Understand the Pelvic Floor

Chapter 1

Intra-Abdominal Pressure

Uh, my name is Brent Anderson and great to be back at parties any time. And today we're really looking at a little bit of freestyling as we talked about the pelvic floor. We recently had some help with plies anytime, uh, if the plot is method alliance and we had um, them shoot just a little bit of the work who are doing with two ultrasounds, looking at a hundred plots, teachers, pelvic floors. And so the, the information that we received from that event, um, has been very powerful. We've been, I think there's been like 57,000 views of that video clip, uh, virally. And so we're really excited about that. But it made us think, as I was talking with Kristy, is that, you know, there really is a big demand for people to understand this part of the anatomy of the human body and how it works, especially as as movement pertains to it. And what I want to do is, because we're sort of freestyling today, I have some pictures, I made some drawings, we have some props that we're going to play with. We're going to try to experience and have a better understanding of what really is going on in the pelvic floor as it relates to the abdominal wall as it relates to the diaphragm. And in particular, how can we be more sensitive as Palladio teachers in how we cue in particular and having maybe a different framework of how we facilitate proper organization, the body. And I think that's going to be the real essence of today's workshop. So we're all in this right place. Are you in the right place? We're good. Um, the first thing I want to start with is going back to Joseph plot.

He's original concepts, right? And the, his thoughts and one of the things he talked about was that the first requisite for happiness as a healthy body and a healthy body is able to perform its many very daily tasks spontaneously, naturally with pleasure and zest. And so I want to take those words apart and, and you're welcome to join in and sort of play with this as interactive is what comes to your mind or what came to your mind when I asked those questions or when I said Joseph's quote that, you know, natural, spontaneous organization and able to do our mini very daily task naturally. What comes to your mind when you, when you hear that you can't answer anybody? Yeah, I think it's just being able to be partake in your life and do the things that come up in everyday life without pain, without the, just to be able to enjoy the cages of everything around it. Good. So we're able to participate in our daily life and, and the pleasures of life without pain and without having to even be conscious of it. Right. I mean it's like, you know, do you want to have to think about lifting your pelvic floor every time you bend over to put your shoes on? And I think that's really one of the things we're talking about. What else comes to your mind when you hear that? Yes.

I'm not removing like an animal a little bit as in like, you know, animals aren't really willing to engage this or engage this. But then looking there very naturally you're like that. And in that qualifier then kind of maintaining and finding our own kind of natural movement, right? So the comparison to an animal, right? And how, I'm pretty sure it, kangaroo isn't thinking about engaging pelvic floor every time they hop, right? And so that natural organization and Joseph referred to animals quite a bit. He felt the cat was probably the most spectacular animal of all. And that idea, that natural organization that an animal would do and its process of moving.

And if you think about martial arts, many of our martial arts are built on moving like an animal, right? If you think of Capo Eta and you think of these different things, it's like can you move like the monkey or can you move like the Scorpion? Or can you move like a fish? Or you can, and we think of this natural movement. Now here's a concept for us. Okay.

When a horse is born, right, the foal comes out of the mother's womb. Within an hour, it's walking around. Okay. How long does it take a human to be able to walk around after? Pardon up to one year. Right. Even up to 18 months is considered normal development. So if the child is walking by the time, the 18 months, that's normal development. Some a little earlier.

I know when my kids were growing up and they started walking at like nine 10 months, I would kick them back down to the ground and try to keep them on the ground as long as I could. Because the idea is the more time they spend the ground, the more we sit Brickell, neuro, muscular development they will have. So the idea is we really don't want them to walk too early either. We found in, in developmental on, I didn't take them down, I just gently nudged him down. But the idea is that what we're looking at is what do humans do naturally and really what we do naturally as we learn, that's what we do. We learn. And so, you know, we have time. We learn how to move, we learn how to walk, we learn how to talk, we learn how to eat and swallow a, the, there's instinctual things that help us to do that as we develop in survival. Um, and that being said, we learn to do things and we learned to do things based off of need and perception of need. And this is where when a child is learning to lift an object, and I want you to think back, um, somebody who had children already when you're young child is learning to pick the doll up for the first time or pick the truck up for the first time or pick some dirt up off the ground and put in their mouth for the first time.

That process is very interesting to watch because they're not familiar with gravity in that organization, but guarantee like the animal, they're not thinking or even aware of a pelvic floor, abdominal wall or diaphragm working to be able to learn that what they're playing with is balance, right? So there is this very complex mechanism going on in a young child of learning to organize their, their body weight in relationship to gravity. As they squat down to pick something up. The first time they do, they typically are weight heavy in the front and they fall down. They smash their face into the ground and they're not very happy about that, right? So they cry, but there's a learning mechanism and the learning mechanism said mixed time, I'm gonna lean a little bit further back when I bend over to pick up that toy and they fall back the next time on their butt and they're going the diaper and the pampers are a much better shock absorber in my bottom than my face on the ground, right? And so we learn in that process and then we learned different weights.

We realize that something that's heavier has a different demand, a different load, and it changes. The center of gravity in our body has to adapt for it. So the posts tier slings are going to work a little bit differently when something's heavier, then when something's lighter and it's always in relationship to that gravity, how do we organize our body to gravity? Right? So that being said, this, this, the keyword we're looking at is spontaneous. So now let's go into our teaching world and the words that we've used over the past 20 years, one in particular comes to my mind is core control. Have you heard that word before? You ever heard a core control before? Okay, so core control was a result of research that was done trying to understand in particular back pain populations. Trying to understand, you know, how it is that we organize our bodies neuromuscularly as it pertains to movement. And I think that's fair to say.

And the research came back and showed some very enlightening outcomes. One of the greatest evolve being Richardson and Hodges from Australia back in the 90s where they showed that in normal organization of a very simple movement of just lifting the arm that the core muscles organize spontaneously, subconsciously and sub threshold. Those are three things I want to clarify. So spontaneous meaning the person was not thinking of contracting a muscle to be able to lift their arm up against gravity, okay. And subconscious meaning that they weren't aware of what was going on in their trunk.

They were just being measured and sub threshold meaning that in a volitional contraction, for example, let's just do it right. Let's do a volitional contraction of abdominal wall, contract the abdominal wall, and you can feel the muscles hardening. Okay? So the reality is a volitional contraction is usually too much. Would you agree? Right. If you go through and you have go to the point where your volition contracting your muscles, you're probably contracting too much.

So that spontaneous contraction, that subconscious contraction is important and it is thought that just in normal organization to move a limb, that there's probably 20 to 30% of the Max voluntary contraction is happening in that subconscious sub threshold contraction. So that means it's just a little bit, we are really efficient animals. If we are willing to listen to our bodies and align ourselves well in practice, right? We become very, very efficient movers. And it's true, if you think of the first time that you rode a bicycle and you put your hands on the bicycle bar and you had training wheels and someone's behind you and then they took the training wheels off and all of a sudden it starts and there's like this shaking, the whole body shaking and all the muscles are recruiting and right, but within two weeks it's like very easy. No hands say mom, look, no hands. I can do with no hands, right? Until you run into a car. And the idea is that we continually learn and refine things. So another key word that I want to talk about is anticipation.

Anticipation is based off of experience. If you haven't had the experience before, you do not know what to anticipate. And therefore you typically will over recruit or under recruit in a new experience. What do we typically do? We over recruit. That's right. So we're more likely to, to use more muscles than we need as a mechanism. And then what we do is we start reducing the amount of muscles when we realize I don't need that much tone, I don't have to grip that hard.

I don't have to hold my shoulders back that hard and makes even a little bit worse. And I start softening and relaxing and becoming more efficient. Think about skiing. I remember learning skiing as an adult and um, I was 21 years old and going, I was skiing every Thursday, going up skiing and in the beginning it was very, very hard. 10, 20 years, so many muscles to try to turn or snowplow with something that was foreign to me. And then little by little, uh, good coaching, good teaching, I started learning how to use what David Litman calls the kinesthetic dynamic edge, the car day. And we started playing around with that and I realized that I just barely have to shift my center of gravity over the edge of the ski. And when those new parabolic skis back then in the, in the 80s I was able to start skiing much more efficiently and then all of a sudden I could take on more and more challenging terrain. And we just learned that way to become more efficient as we understand what it is involved in it. All right, so now you might be thinking, what does all of this have to do with the pelvic floor and the core?

And it has everything to do with the pelvic floor and the core. So the concept that we're going to start with is this idea of intra abdominal pressure and inch abdominal pressure can be diagrammed this way where we look at the organization of certain parts of the body. So we have the diaphragm up above, we have the abdominal wall that wraps around and connects around to the back of the spine and we have the pelvic floor below. So we call that the hydraulic amplifier. So you all have a ball, okay? So let's take the ball, can grab the bar, put in your hands and think is if I pushed or contracted, my abdominal muscles is going to increase the tension and push the diaphragm up and the pelvic floor down, right? So if this is the diaphragm, this is a pelvic floor and I contract the dominant muscles, there's only one place for those tissues to go, right? So the viscera inside that's inside the air, the air represents that pressure is going to increase and it's going to push the diaphragm up in the pelvic floor down. Okay. When I breathe and I inhale, I am right pushing the viscera down, which is going to also increase the pressure of the abdominal wall and it's also going to increase the pressure inferiorly on the pelvic floor. Right?

And if I am lifting my pelvic floor, I am going to do the same thing. So the inch abdominal pressure is probably the most important thing that we need to be looking at. Instead of talking about muscle contraction and core control, we're saying what is the appropriate intra abdominal pressure needed for the anticipated load of that activity. I know that's a lot of like trying to get our heads around those words, but that's really it. What is the appropriate IAP or intraabdominal pressure needed for the anticipated activity? So when I say anticipated, how do we know what we're anticipating through our experiences, right? So if we've practiced doing that activity, our body knows what to anticipate and now we go back to Joe's original thought of a healthy body, which is able to do our very daily tasks spontaneously, naturally with pleasure in zest. Right? And that's what we're talking about.

So what happens when we create volitional contractions? What do you think happens in any muscle of our body? Can you think of any activity you do in your natural daily life and daily activities that you are consciously contracting a muscle to be able to do that activity? Be careful of your answer. All right. And maybe even think about pre polarities teacher or pre physical therapist or pre chiropractor or pre movement instructor.

Was there any activity that you did during your day that you consciously contracted a muscle to be able to participate in that activity? The answer's probably no. Probably No. Now when we lifted weights, those of us that were in weight training, the load of the weights created a maximum contraction because we push ourselves to a limit of what our muscle fibers could produce with the levers of our bones and the fascist slings to be able to, to lift. And as we became more connected and more organize, we became more powerful, maybe even with the same torque, those muscle fibers. So this is what we see when people practice PyLadies and Jared tonic and yoga, and they start having awareness of connectedness and alignment.

The same muscle fibers create more torque. The plyometric power happens because of the alignment and the organization. So one of the things that Hodges discovered was that the transverse abdominis and the abdominal wall recruited 15 milliseconds prior to the recruitment of the deltoid. So the activity was you have wires in your shoulder, wires in your abdominal wall and your back. And when you lifted your arm up as fast as you could, they would measure the electrical activity in those muscles. And what they found was that in healthy adults, the transverse abdominis fired 50 milliseconds prior to the contraction of the deltoid. And if you think about 50 milliseconds, that's really fast. Okay? The fastest volitional contraction, like winking your eye is about 250 milliseconds to think about it and then do it. It's about 250 million. So it's a quarter of a second.

And what Hodges showed consistently with very little variance was 50 milliseconds of a contraction prior with, which was an anticipation, right? So that's a subconscious sub-threshold contraction, preparatory for the anticipated load of lifting the arm. And what we noticed then was in his study, he also looked at people with back pain and he did the same exact measure. And what he discovered was people with back pain were all over the place. So they weren't that beautiful pocket of 50 milliseconds prior to the contraction, the dilatory, they often would contract afterwards if they can track it at all. They were all different levels. There was no consistency with it.

And so what we did as a profession, as we extrapolated that information from Richardson Hodges Research, and we said, hm, if somebody has low back pain by teaching them isolated transverse abdominous contractions and how to do that, we can get rid of their low back pain. Does that sound like a reasonable thought? But what's wrong with that thought? Why? Why didn't it work? We know now that the doesn't work that way. It's to smile. It's too slow, right?

So by the time you think about it, you, it in, it's probably been too long and you're right. So even the verbal command, typically we see it about a thousand milliseconds with a V, which is one second. So if I say draw your abdominal wall in, by the time you process that language and draw the muscle in, it's been about a thousand milliseconds, right? And if you're really smart where you've trained it, and I just say ta and you do it, you might get down to like 500 milliseconds, but you're not going to get to 50 milliseconds. So 50 milliseconds is a response and it's a load response. And so one of the things we learned from that is that there is some mechanism which is our appropriate septic system that works at the spinal cord level.

Theoretically, that when there is a load or an anticipation and it fills that appropriate septic load or the anticipation of load is actually more powerful, it sends a message down in the anticipation, puts the whole program into place at a subconscious sub threshold level. And that's the key. And that's why the Alicia only training these muscles in any of our clients probably is not gonna be as effective. I'm not saying it's wrong, I still have patients that I have to go back to the level of doing isolated contraction or get the ultrasound out and teach them how to even find a muscle after they've had pathology in it or to see if it even works. But the reality is where do they have to go to be healthy and happy according to [inaudible]? What do they have to be able to do to be healthy and happy? A healthy body?

How did he define it? Spontaneous. Right? And so a volitional contraction is not spontaneous. And this is sort of the point that we, that we make with that. So one of the things I want you to do is I want you just to feel it. You're going to stand up right where you are.

And what I want you to do is just standing there nice and relax. Squeeze your thighs. Just squeeze your thighs and notice what kind of tone there is in your thighs. Now do you think there's any muscle fibers working in your thighs right now to be able to hold you up? Of course there are, right? So now stand on one leg and squeeze the leg that you're standing on.

And what happened to the tone of that one leg? It increased, right? So now, but both legs down, do a Max voluntary contraction of your legs, your quadricep do an isometric contraction of those legs. Now squeeze them. And what does that feel like? Does that feel, do you ever use that kind of contraction when you're doing your daily activities? No. Okay. Have a seat. So the idea is that our organization, a pelvic floor in the spine is very much the same way. Right? It's no different than what you felt standing. Now what we could explore is that by have you shift your way forward or back or align yourself better with actual allegation.

We could probably get the muscle contraction, the tone in your leg to do what? If we get a more ideal posture and more ideal alignment, what's going to happen to the tone? It's going to go down. It's going to decrease because we're to become more and more efficient. So when you look at activities like running or we look at cycling or we look at swimming, any kind of endurance, athletics or sports, we want efficiency. We want to burn as little energy as possible to be able to have the endurance and to be able to minimize injury. Okay, makes sense.

So now let's go back to our queuing as pilates teachers or things like [inaudible] come forward and just think what are some of the common queuing that we do is pull out these teachers and movement teachers that might not be as effective as we think it is. Can you think of some queuing that we use in the [inaudible] language that maybe now we have to rethink, engage the pelvic floor. What else and who? Who even knows what that means? Engage the pelvic floor can be sex that's engaging in pelvic floor. Pooping could be engaging in the pelvic floor. So we have all these different, I mean, what does it mean? I heard, I remember, I won't isolate anybody out on this, but I remember grading classes in, somebody said in the queuing to a woman or sixties now's a good time to lift all three holes of your pelvic floor. And I was thinking like, what does that mean? You're filming, you're filming something that's going to be internationally taught.

What does that mean? Lift all three holes of your pelvic floor? Right? So these are the kinds of things that are out there. What are some other ones that we hear? I was going to get lit. Lift the pelvic floor. What else?

Contract. Contract. What? What are some other parts of the body? Not just pelvic floor, but what are some cues that we use that maybe we have to rethink? Emails is fine. Navel to spine, right? So drawing the navel into the spine or scooping or Halloween. Okay, good. Connecting the front of the rib cage, those kinds of things. Good.

What are some other things that might be part of that funny dry and the hipbones together. Now we're going to come back to that. Bone direction is actually very good. Bone direction is much easier for the brain to solve than soft tissue contraction. So that's actually a decent one. And we might say rather than dry it together, is allow them to come together, allow them to come apart. So when they're squatting, the sit bones allow to move apart and we come up, we allow them to come together, we spiral, we move the bones in their proper arthrokinematic rhythms, the bone rhythms that we talk about. What are some other things that we use? There's a really popular one, especially with bridging activities.

Can you think of something somebody would say in a bridging activity that would make Brent go absolutely nuts. Okay. Well [inaudible] would send me out of the, I would leave the house. That's absolutely out of the question, but what's the, what's another kind of thing that is sort of tied to that? Squeeze. Squeeze glutes. Thank you. That one drives me nuts. I said, if you're a Pollstar person out there listening to this and you come to take your exam or teach and you use squeeze your glutes or draw your belly button and navel, you will send me crazy. Now, I know a lot of people teach that way, but why would that be a problem?

Because we're going to look at some cool things and see maybe that type of queuing has created erroneous organization in the body. All right, so I want you to think for a second what might be some other examples of, you know what? What might that type of queuing, we're going to squeeze our glutes, I want you to squeeze your glutes. What would that create? What does it, what kind of movement pattern does that create? Well, you're not using the correct, you're not using your abdominals [inaudible] muscles taking over for the muscle. It should be functional.

So you might have an imbalance or a compensation of the muscles, right? So you see like this imbalance between the anterior wall and the hip extensors. Okay, good. What else might we see? Oh, increasing the tension and for us it's working, right? Right. So you create abnormal stress or tensions that actually are counterproductive to the desired movement, right?

So if I want hip extension or hip flection or spine articulation in particular, let's say I want to bridge with spine articulation and I over recruit my glutes because my teacher said, squeeze your glues together. What's the carryover in that mild tone? What else is going to be squeezing together? Probably back extensors and maybe even abdominal muscles as you sort of bare down to get that to build lift up. And that's also probably going to over recruit even into the anterior hip where the hip flexors.

So now your desired movement has been over recruited and we're not able to get the isolated movement we want of our ticketing, the lumbar spine or the hips or the pelvis. Right? And we see that all the time that we would expect from a novice. As we become more proficient, we would see less over recruiting, so it's not like we jumped down their throat as a client and say, no, don't over recruit your glutes. We just let them go and we say things like, try doing that same exercise but use half as much energy to do the same exercise and see what happens, and then they do it and it's still owed too much. Try it again to do half as much as that and half as much as that and keep going halves until they're able to do that movement. Right. With minimal activity and beautiful movement and control.

When we get, I often say, when I see that little bit of shaking when the muscles going, I, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. When it talks like that, that is an ideal place to be. That's telling me that those local stabilizers, those deep, deep muscle fibers that are responsible for proprioception or waking up and when they wake up, you'll see the most beautiful sequencing of the spine and the joint and the hips moving through a range of motion. It becomes very efficient because what's happening now is gravity or the direction of force that we're creating with momentum is the mover and the sequencing of those deep muscles of allowing which segments are going to move and in which plane is what creates fluidity and fluidity is one of our key words as is teachers, isn't it? We want that fluidity, that transition flow. We talked about words like that. Those are all qualitative words of what movements should be.

Chapter 2

Controlling Intra-Abdominal Pressure

Often when we're doing our movement, for example, a roll down or roll down, the primary mover is gravity and so what we're doing is we are attempting to allow, right?

We're allowing gravity to move one segment at a time. As we roll down through space, let's, let's take it a step further. Let's talk yoga a little bit. Okay. In Yoga, we use the word Bhanda. So you maybe have heard the word Mula Bandha Udi and abandon Shahada, Banda, armsy, Banda, Genoo, Banda. Banda just means, I won't say just cause it's not just, it's an energetic concept as well, but it is a coke contraction of a joint complex. And that's according to, um, one of my favorite yoga teachers in Australia. Um, the, in slipping my mind, but we'll come back to that. But what he says is that this, this Koch and traction around the joint, right? Multiple joints is what allows us to move energy up and down.

So if you're doing a headstand, you want to have a little more stiffness here that's pushing the energy away from the head. So we're not getting too much blood in the head and not getting too much tea in the head. We're able to organize and have a good headstand, right? So think about, applaud. He's exercise. Now I want to do roll up on the roll up. I'm laying on my back. I want to roll and articulate my spine up. Where do I want to have the stiffness above or below the segment that's moving.

Which one below? That's right, and as we get more efficient with it, it's going to be dynamic, right? So I'm going to move here. It's kind of there in here and then here and then here and here and it will just create enough stiffness to be able to do that. I remember I was watching a circle Solei performer, he and hurt. He had hurt his back and we were looking at the videos of him and he did a hand to hand with his wife who was his partner.

They'd done it for years and she would do a flip and land in his hands and enhanced him. And then he climbed up on top of a chair, hooked his feet into the seat of the chair. The chair was anchored down into the stage and he would push her up into a handstand and then he rolled in, articulate all the way down to roll down, all the way to the floor till his head was on the floor behind the chair. He dropped his hands to the floor, his head like you would in a roll out, right. His wife's still in the handstand. He then brings your backup over his chest and he rolls himself all the way back up into a standing position.

And I remember thinking like that is the epitome. That's the ultimate segmental control of those Mueller bonds. Now, his MRI was very fascinating because the diaphragm slips in the front, the saw as major in front, the quadratus on the side and the multifidus in the back were all hypertrophy. They look like five pillars, six pillars around the spine, and these are all segmental muscles that were covering one to three segments. And what he was doing was very controlled, creating stiffness at one level while he moved the level above and then the stiffness dropped down and he moved the next segment and the stiffness dropped down. And a very subconscious sub-threshold level to be able to have that kind of control. If he was thinking about it, there's no, you would over recruit, you can't do that. Right.

And that's why when we teach people how to do roll down or roll up, what kind of tools do we have to create the spontaneous roll up and rolled out? What do we use? We use the role of bar, we use the dow, we use springs to assist us, right? And those springs now allow us to do high repetition without fatigue. Until they can articulate with control, the articulation often is there, but the control is not. Now the other key factor here is what's going on in the insha abdominal pressure, right? So I'm doing a roll up.

What's the most common breathing mistake of a roll up holding your breath? They Start and they go, Huh? And then hip flexors and erectus come in and they come up and their legs pop up off the floor. That's the most common mistake of a rollout. So what would be the ideal thing to do to be able to control that intraabdominal pressure. And we talked about this. As soon as I close my epiglottis and I'm rolling up, that pressure is so stiff. It's not going to allow any articulation in the segments of my spine.

So what do I have to do to be able to control that and make it so that it's smooth and easy and articulate in a breath exercise a contract. But how do I do that? Breathing? Right? So exhaling. So the breath itself, and this is where Kathy grant was famous for singing while you did your exercise, right? What a great lesson. It was what I felt the first time I did a roll, but Kathy grant singing and I realized that I was more worried about my voice quality than I was about my abdominal strength. And the next thing I knew is my role up became very easy, right?

And my voice quality improved. Isn't that interesting how those two things happen? So our vocal chords are another diaphragm. So we think of any horizontal plate in our body, pelvic floor, our breathing diaphragm, our vocal chords, even the base of our brain. Some people talk about in osteopathic medicine as being another diaphragm in our body. So that's another control center. And all those things control that.

Intra abdominal pressure. So as we have that control, we have that relationship. In that intraabdominal pressure, we find that we have more efficiency. So here's the big question. Yup, go ahead. The injured abdominal pressure, you can't control intra abdominal pressure in relation to gravity. That's all I can think of. It is. I don't think you finished regarding the, and and going back to the, the hand to hand circular. So a performer, right? What? What? Now we go back as he was breathing, so he was controlling the Trib dominal pressure. He had amazing local stability. Remember, stability is defined by control of mobility.

We often use stability as rigidity. It's not the same word. It doesn't mean the same thing. Stability always this control mobility. So he had to have amazing segmental mobility to be able to do the exercise. Otherwise the levers too long and now you're going to create sheer force and you're going to have an injury, which is what happened to him. He said he had, he had done seven shows in a row seven days in a row and he was feeling a little sick. He was feeling a little weak. And he sorta had a little glitch while he was rolling up any herniated a disc.

Right. Because it was just, there's so much load that if he was not perfect segment by segment rolling up that the sheer force on that would be too great. And that's what he did as he herniated. Yeah. So that, that concept of understanding, there were multiple factors. He had the experience, right. He had done it for years with his partner. He did it two shows a day, six days a week over and over and over again. Right. And so there was a physiological change in his muscle structure, which would be true for any of us. We looked at a ballet dancer. We say, you're a ballet dancer. We look at a modern dancer. Oh, you're a Martha Graham dancer. We look at swimmers. Oh, your freestyle. Oh, your endurance swimmer. You're, you're a butterfly swimmer.

Your backstroke. We can tell by how the tissues of the body organize. Eric Franklin has a great statement where he says, we are what we practice. So we look at people's bodies. We can pretty much tell what kind of activities they participate in, if they're serious about it by how their body organizes. Right? So he no doubt had these changes in his body based on the load and the train that he had done for years and years and years.

And it actually was quite easy for him typically to be able to do that activity because he did it two times a day, six days a week for many years as a circus performer. Right? You grew doing it in other words, but when you looked at his body, you realize that he had the experience, he had the physiological change, he had the control, segmental Lee, he was able to breathe. If he would have held his breath on to two or three segments, moving together would have created too much sheer force and he would have created an injury, which is exactly what happened to him right in the end. And I think that's a big lesson for us to learn is that we're creating moving opportunities and we're allowing the body to explore it. In pilates, as probably the most powerful tool we have, is that we can create a system environments to allow the body to experience what normal movements should feel like of the bones moving through space and how the nervous system there are Muslims gonna lay down the pattern of that movement as we learn it through practice, which was part of Joseph's plan was you practice these exercises every day and within three to four months it'll change your life, right? That's what he said. You practice it. It's going to change your life.

We do these exercises and we work in all different planes. We work in different orientations of gravity. We're looking for planking. We're looking for articulation. We're looking for segmental movement. It's so diverse. We do lateral flection. We do rotation in all different orientation. That gravity, it prepares our tissues when we practice it and refine those skills to be able to exactly what Joe talked about, spontaneous organization, Natural Organization of our daily tasks with pleasure, right?

We're no longer strained or thinking about things. It happens. Now remember, we are not naturally born to do that. We are naturally born to learn how to do that. Can you understand the difference between those two things? Because we often think, oh, it's just natural for man to do this or for women to do this. It's like we are built to do it and we can learn to do it, but if we do not learn to do it, we cannot make the assumption that we're going to do it correctly. Right?

And one of our biggest foes of all is sedentary life. As human beings, we are not built to be sedentary. And so when we look at things like pelvic floor dysfunction, Dyer, active insufficiency of the diaphragm, a ballooning of the abdominal wall, um, tight hip flexors, restricted Dorsi flexors and the ankle, um, collapsed thoracic cage, those are all responses of being what we practice. We practice sitting in front of a computer for 14 hours a day. Whatever we end up doing or with our iPhones, it's going to be that kind of punishment that we give our bodies.

We're going to look like a sedentary person and a sedentary person is not healthy. The statistics show, and again it's not to pick on chairs or sitting, it is the sedentary life style. It's the suburbia zone. It's thinking that you drive as close as you can to the front door of your [inaudible] class. You go in and take your class and you have two hours of it a week and everything else is, I drive through my Starbucks, I drive through my bank, I drive through the child, drop off at the school. I even can drive through milk farm in Miami and it's just I can order my, my food groceries right through a window and my car and I have to get on my car. I then go to the bank and get my cash out with a drive through that.

Suburbia ISM is probably our biggest enemy in longevity. And that being said, one of the things that gets messed up is how we organize our body, particularly the rib cage to the pelvis, which is our topic today.

Chapter 3

Pelvic Floor Research

So let's take a look now and let's talk a little bit about some research that we've been doing. We're looking at the pelvic floor. So we sort of have this nice foundation of thinking of how the body organizes itself. What is spontaneous mean? What is more stability, meaning the controller mobility. And now let's take a look at what we're finding. Okay.

When we look at the pelvic floor with the ultrasound, uh, one of the things that we're looking for is to see how the relationship of the bladder is to the pelvic floor. So the bladder is this black void that you'll see on the pictures I show you. And that black void is urine. So we want people to have nice full bladders when we do their ultrasound to be able to see it at the bottom of it is the pelvic floor. And so we can tell by displacing the bladder, whether they're actively able to lift their pelvic floor or not.

And so the question that we posed in our original research was, are we doing what we think we're doing? Right? It's not, nobody's saying it's right or wrong, right? It's just saying, are we doing what we think we're doing? That's the question. And so we've now looked at over 200 Palladio teachers, most of them averaging over five years of teaching experience. And we've asked them, and again, primarily women, female, and we've asked them, do what you think or what you would teach or how you would Q, lifting the pelvic floor and tell me when you're doing it.

So we have the ultrasound. Transabdominal is who we're looking at abdomen and we're looking down into the pelvis and we want to see if when they think they're lifting the pelvic floor, if the pelvic floor actually displaces the bladder, lifting it up. That's our measure, right? And what we found is that 45% of those 200 female Polonius teachers thought they were lifting their pelvic floor up and they were actually pushing their pelvic floor down. Again, we're not saying that it's right wrong. What we're saying is that there is an inconsistency with what we think we're doing and what we're actually doing.

What system of the body do you think is not representing itself well in this picture? That I just painted for you think of global systems, like what system is not, was that we'll come to the respiratory system. That's not as a big piece of it. But what else? How is that information going from our thought to our body and our body? Back to our thought, the nervous system. What part of the nervous system? Let's get more specific.

How do we know where our body is in space? Proprioception. That's right. So we have all types of receptors. May can are receptors in our ligaments, muscle spindle, fibers in the muscles. We have Golgi tendon apparatus that are the Golgi tendon organs in our tendons. And they all work. And even in the bone pressure, there's these mechanical receptors that tell us where we are in space.

We have our inner ear, right? So the inner ear or vestibular system tells us where we are in relationship to gravity, in rotation, in acceleration, deceleration. And then we have our eyes. So those are the three main things that tell us where our body is in space. What we're doing right?

Well because we can't see our pelvic floor unless we're looking. We cannot use the information of the eyes, right? That input to do it. And because the way we do the test, we have people laying on their back, the vestibular systems out, right? Which I do think is something we have to think about in the future, but the vestibular systems out. So now we're just looking at the appropriate set of system, which means we're looking at the mechanical receptors, the neuromuscular receptors, and what our images and experiences of doing that.

So what we see is in a normal, when we look at this picture here, you can see that this is the bladder. This is the pelvic floor. This is me. That's the ultrasound head. That's what I'm holding on the abdomen. So I'm looking at the pelvic floor. When I asked this individual to lift their pelvic floor, do what they do to lift their pelvic floor, they had a correct direction. So they lifted the pelvic floor.

You can see the dome of the pelvic floor lifting up into the bladder, displacing the bladder. And now we know that that was what we would call a positive response. So they volitionally thought left pelvic floor, they contracted the muscle and the pelvic floor lifted. Okay, so that's number one. Number two, Yep. Number two, we asked them to do the same thing, right? And here you see them over recruiting the abdominal wall and actually pushing the floor down so you can get in, see a little different bladder, a little different shape, but you can see the domain coming up in that domain. As an example, in the second picture here of the pelvic floor actively coming up. Okay?

So those were two correct examples. And this is an example of [inaudible]. They're asked to do it and you can now see this floor is down much lower than the pelvic floor here. So we were asking them to lift the pelvic floor. They said, I'm lifting my pelvic floor, and the pelvic floor actually went in the other direction. I think I have another one here that looks at the same thing. Lift the pelvic floor, pelvic floor, wind down. Okay, so this is the fourth one. Now on the fifth one here, something interesting happens. This is a different strategy.

And if you're looking at this picture, what do you see in this picture? On the second part of it here, that's actually going on. Okay, you can't see rectus, she can't see any, this is a pelvic floor, but something happens. This space here narrow. So this is a squeeze of the glutes. So what they're doing is they're increasing the pressure this way, thinking that's the pelvic floor. So that was an interesting adaptation.

They thought they were living in pelvic floor, but because they're squeezing glutes and abdominals, say, where are you doing the abdominals? You just can't see it here, but you know it because it's pushing the pelvic floor down. And this last one, number six is sort of the same thing. That's also a gluteal squeeze relationship to that. Okay? So we're seeing almost 50% of people thinking of lifting their pelvic floor up and actually pushing it down. And we're seeing some different organisations to that.

So let's look at what that, what that's like. Okay. Okay, so we're saying that this is the pelvis itself. We're looking through, and this here is the pelvic floor, the fleshy part of the pelvic floor. Okay? And our goal is to get them to be able to lift the pelvic floor.

And what we're seeing in the picture is the bladder sits here. Okay? So the bladder's there, and this is the pelvic floor. And when they lift, we should see this dome up theoretically into that bladder. That'd be the correct response to that. Right? And what we're seeing with that 45% in a drawing, right?

Is that we're asking him to lift and we're seeing the pelvic floor now going down away from the bladder. So that's telling me something's going on, right? It's telling me that we're probably having intra abdominal pressure is going up and it's so high up here that it's pushing down this way. Right? And they're also having pressure coming in this way into their abdominal wall so that viscera only has one place to go. Right? If I push everything down and I'm tightening everything up, the only thing that pelvic floor can do from this resting position is go down.

Okay. Now, the other thing that we saw on one of them was seeing this space coming in. So we saw this kind of activity happening here, which to me would tell me that's also coming from more the glutes and squeezing the inner thigh muscles. Maybe the arbitrators or rotators pushing us together, doing the same thing where they're recruiting their transverse abdominis and their abdominal wall. That inch abdominal pressure goes up and when it goes up, that pelvic floor now is going to go down. That makes sense. You can sort of see that picture. All right. And this would be the same thing where we see the pelvic floor going up and down and where that pressure is coming from. So now the result of this is we're not saying one's right or one's wrong.

Matter of fact, I think it's incredibly dynamic and it can be either, and I don't think it's about, is the pelvic floor lifting up or as the pelvic floor going down? I think it's about, is there the appropriate amount of stiffness for the anticipated load? And that might be in some positions, if I'm rolling down like this in a dance move, right? I might want my pelvic floor to drop down as part of the compensation for the intro dominant tone that I need in that flection where with I'm in an extension pose, I might expect that pelvic forward draw up in a relationship of the intrabdominal pressure with my body going into extension. So it could change. And I think that when we look at movement, it's very dynamic.

I think we get caught up sometimes thinking like, oh, it always has to be this way. Right? And if we think about it, most of the research that we've done is with a very still torso. We're not allowed to stick needles into muscles that are moving. So if we're going to do kinesiology EMG and we're going to put the needles into the muscles, we can't ask them to move their body while those muscles are in to be able to measure the neuromuscular activity. Cause the needle risk is to break and we just don't know.

So now we're using surface EMG, but that again doesn't necessarily give us, there's so much noise with the surface muscles. We don't know what's really going on deep. So if we really wanted to look at it like what's going on and we'll tiff it eye muscles next to the spine and we put a needle in it, we want to know what happens in a golf swing. We're primary commitment to get that information but we can start guesstimating a little bit and we sort of know that based on low those muscles are going to fire anticipatory to be able to create the right amount of stiffness to allow the rotation to happen in the more efficient. The more we practice, the less energy we expend, the more efficient that sort of bond a man. That image that we use at the bandha is going to allow the spine to rotate more efficiently, faster based on those on the experience. Right.

And so that we often talk about load

Chapter 4

Determining the Load

and that's sort of where I want to go next is thinking of that intra abdominal pressure should respond to the load that's placed on the body. And load is determined by the choice of the activity and the alignment of our body, right? So I'm going to have you do another standing up activity. Okay? So you're going to stand up for a second [inaudible] and once again, just sort of feel and notice what your thighs are doing, right? You sort of feel how they're sort of relaxed, right? Soft.

Now go into a slouched position as if you're 79 years old with severe stenosis, right? Forward head posture, right? Knees are a little bent, hip flexors are short, and just stay there for about 60 seconds. And you guys can do the same thing at home, right? But you're going to practice this and just stay there. And this is really a fantastic way to strengthen up your quadricep muscles because what you're starting to feel already is an over unnecessary recruitment of those muscles that are going to fatigue the energy in your body very quickly. Stay there for another 30 seconds, right? And what are you starting to feel?

Very heavy, right? So the thing about it, right? When we are working with our clients that have these postures, is it any wonder that they get fatigued when they go shopping for half an hour? Walking around in this posture? You're, you're still 45 seconds, you've got 15 more seconds and what are you feeling? You're already feeling fatigued, you're feeling Achy, an issue fleeing unnecessary muscles. You can relax and have a seat, right? So what happens, right? And it's like, thank goodness, but remember, alignment, alignment and the fashion system interact with each other.

To be able to create efficiency. We have to get away from the mentality of muscle torque and think more of movement efficiency. And for that reason our queuing is going to change. Our queuing has to change. You know, we have to get away from this idea of core control. It was a great study by an osteopath in London. A Letterman is his last name and Letterman was did uh, what we call a um, systematic review.

So he took all the research that had to do with core training and exercise training, general exercise training as a pertain to low back pain. And what he found is there was no significant difference between exercise training and core training in that result of outcomes where people with low back pain. So when you hear that, what does that make you think? Okay. Huh. Exactly. Huh? So if you are sending your hall, you would go, hmm, all right, and this is exactly what is making me do. I'm thinking like, well what does that mean? What does that mean to you? What comes to your mind?

It, it doesn't put your job at risk, but let's we think this right? Because I think we keep identifying Palazzos with core control and it is not, if we, if we want to have this battle we can take on Stuart McGill, right? And Stuart McGill looks like he's an enemy to plot. He's, but he's not. What Stuart is saying is if you want to talk business about core control, bring it on because he specializes in heavy load power lifters, repetitive strain lifters, workers' compensation injuries from repetitive lifting and heavy lifting. So he's looking at a population in particular and realizing that in that population you want as much stiffness as you can generate with your intrabdominal pressure. That makes sense.

Minimize the sheer force. If I'm going to lift up 400 pounds, I don't want my lumbar spine sliding around. I don't want to be inflection. I don't want to be an extension. I don't want to be in a millimeter of lateral flection when I'm loaded, so when I'm loading that body, I wanted to be as in neutral and stiff as possible. So we hypertrophy the muscles around those areas to fill up the fashional sheets to create stiffness. One of the things that Stuart Miguel showed is that when they're in their off season, powerlifters have back pain.

As soon as they hypertrophy the muscles back up in the fashional sheath, they no longer have back pain. Right? The problem is is we make that correlation as if we're all wanting to be power lifters. I have no intention of lifting more than 40 pounds. I don't, not anymore. I don't have any intention of that. I want to be able to take my suitcase but it up above. I like playing, you know, sports and golfing. My golf club weighs less than a pound. Um, you know, I want to be able to pick up grandbabies and those kinds of things which get up to like 30, 40 pounds by the time I tell them, you know, you know, lift yourself but you get the idea is that, I mean I'm personally am really interested in moving and so we have taken that word core control and tried to own it as polite as teachers. And we've tried to say that the hollow abdominal wall is core control and in reality the hollow dominant wall is not core control.

We've misconstrued the data coming from Hodges that talks about the TA's in normal natural activities like lifting your arm of how the Tia would come on. We don't want to make the ta strong. We want the ta to create the right amount of stiffness at the right time. So my deltoids can lift my arm up or so I can swing the golf club or so I can do the hand to hand activities a circle, sully, or I can lift a 400 pound bar in a power lifting competition. Does that make sense?

Based on the activity that I choose and the load that I anticipate will determine how much intra abdominal pressure I need. The question is, am I trained to handle a high amount of intrabdominal pressure? So most people are trained to handle the activities that they participate in, but when they decide, oh, I'm going to go do crossfit now, right? It's not, the crossfit is bad, but if you're not conditioned to do crossfit, you have to eventually get conditioned to crossfit. But crossfit has clean and jerks and dead lifts and plyometrics and explosive activities and pull ups and all these things that are actually great activities. They're great training activities. You have to do it.

If you want to be an elite athlete, you have to do that. Cross training to have maximum performance period. Ization is, is unnecessary, right? You can't be a phenomenal sprinter by practicing platas cookie, right? But polarities would help you organize your alignment and your organization that would make your body more efficient. In it's sprint training or in its swimming training or in its cycling training. It doesn't take the place where it doesn't make you a good golfer.

It says here is a more supple body that a golf pro could now facilitate lessons on. To make you a better golfer. By practicing golf, you got to play golf to be a good golfer, you got to run to be a good runner. But if your body can't handle those stresses, then we come back to a more basic level of organization. Does that make sense? So when we talk about core control, we of want to take that whole idea, core control, and I'm giving you permission. You can blame me, put it in the garbage can. That's not what we do is pull out as teachers, what did Joe Call Paul lattes controller. Gee, it was control of movement. It was not core control right now.

The idea of organizing well and organizing our rib cage in relationship to our pelvis and our pelvis in relation to our legs and how we organize with gravity and the activities. That requires a tremendous amount of training and that's what we do is pull out his teachers. We teach [inaudible], we teach the science of Control of movement, we teach efficiency, we teach spontaneous, natural pleasurable movement and when we get sidetracked thinking that, oh, we have to have this core control, and Joe made a mistake in this because he named the powerhouse and he talked about the powerhouse and sort of had that, you see those pictures of him holding the powerhouse. This creates a problem, which is one of the loud, louder parts of this discussion that I want to go into before I open it up for questions.

Chapter 5

Second Phase of Research

One of the things we're realizing now is this intimate relationship between the diaphragm and the pelvic floor. It's a very, very intimate relationship and the abdominal wall and when we hold our abdominal wall in thinking that we are doing core control or we think we're lifting the pelvic floor and what we often are doing is inhibiting the activity of the diaphragm. Can you, can you think about that? Right. So if I hold this, I'll do that. Let's just hold our abdominal wall in and now take a deep diaphragmatic breath.

Not so easy. Right? Because by drawing in we're making it so that the diaphragm can't descend. Okay. And when that diaphragm cannot descend, we're finding a direct relationship with pelvic floor dysfunction. So let's go back to the study that we did in the second phase. So Hodara shorts is a colleague of mine from Israel and she's very brilliant working on her phd right now. [inaudible] teacher, physical therapist and Hodara and I were going through this questioning process because we knew that we had a 45% false positive people that thought they were Latina pelvic floor up.

They're actually pushing it down and we're trying to think of like what would be a good question to ask because this is really what science is about is are we asking the right questions? And so we thought, well what happens with volitional contraction? We saw the 45% faults and then there's what's called a mechanical displacement. So mechanical displacement of the pelvic floor has to do with, the easiest way to do it is breathing. So if I take a deep breath in, it's pretty for sure like 90% of the subjects, the pelvic floor descended when they were relaxed taking in a deep breath, pelvic floor window. And when they exhale pelvic floor sprung back up. So there's a certain element of elasticity in these tissues that respond to pure mechanical load and unload. So the more load I have, the more likely that is to tense up. And it doesn't matter if it lifts up or goes down, it just has to create the right amount of tension in harmony with the other muscles of that hydraulic amplifier based on the movement and the load of that activity. And the anticipation of our experience, that becomes the power, not a contraction of a muscle.

That muscle might never really go into a uh, concentrate contraction. It might be an eccentric contraction that creates a little more elasticity, almost like a trampoline when I'm doing something spontaneous like running, right? Cause I have to breathe when I'm running. So I have this diaphragm, abdominal wall and pelvic floor acting almost like a trampoline based on the load absorption when I strike the ground with my foot. So that ground force creates that reaction. Okay. And I think that's going to be a much more powerful thing of saying if I am aligned well in my load reaction force to the ground, I need to use a whole lot less tension and tone in these muscles to be able to run efficiently. This is where impulse style, we're spending a lot of energy right now looking at running and we'll be launching this year or post to a running concept. But it's the idea is we're looking at how do we improve the efficiency of that ground reaction force. And it has to do the alignment. So if I run and I run in, I heel strike in front of me with a load. I have a huge ground reaction force.

It comes up to my body and my tissues get jarred. But if I'm running, I'm part of that my [inaudible], my Stryker heel, um, ground reaction force is directly underneath my body, right? And I'm elastically pulling up and moving into higher cadence. Now all of a sudden I decrease the ground reaction force and my tissues are acting more like trampolines. So the factual slings are loading and loading, loading and loading, loading and loading, loading, unloading. As I run at 180 beats per minute. And that's how the body tissues respond. Very healthy, which means you can't think about holding a muscle at 180 beats per minute is way too fast. But that's a normal human cadence. We, the research shows that over and over again that 170 to 185 beats per minute is where the raw human should run. Humans should not jog.

Jogging is horrible for humans. People often mix the words up and they say, Oh man, I've been running. You just kills my knees and my ankles and my back. Yes, jogging kills your knees, ankle and back. But running actually doesn't, if you run correctly. We are designed to be runners, endurance runners. We really are designed to do that, but we must learn how to do it correctly, just like we learn to do any movement correctly and efficiently. So there's a great study done by Danielle Holder. She's one of our educators and her boyfriend Tanner, who is a phd and now he's in medical school. And what they looked at was this intra abdominal pressure. And Tanner, his phd was in um, bio-science and he developed an intra-vaginal IP measurement device, so intraabdominal pressure device. And the question was very, very smart because what they did is they picked a gold standard.

They said the amount of intrabdominal pressure for a woman to stand up from a sitting position became their gold standard. So they measured that standard. They said this is how much pelvic floor and intraabdominal pressure is needed to be able for a woman to stand up from a seated position. Then they took them a took rail Sakowitz book, the plot, his book and they had them do all of the exercises in the beginning and intermediate level exercises of rails book. Okay. Pretty cool idea. Good concept. And they compared the intra abdominal pressure required to do all of the applies exercises to the sit to stand standard.

Well guess what papers published beautiful paper. They're only like two or three of our exercises in the beginning. Intermediate work that even come close to the amount of intrabdominal pressure needed to do a sit to stand. So is there ever a time implies exercises that you need to volitionally contract your abdominal wall, increase your improved intra abdominal pressure if it is never as much as just skin out of your chair. The answer that would be obviously no. Right.

Do you want to know which exercises came close or past the sit to stand rollover hundred enrolled up to the intermediate work. But that's telling you that all the way up into the intermediate work. It's like we're not creating such abnormal intraabdominal forces, first of all, for us to even compare ourselves to core controlled exercises, which do not show any more efficiency than any form of exercise in treating people a low back pain. So that's why I say you can sort of lose that terminology. I don't think we need to use that terminology anymore. In our, um, in our teaching skills, we talk about control, we talk about efficiency, we talk about um, load and alignment.

Those are the words that we want our clients to be able to appreciate in the organization working right? Here's the problem. For 50 years we've been a society that wants a six pack. They want to look skinny and hard bodied, right? Not realizing that everything they do to make themselves skinny and hard body actually hurts them. It hurts them, right? If you think about where we are today with the fixation of hard bodies and if you went to anybody with a hard body, I treat them so I know they're injured.

Most of them have back pain. Most of them have some kind of herniated degenerative disc from doing exercises to have that kind of looking body, which often has decreased the rassic mobility has a little bit of excessive kyphosis and when we lose that mobility and our thorax, guess where the movement comes? Neck, shoulders, low back. Guess where the majority of our pathology is today? Orthopedically his neck, shoulders and low back. PyLadies restores thoracic mobility. Why? Because we focus on breathing and segmental movement.

That in itself is going to alleviate the stress that we experienced in our low back, shoulders and neck. So people with these types of injuries are realizing when they participate in movement of the thorax that they actually feel better even though they don't know that. It's just something we do. We lay them on the barrel, we do spine correct rate titties, we do roll downs, we do Swan, we teach them mermaid, right spine twist. All of that saw all those things are segmental movement of the thorax with actual elongation. We're taking away, the stress is going through the low back. We're taking away the stresses going through the neck. We're taking away the stress is going through the shoulders.

As soon as we organize that, there's no difference, I believe with pelvic floor dysfunction and thoracic immobility. So when diaphragm does not move, breath becomes ballooning of the abdominal. So we see the part, the abdominal watchers balloon, so people that are deconditioned, rigid in the thorax or balloons or accessory breathers, one of the two, right? So our pilot is hard body or holding in. There going to be accessory breathers are deconditioned. People sitting at a desk are going to be balloons, but what they ended up having both of them is inactively insufficient diaphragm. So the diaphragm itself does not do its normal job of descending and ascending 1512 times a minute that it's supposed to do as we breathe, because we're consciously overriding our natural system, trying to hold our abdominal wire. So we're seeing those contractures.

And that's something that we're going to be looking at now is looking to see if there's a correlation between actively insufficient diaphragm and poor mobility in the thorax and in continents and other pelvic floor pathologies, which would be great for us because we see it in here at clinically and anecdotally. So your clients come in, they have incontinence, they do pilates, and their incontinence gets better. We think it's getting better because we're telling them to lift the pelvic floor, but it might be getting better because we're moving their thorax and teaching them how to breathe. That makes sense. And I don't know that, I think this is, this is sort of a speculation, is that gut feeling. We know it's not related to pelvic floor lifting because we make too many mistakes and powerlifting for that to be what's working. So we think it's probably more related to that. And the funny thing is we noticed in our study, remember I started talking about the mechanical and I talked about the volitional contraction, the pelvic floor. The third category was spontaneous.

So we took, we took Danielle's and Tanner's study and we took that idea of the intra abdominal pressure, the pelvic floor and the sit to stand as a gold standard. We said what would happen if we ultrasound sit to stand and we could see the activity. So what we've found is in 50 subjects we looked at volitional, right where they're doing their contraction in their head, mechanical. We just look to see a breath actually displaced the pelvic floor. And then we looked at spontaneous to see of when they did a sit to stand, did that actually lift up without them knowing what we were even looking at? So this is what we found.

Out of those 50 subjects we found still 45% volitionally did it the wrong way. So some magical number. We've stayed right? Every group we've done in Israel, what we've done in California, in Denver, in Florida, now we're over 245% applaud his teachers pushed their pelvic floor down when they think they're lifting it up. No correlation with how many children you've had or those kinds of things. No correlation. Almost all of them. 90% of them, the 50 had normal mechanical displacement, right? So there are only like five that didn't, which I'll talk about in a minute. So they breathed in pelvic floor a drop down, they x held, pelvic force sprung back up. Okay. The volitional, I mean the spontaneous, this was the cool one.

So Hodara was measuring the spontaneous and what we found was the 45% that were negatives, the 45% that thought they were looking in their pelvic floor plan, we're actually pushing it down of that 45% 69 did it correctly with the spontaneous measure. So just being current aligned correctly, coming up, they became positives, meaning they naturally spontaneously organize themselves better, which meant there was only about 10% that were negative negatives as a whole group. Five, five people out of those 50 that foolishly went to contract push down a spontaneous, you went to do it and pushed down. And what we think is that 5% also seem to have a correlation with incontinence. And they also had inactive in inefficient diaphragms. And when we went in and did a manual release of the diaphragm, myofascially pelvic floor on two of them returned spontaneously. So that's just a case study, right? That's all we're saying now. And don't, don't go saying this is what it is.

This is a case study that now we're ready to take and do a full IRB and do like data now and really the real question and be able to look at people with pelvic floor pathology and be able to understand what really is going on inside their body and organizing the pelvic floor and how should we apply these teachers be facilitating this, right? So it best, we hope to find that there is a correlation with breath and diaphragm, which really empowers us as Polly's teachers, right? And as Gyrotonic teachers to be able to yoga teachers to, to be able to really make a difference in people that are suffering from pelvic floor dysfunction and low back pain. So a lot of times we keep thinking, looking down, like we got to get the pressure stronger and stiffer here when in reality what we need to do is distribute the movement forces and we need to be more efficient with the control of those muscles and integrate them. So I think that's going to be one area. And in a worst case scenario, what we at least have shown is that using volitional queuing to contract the pelvic foreign abdominal muscle probably is not the most efficient way to get organization of the body. I don't think we do harm by doing it. I don't think anybody's done harm by telling somebody who can track the pelvic floor, the buyer's gonna do what it does spontaneously, which is what I think we showed is that when people, even though they did it wrong volitionally when they went to to sit to stand, they're body performed correctly based on the anticipated load.

And the few that didn't, the five that didn't, we saw our relationship with the diaphragm. So that's sort of where we're going with the, with the information. And I hope if nothing else, that in this discussion we sort of come away with more questions, right? That's what research should do. It should bring us to more questions and we should be asking ourselves in all of our teaching, you know, do we facilitate or do we interfere with the quality of the movement by our queuing, whether it be tactile, whether it be a visual image or whether it be direct. And I always ask myself that when I'm working with somebody, it's like, is what I'm doing facilitating better movement or is it interfering with better movement? That's, that's really the question. And that's how we learn.

And I can also say that everybody's a little different. So I don't think we're ever going to find, oh, this is the law, this is how we do it. And that's why with breadth, I say breadth as a tool, not a rule, right? It's a tool. So we use it to be able to facilitate movement where we need movement to happen. We use it to facilitate stiffness, we need stiffness to happen. It's a tool. If you tell everybody you have to inhale here and exhale here and somebody as a balloon or an accessory breather, the breath pattern makes absolutely no difference to the impala quality of the movement, right? The same thing of telling somebody to contract a muscle.

Chapter 6

Rule of the Ribs

So let's play with this concept a little bit where we call the of the ribs and we've done this before on plot is anytime, but I want to just sort of tie it in now to what you feel in your pelvic force. So sitting on the edge of your boxes and you're going to sit on the edge of your chair at home. And what I want you to think of is the rule of the ribs is says mechanically that the head of the rib articulates with the disc in between the two vertebrae. So when my vertebra move into extension mines, you can put your hands like you're doing extension with your vertebra, right? The disc is going to move and displace anteriorly and that means the ribs are also going to slide anteriorly. If I go into flection, the disc is going to go posteriorly and my ribs are going to slide posteriorly.

And if I go into a lateral flection, the desk will go the opposite direction. So where my ribs, so in a mermaid position, my ribs are going. If I'm doing a mermaid to the left, my ribs are going to slide to the right. Okay? They'll always follow the disc. Rule number two is that the neck of the rib articulates with the Vertebra below and the transverse process. So it looks a little bit like this.

So now when I go into extension, we said rule number one disc goes forward, rib goes forward. But because it's attached to those transverse processes, the rib itself is going to incline down. So I'm going to go this way, my ribs are going to go in extension, my rib is going to go forward and down towards my pubic bone. And the opposite. When I go into flection, they're going to go back up underneath my heart. Can you feel that? Just moving the bones in place.

So what I want you to realize is that by moving the bones, we actually get the normal or desirable organization of the inch, abdominal pressure and the alignment of the spine to the pelvis. Can you feel that? So try it again. We're going to go into flection and we feel the ribs sliding back up and all of a sudden it gives us access to movement in the thorax. So it now makes the spine long. And as we go into extension, we're saying the ribs forward and down and we're able to keep that excessive extension out of the neck and out of the lumbar spine. Okay. Now the last thing we're gonna do is we're gonna play a little bit with this idea of the hydraulic amplifier. So sitting on the edge of your chair, right?

And we're just going to have our arms sort of bent to the side just like this. Yeah. And what I want you to think of is that the disc space are like these balls. Okay. And that I have the pump to pump them up. So we're going to go into a collapsed posture, right? Arms to this side.

And I'm going to pump up the disc. Yeah, right? And now just rotate that. So sit bones are on the ground. Rotate around it nice and freely. Rotating side to side. All right? Include the eyes. The eyes are looking around. And now imagine that you're holding a 2010 pound weight in each hand, right? And notice how your body changes with the image of a 10 pound weight.

And now release the 10 pound weight. Keep rotating, put the weight back in your hand, and release the weight. Okay. So what did you experience with that part of it? What did you, what happened when we changed the image to a 10 pound weight in your hand? What happened to the quality of the movement? What changed? But left? Became restricted, right? So it had more stiffness, more stricted. What else did you notice? Cool.

Right? So the muscles naturally increase the tension, right? So you had the more stiffness, you slowed down a little bit too, right? So there's an inverse relationship between load and velocity. Okay. So now let's do it with volition. Okay, so we're sitting our position, we're going to lift our pelvic floor up. We're going to draw abdominal walls in and we're going to rotate.

Yeah. And then relax. What was the difference in that activity with you? Volitionally contracting the muscles to do it. What did you feel? Stiffness was it? Did it make sense? Okay, so let's compare the two of them, right? So we pump up our desks and we're just rotating and there's no weights.

Very light. Now draw your pelvic floor up and draw your abdominal wall in and you notice that it actually is almost painful. Can you feel that to the back of we keep going? It's going to be painful to the back because you're limiting and natural movement. Go back to the disc being pumped up right now at 30 pounds in your hand.

Decreased range, increased stiffness, drop them again, go back to just nothing. And you notice how the body naturally adjust because it already knows what 30 pounds feel like because you've picked 30 pounds up before or 10 pounds. And the point we're making is that the nervous system is so much smarter than us as plot, as teachers. Yeah. Even if we identify that a muscle group is not working right, can we be creative in our queuing to be able to organize the body in a much more efficient way?

So by giving you the image of pumping the disc up as if it was a balloon or a ball or inner tube, it's to use those muscles right here. You use all those muscles, but just sort of get this idea of this length. There's the body's figuring it out. And then we're saying, now we want you to go to rotate. We want to optimize that rotation. And it puts you in a beautiful alignment when we change the anticipated load, the nervous system naturally increase stiffness, decreased range of motion, and slowed down the velocity. So if I'm golfing, what do I want? I want velocity, right?

If I'm lifting 400 pounds, what do I want? I want stiffness, right? And allowing the body to figure that out is really important. So when I have a client that comes up and they're doing their footwork for the first time, they're going to over recruit. All right? So just let them make the mistakes. Are they going to get hurt doing footwork on the reformer for the first time?

No. Right? Very, very, very unlikely that they would get hurt doing it the first time. So now what do I do? I let them make the mistakes and I say, what happens if you use half as much energy? What happens if you use the image of balancing a cup of hot tea on your pelvis while you're doing this activity that the nervous system solve the problem, right? While they're rolling up Singh distract them. They're doing a roll up. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Right? And that scene is, they're going through the four, five, six is the problem.

That's the middle where they get stuck and they typically will do a, Huh, right? And now they have this thing, four or five, six, four, five, six, right? And if they want quality of voice, you're going to see quality of movement sort of tying together. So it's really becoming smart with how are we using the nervous system as the teacher to be able to facilitate quality and efficient movement. Coming back to the, again, what we started with and we finished with is Joe said, the first requisite of happiness as a healthy body and healthy body can be defined as a body capable of doing as many very daily tasks, naturally, spontaneously with vigor and pleasure.

And I think that's how we have to think about pelvic floor and the abdominal wall and the diaphragm. So as we bring this to a close and, and, um, I love talking about this topic and I realize that there's often many, many questions that come from this topic and there's a lot of controversy and how we interpret teaching movement and particularly pelvic floor and abdominal wall. So what I like to do now is, um, actually prepare ourselves to be able to ask questions and do the best job I can to answer those questions. And for us to be engaged in a little of a dialogue, to be able to, you know, to really understand and at least understand what we don't understand and, um, move forward in some of our research and those kinds of things. So I look forward to answering your questions.

Chapter 7

Q & A

So we've talked about quite a bit of depth in the workshop of the pelvic floor, the diaphragm, it's relationships or the new way of looking at things and how we would cue or teach it. So the purpose now is to engage in a dialogue, um, questions that you might have about teaching and how you facilitate teaching in this aspect of and the pelvic floor. And I also want you to think about how we would communicate it to our clients. So I want this dialogue to be something that not only is it beneficial to other teachers out in parties, anytime land, but also to consumers, people who are using the product to be able to improve their health and how they might better understand, um, the pelvic floor and the relationship it has to their movement.

So the time is yours to ask questions. And I'll do my best to answer, but again, if we can just keep it sort of loose and a nice dialogue would be great. Okay. Thanks sprint. My question is often when you, somebody starting, you'd starting to teach [inaudible] you have been doing the hundreds teasers. Um, a lot of the work goes into their back and they, they, they stop and go, oh my God, my back or their neck. So how would you cue, you know, if you want them to involuntarily engage their abdominals?

I just don't underst I, I'm not too sure how to cue them because obviously there's an imbalance between the front and the back. So, you know, so the overcapacity. Fantastic question. Um, well, we'll actually do that in a movement class. So we'll do right after the Q and a that we'll go through a little bit of movement, but let's answer your question together, right? So instead of asking somebody to draw the navel into the spine or to Holler abdominals, what's another way that we could prepare the body, for example, to do that? And I'm thinking we should just practice it. So let's just do something right. So just sit sideways on your, on your, uh, mat or on the floor and you know, fill the sit bones on the floor and fill the back of the neck length. And so you sort of feel that nice position.

And now what I want you to do is allow the pelvis to roll back a little bit without losing the height of your head. It's just going to be a fraction of an inch. All right? And then now start to send the lower ribs back and up underneath your heart, right? Until you fill the shift of the gravity that now you can bring your hands down to the floor and you could actually lift one leg up at a time, and then you can have both legs up at a time shift back. And now you could go into any of those activities, right?

So by teaching them alignment, remember going back to alignment and where the center of gravity is going to be placed will automatically engage the right amount of tone in those muscles correctly, right? And that was something that if I don't get the right alignment and I do facilitate a muscle contraction, am I getting what I want? No. Alright. The load based on the activity will automatically demand the more intensity activity. It'll demand more muscles to work in stiff just like we did in the example with the, so placing the body in the right position.

This is a common problem we see with teaching teaser and teaching some of these exercises is people think is now hip flexor exercise. So it's like, oh my hip flexors are so weak, I can't do the teaser. Um, excuse me. It's not teasers. Not a hip flexor exercise. Teaser is a balance exercise, right? Especially when you add the handles and things too. It's like, do you, can you get your body into position that now the leg has this nice alignment that it can work freely in that organization without being held or over recruited. So that's a fantastic question, but I hope that helps. Like just thinking like think of alignment of what your desired movement is and center of gravity. Like, how do we position our body to be in the best I, so as you went back, you all of a sudden I'd do a placement was like, oh, now my leg comes up easy. Oh, there's teaser. Right?

Just following on that question, it almost sounds like, yeah, okay. Get them in alignment. But rather than telling them what they're supposed to do or where, just tell them where to go. In other words. Yeah. You don't even have to be super specifically worded towards alignment, I think because what I heard you do was roll back, but don't move your head roll. So you were getting me there, but it wasn't an alignment cue to my mind. If I'm new. Yeah, you're just telling me where to go. The new person is not going to know that at all. Right. But the nice thing is, is that we take them to a place where they can feel the balancing in their body and we bring their consciousness to it. And so those are called builds.

So we're building an exercise, which we'll play with in a little bit on the Mat, but we build it. So we say, okay, to just tell somebody to go into a teaser position doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Especially somebody new because all they're doing is they're looking at you doing it and then they're going to try to reproduce. It is a build the definition of creating anticipation. It is. That's a good way of, it's like, you know, if I can, for example, create an awareness of pelvic position with something as simple as pelvic clock, right? And then I'm going to take that pelvic clock now into a seated position and say, can you feel the same orientation of the pelvis moving around? Right?

So we're going to do now is we're going to go back to 12 o'clock for activities such as teaser or roll up or those kinds of things. We're going to be in a 12 o'clock position with a pelvis, right? When we're doing spine twist, we might have, we might be going to three o'clock when we go to the left and going to nine o'clock when we're going to the right. So it's once they have an awareness of where that is, where that placement is, and most people don't and we're just telling them that we're going to make this a muscle. Like, okay, this is an abdominal exercise. Here we go, lifting the legs up. And it's like, oh, alright. And they're killing themselves. Sorry. Yup. I know I'm probably beating a dead horse here, but even to say it's an abdominal exercise, maybe I'm just thinking, I'm not saying it.

I'm questioning even to say this is for the abdominals doesn't, I mean does that lend itself to over recruiting? Cause all of a sudden now your focus is there. It can. Okay. Right. I, what I'd rather say is this is an exercise. This going to work on strengthening the anterior chain of your body, right? It's going to strengthen everything in the front. Um, for example, a plank exercise, right? So leg pull, front leg pull front, gravity's pushing you down.

It's creating a connection all the way from your toes, all the way up through your shoulders in the back of your neck. So it's, it's dealing with that. Am I turn the other direction? I do a leg pull exercise. Now I'm working, or a breathing exercise and the trapeze table, I'm working the posterior chain. Right. And I'd rather do that in the worst thing you could say is this a stomach exercise? Because stomach is a digestive. Oregon is it's smooth muscle. We don't volitionally contract our stomach. So telling people to use your stomach is also a misleading.

It's not teaching good anatomy, Tommy. Tommy is correct because Tommy is a place that we, we talk about Tommy or belly or we often refer to this as that or the abdominal wall, and those are correct anatomical terms and there's nothing wrong with saying this exercise is going to challenge your abdominal wall. Okay. Well we want to be careful of doing though is saying that with something like roll up, if you make roll up an abdominal exercise, you missed the point of roll out. That's not how Joe wanted roll up touch.

I want to roll up being taught as a segmental movement that rolls the air out of your lungs, right? The roll up was to get every atom of air squeezed out of your lung, like a opening a can of sardines. And so if you make it a abdominal exercise, if you go, my abdominal is so weak, I can't do roll up tight. Roll up is about spine articulation and flection. Swan is about spine articulation and extension. If you don't have thoracic mobility, those exercises are very demanding on the muscles, right?

So you're gonna have over recruitment of hip flexors, over recruitment of Rectus, over recruitment of your obliques to the point that is not serving its purpose other, other than making your abdominals look well. But you'll notice that, you know, and I always talk about this example, if I go up into Wyoming and I find a farmer that's a tall strappy farmer, right? Drives drives a truck, right? But the guy can slang like really heavy bells, a hey, he can work all day long, he can move the horse off of the, you know, something. He can move posts ridiculously functionally strong. But he's this skinny, scrappy farmer, right? But very strong. And then you take one of your bodybuilder guys, you put them out there too to move. Hey, forget it. He'll last five minutes. Right? So we keep confusing big muscles with torque and power.

We are what we practice. And so even though the guy's throwing hay all day long, his body has adapted to throwing hay and he's really strong, end efficient. And somebody who's just strong from lifting weights is not going to do, is not going to be able to throw the hay very long. And I think that's the thing is looking at sane and PyLadies, we want to be efficient. We want to be able to go up into the advanced exercises and do them efficiently and knowing that they're going to create enough load, that they will change our bodies. They will change our bodies, the advanced exercises because of the load. But there's no reason to make them unnecessarily change because we don't understand movement.

Mm hmm. Neither one of those Arsenio Hall moments. Alright, other questions? We have a questionnaire. Okay. Um, I have a couple of them. Chain pick which one I want first. Perfect. Um, and knock dancing. Monroe ask them, the one thing I would love you to speak to and get your thoughts on it is the whole, um, I only say the whole idea, but the, the, you know, I'm speaking from a postnatal perspective here, but I know it applies to everybody, but your little idea that, you know, you know, got a retone Kegel, Kegel, you know, but then the, the opposite of that, which is like the issue of not being able to relax the muscles once they're contracted. So just in the concept of understanding the pelvic floor and you know, if a woman just goes on and Google's, she's going to find, oh, just Kingwell it's just so simple, right? Just, but it's obviously as we know nothing. And not that it's not that simple, but it's just the, the design is, is, is just more, um, more wonderful than that.

Well, let's, let's talk about that design, cause this is a great question, right? So make the diamond with your hand of the pelvic floor, the slang, right? So let's say the fingers or the pubic synthesis and the back angle is going to be its attachment to the coccsyx and the diamond on the side is going to be the connections to the, the sit bones, the issues, right? So you have this sort of sling here and those fibers in the slang run long wise, right? Length wise. So they're going to be like a cup or sit like this. Now inside those slings are sphincters, right?

So we have anal sphincter and urethral sphincter and you also have vaginal wall, right? For Women. So there's times when we see a true pupil, cock cgs muscle, which is the slang and we can see it contract or we know that the sphincters. So when you're paying, you're relaxing the sphincter muscle to be able to urinate. And the same thing with the anal sphincter have to go to the bathroom, right? And the vaginal walls are tubular muscle, which contracts like this, right? So the fiber is that it can tracts this way.

So there's times when we see the different interpretations of what's contracted and the don't forget the glutes that are on the outside of that that often are mistaken for being in pelvic floor. So you can sort of feel like, just sort of feel yourself, squeeze the glutes together underneath. It's going to lift your sit bones up off. Some people think that's a pelvic floor lift. You could pretend like you're stopping the flow of urine or if you are stopping going to the bathroom deprecating, those would be more sphincter muscles. And there's something even a little more unique, which is actually feeling the pubic oxygen cgs muscle come up and relax down.

And so as you inhale and exhale, you can almost float when we do a low squatting activity in a little bit, your are really bring it to your attention. And then the vaginal wall is even different from that. So if you could imagine, and your, excuse me for the image, but if you are removing a sanitary Tampon, right, and you didn't want it to be removed, that would be a vaginal wall contraction so that you know, women can typically relate to that one a little bit better than just, you know, try not to stop the flow of urine. Going back to your question now, so the idea of, well what's the Kegel, right? The complaint typically is incontinence of the urethral sphincter. That's, that's the complaint, right? That it's something happened during childbirth or during prostate problems for men, that there's, there's a loss of a, of, of continents, right? And so in continents can be urgency, it could be psychological, it could be a weakness of the sphincter muscle, it can be a lot of things. And I think that we're going to learn, and this again is where we have to go now is looking at the pathology of incontinence and seeing is there a relationship with things like the diaphragm hypertenicity that you talked about with the pelvic floor, which I think is more of a problem than facility even.

I think that we see more people that are hypertonic and that might be in relationship also to sedentary lifestyle. So there's other things that are in there that I don't think we really understand. And my friend Pam Downey, who specializes in pelvic floor and as a physical therapist and does internal work, she's one of the leaders in the country, um, often is dealing more with things like trigger points and hypertonicity in the pupil cock cgs muscle that are causing the incontinence, not necessarily going in and strengthening. So she often feels that we overdo the idea of kegels. Now there are some people that are flacid and it's just like any, right? So we have are people that are hypertonic and we have our people that are, you know, loosey Goosey in their body. Pelvic floor can respond the same way.

So if you're too loosey Goosey, maybe want to increase the tone and if you're too tenths, we want to release and relax some of that tone and any deviation from normal could result potentially in incontinence and other other dysfunctions of the pelvic floor. Yeah. How do you know if you, if the result is the same? How does one know if it's hypertonic or flacid? Yeah, that's a great question. Now in the ultrasound we can tell. So one of the things we look at in the picture of the ultrasound, I'm one of them, the, I think it was the second or third one, the pelvic floor was already domed in the picture.

So at rest the pelvic floor already was dumbed up and the ones that were more elastic or relaxed, the pelvic floor was a little bit more flat. And then when they can track the, it would dome up and when they relax it would come back down. That would be sort of a normal, what we think is normal. I don't even know that we know that anymore. But, um, some were up and they were able to get a little bit more up. So they showed that they were able to get the right direction, but they already were domed and others were, you know, they were up and when they tried to contract it, they could only go one direction, which was down. That makes sense. So there's, there's, there's like four or five scenarios that we're seeing now we want to do is partner up with a therapist or a doctor that does internal examination and have a double blind.

So the idea is we look and we see something that looks like it's hypertonic with the ultrasound and for her to go do the POW patient and see if it indeed is hypertonic, um, in that muscle. And she can tell by the trigger point and just her pao patient expert skills and she wouldn't know what we're seeing on the ultrasound. But we'd be able to see if there's a correlation with what she thinks she's feeling as a hypertonic pelvic floor and what we think we're seeing as a hypertonic for. I love the, I really appreciate the just defining Joseph pull out his original words about it because I know Mandy ink and gave other great, you know, comments on it, but the idea of, you know, trusting your body to move appropriately as it needs to, the forces being placed upon it and all that. But with, um, pelvic floor. And it's so interesting seeing the ultrasound images, particularly of the woman that you, that was already hypertonic.

There's already that dome and she was able to live the right way. But we know without hypertenicity that muscle fibers are shorter. So they're theoretically right or by the book, they wouldn't be able to produce as much force. So wondering if, but like studying the, the strength of these muscles, whether it's normal as you say, we don't really know or hypertonic or even, you know, and what we might look at is the experiment that Danielle and Tanner did of looking at intra abdominal pressure in relationship to that. So by using a intrabdominal pressure measurement that is in the vaginal wall, we're really going to know sort of what's going on that pelvic floor. If we correlate that with ultrasound, we're starting to get the right questions that we're asking. And that's, that's the right question to be asking, isn't it? And, and I don't think we have the answer to it yet, but I think we're asking the right questions now. And, um, you know, I don't know that we will, you know, there's a difference between what we think we're doing and it's, for example, saying everybody contract your bicep muscle and everybody goes, okay, I got it. Everybody lift your pelvic floor muscle.

So theoretically we should be able to contract any muscle, you know, blink your eye, whether your nose lift, your levator Labia, Angular Sala, Canarsie muscle, you know, once, I can do it on one side, but I can't do it on the other side. So, you know, there's parts of our buys it if we don't practice as another muscle, for example, if the camera's zooms in closely, I mean they can see my, my ears wiggle, right? So I can move one year at a time. And, and, and that took, that took, that took a long time. I remember I had, you know, I was sick with some kind of flu bug for like a week or something. And all I could do is practice moving my ears. And so I learned how I learned how to wiggle my ears. So, uh, foot intrinsics, right? So we have the muscles in our toes to be able to play piano with our toes and to lift up, you know, the big toe and the little toe lift up the middle toes. We can do it definitely with our hands because we practice those kind of things with our hands typing or writing. We have, we're equipped to do it with our toes, but we don't because we're not familiar with it.

And you brought up a really good point earlier today, which was sometimes the process of the pregnancy in the birthing becomes the very first time that a woman becomes even aware of a pelvic floor region in many women, unless they're in this profession, right? So if they're not in this profession the first time they even have any proprioception, awareness of pelvic floor is going through the pregnancy and the birth in and partum and the rehabilitation afterwards. And so again, you know, where our awarenesses is, where we will have consciousness and alertness of that part of our body. And so what we're trying to do is say, how do we bring awareness, for example, um, in some of the, in Chinese medicine for example, and some Japanese medicine for pelvic floor for years they've used like marble eggs to be able to, to work on controlling that for other reasons, right? For, for sexual abilities and those things. So again, we are what we practice. So the idea is how much pelvic floor awareness do you need based on what you choose to participate in. If you're a nun, you know, it's really about being continent. You're not socially active, you're not going to have babies.

So it's about being content and you don't care necessarily what your belly looks like cause you're covered it up, right? So depending on what we choose to participate in, if you're a model, you're really worried about looking skinny for the picture. And if you're, you know, uh, you know, sexually active, it's about having pleasure if you're having children's about having a healthy delivery. Um, so I think it depends on what we're choosing to participate into. And sometimes I think we make such a big deal about things that might not correlate with what that person wants to participate in. I'll share a real brief story on this has nothing to do with the pelvic floor, but it has to do with what we choose to participate in as a woman, a client of mine that 87 years old, she comes in for a shoulder impingement. She's seen one of our therapists.

I walk in and she's whining and crying and making all this noise about how much pain she's in doing her physical therapy. So I walk over, I stopped the physical therapy and I ask her, when does your shoulder hurt you? She says, besides when I'm with a physical therapist, and I said, yes, besides when you're with a physical therapist. She goes, the only time, and I told the doctor this, that it hurts me, is when I'm reaching for my Coffee Cup on the second shelf. And I said, it doesn't hurt you any other time. She was like, no. I said, move your Coffee Cup to the first shelf. Right. And she goes, you're a genius. Now. She didn't need physical therapy. Her lifestyle of what she chose to participate in was so limited that it's not worth going. Trying to get her to have good thoracic mobility and to be able, her left shoulder was just as limited or right.

And the only time it bothered her was reaching for a cup on the second shelf that she did every day. So moving the cup down to the first shelf, solve that problem. But I haven't, 86 year old patient who is an avid competitive golfer now she's had multiple back surgeries, fusions, pacemaker, a number of other types of injury injuries and treatments and surgeries. And for her to participate the level she wants to participate that she has to have a very high level of awareness. Right. So I have her on a 50% golf swing because of the fusion and a little back. She does water aerobics to be able to keep the conditioning and keep her weight down and the low impact. So she's not bothering her arthritis in her knees and her ankles.

She does pull out these once or twice a week. She does physical therapy with me once a week. She sees her golf pro twice a week and she golf twice a week, so she's spending thousands of dollars a month to be able to be active at the level she's choosing to participate as an 86 gentleman. Comparing those two women, very, very different scenarios and I think it's the same thing for us when you look at anything is the first question I ask is what do you believe you should be able to do that you feel you're not able to do right now? And if I got ACR show, woman says, you know, I want to be sexually active and I wanted this and that and that, then I'm, then I going to take that into consideration, right? Or I want to be continent, I'm tired of leaking.

Then we're going to take that in consideration and we're going to build a program that's going to increase awareness, use appropriate perception correctly, find efficiency, refer her to somebody like Pam who could do some internal work with her as well. And you know, maybe do some biofeedback. I mean, there's a lot of tools out there for pelvic floor dysfunction, but the idea is to, to realize that it might cost her more energy and money in her eighties to be continent than it would for maybe a 35 year old that just had their second baby to, to work me kind of. But it's possible and it's just are they willing? Is it important enough to them? Maybe they're just saying, hey, you know what my mom had and my grandmother had it. I just put a sanitary Napkin in my, you know, in my underwear and I deal with it when I cough and sneeze and you know, and walk. And if that's, if that's where they're at, they're not going to make the effort then necessary to be conscious and alert and aware of that part of their body. Yeah. They might just shut it down completely.

So, um, I'm really liking and hearing the alignment portion of this cause it's, it's so refreshing to hear. Okay, just do the movement is sort of how I'm hearing it. I know it's more than that, but that's part of it. More than part of that. Yeah. So do the movement. But what would you say to instructors who, for whatever reason, because they feel like they charge a lot or they went through a lot of hard work to become a structure instructor, what would you say to them? Who said? I think sometimes we feel like we've got to tell them the reasons why, or we've got to tell them what should be happening because we won't know. We're not gonna hop up with an ultrasound. We don't know if there are, you should not be doing pelvic floor. No, no, no. How do I get myself into these? No. Um, but so, so how do we become okay with the movement we're offering being enough?

So, you know, this is a, it's one of my favorite topics and my idol with this is Shelly power. Um, you know, Shelly off takes a back seat. She's now president of the PMA board. Shelly has a gift of, because of her knowledge, because of her understanding of those things to make movement incredibly simple and meaningful to her clients, they don't have to have more knowledge than they need to have or that they want to have. So we're often guilty of doing what I call vomiting knowledge onto our patients. It only becomes confusing. What is their objective?

Their objective is to be able to do a certain activity efficiently. And if they come with a perception that that activity is too hard or it's too difficult and you can make it easier by a touch, an image because you understand the anatomy and the physiology and arthrokinematics so well you don't have to say anything. A great teacher, the really good teachers don't have to look like they know anything. And if they're really good, there'll be humble like Shelly is. And just say, I just taught her how to make it simple. I just taught her how to make it simple. That's it. Right?

And to me that represents a much higher skilled teacher than one that's trying to vomit their knowledge on top of their patient. And that's what it feels like when you're the recipient of all these words, these big words, looking at how smart you are, you know, well you've got a spondylitis thesis and you have a spondylosis of the undeleting Pedulla it's like, that's not real. But yeah. So you know, we do that to look smart. Yes. And the validation comes in making things that seem hard to our clients, easy to them, that they successfully have a positive movement experience without pain.

That they have a movement experience that exceeds their expectation of what they thought they could do. Those are life changing experiences. Them knowing where their transverse abdominals and if they're can track to Internet in 99.9% of the people is not relevant and not important. Knowing that they can move and reach for a door and put their bag up on top of the shelf and, and can pick up kids and play golf and play tennis. That's important. Body awareness in space becomes important to them. And maybe what we're looking at is again, grading and just like a child. So, for example, um, you know, when a child needs to know something a certain level, we teach it at that level.

And then as they go to a higher level of understanding, we then teach it at that level of understanding and they go to a higher level understanding. We then teach the adolescent at a different level of understanding. So for example, why do we teach kids about Santa Claus? Well, I'll tell you why we do that, right? I mean, I've thought long and hard about this. It's the same thing. You know, there is a similitude of Christian belief in the God that gives you all these great things, these great gifts of life and eternal life in a Christian or a monotheistic religious beliefs. So Judaism, Islam, Christian doesn't matter. And so a child doesn't understand that at three years old.

But we have a character that is giving and provides gifts. And those gifts are based on whether they're good or bad or naughty or nice, right? And so it's a level that they understand. If we do our jobs right as parenting, we're now saying Santa Claus is similar to a goddess or similar to what parents are. We love you so much, we want to give you things, but we also want you to, to earn them in a way by becoming responsible people. And then as we get older, it's like now it's your turn to be Santa. Now you're a, now you're a teenager.

Think of people that you could provide service for that would be meaningful and that will bring you joy, right? And so that's a perfect example of like, what do I need to know? You know, we sex education, you know, a little child, three years old looks at their mother. What's that? You know, why do you have hair there? And you answer it at the level of a three year old. You don't answer it at the level of a 13 year old. And as it goes on, you answered age appropriate. There's no difference in teaching any concept. And that's why when somebody comes to us that is completely ignorant to their body and space, we teach them at the level that they can understand it and then they're going to have, the next question is going to be, you know, I noticed the other day when I was sitting down that I was actually always back on the back part of my sit bones and it's like, wow, that is awesome. Let's bring the pelvis out and show you what that looks like because now they're ready to learn it. Yes. So the nuance to the question, I want to know that I did. I think that was really good.

I'm excited about the season now. Um, I don't have a token. It's about you given I know I got it. Yeah. And so the nuance to the question or another layer perhaps is, so I'm the teacher and I know what I know and I know what I want to have happen, but I'm still talking about this thing I can't see. So if we go back to the Santa, I'm Santa now. Yeah. And I don't know, but there's, I'm not seeing the children react and seeing the joy. I'm still, or I'm not seeing the results. I don't know if I'm getting the results. So is there any tips for, for the instructor who's who, who knows they're doing the right thing they think, but how would they know?

So here's here to keep the confidence, the good news. What we find is if they're aligned correctly and they practice anticipate correctly and their goal is to be efficient, the likelihood of the neuromuscular system working correctly is very high and they don't have to know exactly the Po. We can make the assumption safely that when we are aligned correctly and the load is correct and we are practicing, that we're going to become efficient using the right muscles at the right time in the right sequence, in the right synergy pattern that far exceeds our understanding of it. Now, even though I've studied it right, it ad nauseum of how the muscle system works together with the fashion system and the skeletal system and the mind with anticipation and experience and all these different aspects, right? Spinal cord reflexes. Gravity is a huge factor in how we move and how we anticipate movement. I couldn't express that in the moment of movement, right? I mean, I had to write a 20 page paper on what was involved in a kiss for my neuro course in university. It was just just a kiss. But the neuromuscular involvement and what was going on in the brain with the anticipation, the perception, the question of do they want to kiss me back? I mean, and then the actual motor pattern of the head jutting forward a little bit and that sort of nervousness and waiting also for the visual feedback to happen to see are they jutting for the same amount and is there, are they starting to have other fair amounts starting to work? Right? And so that's, that's the reality of what happens spontaneously to us.

Heaven forbid the two teenagers fallen in love, have to think about that kind of stuff in their first kiss, right? Heaven forbid. Why would we make it any different for somebody that's experiencing movement? Now we are the experts in have to know it and be trained in it. There's no exception for us not to know all of our anatomy to no motor control, to no arthrokinematics. We have to know that information. How we convey it and facilitate movement is a whole nother story.

It's a whole nother level of expertise. That's why I said when you look at like Shelly teaching or here Shelly teach the classes on plies. Anytime you're realize that she has an incredible gift for making things easy and I think that's what we should aspire to be. That's what makes a teacher great is somebody that actually has impact on the community to have these great experiences when we try to motivate them by making it how hard it is. Oh, you're doing so see how strong your belly scr hard. This is. You know, there are people that are motivated like that, but they're the same people that like walking around with their bone, sticking out of their skin. I mean the people that like pain, they have this belief that no pain, no gain, and they're the ones that are 60 years old with horrible arthritis, horrible degenerative changes and they're not able to participate in normal activities. Now because they had a misperception of what health was held to them was a hard body and this competitive thing that put their body at risk of injuries that led to degenerative joint disease and fractures and surgeries and other things that, you know, like I have in my body. I mean I grew up in that mentality.

That's what I was trained to think. And now if 52 I'm thinking like, you know what, I'm okay if I have a layer of fat on top of my six pack and I'm okay. You know, if I'm not the strongest guy in the league at my age, but I want to be able to play golf, I want to be able to go hiking and I want to be able to be, you know, active in my life, um, without having to worry about pain all the time. It's not, well just in that line though, can you have your cake and eat it too? Because there is that pressure outside. So can you, if they choose to yeah. If they choose to participate their level, yes. By all means. You know, again, it's what's your expectation is in life now, you know, if I'm somebody who's I, for example, I pole vaulted, right?

Pole vaulting is a crazy sport. It's one of the most challenging sports. It's unilateral, meaning that I'm going to have very lopsided forces going through my body to be able to get upside down. I have to sprint, I have to jump, I have to vault and use my upper body strength and I fall down from 1516 feet onto the pit hope that I land the right way, right? And if that's what I want to do and that's what my client wants to do, then I'm going to help them to try to be as balanced as possible. Participating in that activity. If they want to be a bodybuilder, that's fine. It's what they choose to participate in.

The key thing always comes back to what we bring to the table as potties, teachers, alignment, mobility, control and mobility. If we can provide them with those things, then they're going to be able to learn their activity more efficiently and their power, they'll have more power, right? They have more, more spraying, they have more endurance, have more resistance in the long term, they'll last long or they'll perform their sport longer because they have better body awareness and they have better alignment. Right? So if I'm in this posture here and I want to be a tennis player, right? And I do all my weight training here and I have this, you know, really big pecs and a really tight six pack, I put myself at a huge disadvantage as a tennis player. All right, so now my range of motion is going to come from height hypermobility in the shoulder or my low back or both. If you just want to be thin, then you should eat less and do a little more cardio and be active and be outdoors and be conscious. You know, it's like, again, it's just asking the person what is it that you want?

Not everybody the same thing. And that's why I've sort of come to a conclusion. I had them out of alignment in my head. I still wanted to be my 18 year old body that was very in shape and model kind of shape. You know, and I didn't want to invest the time and energy at 50 years old that it would take for me to look like that. So I would never be happy. I, I just didn't want, I mean it would take me four hours a day and not eating food that I want to eat and having a lifestyle that I don't want to have at 52 years old. And that's my reality. But my vision in my head, that subconscious thing saying when I look in the mirror again out of the shower, it's like, ah, you know, and then you see old picture of yourself at 18 2024 years old and you go on like, this is what I, this is what I look like underneath all this fat. But it's like, no, it's not what I looked like any of those fat.

It's like I have chosen a different lifestyle and when I understand that my lifestyle is to be supple and my lifestyle is to be able to be mobile and to be active is very different than the lifestyle of looking like a model. Right? Or being in top shape for pole vaulting or dancing, which would the activities I used to do. And so that being said, I find the alignment and the activities I choose to participate in and accepting myself with how I am now or having realistic goals that I can achieve of [inaudible] 10 pounds. And I want to keep my weight under this level and I want my cholesterol list into this level and I want to be this act of, I want to be able to go run a five k and not and be happy. Yeah, exactly. And so I, you know, that's the balance. I'm like my client that golfs, she has to spend four, six hours a day and a couple thousand dollars a month to be able to golf in the state so that she has her cake and she eats it too. Right? But I don't know that I'm willing to do four or five hours a day in my busy day.

I mean, like I get excited about things that we're teaching and the research we're doing an impact in the world with movement and really making a difference. And so there's other things that are exciting me now at this stage of my life rather than looking in the mirror and you know, seeing a six pack. That makes sense. Cool. I'm going off. I from my experience in my life, I tended to be very rigid and um, I tried so hard to be perfect all the time and I've experienced that now I have to kind of, I kind of, I didn't know. And in, in doing so I actually probably didn't look that perfect cause it was so rigid and mechanical. My movement, the way I approached my life and now I look at the waves, I look at the wind, look at the trees and I try and let my body kind of move naturally and actually really hard for me to kind of let go and just to feel it, let my body in voluntarily do the movement. But it feels better. Like even when we did that exercise earlier, just kind of moving side to side, it was like, wow, that just feels so natural and fluid.

So I really appreciate that. I'd like to translate that to my clients or the people that I work with because I think the world makes you more solid. And as we age, we've got to become more fluid and functional because otherwise you're going to break. Great comment. And it's a great observation and I agree with you 100% and I, and I don't think it's easy, I don't think it's easy to move from a very rigid structure that we have to one that is, you know, take Philip Beach for example. Right? So Phil Beach doesn't have any furniture in his house, you know what I mean?

He's really gone to the extreme to make the point of how he chooses to live his life and to keep himself supple and to really listen to what the world's telling his body. You know, instead of creating all these cushions and things that are ergonomically right, you know, it's like learning how the tree waves and how the dog sits and you know, how the child plays on the ground and how native tribes Cook and how they build bricks and those kinds of things in, in the way that the body's made to move. And you know, I wrote a course, um, settings, a new smoking that I've been teaching, uh, and I teaching it. Yeah. And, and, and so it states a, you know, you just go to the next channel when you're ready for, I bet. But, you know, it's, it took me, I didn't use a chair to prepare that course and it took me three times as long to build the course. And that's because we've created a society of efficiency in doing certain types of work. And so the desk has become a very efficient way of producing work, but it's taken us back thousand millions of years of evolution into this posture. Again, like the monkey, right. Put a chair in a workshop. I don't use the chair in the workshop, but I did not sit in a chair to prepare it. So I sat on the floor, I knelt down, I stood up at a counter. Um, but I did not sit in my chair to do the course, but it took me three times as long to build the course. Well, it sounds like that's not very efficient.

Okay. Let you get the idea that it's like, you know, we have to make conscious decisions of what, you know, what do we want in life? What makes us happy? Right. And I can guarantee you that, you know, being a hundred pounds overweight and you know, having, and cancer and those kinds of things are don't make us happy and negative thoughts and depression obviously don't make us happy and destructive thoughts don't make us happy. Malalignment does not make us happy. And if we reverse that, then we can say the opposite is true. I a good healthy lifestyle makes us happy, good posture makes us happy.

Um, and that's, that's easy to prove, right? So you go in a slouch position and smile in others. How false? The smile is and frown. Very easy. Come up into a good posture. Smile, very easy. Frown very hard. So fascially in our bodies, good posture facilitates smiles and emotions of happiness.

Bad posture facilitates frowns in emotions of sadness. So people would come up to us after our class and they stand up and go, oh, I just feel so happy when I come and I do pilates with you. And then I go back to work. I go back home and I'm just, I don't know. But when I'm here, they're literally, we'll move their body like this when they're talking to us and express a relationship with emotion. And that's always impressive to me. The notice that you know Joseph was right when he said, you know how important that posture is for self confidence. You're talking about young men getting jobs or things like, it's like if you got to get a job and you're in bad posture, you're not going to get the job. If you're in a good posture, you much more likely to get a job. And now a hundred years later, when you look at HR and they're doing consulting to the millennials that are going out and applying for jobs, who all are like this, right?

And they're being told, you have to stand up tall. You gotta Tuck your shirt and you got to cut your hair. You got to, you know, make yourself more presentable in a way that, that you PR that you show confidence. It's not about what we're seeing. We see what you feel, right? So if you're feeling intimidated and you're feeling a low self esteem, we, we can fill it when we're hiring, right? We can feel it when we're interviewing, but when the body posture changes, there's a different air of wellbeing and confidence that follows that.

And if you want the job, you're going to get my, you get the job. If you portray yourself with a confident posture, then an unconfident posture. And that's why, you know, it's like what we do changes lives. It changes the way people see the world, the way they smell, the way they hear, the way they see, um, is changed just by having a actually ligated posture and when they can be, then that'd be flexible. Right? Think of the emotional, spiritual aspect of what you said about flexibility. Right? If I can accept the fact that trees fall down, sometimes when the wind is hard, then I can accept the fact that I fall down. Sometimes if I watched the ocean change and I see the tide change, I can understand that emotionally and my life is going to have changes too. And if I can accept the fact that there's low tide and high tide and they're stormy seas and calm seas and that's what life is like, then I'm going to be happier because I understand that I'm aligned with a forest that's much bigger than me and that I can, I can roll with it.

I can tolerate the cancer, I can tolerate the death in the family. I can tolerate losing the job. I can tolerate the divorce, I can tolerate even horrible things like losing a child. Because you understand that the whole world and the universe has that flexibility and supplements to it. And it changes. And sometimes it's harsh and sometimes it's soft. But if you're rigid and you have in your head, we have in our head that the world is a black box and I'm doing everything right. I shouldn't have anything wrong happened to me.

You're going to be miserable because things are going to happen to you because that's how the world is, right? So when you're looking at people that are really happy, Daddy JQ one of my favorite, uh, sort of spiritual leaders in the Brahma Kumaris group, and she said, talking about spiritual soldiers. And she says, when one of us is alert, there is safety for many. And I think about that all the time. I think about, you know, here we are. You know, we joke about being the pasture police, but it's not about just posturing. It's about how vital movement and posture are to safety and happiness and health.

And if you see yourself as being that soldier that's responsible for that, right? Then we're going, there's going to be safety for many, which are your clients. And if you're helping them to be more aware and more conscious and to, to be more alert than they're gonna be a safety soldier for their family and their businesses and their communities that they're in. And it's, it's contagious. I mean, that's the only way we're going to have peace in the world. That's the only way we're going to overcome the stuff that we have is one person at a time becoming alert, becoming aware. That's the only way it's going to happen. You know, it's, um, and, and we have that stewardship is our stewardship as polite as teachers. Because if you really teach the philosophy of Joseph [inaudible], you're going to realize that it is the whole development of body, mind and spirit.

And the body just needs to be strong so that the mind can develop to its capabilities. That's what Joe said. I used to misinterpret it. I used to think it was developed the body in the mind to maximize this potential. It doesn't say that. He says to have a healthy, strong body and develop your mind to its potential. If your body is sick and decrepit, you cannot develop your mind as easily. Right? It's much harder. And so when we put the body in its optimal state, the physical body, then the spiritual and the emotional and the psychological and the mental can really develop and sometimes we need to be broken physically to understand that.

Right? That's how we learn. All right, well we've a lot of good questions and some good answers. Got The 10 minutes we have with you. The movement class will be separate. So we'll do that this afternoon. But um, you know, I think anytime that we can engage in this kind of discussion, this is what I was hoping that we'd get with Kristy and I were talking about this and it's important for everybody, all the viewers to understand as well is that, you know, [inaudible] is not just an exercise. We have to get out of that mentality. It is a lifestyle that changes the world. It said, and that's what Joe saw.

And if we're disciples of Joseph [inaudible], then we need to teach his philosophy. We need to teach the world how to appreciate everything from the exercise, the posture, the sleep hygiene, the um, nutrition, the balance between work, plane arrests. I mean those are really elements that are essential for happiness and essential for, you know, joy in life. And that's what we want. We want people to be happy. And when people practice Palazzo, he's in control on a regular basis, they're happy. Now that going back full circle, when we get so caught up in a content area like I am the pelvic specialists, I am, you know, I'm going to teach your pelvic floor how to contract. I am the transverse abdominis specialist.

I'm going to teach you're a ta how to contract. We lose sight of the whole, we have to understand that Pilati there's a whole wholeness now. There's Times as a rehabilitation practitioner that I have to break things down and I think that's normal. And as a mood plays teacher, we break things down at times until we sit there and we looked at all of our exercises are made up of smaller exercises. So even though we start with something like bridging, bridging is a precursor to and feet and straps are precursor to long spine. So if you can't do a bridge with articulation and feet and straps with disassociation, you really shouldn't be teaching them mom's spine.

Right? And that's the building that I'm talking about. Like when they have awareness of that disassociation and segmental movement, then the springs are really going to assist them coming up into their long spine and they're going to be able to become familiar with it. When they understand that now we can take the straps away and we can do rollover or boomerang or other exercises that are more advanced because they understand the space around the spine with that orientation of gravity, it's all steps. It's all building, it's all facilitating this. And that's why when people look at pictures or videos only without having feedback and that's why you know, the idea applies. Anytime was never to take the place of getting instruction.

It was to be able to make it so that it's more readily available so that we can practice more frequently in between our sessions with professionals. Right. And we need that external feedback. You can't give yourself external feedback. You could probably video yourself and if you are the teacher, you can analyze yourself and try and make some corrections. But that's very, very difficult. I wouldn't even try it on myself. I mean, I always want somebody else to give you my feedback and I think that's the idea is where we want to make the access easy to people to be engaged in the movement activity on a regular basis. But it doesn't take the place of getting the feedback from your teacher and you still have to get that feedback. Even if it's once a month.

You've got to get that feedback in your body of saying, am I in the right area? Can't, how could I make my movement more efficient? I'm still struggling with moving my body through this one particular range of motion. Where's my restriction? And the teacher can help us facilitate where that restriction is. And and today we talked about the pelvic floor and the in the hydraulic amplifier is one of the areas. Maybe tomorrow we talk about the thoracic spine or we talk about hip joints or we talk about the lower extremity, you know the shoulder girdle, it, they're all together, they all work together.

And when there's restriction in one place, it affects the movement everywhere else. And so when we're watching our clients move, we have to understand the depth that we talked about to be able to facilitate the fluidity of movement that we want our clients. All right, cool. Thank you. Hope you enjoy this Q. And. A. I think it was good for us to hear and, and hear the questions because everybody has these questions and so when they're watching this, your questions that you shared and asked her the same questions that they're asking at home. And so hopefully we answered them and if we didn't just write to us and we will figure out ways to get you the answers through polarities anytime. This is Brent Anderson signing out.

So I'm excited to be here at plots any time. And My name is Brent Anderson.

Chapter 8

Mat Workout

We have been speaking today in a workshop about the pelvic floor, the abdominal wall, the intraabdominal pressure, the diaphragm and all those good things and how they integrate. And really what we're looking at is how do we teach a class how to enjoy a class that does not focus on images of muscle contraction but rather just moving in good alignment and good organization and good load to have a good whole body workout. And so you'll notice whenever I teach a class, I really try just to follow the class itself. So I don't really have a pre a written out class. We're going to follow this. But the idea is we will create a positive movement for you, um, plays any time and you will be using your pelvic floor and abdominal and diaphragm hopefully without even knowing it.

So we're going to get started with you laying on your backs. We're going to have your knees bent and a hook line position, arms down to your side. And let's just start with a simple breath awareness because breath really is the facilitation of this whole area we talk about in the trunk, the connection between the rib cage and the pelvis. So just four or five deep breaths. And as you exhale, I want you also to notice and feel the rib cage relaxing into the mat. Feel the shoulders and the chest relaxing in the neck, lengthening the throat, softening the tongue, soften in the mouth, and be able to feel the weight with air reacceleration. Now on top of that, I want you to feel also the ribs expanding sideways towards the wall as well as into the floor.

So you're going to allow that sort of 360 degree mobility around that center of the spine to expand and relax. And here's the feeling I want to create when we breathe in. And I want you to breathe in really deep, as deep as you can and just to expand anywhere that you can expand and then let the elasticy of the rib cage and the body exhale for you with the relaxation. So no fourth muscles. Again, inhaling, expanding the rib cage as much as you can. You can expand your belly as much as you want.

Breathing and breathing and breathing in and that the air out and feel the elasticity recall, and this is really how the pelvic floor is working. While we are breathing, the pelvic floor is descending with the inhalation and it is returning to its resting position with that relaxed inhalation. Let's do that one more time. A deep breath in all the way around and exhale, just a really natural relaxation. Now place the hands on your pelvis and just get an idea of its orientation to horizontal right so the hand sit on the pelvis. If we put a cup of water or we put a level or a balance on top of the pelvis, would the bubble be in the middle? Would the water be balanced inside the cup?

Would you be able to maintain that position while you sort of organize that body length in the neck a little bit more. And you might find you need to tilt the pelvis a little bit, one way or another, just sort of find that place where it's most comfortable for you. Now let the hands come back down to the side and let's try that breathing activity again without moving the pelvis, taking that deep breath, inhaling. And when you exhale, feel the rib cage, especially the lower rib cage, softening even a little bit more down into the mat. So we're starting to create that tube of the head coming into the center of the pelvis and the rib cage coming in alignment with the outside of the pelvis.

Can you imagine that too? Those two tubes. So one is the head coming all the way down through the pelvis, right? So it's going to be coming right down in between the two sit bones in the, in the bottom and then the other one's going to be outside of the rib cage coming to the outside of the pelvis. And it's actually a 360 degree tube all the way around. One more deep breath in, and the next guy. Now with the pelvis in that position, let's change the image. I love to use the image of the bowl of soup because I feel like it's one that everybody can relate to. It's a nice, cool winter day.

Now we're getting into winter. Imagine that that pelvis is a nice large bowl. The mouth of the ball is open to the ceiling, so the pubic bone, the belly button, and the pelvic bones are the mouth of the bowl and your sacrum right. The bottom is the bottom of the ball. So it's nice and round and we're gonna use your breath again to facilitate the natural tilt now of the pelvis. So as you inhale, allow the bolus soup to tilt towards your feet.

And as you exhale, allow the ball to tilt back towards your shoulders. And so if the ball was half filled with a nice soup, I know some of you are Vegan, so we can use a butternut squash puree or something in those. You're like me. We want a lobster bisque, that's fine too, but just start tilting and that's the texture I want. I want it to a little bit of weight and I want you to feel a little bit of heat and as you're tilting, allow that pelvis to move until the soup comes all the way to the tip of the pubic bone. As you inhale and then back towards the belly button as you exhale and make it a little bit quicker, a little more relaxed, you're inhaling, tilting forward, exhaling and tilting back. And let's start picking that up. And again, inhaling, using little to no muscles other than the breath. Inhaling, tilting the pelvis forward and exhaling back.

And let's do that on your own form. More breaths. The more movement that I see, the better. So allow that movement really to take place and just almost like there's no muscles. It's like a little chain of events, a wave like seaweed in the ocean. Fill that fluidity all the way up to the head and you're actually going to feel the head articulating in contrast to the pelvis articulating. Let's do that two more times now. And this last one, allow everything to settle again, taking a deep breath, have that really deep expansion, and then the relaxed exhalation.

Just notice if there's a little bit of a difference this time. And now we're going to take that pelvis and we're going to add a rotatory component to it. So the idea is the knees are going to stay vertical and now we're going just to allow the pelvis to tilt to the right and then the pelvis again until to the left. So we're talking about a rotation, right? So we're going to rotate side to side. Now you might start thinking that that rotation only is happening in the Lumbar, but if you think of the connectivity of it, it's actually going all the way up, maybe even into your eyeballs.

You might even feel that that rotation is all the way up into the body and it's just a beautiful rotation side to side. So if you can get rid of all the bony landmarks and the muscles and just think of that bowl of soup and just tilt that bowl of soup to the right until the to the left. Make it as easy as possible. Use as little muscle as possible, allowing the pelvis to organize itself as a ball of soup. Let's do that two more times and now we're going to combine those two motions. So we're going to go at a diagonal. The diagonal is a little more complicated only because we have to think about it for a second. So if you think of it as walking, which is what it is, then it's not so complicated.

So we're going to go and to your and rotate towards the right foot so that hole balls, who's going to go to the right foot? And that whole ball soup is going to go back towards the left shoulder, down towards the right foot, up towards the left shoulder. Now this time we're going to incorporate the breath with it again. Inhaling as it comes down towards the right foot and exhale as it comes back towards their left shoulder in. As it comes down to the right foot, x Hensley comes up to the right shoulder. We'll do that one more time. Inhaling and then exhaling.

Now we're going to switch sides and go the other diagonal. So we're going to inhale down to the left foot and exhale back to the right shoulder. Really allowing and feeling that connectivity of all the tissues up through the body. So making sure that all the vertebra articulating, it's sorta like l one is saying, hey, t 12 was happening, right? And it's like getting it to talk and oh my fossette, we're doing great today. We're feeling really lubricated. And t 12 toxicity 11 and goes, hey, did you notice the change from sagittal plane to coronal plane?

Like this is really cool. So now we're going a little bit of rotation as that movement comes up into thorax. And I think that's really important to understand that in the lumbar spine we have lateral in the thoracic, we have rotation that happens at that t 11 t 12 junction. See if you can feel that in this diagonal. And we'll do one more and now we're ready for that fall.

Circumduction so let's do the full circles. If I was stirring that pot of soup, that ball soup, and you could just feel the current of the soup moving around and the ball and it's articulating all of the spine. So little bit of that Hula dancer feeling moving all the way through the body. If I was to drop a little wooden bead into that bowl of soup, it would be going around the rim of the bowl. And the smoother you can make that ball, that circle, the faster it goes. I remember as a kid, we'd get into these dough boy pools in our neighborhood and we'd all go in the same direction of the pool until we got enough current that we could let go and we just in the current, around the edge of the pool, that's what I want you to create it so smooth. The sets are gliding so smooth that that little bead is going around.

We can do that two more times and then we're going to let it settle down. So let the soup settle. You'll take in one really deep breath. And upon your excalation we stir the soup the other direction. So counterclockwise or clockwise, whichever way you haven't gone and really feel that movement, that energy, that soup, feel the weight, feel the heat, feel the texture, getting completely out of the muscle and the bone concept. Just allow the ball to move and let your body figure out what that means.

One more circle and then rest. Bring the feet and the knees together. Let the feet or the knees open up to the side. And just to observe from your peripheral vision how far out are my knees. Right? And you might notice one sides more than the other, or they're the same, it doesn't matter.

But just sort of pick up where it is and then bring the knees back up together. And let's go a little bit quicker now. So open and close. Now notice the relationship of what's going on with the pelvis. That pelvis should be in a really sweet spot and you're just going to have a lot of control of allowing the knees to open and close and open and close. Two more times. Open and close. Last one, open and close.

Leave the knees together. Tig, just the right knee, right? The right knee is going to drop down. The left knee is going to stay up towards the ceiling and bring it back up. But now the key is is that the pelvis needs to stay quiet. So using as little muscle as possible, let that right knee slide out.

Bring that right knee up, leave the right. Yep. Now let the left knee drop out. All right, so their knee drop. And our goal is to try to get it so that there's this little movement, but also as little energy as possible. So we're going to alternate side to side. So we're opening right and opening left. Now the key is is we don't ever move this slow, so when we're walking we need to go a little bit faster to have this type of almost spontaneous or elasticity in our system.

So start speeding it up as you have control. Organize it so you only go as far as you can control, right? If you need to place your hands on your pelvis to make sure you're not cheating. Actually, I don't like that word. Scratch the word cheating to make sure that you're doing it as efficiently as possible. Right?

And let's go a little bit faster now and maybe you don't go as far because when we increase velocity, we might decrease amplitude. See if you can control a little bit faster and we're going to go with me this time, right? So we're going to go everybody up, knees up, and we go right and up and left and up and right and up and left and up a little bit faster. Right? Left, right, left, decrease, arrange going, but do it where it's controlled. Yep. Now what you don't realize is you're actually using a ton of appropriate controlled pelvic floor, abdominal wall and diaphragm as you're doing this exercise and relax. Perfect. Keep the knees together. Hands down to the side, out to the side. Take both knees over to your right side. Keep the feet on the ground. Yup.

Now let the lays come over as far as they can until that lasts rib underneath your left armpit actually comes up off the ground, right, so the shoulders on the ground, but that last rib underneath the arm pit comes up. Now take a deep breath in to the left lung. Expand that area. Now when you exhale, we're actually going to send [inaudible] this rib down with the exhalation and then this rib in this rib in this room until it actually brings the legs back up, back into the starting position. Take the knees over to the left side. Breathe into the right lung in a little bit more postier if possible, like right into the armpit and the ribs behind XL. Sending the rib down, drawing the legs up. Let's do that again.

These are all the way up. We're going to go a bit fast or we're going to take it to the right. Inhale. Exhale. Let the breath bring the legs up in hell over to the left. Exhale, sending the rib down, brewing in the legs, up in hell to the right.

Exhale, bring it back up. Let's go a little bit quicker. Again, appreciating the reciprocal motion is happening when we walk. I think that's really important for us to understand that relationship and just going where it's safe for you and you'll notice that your range might decrease as you pick up the pace or the tempo of the side to side. Let's do it two more times, two more times the right two more times the left last one to the right and last one to the left. Beautiful. Take the right leg up to a tabletop position. Yup, and take the left leg up to the tabletop position. Hands are out to the side to sort of stabilize your control and now we're going to do the same exercise. Taking the knee side to side again, you'll notice a range of motion will decrease a smidge and then bring it back up to center.

Use the same strategy though so that we're using the breath as we come over and then we use the exhalation to draw the ribs back down that pull the legs back up. Really creating the movement of the diaphragm and that lower rib cage, they're going to be really crucial in the relationship of pelvic floor and diaphragm activities. Let's do that two more times side to side and see if you can make it even easier. The idea is that the breath is doing the work, not unnecessary muscles. We breathe in hell to take it over. That stiffens the spine up a little bit and we exhale. Draws the leg back up. Last one to the right and to the left.

Now what happens when we take the legs and straighten them up to the ceiling, so now we're doing more like a pendulum of the clock, right? Arms are out to the side for stability. We're going to take the legs to the right. The range of motion is going to be less and it's a tick tock. Tick Tock, tick, Tock, tick. Talk a little bit faster. A little smaller range can fold all the range, right?

You use the breath to do it. The inhale takes it to the side. Exhale brings the legs back up to center. Inhale to the side, exhale up to center. Just exploring how the rib cage is going to draw you back into that center axis. One more time to each side and relax at the knees, bend down feet or sit bones apart. Going right into spine articulation with bridging. So hands down to the side.

When we go into the bridging, one of the things we look for often is how do we get as many segments as possible to participate in the articulation. So using, um, more of a flow feeling rather than thinking of any kind of lifting or holding, we're gonna let go of those thoughts and just allow. And more importantly allowing the come down is how we learn to come up. So let's take a bridge and roll the bottom up segment by segment till the weights just to the base of the shoulder blade. Let's just get to that place. So everybody's up on that shoulder blade. And let's start here. When we take the inhalation in, we're going to expand now the ribs from behind.

So taking that deep breath and as you exhale we're going to slide the ribs down towards the floor, but also up a little bit towards the heart. And that's what's going to allow us to get that movement in that upper lumbar and lower thoracic until you come all the way down. The pelvis relaxes. Every time you come down, you want to make sure that the hip flexors and the glutes and all those muscles, any tension around the hip completely relaxes. You take a breath in and we exhale, we peel it back up. And the idea here is that if you could imagine that we're actually on the beach out behind us and we were just allowing that like a one foot tide to come in and it's gonna roll up the pelvis up, up, up, up, up.

And then the beautiful feeling here is as the tide goes back out, it's creating the draw in the space between the Vertebra as they come down. So again, feeling that space, reaching long, long, long, all the way down. Segmentally let's do that two more times at your own pace. Articulating the spine up, looking for that segmental movement and really being able to allow coming down. You want to feel the ribs in the vertebra sliding down into the sand or down into your mat. Okay. Now this next one, we're going to come up into the bridge, so everybody up into their bridge position and we're going to stay in the bridge and dropped the sternum down literally about a centimeter and then allow the pelvis to slide side decides one of my favorites. You've seen me do this before, but allowing that segment to movement side to side. So we've talked about pelvic floor, we've talked about diaphragm.

Now what we're doing is we're waking up the local stabilizers around the spine for the [inaudible] and the inner osseous muscles of the spine, right? And then dropped down another centimeter through the sternum and slides. I decide and allowing that movement to happen with as little muscle as possible is what wakes up is what wakes up. Those little tiny muscles are truly sliding side to side as if your bottom was on a scale more or as if you were a typewriter working your way down segment by segment, drop an inch slides. I decide dropping into slides.

I decide this relationship actually is allowing the pelvic floor, the diaphragm, mortify and all these muscles to work at a very low sub threshold, sub maximal level, right subconscious level. One more time, all the way down and then relax. You bottoms. Alright, now from here, find that sweet spot where the pelvis is nice and quiet. The rib cage has settled down. Take the hands, put them together so they are on your sternum, fingers pointing down and as you exhale we're going to send the ribs back and up underneath your heart, right? The elbows are going to reach to the corner of the ceiling and then back down. We'll use our breath to facilitate that ribs go down to the floor and up underneath our heart. As the elbows reach almost. If I'm grabbing those elbows in drawing you up a little bit higher, we'll do two more of those.

Exhale and reach. That's the feeling right there. Good and down. And we'll do one more time. Exhale and reach. Send those ribs away. Beautiful and down. Now let's take that into the chest lift. So take the hands behind the head. Same kind of idea. Keep the elbows in the periphery as we exhale.

The same idea with the ribs reaching to the back and lifting up underneath the heart as we come up. Keeping the back of the neck. Long. Inhale, release the hands. Arch them to behind the knees, right. And now lift up gently with those hands a little bit higher. Use the hands to come up. One or two more segments. Keep that height in how? Back behind the head. And exhale. Rolling.

Yeah, let's do that two more times. Exhale, roll up in how arch? Lift a little bit higher with an exhalation. Keep the back of the neck long in how? Back behind the head. Exhale down last time. Exhale, roll up.

Inhale, arch. Exhale. Lift this time. Stay at that height. Bring the hands behind the head. Stay their hands behind the head. And we're going to inhale deep five times into the back of the rib. K. So really expanding this area. And again, as we expand diaphragm, we are educating pelvic floor, right subconsciously. So it's got two more breaths. Deep breath in.

Keep that height. Yup. So when you inhale, you're expanding the back of that rib cage. Exhaling, rolling back down and relax. Beautiful. Use the back of your legs to roll yourself up into a seated position. So a modified roll up, sitting at the very edge feeder, right on the edge of your mat. We're going to sit up nice and tall, right. And when I want you to do is concentrate on where your head is in space so you can keep your hands behind the knees. And we're not going to do a four roll down yet. We're going to do a partial.

So the weight in the sit bones is going to be nice and equal. Yup. The head is still in space. Now where is the relationship of the ribs and the pelvis between the sit bones in the head is what I'm interested in. So in this beautiful position, you're going to keep the head in space and gently roll the sit bones back away from your feet without dropping the head or losing the height and then roll the pelvis back underneath the head and roll the pelvis back again away from the feet, pelvis towards the feet. Very subtle movement. Don't feel like it's a big movement. Keep it very small, right? The headquarter stay still in space.

What's happening as the lumbar curve is actually lengthening and giving you a height as you roll the pelvis back in the initial movement. That's why the head can stay still in space. Then when the pelvis rolls back forward, the denominator, the pelvis gets taller, but you lose height because the curve of the spine, so it's all you're doing is you're balancing out the pelvic position to the lumbar position. Let's try that a couple more times. Just gently rolling it back and then rolling it back forward. Now this time, roll it back. Keep the head where it is, and this time we're going to send the ribs back up underneath the heart so the ribs going to continue to slide. The head will start to drop down as we continue to articulate the spine.

Let the feet be heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy, and feel the rib sliding back as you gently roll yourself down until you're on your backs. Your feet can be the last thing to come up as you roll back into your position, right? A modified rollout. Let's use the same technology in our bodies, right? That same image to be able to do our roll up. So a modified roll up. We send a fetal away. Our fingers are hooked onto the legs.

We use a little bit of finger flection. That's about the only muscle I want you to use. And by sending the legs away towards the floor, the spine comes up, the ribs slide back and up underneath your heart and you come back up into your seated posture. Very nice. We're going to do this again and we're going to use half as much muscle. All right, half as much energy. So the same idea is all about sliding.

All we're doing is sliding. So you're going to send the pelvis back, the only muscles we really want to use it in your hand, your feet images, heavy sliding the ribs, the ribs slide back and up underneath your heart. The feet come up off the ground when it's time and you roll down through your spine. So the idea is that we play a game called red light, green light, which means you could stop anywhere in that role. So this is gonna be the last one to roll up that way. Sending the feet away or all in the body up. Yeah.

All the way up. Now come to the front of the Mat. Yup. We're going to go into a little rolling activity, right? So the rolling activity, we can start either by holding the back of the legs or if you're feeling the more advanced, you can bring the legs all the way into the chest. But I still want you to be able to feel that drawing back of the ribs away from the knees. Right? So either one's fine, either holding the ankles more traditionally or the back of the knees. Create space.

And now find the balance on the sit bones because you understand this posture now. And as you inhale your roll back and exhale, you come up again using momentum in this exercise. Making sure the breath inhale back, exhale up. Inhale back, exhale up. Let's do it two more times. Inhale back, exhale up on the last one. You're gonna find your balance, but you're gonna roll all the way up into a squat position, right?

So low momentum. Inhale up. See if you can roll up into a squat position. Very nice. Okay. It's all right. Practicing. Of course I didn't demonstrate it. Now try to see if you can get the hills down right as best she can and get that chest to start coming forward. You can put your elbows into the knees, the feet can be a part. If you're going to be a part a little bit more. Sometimes you might need a little more space to be in this position.

But this is a breath exercise now. So where are we going to do? Is concentrate on expanding the rib cage 360 degrees. We're going to expand belly forward, ribs out the side and ribs, posteriorly or breath, and then let it spring back yet. Okay. Deep breath in. Push, push, push, push, push with the breath. And then [inaudible].

Now this time, feel the expansion going all the way down into the pelvic floor, right? So we're expanding. Now feel the expansion of the pelvic floor down. It's like a trampoline. And when you exhale, trampoline bounces back up. Let's try a little bit faster. I'm going to breathe in. Oh, last one. Good. Bring it up a little bit into a pitch position. Knees are still bent.

Arms are going to come back into a dark position. So the body is in a flat position. Angled out, palt in the hands up towards the ceiling and lengthening the spine with a breath and it's going to be like hundred breathing in. Two, four, five. Exhale, two, three, four, five and four. Five X, two, three, four, five in. You got it. You knew I was coming. Keep going. Yes. And three more times in two, three, four, five, two, three, four, five in four or five out two last one in four, five, two, three, four, five. Now bring the hands forward in that squat position here and flooded the arms like swimming. Get the body up. Vertical modus. I'm vertical.

I'm not leaning forward. All right, we're learning that organization there, right? Drop down a little bit deeper all the way down into the squat, coming back up from the squat down into the squat. Keep that chest up and a last one. We're coming down, pick the hands over the head, alternating the arms and come up. So we're creating a rotatory force through that body is demanding. Never said it would be easy to work on the pelvic floor.

Then thing we just don't want to have to think about contracting the muscle. Last one, we're doing our swimming exercise with load and up and relax. Come all the way down and go and quadruple hands and knees. How is that for waking that up? Good stuff, right? All right, so we're going to play a little bit quad repaired.

We're going to think of just that wave again. So get your hands in a good position from here. You're okay. Allow the pelvis to be, I'll follow her lead. Christy always knows the best, but think of how the pelvis is going. Initiate the wave and the articulation through your rib cage.

So our goal in this exercise is to get the rib cage moving as freely as possible. The head and the pub opposite and move with a little more fluidity now. So let's get them moving. Let's get their flow. It doesn't always have to be slow. He'd be faster. Use your breath, your breath will pace in her dry and down.

Okay, two more times. Create the diagonal on the next one. Yeah, yeah. You guys got me out of breath on that squat diagonal. [inaudible] just the way we do with the pelvis, right? So if you look up here, we're going to come into the diagonal and up and the other day I get on and, and again, just listen. You're listening to what your body's telling you. The more mobile. The thoracic is, the more mobile the ribs are, the healthier the pelvic floor, the diaphragm and the trunk.

That's it. Find that movement in here? Nope. Oh, way through. Yes. Good. Drive it through the ribs. Anthro. Have you gone both directions? All right. And you know my favorite [inaudible] is the full circumduction so let it go. I'm not going to say like on the dance floor. Oh, I said it fuller.

Yeah. If I had hair I would be whipping it and reverse the circle. [inaudible] it's good. There's no wrong on this one. Just so loud to move. Find out what's going on. You got it. Good.

No, that's fine. That nice middle of the road position of your body. So the back of the neck is long. The ribs now know where their places in the body. There's a little bit of lumbar curve, a little bit of Kyphosis in the thorax. The back of the neck is long and slide the hand in leg opposite of each other.

Oh, for the ground. Only high enough. We don't lose that nice position in the pelvis so it doesn't have to go up so high. Yes. Good. And back down and switch and back down and switch and back down. And switch down.

Reach down. Keep the pelvis quiet. That cup of hot tea, sitting right on that sacrum and down. We're gonna go a little bit faster. Reach down, reach down, reach down, reach down. Load creates demand. That's it. Good. And relax. Very good. Give your hands a little rest. Sit back on your legs. So we're going to do a little rotatory work in the plank position.

Okay. So in the plank position, meaning that, that nice long plank and we're going to run the feet of place. Okay. From there we're going to do shoulder taps. Okay. And what we're actually doing is we're creating a load that is on the longitudinal axis. So what it creates for us is integrating the whole system. So you know, I'm not a big fan of using words like core control, but this is really connecting from the head down to the foot.

So let's give it a try. I hope I made it look easy. Going into a plank position that toes cocked back. Yep. The body's long. And we're going to alternate. Start slow. Right, left, right, left, right, left, and gradually pick up the pace until you are running. Small little motion. Yeah. Good. We're going to go for 10 seconds. Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two and rests.

You come up into a high kneeling position. Shake those arms. Yeah. Okay. So in the high kneeling position, we're going to do a little bit of coming back and up again, right. Hinge back. And Ah, when you come up, feel like the sacred is pushing through the hips, right? So we're sending that, say come through the hips. We lean back from the knees and we pushed the sacred through. We'll lean back and we push the sacrum through. We do this one more time and then we come up.

Take the hands in front at a 45 degree angle and imagine you're pushing down the pedal of the chair, keeping the femur vertical until the hands touch the floor. Send the tailbone down, roll back up, hinge back. Come forward. Roll down. The hardest part is the initiation in the final. Well, I'll try to keep those fingers vertical this time. Lean back and four last one. Keep the famers vertical rolling down, back up. Take the toes underneath.

So back and up for that. So can push in and down and back. And I'm afraid to do it up here, but you're going to come into this position and back. Are you afraid he's going to go up the table and not worried about doing the exercise? I was a little worried about being up so high.

So you're just going to go up and tell it? Yes. Just to the squat and then take the knees back down. All right, so we go from here. Hips forward, hips, back and up and here in Florida and here and up. Notice how I'm not thrusting right forward, back and up. Okay, last one and back and up. Now this time, bring the knees down. Catch your breath a little bit, cause we're going to go into plank position again. Getting ready to finish up here. Yep. All right, so back out into plank.

How are we going to do shoulder taps? So shoulder taps, plank position. Tap the shoulders nice and easy. Stay with it. Nothing hard. Try to keep the body from swaying, Huh? And as you find it, we want to go faster. If you're really good, you can do legs at the same time.

Get the feet going that axial load and realize come down on your tummies. Ah, are you ready for a swan? Now I bet in the heads of the side of your chest, elbows up towards the ceiling. The legs are engaged in the sense that they are reaching. There's energy in them. There's now vibration, magnetic energy. Send the elbows down.

The ribs are going to go forward and tilt towards the pelvis as you come up onto your thighs. Nice breath in here. And that makes so coming back down again. I wonder if the microphone picks up my heart beating from doing that. Actually that's called burst training and burst training actually sets your metabolism and gear even if it's just 10 seconds and back down. And this time we're going to come up all the way up. Yup. But bond those knees, fill the shoulder blades sliding away back of the neck long. And let's practice her breathing in this position. Okay, so again, inhaling all the way around the rib cage, right?

So what I want to see is it the font of the body is supported by inhaling into here. Yes. And support it here. So the question is can you maintain the position while that's happening? Can you maintain the length of the spine while the rib cage is expanding and contracting with the breath? So think of the spring. Now we do one more time. Deep breath in. Deep, deep, deep, deep, deep.

Let it spring back in and enrolled. Okay, so from here, prop yourself up onto your forearms. Yup. And we're going to do single leg kick, right? So bring the hands together, get that nice support through the triangle length. And again, the ribs. I want you to bring up any of your heart just as finish to get your hips off the ground. We're going to take the right knee, bend the knee, bringing the right heel to the bottom, flex and reach, switch legs, pump, pump, and reach. Now I lie. Everybody does this a little bit different. I like a flex flex point in reach. Try to get that leg off the ground.

Bring it down. Flex flex point. Okay, you ready? Right leg, beginning flight, flex and point. Left leg flex. Flex and point and flex. Flex and point. Feel the connection with the front of the thigh to the ribs in the front. Flex flex and points. Meet it with a counterbalance. The same energy that you flex your knee with your supporting through here.

It's the same energy, right? Balance it so that the low back does not collapse and it's hit a little back. Come up a little bit higher. Yes, there you go. Bump, bump and reach last one and reach and turn onto your right sides. Let's go into a sidekick position. Come up onto your forearms.

Take that left leg. We're going to lift it up. About halfway up in this space, the left leg or the left leg, right leg stays down and we're gonna turn the left toes towards the ground. Okay, so we're going to keep that nice long Torah so that we just practiced on right? Keep that relationship of the ribs, keeping the relationship, the pelvis toes turned down and we're going to do little pulses. Dorsey, flex the ankle. Turn the toes towards the floor. Yep. Now pulse the hill up towards the ceiling. Small little pulses. Two, three, four, five, six, seven and go circles. Now with the leg and one, there's a very important reason why we turn the toes down is because we are sedentary animals these days and we've lost some of our internal rotation, which is really important in getting the right pelvic floor muscles to activate.

He going to more and reverse the circle. Okay, five, six, seven side kick. Take that leg, make a neutral and forward and back and forward and back and forth and back and forth and back. Find the rhythm for a little fluid, more fluid and fod and back and for. Leave it back orientation with breath. Take the left hand, reach it forward. Reach retreats, find the rotation. The neck is long. Taking a deep breath in the center of the rib cage. Fill the rib cage.

Expand on top of that right shoulder. Get on top of it, fill that length and that reached the rotation. Exhale spontaneously brings the ribs back into place, right? We're working on that spring. That elasticy expand the rib cage in all directions. Xcel recoil in Halleck span.

That's it. Inhale, expand. That's the last one. And realize well over under your stomachs, Belize. Good, good, good. Hands behind your back head. Turn to the right. Double Lick. Same idea with a double pump of the hills and you'll slide the hands down your back. Come up into that long position. I liked the dark position. Okay, so I don't want you to come up too high. Think more of being long so everybody's heads. Turn to the right hills, pump one, two and reach heads. Go to the left and pump, pump and reach to the right pump.

Pump and reach and left pump. Pump and reach two more times and right pump, pump and reach. Fill that length. Pump and reach. Now this last time you're going to pump, pump, and stay in the dark position, right? You're going to stay in the dark because everybody in the dark position, hands to the side, back of the neck as long now and the dark position. We don't want to be up quite so high, right? So we're thinking of length.

Yes. Now the breath is going to come into this part of the back, so we're going to expand into this part of the bag. Five deep breaths. It feels awkward when you're on your stomach debris there. Really think of expanding the balloon. You're breathing into balloons and then you're letting the balloons Alasta city push the air back out. And remember, every time we exercise a diaphragm, we're actually exercising and pelvic floor and abdominal wall. The area that's most efficient and most of us is the diaphragm.

Is your last breath and relax. Roll over onto your left side. We're almost there. We haven't done any heart exercises yet, right? I don't think so. We haven't had anything even intermediate yet. Oh right. Okay. There were a couple ones challenging with the squats. I admit.

Those were sort of cool one. All right, so here we go. Up on top of that left arm. Get that right leg up, Dorsey, flex the foot. Turn the toes down and Paulsey up and up. And three, four, five, six, seven, eight circles going forward. And one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and reverse and go. One, two, three, four, five, six side kick.

Neutralize the leg up and reach back and reach up and reach back and reach forward and back and flex and point fluid motion. Using your breath to counteract the force in Helen. It's Ford. Excellent. It's back in x last one. Leave it back. Take that right hand, reach it forward. Opposite of the leg reach, reach, reach, reach, reach in this position. Deep breath, expanding the ribs all the way around the center axis and relax.

Deep breath and expand like you're floating on top of that left arm. One more time. Deep breath in and relax. Sitting in Mermaid position from that side. Just bend that left knee in front of you. Right leg to the side, left hand down the ground, right hand behind your head. Take that right elbow up to the ceiling.

Take the left hand and push a little bit with that elbow. The elbow drops into your body just a smidge. Yep. And send that left elbow. The right elbow, sorry, up to the ceilings. We're really feeling that lifts that length. And now in this position, three deep breaths.

Expanding down into that side, opening that space up, keeping that elbow reaching opposite of the other elbow. Really feeling that length. Last breath come up over to the other side. Right hand goes down. Leave the legs where they are. Left hand behind your head. Left hand. Now left elbow, reaching up for the ceiling. A little more challenging in this direction because the legs are locked.

All right, so now send that breath. Expanding the rib cage more into the left long. Expanding it, not just to the side but expanding it front, back and side, right? Really expanding that. And when you exhale, lift from the underside, reaching a little bit more with that elbow up towards the ceiling. One more breath and we ready to go into a little seaweed activity. We are going to flow side to sides.

Come up and over to the left hand and flow and over to the right. Let's go ahead and faster and flow wrong. Use your breath. Let me hear that breath happening. It's part of the movement. Synchronize it. Feel the ribs expanding and contracting. Diaphragm expanding and contracting.

Fill it all the way down into your sit bones opening and closing, opening, closing. You'll feel the closing when you come up into vertical open. When you go to the side, that movement side to side. Last one, up or over to the left. Stay there. Take that right hand. Now down onto the mat. You got it. Push the hands into the mat. Push the ribs back away from the hands.

Length in the back of the neck. Fill that space. Yes. Deep breath. Couple of times. Really filling that space. Expanding between the ribs, between the shoulder blades, expanding that space that we just don't get into. Give me more right where my hand is. That's okay. Now from here, we're going to go up into extension, so pull with the hands. Feel the sternum coming up, the ribs going forward and tilting down so that low ribs going to come down towards the pubic bone as this comes up towards the ceiling. Okay. And then push with the hands and roll it back. Sending the sit bone down, lengthening through that spine. And again, inhale, coming up.

Big Breath. Excellent. Oh, that's it right there. That was great. We've got a nice little manipulation out of her bag without having to try too hard. Let's put the same thing here. Yes. And back and inhale. Expand in this area and held there. Exhale back. Aw in hell. Last one.

Brain that right hand behind your head. Open it up and come back up. Hands behind you. Yep. Yep. Lean back. Switch your legs to the other side is quietly and gracefully as possible. Right hand on the Mat. Left hand behind your head. Up and over.

First sustained breath to the right breath is going to go in the left lung. Sanding that elbow up towards the ceiling. Opening up that space in between the ribs. Sit bone reaching down to lean. The opposite pressure from the hand pushing on the mat. Let's get a little more movement in there.

That's what I want to see there. Can you push with that right hand to get then there it is. Left elbow up, deeper breath. I want deeper breath. Really feel the diaphragm descending down towards that left hit. Hey, one more time. Make this meaningful, right? A lot of times we get so lazy that we lose the purpose of this. What you are experiencing right now is a major education of the pelvic floor and that whole hydraulic amplifier without me ever having to say pelvic floor to the left, right hand behind the head.

Same thing, right? We're going to send that up. We're going to reach through. We're going to feel the lift. The elbow creates the axial elongation coming up and the ribs are sliding to create that opening in that rib cage. This is Kristy and I have a history in this part of the body for a number of years now. You know we have a rib affair, no crying. This is a joyous moment. Really feel that expansion, feel that opening, but the breath, create the recoil, let it just open and then springs back last one and up and over to the right, flowing and to the left like the seaweed in the ocean.

Really flow in feeling that movement all the way through all of the ribs, right through the sit bones. Remember we said the sit bones narrow as you come up. Vertical widen as you go to the side and we use our breath to facilitate that. One more time to the left. Stay over to the right, right hand comes down around the back. Push the hands away around in the spine in between the shoulder blades.

Deep breath in between the shoulder blades. Really expanding, expanding, expanding, stay there, stay there, fill that space. One of the things we learn here too is that you have to be patient. If you want tissue to change. So whether you're teaching or doing this exercise, don't be in a hurry to get them out. I let them have four or five breaths of really opening that space. And from here, now we're going to pull with the hands, head and sternum.

Come up, lower ribs, tilt down, left sit, bone comes up. Deep breath in. Exhale, push back. Inhale, pull forward. Exhale, push back. Inhale forward. Already I've seen much better movement in the rib cage. And inhale last time. And exhale, press back.

Left hand comes behind the head and come up into a seated position. Spin around so that your feet are pointed towards the center. Ah, how are we doing? All right. Okay. We've got one or two more exercises to do and then we're there. So lays in front. Yep.

We're going to take the fingers to the side and we're going to work a little bit on the whole fashional connection. Now from a long sit position, so we're gonna take the fingers, keep them on the ground and keep walking them as far as we can out and just make sure that the rib cage is over the pelvis, right? So I don't want the rib cage push forward. I don't want the rib cage reaching back. I want to get that nice long position and walk those fingers out. And we're really not doing this for a spine stretch.

We're doing this for a neural mobilization to have you feel like your head wants to move around a little bit. That's fine. Let it just wiggle side to side. Sort of notice where those restrictions are. You might feel some burning or those cuttings going down your arm or your hand. You won't hurt yourself. It's okay. All right. Just find that and from here, let the legs, the arms float up and then hug that tree and now go into your spine.

Stretch over your legs, relax your face, taking a deep breath and stack the spine back up vertebra by vertebra all the way back up. Fingers to the side. Walk the fingers out, float the hands up, hug the tree up and over the legs. Relax the face, palms drop down onto the ground. Yep. And this slide and drag them back as you stack the Vertebra back up. This would be our last one. Hands out to the side, hug that tree up an overreaching law and stack it back up. Cross your legs. And these roll over into a pushup position.

Give me one perfect Palladio's pushup. And then walk your hands back up into a standing position and walk the hands back into a pike. Keep the legs straight as you can. Send the tailbone down, fill the ribs, lifting your spine up. Oh the way up. Take a nice deep breath and we'll do it again. One more time.

Rolling the head down. Just a standing roll down, rolling all the way down. And when we're stacking back up, one of the things we want to feel is that the ribs are what's bringing us up, right? So as the tailbone drops down, the ribs are lifting up underneath the heart. So there's really no muscles doing anything to get to that nice top position in that standing position. All right, so right there. Let's close our eyes for just a second. Okay.

And be observant of our feet. The connection of our toes into the floor. Feel the hills. Is the weight equal between the ball of the foot? And the hill. A gentle lean at the ankle. Forward you go until you feel the muscles in the legs. Relax. The pelvis is stacked on top of your hips.

Now the ribs stacked on top of the pelvis, the head on top of the shoulders in the pelvis, the shoulder blades resting now on the rib cage. Very little energy needed. Taking a deep breath here, expanding 360 degrees and exhale, finding the place where there's the least amount of energy being expended for us in upright. Partialists. Do that one more time. A deep breath in spontaneous exhalation. Yeah. Find that place where there's the least amount of energy. Open your eyes and give yourselves a hand. Good job.

[inaudible] so I know I might've been a little random in the way we organize some of the thought there, but the idea was really getting you to use your breath and diaphragm and the ribs to facilitate a reorganization of the pelvis, the pelvic floor, and the abdominal wall. So try the class a couple of times. I would love to hear your response. Let me know how you feel. You guys can write me as well and have a great day. Thank you.