Asymmetrical Stance
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We can imagine this biblical hero raising his left leg first when he puts on his boots. The entire right side of his body is compressed, and this compression would have been reflected in his gait.
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Your Hamstrings and Your Posture
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If you look for “hamstring stretches” in Google Images, you’ll get a page full of illustrations most of which demonstrate what I’m trying to show you not to do in the accompanying video. This young man, for example, is mostly stretching his lower back and giving himself a crick in his neck. How you position your pelvis and spine makes a huge difference in the effectiveness of your stretching. I also hope to convince you that your hamstrings don’t exist in isolation in your body and that to lengthen them effectively involves changing how you use them in daily life…
Read MoreHeal Your Posture: A Review
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Rolf Movement Instructor Mary Bond has a gift for relating ideas on functional ease in movement to daily life, offering ways to practice whether at dinner, while brushing your teeth, changing a light bulb, or standing in line. She did this in her book The New Rules of Posture: How to Sit, Stand, and Move in the Modern World (Healing Arts Press, 2006; now also available as an ebook), and she offers more in her recently released DVD Heal Your Posture: A 7-Week Workshop with Mary Bond, which I consider an invaluable resource for both Rolfers and our clients…
Read MoreOn Pilates and Core Strength
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As the author of The New Rules of Posture, you might think I’d be a paragon of deep abdominal core strength. Sadly, not true. In fact, shortly after the book was published I was beset by an embarrassing bout of low back pain—a sure sign of low toned abs. And this wasn’t the first such episode—I’d been plagued by a back that “went out” pretty regularly for 15 years. Because I’ve been a proponent and practitioner of Rolfing© Structural Integration, I continued to assume that the pain was due to misalignment, and that more structural bodywork was what I needed. But I also saw the occasional chiropractor…
Read MoreThe Passenger Seat
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What’s the rule? A car length for every 10 mph? I don’t always follow that rule, but my friend drives way closer to the car ahead than I like. We’re in freeway traffic that is crowded but moving. Several times the brakes are necessary when our lane unexpectedly slows. I sense myself applying brakes of my own, griping my calf and digging my heel into the floorboard. I’m gripping a phantom steering wheel as well–my traps (upper shoulder muscles) clenched in an effort to gain control. My tongue presses back into my throat in a half-swallow. My mother was a nervous passenger, too…
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