At some point in our history, people began to realise that we were disconnected from our bodies. In effect, in an attempt to re-connect, exercises were created. Weight training was one of the first serious exercise modalities. The practice placed resistance on the muscular system which began the process of building muscle. Many exercise regimens these days contains some root in weight training. This has led, in part, to people coming to believe that they need to make really quite an effort in order to move.
Because lifting weight is often aimed at lifting an object heavier than the body is naturally capable, exercise specialists have spent years deciding how to organise the body so that least injury occurs. This general organisation of the body has filtered down into exercise modalities that do not require dead lifting large amounts of weight. So a belief system has been built around how best to organise the body in order to simply move. Once these concepts have entered the gym at large, or the Pilates studio or yoga studio, people tend to make the mistake of assuming that this is the way we need to move through life. Therefore, lifting shopping bags, whether heavy or light, entails engaging stabilising muscles, hingeing here and there and finally lifting the bags. The simple fact is that lifting normal weighted shopping bags is an every day movement that does not need the specific orientations of weightlifting involved.
There is a a misconception surrounding movement and how muscles work. This comes out of trying to work out movement in cadaver labs by simply pulling on specific muscles. When this is done, it appears that the bicep muscle moves the forearm. Clearly this is a not quite true. In real life, the body is full of energy and a diverse range of muscles, bones, nerves and fascia, all of which are always involved in movement.
In trying to organise movement according to the theories behind which muscle moves what, we have become obsessed with contractile tissue. We have come to believe that movement is done through contraction. This simply is not the case. When we contract to move we stifle the gliding potential of the muscle fibres and the muscles that lay upon each other.
These contractions we create to make the body move create patterns in the body and before long the body will begin to move according to that learned pattern. We also create an order of engagement. This becomes subconscious pretty quickly. Soon, the body has to listen to the brain and its patterns in order to create a movement it would ordinarily be quite capable of performing without all this over-engagement. Exercise concepts disrupt the flow of fascia.
When we engage musculature (let's use the 'core' or corset muscles as an example), we interrupt the flow of the body. We create an instant separation between the upper body and the lower body. In this separation, the body no longer hears or understands itself. The understanding comes through the flow of
the fascia. This deep engagement of musculature interrupts the communication system that is the fascia so the feet no longer have any relationship to the hands. Surely this cannot represent the true nature of movement.
Human beings seem to want to prove that the analytical brain is larger than nature. We have proved this in the natural world, interfering to the point of calamity. We do the same to the body, disrupting the natural flow, which seems to be fine, if not good, for a certain amount of time. But at the end, the interruption to natural free flow of fascia will catch up with us. It is this interruption in the fascia that creates pain. The lack of the body being able to fully relate to itself and its environment. If we want really healthy happy bodies, then we need to develop a really good understanding of its natural role.
