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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!
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.
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!
Think of something small like stubbing your big toe.
Think of how much weight you place in that toe straight after. Not much. You are making a compensation for the toe by keep off that part of your foot. You wont roll through the foot because you don’t want weight to disperse through the big toe.
If this was your right big toe, you would probably put more weight through your left foot to compensate. Your hip might stick out to the side in doing so and then your pelvis and spine need to adjust on top of that including your ribcage, to get to the top where your neck and skull need to compensate for the spine and pelvis below.
I wish I could say it stops there but it doesn’t. Your shoulder blades will also get in on the act which will impact your arms all the way through your elbows to your fingers.
So that’s a small example & a truly valid one. But what if it was a bigger injury, a break maybe. You would have a more intense pain and a longer recovery. A longer period of immobilising the toe, more compensations required and more awareness to stay right away from pressure through it.
This is the domino effect that has to happen every time you have a painful reason to compensate. The body is a phenomenal machine that tweaks this and that to keep you going, keeping you moving AND keep your eyes level. This is key.
The reason again is quite simple and easily explained. Tilt your head to the side and see how “off” you feel. Try and walk like this or sit and watch the TV…you will have a sense of it feeling wrong and a drive to straighten back up. Level eyes are always the end goal in the domino of compensations.
Our clients have been able to explore why their pain existed and experience movement to free their compensation postures.
This process can be liberating. It not only justifies your painful experience, it empowers you to be a major part of your success while we navigate the way to balancing your body.