EATING YOUR PSOAS and other PILATES

2010-07-13T07:41:00.001-07:00

Kathleen teaches at Rancho La Puerta, 9 - 16 October, 2010. www.rancholapuerta.com

2010-05-11T06:08:00.000-07:00

ONE BREATH FOR ONE HUMAN PROJECT

22,000- 26,000 times per day, you use your breathing muscles.

~One Act of INSPiRATION~

Teach yourself.
Teach your book club.
Teach your soccer team.
Teach your business network.
Teach your classmates.
Teach your partner.
Teach your child.

(1 - 30% of our children have asthma (World Health Org statistic)
How can they learn if they can't breathe?)

Ten Steps to Breathing
1. Put your hands on your hips like someone scolding. Thumb to the back.

2. Now, flip the hands around so the thumb faces the navel.

3. The surface of the thumb and the index finger are along the ilium (hip bone).

4. Press the palms up flat against the back. (Good stretch by the way.)

5. The baby finger will be on the 12th rib. (You have 12 on each side; this one is little.)

6. The longest or middle fingers will be touching each side of the spine.

7. Inhale into the palms. It might take practice for someone to feel their back expanding.

8. Exhale from your abdominals. Feel your belly contract and flatten by exhaling. Exaggerate that on the longer exhales.

9. Once you get the feeling of the soft tissue of your back expanding, then keep the expansion of the back muscles into your hands, even during the exhale.

10. Now you are in place:

Inhale for 4 counts, exhale for 4 counts. Do that again.

Then inhale for 4 counts and exhale for 6. Do THAT again.

Then inhale for 4 and exhale for 8, 10, 12, each a progressively longer exhale.

Until you run out of air and MUST breathe.

~ONE BREATH FOR ONE HUMAN PROJECT~

Trigger your instinctive inhale.
Breathe to the lowest richest lobes of the lungs.
Stop starving your mind and body of breath.

Breathe.
Teach someone else.
We've got to stop waiting for someone else to fix it and do it ourselves.

NEXT:
ACT TWO, Your SIDEKICKS.
To improve walking, running and sitting.
To get your power from your center, not your neck.

2010-03-30T11:05:00.000-07:00

YOUR BONES ARE WELL

A December story on NPR is still haunting me.

It tells the tale of how Merck, a giant pharmaceutical company, facilitated creation of Bone Measurement Institute (a one-employee organization), lobbied to create a piece of legislation that changed Medicare reimbursement rules to cover bone scans (so you don’t have to pay $300 for one), got clearance from the FDA for a lower dose of its drug called Fosamax, and thusly created a perception of need for treatment of a ‘disease’ called Osteopenia.

That ‘disease’ is an utterly arbitrary line drawn in the heat of a hotel room at the top of the Spanish Steps in 1992 by experts gathered to clarify Osteoporosis as a diagnosis.

The delineation of ‘Osteopenia’ was entirely for research purposes.

(The full story ~
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121609815

The suggestion: instead of taking a drug, take responsibility, take a walk, jump around, move your bones.

Bone changes all of the time. It is the most vital substrate in the human body.

Bone changes in response to chemical and physical forces, or food and exercise.

Not ‘food’ that is bastardized by chemicals themselves, but the nutrients the body uses to facilitate the chemistry of bone-making.

Not ‘exercise’ from its latin root, exercitium, meaning to keep busy, but movement of your body in the uniform field of force called gravity.

Nutrition and creative movement make bones. Muscles make movement. Muscles make bones.

The following has many excerpts from Wikipedia with all of its refinements and flaws, but it does synthesize into a few paragraphs the information of several books on how bones grow and behave.

Bones in a healthy person adapt to the demands they meet. They can get stronger and more dense if there is a higher demand placed on them. In other words, get up.

“Wolff's law is a theory developed by the German Anatomist/Surgeon Julius Wolff (1836–1902) in the 19th century that states that bone in a healthy person or animal will adapt to the loads it is placed under.

If loading on a particular bone increases, the bone will remodel itself over time to become stronger to resist that sort of loading. The internal architecture of the trabeculae undergoes adaptive changes, followed by secondary changes to the external cortical portion of the bone, perhaps becoming thicker as a result.

The converse is true as well: if the loading on a bone decreases, the bone will become weaker due to turnover, it is less metabolically costly to maintain and there is no stimulus for continued remodeling that is required to maintain bone mass.”

Trabeculae are so cool! They are architectural structures in the bone that create along lines of force to give strength but with much less weight.

Some examples from Wikipedia of how specific activities affect and change bone. You tennis-players already know this.

The racquet-holding arm bones of tennis players become much stronger than those of the other arm. Their bodies have strengthened the bones in their racquet-holding arm since it is routinely placed under higher than normal stresses.

Surfers who knee-paddle frequently will develop bone bumps, aka exostoses, on the tibial eminence and the dorsal part of the navicular tarsal bone from the pressure of the surfboard's surface. These are often called "surf knots."

Astronauts who spend a long time in space will often return to Earth with weaker bones, since gravity hasn't been exerting a load on their bones. Their bodies have reabsorbed much of the mineral that was previously in their bones.

Weightlifters often display increases in bone density in response to their training.

Mechanostat

A refinement of Wolffs Law suggests that bone growth or loss is part of a feedback loop which is a life-long process. The bone adapts its mechanical properties of mass and geometry to the need, or everyday usage and demands (Mechanostat). Muscles make the demands. Muscles bend bones, that is they create ‘elastic deformation of bone’.

“These relations are of immense importance especially for bone loss situations like in osteoporosis, since an adapted training utilizing the needed maximum forces on the bone can be used to stimulate bone growth and hence prevent or help to minimize bone loss. An example for such an efficient training is vibration training or whole body vibration.” (Wikipedia)

In other words, we are back to,

Get UP!

Jump Around

Wave your Arms

Find Abundant Bone in your Moving With Abandon

Some of you were in the class the day we were throwing arms around. Your arm ‘lengthened’ after that process and lots of people said they felt “tingling” and “alive”. That randomized throwing of the arms is a kind of vibration training.

Putting It In Reverse

2009-09-16T21:20:00.000-07:00

It was the slippery slope of aging

with a bleak future of

knee replacements

a crippling scoliosis

incontinence

stiffening joints

an out-of-touch body.

Everything was tight except what was supposed to be tight.

ENOUGH!!!!!

When I walked into the PilateSpa studio on March 17, 2005 , this Irish Lass said:

ENOUGH!!!!!

That day I began

PUTTING IT IN REVERSE.

With Kathleen and Bree as my guides, I began and I continue week after week. The infrastructure was and is as instrumental to my progress as the motivation to feel and look different. My budget was reworked so the cost of the sessions was built in for the “long haul”. The sessions became as vital as groceries and trips to the Opera. The drive from the West side to the East of Madison became a part of my routine without grumbling about construction on University Avenue or the football crowds that made me late for Saturday stretch class.

The two beautiful dancers that became my teachers allowed me to fantasize and reminisce about the years of my youth as a dancer. That helped me believe I could Put It In Reverse. My trust in their patience, kind suggestions, demanding perfection, and in-depth understanding of movement and the body, carried me on a wave of belief in myself and propelled me forward each week.

As I write this I am submerged in the fourth year of a Pilates practice that honors my body. The day I tossed the mini-pads away, I giggled. The days I bike and have no knee pain knowing I did it without surgery, I smile. Each day my spine feels straight without the aching fatigue of the past.

I stand straighter and prouder of how I am keeping it in reverse and loving it.

Julia O’Reilly, A 73 year old believer.

Chapter One

2009-06-30T11:52:00.000-07:00

KITE BODY

The Kite. Aloft. Soaring. At one, utterly, with the wind. A sheer, stretched over the lightest and simplest frame. Engined by a whisper on a breeze, skipping brightly ahead of the wind.

Breathe as the flying kite. The simple frame of the ribs, strong, yet yielding to the demands of the muscles, alternately being the breath, then sailing the resulting thermals.

Let the last four ribs, two on each side, the floaters, pull back into the planet. Like pulling down on the string directing your kite, a momentary expansion and thus deeper tension is created.

Then your legs will follow. As the tail to the kite. Entirely necessary for balance and line and direction, but not at all driving the body.

Breath-wind drives the body kite. Legs trail, graceful, without wasted effort or motion.

The body flies.

(Think about this in Footwork or Stomach Series on the Reformer )

KITE BODY – THE MECHANICS There is the tendency in exercise, and other rote activity or movement, to use certain groups of muscles for everything. Legs are consistently over-used. Consistent over-use becomes misuse of the body.

While inherent in the very discipline of pilates, conscious choice of which muscles to use is still challenging. Consistency in use is challenging. Even in pilates, the threat of overusing the thigh muscles and hip flexors prevails.

The concept of Kite Body facilitates initiating the movement from the body itself so that the legs, especially the hip flexors, do not overwork, and so that the functional breathing muscles are powerfully engaged.

Start with the simplest classic Kite.
Spine: How convenient! The backbone that runs down the length of the kite is called its spine.

Spars: The cross-bar or support sticks, which extend horizontally over the spine and out to the pointed sides of the kite are its Spars.

Skeleton : The ‘t’ or cross-shape of the connected spine and spars form the skeleton or frame of the kite and support its shape.

Sail:The light but strong fabric which covers the skeleton-frame and catches the wind, is the kite’s sail.

Feel your spine as the vertical brace in the frame, or spine, of a kite, and the width of your shoulders as the cross-bar or spar.

There is the same tensile strength, or rigidity, or support, at the ends of the frame spars as throughout each inch of the frame itself. And the frame is flat. This does not mean the spine should be cranked flat as a ruler and the shoulders ‘rigidly back, but that the end points of the shoulders are on a plane with the back, that the spine is pulled taught with the same muscle power throughout, and the same tension is created on each disk between each vertebra.

Triangles are the simplest stable shape and form. A triangle is the simplest geometric figure that will not change shape when the lengths of the sides are fixed. This cross-bracing of shoulder-line to the vertebral spine creates two triangles in the body. Pulling the ears up away from the shoulder-cross-brace creates the top triangle; pulling the tailbone down away from the shoulder-cross-brace creates an opposing triangle.

The forces in the body then, are purely tension and compression, not shearing, torsion, bending or momentum. This creates a simple, safe and powerful architecture in the body. Whereas geometrical triangles and building trusses are fairly fixed at their points, because the body is alive, you can ‘think’ the points of all of its triangles into moving farther away from all other points. The bones, then, have direction, the muscles, opposition. Opposition creates length. Your Kite Body expands.

Stretch the back and belly and neck muscles over your Kite-Body frame of the shoulders and spine and you have a flat, taut sail of living tissue with which to catch the wind, or the breath.

Kite fabric gives. Back muscles give. Sometimes too much. The back needs to be uniformly engaged for the kite to fly smoothly and elegantly. Fortunately, the muscles that help the inhale wind, (Serratus Posterior Inferior, Q. L., Latissimus Dorsi, Serratus Posterior Superior, intercostals), all live in your back. Though they themselves contract to work, their net effect is to expand the ribs, the spine and thus stretch the kite fabric. Yet more opposition. Yet more length and balance.

When there is wind (inhale), the kite body is fully taut, full of muscle potential, moving to flight. When there is not-wind (or exhale), the kite frame does not collapse or its fabric disintegrate. Neither should the body kite go flaccid. Conveniently, the muscles which facilitate the exhale include the abdominals pulling in, which helps flatten the fabric of the back.

Moving from the wind, the breath, the Kite-Body flies wide, long, uniformly integrated. The legs, then, trail the body rather than pushing it. Your legs become the long, graceful, supple tail to the Kite-Body in flight.

[Box Kite description next]

[DaVinci’s Man]

Chapter Two

2009-06-09T21:22:00.000-07:00

EATING YOUR PSOAS

Will you take your tenderloin rare, medium or well-done? Tough, stringy, gristly? Flaccid, pale, tasteless. Will you take your breath like black pepper? Small, dark, gasping? Heave your breath like salt? Scattered, rationed, uneven? How will you move your psoas, the tenderloin of muscle connecting the vital column of spine to the long stilts of your legs? Great hacking jerks as if under a dull steak blade; in shuddering catches as if under shredding tears of your teeth?

USDA Prime psoas is rich, red, meaty, low in fat and connective tissue, made supple by its power to extend/arch your lower (lumbar) spine, made rich by its job to bridge the transition of thoracic spine to lumbar spine and walk your legs, made tender by equally balanced use. Made red by full, bottomless breathing; uninterrupted flow of life to each meaty cell.

Eat your psoas. (Cold rare, no pepper, light salt.)

TAKING YOUR PSOAS – THE MECHANICS

You own two tenderloins, a left and right psoas. Most people have two petite tenderloins as well, a psoas minor, left and right, but not everyone.

At its extreme connection, that powerful hunk of meat called the Psoas (so-as) is a muscle which starts at your twelfth thoracic vertebra to the back of the inside of your high thigh bone. That is a pretty powerful position in the architecture of the human animal – to connect the spine to the legs across the great divide of the pelvic bowl expanse. Specifically, the psoas attaches at T-12, where your last rib floats at the back of your ribcage, and at the next four vertebrae, or spine bones, below that rib. That broad, fanned series of contact points is narrowed to one connection at a bump on the femur - your leg bone - called the lesser trochanter. Between those attachments the muscles gets to be that thick meat you like to grill. At least that’s the preferred condition.

Sitting for long periods of time shortens that muscle. Letting the lower spine arch forward tightens it. Inactivity in general makes that muscle short, weak, ischemic, brittle. Pilates, on the other hand, demands that the psoas do its job of stabilizing the spine and flexing the legs, the bending of the thigh forward at the hip joint.

Often the problem is not that the psoas needs to be strengthened, but that it needs to be conditioned and used appropriately. The muscle often needs eccentric conditioning, that is, the muscle learns to contract as it is being lengthened - as the leg is moving from bent at the hip (flexion) to full extension (or straight).

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