The simplest answer is this: Pure Human Movement.
The body is built to MOVE. However, somewhere along the way our body reorganizes itself around it’s past (such as an injury), and we are then stuck with a body that doesn’t move well due to this modification. The body cannot thrive within compressed spaces and neither can you.
Anatomy in Motion is a movement-based process, developed by Gary Ward. It centers around finding a stable base in your foot and how it interacts with the ground, relating back to the gait cycle (walking cycle). Walking gives our brains context for joint movement patterns, it establishes the “blueprint” for the foundations of movement. The foot is the first point of contact to the ground and leads the rest of the body forward. So if the foot leads in the wrong direction, you can imagine that the body above would need to adapt a different approach to accommodate!
With this in mind, we use a particular set of exercises, based on the phases of gait, and gait is a whole body movement. The goal of these exercises is to facilitate the body to access its natural movement patterns and override habits from the past. An unravelling of the modifications adopted.
By simply using movement to help bring your own body into alignment, we can create space for movement and an environment to heal. We want to educate you on human movement, so you can ultimately take ownership of your own body by re-educating YOUR OWN BODY to move well again.
By using Gary’s model of joint motion through the walking cycle, we can determine what a joint should be doing through a moment-to-moment breakdown of walking, and what that joint is evidently NOT doing. The human mode will always be stay upright with level eyes (the only other option would be to fall down). To achieve this we MUST ASK what joint is compensating and what structure is stressed above the foot? Your back? Your knee? Your shoulder? The clues all come from your injury or medical history. This is not a needle-in-a-hay-stack process.
Human movement is an unconscious patterned response, we just input the intention to move and trust that the body will sort itself out to achieve our goal. Anatomy in Motion breaks this complex pattern of movement into simple chunks from the feet up. When we finally have full movement in our feet, the difference it makes elsewhere can be huge!