Your body was fashioned to move. There is plenty of evidence to support the fact that movement 1) promotes healing and overall health/wellness, 2) is positively correlated with life span, and 3) when dosed properly can decrease the need for major surgeries.

The process often neglected is the process of learning to connect with your body through movement. I’m not talking about taking an anatomy and physiology course, but rather about your bodily awareness, how you position yourself subconsciously and how you adjust to the demands placed on you.

There tends to be a lingering narrative in healthcare that our bodies are weak, fragile, and need to be protected - yet all the while this narrative ignores the fact that our bodies come hardwired with adaptive and protective mechanisms that are meant to ensure that our bodies are able to handle the loads placed on them.

What our bodies need is the right stimulus to create these adaptive changes.

This is where we implement intentional and systematic training progressions tailored to each individual’s stage of movement development. Rather than compensate around an issue, we want to address, improve, and resolve these deficits.

In modern healthcare settings, individuals often present with an issue such as “pain” or “over use”. What they often receive however is a mixture of activity modification and multiple interventions to help them better subvert the issue at hand.

This can be necessary for a time to improve symptoms. However, the real underlying issues must be fully addressed - that being, underlying weaknesses, poor tissue mobility, poor motor control, poor stability, poor tissue resiliency, endurance, etc.

Below are examples of compensatory mechanisms that may allow you to function through your everyday life more efficiently, however, they can also mask the root deficits:

- Joint braces

- Joint sleeves

- Orthotics

- Adjusted shoes

- Activity modification

- Pain killers, creams, and gels

- Injections

- Various surgical procedures

There often is a time and a place for all of the above. However, for those seeking long-term health, performance, and vitality - isolated weaknesses and dysfunctions will eventualdy develop into larger, more systemic dysfunctions years down the road if they are consistently compensated for.

At some point there has to be a goal and a timeline to progress past dysfunction and out of compensatory strategies for relief. This does not mean that you simply go back to doing what got you hurt in the first place without being protected. It simply means you protect yourself by refining your body rather than compensating around dysfunction.

Looking purely at your musculoskeletal and nervous systems, all of the following are factors that will affect your movement capacity. They all must be taken into account:

• Muscle flexibility

• Muscle strength

• Muscle endurance

• Power output

• Neuromuscular sequencing (how your nervous system organizes and coordinates your body through a given movement).

• Tendon and ligament resiliency

• Bone integrity

• Joint capsule mobility

(This does not even take into account other body systems and the interplay that they will have on all of the above factors)

Your nervous system is the internal processer that governs all bodily function. This system has to be re-calibrated to support efficient movement and posturing if you are to see real long-term improvement.

If you were to think of your body as a machine, your nervous system would be comparable to the software which is responsible for all of the internal circuitry that governs movement of the physical body.

Since the nervous system is responsible for generating, organizing, and governing all movement and function, a proper system must take into account how this system effectively learns and develops.

The process of motor learning is something someone can guide you through. However, at the end of the day, there is no way around the fact that you must be the one to connect to your body on an internal level and that takes a.level of intention.

Knowing how to effectively target and optimize the function of this system is what allows us to see fast progress and lasting changes in performance.

In our modern healthcare world, our body often gets sectioned off and isolated into component parts. For example, you may see a physician or PT for your foot, shoulder, knee, back, etc.

However, more often than not, that injury is really just one component part of a much larger global movement issue.

Unfortunately, however, such issues often get sectioned off and treated as an isolated foot, knee, ankle, shoulder, or spine issue - neglecting the fact that our bodies are one whole system made up of smaller systems working in concert together.

The implication is that change in one area will affect (in some regard) all of the other areas around it. Said another way: change of function at the foot/ankle can and will affect (on some level) function at your knees, hips, spine, and even shoulders.

This is why training the body holistically through complex, multi-joint functional movement patterns is a necessary end goal for any training program. However, this must be trained in an effective sequence.

Plane and simple, the more functionally able you are relative to your activity demands, the less likely you are to suffer from recurring or chronic injuries.

Addressing an isolated area of the body can serve to restore proper range of motion, coordination, and strength to that area. However, your body must learn how to effectively integrate those new found changes into the “whole”.

Because your body moves as an interconnected system, all of the parts must learn how to efficiently sequence and organize together. This is why functional movement education and training with emphasis on biomechanics and body awareness is integral for long-term success.

This is why our target goal is to improve your overall functional capacity rather than just to “treat an injury”. You can treat an injury and get re-injured the next day. However, if you improve your functional capacity through proper biomechanics you will:

1. Improve your longevity

2. Decrease your risk of injury.

3. Improve your overall performance for life and/or sport

This process of learning skilled movement is called “motor learning”. Like learning any cognitive skill, there is a learning process that has to take place from beginner to mastery and there are preliminary steps that must be taken to effectively learn, retain, and apply a given movement skill.

If you were to jump straight into calculus without a basic understanding of algebra, it would be somewhere between very hard and impossible. The same is true for learning movement and learning your body. You must have the right training progression to be able to effectively learn, retain, progress, and apply a movement pattern to a respective skill, and this is where I personally see most programs lacking.

You can move from ‘point A’ to ‘point B’, but if you have little control over that movement (i.e. you demonstrate a lack of muscle activation and positional awareness through that movement) then you may still have another injury waiting to happen.

The job of a movement specialist is to analyze and coach you through the right progressions for you and your goals.

As mentioned above, movement is a learning process. Learning is where long-term results happen, and it is by connecting with and learning your body that you are able to develop a level of bodily autonomy - meaning you understand the language your body is speaking to you and you understand how to respond accordingly.

Without the desire or willingness to learn, you may see positive change for a time, but 1) it will only carry so far, 2) you will likely find the same issues resurfacing in the future, and 3) you will always depend upon someone else to try to bring your body back to a normal state of being.

I often tell my clients, “there is no one out there better set up to feel what is going on in your body than you.” My desire is to coach and empower those who have a willingness to learn through the process.

You hear it all the time: “don’t do ___.” “You’ll get hurt if you keep doing ___.”

In reality there are few movements that are inherently “bad”. Simply put: there are movements that your body “is” or “is not” prepared for, and there is often a whole host of reasons why your body is or is not prepared for them.

Reality is that our bodies are capable of so much more than culture often gives them credit. We just need the right stimulus and progression over a long enough period of time.

It is never a matter of “can” or “can’t”. Movement can be an open field and we can go however far or deep we want to go. The important questions simply are:

1) How far do we want to go (what are our movement/performance goals)?

2) How much intention and resource are we willing to commit to achieving these goals (I.e. what are our priorities?)

3) Do the answers to questions 1 & 2 practically match up? Is there a means through which they can m?tch up