The following is a post that I have plagiarized from the venerable
Aikido-L mailing list:The original post is from John Costello, and it was answered by Pauliina Lievonen.
Pauliina is an Alexander Technique teacher as well as an experienced aikido practitioner.
the discussion is about a very common postural distortion found in NMT practices, and I think that Pauliina did a great job of answering John's inquiry.
John:I've been reading Blandine Calais-Germain's "Anatomy of Movement",
which provides a well illustrated and quite detailed account of which
muscles, joints, bones, ligaments, and tendons are involved in various
bodily movements; but it has the disadvantage of being very focused --
it will tell you which muscles are co-opted to move a certain body
part a certain way, but it doesn't move beyond that to tell you what
other muscles and motions are weakened or strengthened synergistically
with a given motion.
I've also been reading Eric N. Franklin's "Dynamic Alignment Through
Imagery", which is *very* holistic, concentrating on how to achieve
various whole-body postural adjustments and movement qualities through
imagery. It has the disadvantage of not being all that technical
about the relationship between movements. (Though I find that the
imagery involved often provides an insight into the
muscle/bone/ligament relationships which the more biotechnical
"Anatomy of Movement" lacks. It has a beautiful illustration of the
skeleton looking down from the point of view of our head, for instance
...)
Both these books are really excellent (and I also really like Frédéric
Delavier's "Strength Training Anatomy"), but none of them has answered
this question:
Often I have been told to do a physical process which is variously
described as "dropping your tailbone", "not sticking your butt out",
"shutting your asshole", or "rotating the sacrum under". What is the
muscular / skelatal / whateveral advantage to this posture? (Or is it
an instruction meant to indirectly correct some *other*, harder to
describe postural deficit?)
Would you more physiologically (or kinesthetically) minded listka mind
taking a shot at clarifying this for me?
Actually, it might be kind of cool to make a list of all the
postural/physical adjustments we've been told to make, and try to
catalog their physiological effects on the body's powertrain. "Bend
your knees" is another favorite, as is "drop your shoulders"... Any
other ones you can think of? And what are their physiological bases?
Pauliina:My head is kinda fuzzy right now but I'll have a shot at it...
If you look at page 214 in Anatomy of Movement, that is a very nice
drawing of a very typical pattern in standing. For those without the
book, it's a girl standing with the top of her pelvis tilted forward and
her butt sticking out. :) The picture is an illustration of the effect
of the iliacus.
http://www.meddean.luc.edu/lumen/meded/grossanatomy/dissector/mml/ilia.htmAlmost everybody I've worked with has that to some extent. The below is
what I've observed myself - I don't know if someone has actually done
research into this.
That forward tilt of the pelvis means that if there's a horizontal push
on your torso (say someone grabs your wrist and pushes...) the force of
that push will travel along the spine but at the hip joint it can't get
effectively transfered to the legs. So you are more easily out of
balance. Plus it makes it harder for your legs to work efficiently
because there's tension in front which tends to get communicated to your
leg muscles and if they are already working before they need to they
have less potential to work with.
You might be able to feel this: When you sit in a chair, the psoas needs
to be active to support your spine in an upright position, but the
iliacus doesn't. However, because those two run so close to each other,
they tend to want to start working together. The result is that people
tend to tighten the iliacus unnecessarily in sitting, tilting their
pelvis forward almost sort of sitting on top of the upper thigh - and
hollowing the lower back. Or conversely, they want to relax both the
psoas and the iliacus and then find it very difficult to sit straight up
without a back rest because they find themselves slumping backwards.
Now when the same person stands up, they tend to keep that tightness in
the iliacus, and so you see the same tilt of the pelvis forward.
Actually I don't know if sitting is the main reason for this but it's
where it often is recognisable for my students.
The tricky thing is that the effect of this can often be felt as
tightness in the lower back. There can be tightness in the lower back,
too, but if one doesn't look at the _front_ of the hips and pelvis, it's
hard to get anywhere with it.
One exercise that I like is actually going into horse stance (a pic:
http://wongkk.com/images-3/general-5/horse-stance01.jpg), but on the way
very consciously softening the front of the crease between the top front
of the legs and pelvis. The image I have is of my back staying straight
up and oriented back and my kness going forward and away from my back.
kvaak
Pauliina
