed across a broader area, preventing isolated muscle fatigue and decreasing shearing forces on the joints and tissues, ultimately decreasing the likelihood of strain and inflammation.

This alludes to the fact that CKCM’s are good for our tissue. These movements improve blood flow, flexibility, lymph drainage, muscle health, circulatory function and cardiovascular health in a far greater way than any open kinetic chain exercise. CKCM’s will have increased metabolic effects compared to OKCM’s, and they also promote joint health by helping to re-establish proprioception and our ability to sense joint position.

One further benefit of CKCM’s is that these movements improve function of the nervous system. This is because when more muscles and joints are moving in a complex closed-kinetic chain pattern, more nerves are firing. More nerves firing means more blood flow, better communication with the brain and thus a greater ability to dynamically move through space with intelligence.

Finally, closed kinetic chain movements are simply more functional than open kinetic chain movement in that CKCM’s are more often based on movement patterns that are innate to the human body. As babies and toddlers, each of us develops our physical function through a series of innately choreographed movements, and these movements manifest from the age of three months up to the point of walking without any instruction or mimicry taking place. This means that we don’t learn these movements from someone else, we just do them. These movements are innate in all babies, everywhere in the world, and they tell us a lot about functional motion and how the utilization of the hands and feet in a closed kinetic chain is the basis for all natural human motion.

Going back to our bicep curl exercise, let’s compare it with a closed kenetic chain movement involving the biceps and triceps using the example of a wall plank. A wall plank is basically a plank position where the head, shoulder girdle, rib cage, pelvis and legs are all in a stacked, vertical alignment with the hands on the wall standing at arm’s length. The movement involves pushing into the wall to fully extend the elbows.

In a wall plank, the triceps contract in order to extend the arm, but at the same time the biceps co-contract in conjunction with the triceps to stabilize the elbow joint. The biceps also must lengthen to increase pressure into the wall and bear the weight of the upper body. Because the hands are fixed, a whole chain of muscles from the hands into the shoulder joints on into the back and into the abdominal muscles and down into the pelvis and legs also co-contract to help support the body’s weight.

Once it becomes relatively easy to do a wall plank while maintaining good alignment, a full plank can be introduced involving the more challenging version of pushing up off the floor. In a full plank the biceps and triceps get worked but in a clearly functional way that facilitates our ability to lower ourselves down to the floor and lift ourselves up off the floor.

There’s a lot of press about strength training these days with ever growing evidence of its importance for human health and longevity. At Alignment Lab we’re big fans of strength training and we provide it daily with every one of our clients by teaching them mainly closed chain kinetic movements. We’ve found this approach to be ideal for promoting functional strength that is at once empowering, health promoting and practical.