From my last newsletter, I finished with the statement that posture is an elaboration, a process, a configuration of your body’s structure in the environment of gravity and ground reaction force (GRF) in space. The “holding pattern” from which all your movement occurs.
It can’t be stressed enough that all posture and movement begins in the nervous system and not in the muscles. It is a “brain driven” process. The peripheral (PNS) and central nervous systems (CNS) initiates, regulates, and monitors the process of your posture and movement that takes place below your conscious awareness, but actually occurs at the subconscious level.
According to Deane Juhan, the author of Job’s Body: A Handbook for Bodywork, “There can be no movement neither free or limited, without muscular activity: there can be no muscular activity without neural stimulation: and the quality of every muscle action, its timing, duration, and style, effectiveness, is a summation of all activities of both the CNS and PNS at that moment.”
It is actually more accurate to state that the muscles of your body receive stimulation from the CNS and PNS about your environment whether at rest or moving that causes an output to supply enough tensile and compressive force that offsetting the effects of gravity and GRF. The nervous system, muscles, fascia, and bones are all essential in this process.
However, your nervous system is not limited in its function with posture and movement. In fact, it pervades your existence. All that you are, everything you have experienced in life is in fact brain driven and stored as memory.
Human memory involves the ability to both preserve and recover information you have learned or experienced. There are three stages of memory including sensory, short-term, and long-term. The focus of Myomemory Transformation Advantage (M.A.T.), a system I have developed is on transforming sensory memory to short-term and finally long-term memory.
With sensory memory, sensory information about our environment is only stored for a brief period of time, generally for no longer than a half second for visual information and 3-4 seconds for auditory information. People only become consciously aware to certain aspects of this sensory memory. However by attending to the sensory memory, it allows some of this information to pass into the next stage known as short-term memory.
Short-term memory is also known as active memory because it is current information we are currently aware of or thinking about. In Freudian psychology, this memory would be referred to as the conscious mind. By paying attention to sensory memories, it generates information in short-term memory. While many of your short-term memories are quickly forgotten, attending to this information allows it to continue to the next stage of long-term memory.
Long term memory refers to the continuing storage of information and in Freudian psychology is referred to as the preconscious or unconscious. Information stored that is largely outside of our conscious awareness can still be called upon to be used when needed. This is actually a primary goal of M.A.T. in taking sensory memory and transforming it to long-term memory.
Neuromuscular patterning, the foundation of posture and movement, exists in the sub-cortical area of the brain and is not a function of your conscious mind. Yes, no one can deny that you control the goal of movement, the time, the space, and dynamics of the movement, but not the “how” of movement. No one thinks about how they step when walking nor do they consciously control what muscles actually are doing the movement. This is patterned and sequenced in and below the normal conscious, thinking mind.
In fact when the conscious mind gets involved in the effort, it may only inhibit your normal, habitual neuromuscular patterning and sequencing. When competing in nordic ski jumping, many of my coaches would often advise me to “take the conscious mind out of the skill.” That was also the consistent advice I gave to my younger son when he competed at the collegiate level in gymnastics for the University of Minnesota. Simply, let it happen at the unconscious, reflex level and don’t involve the conscious mind. Let your body do what you trained it do in practice doing repetition after repetition. As Billie Jean King once stated, “Champions keep playing until they get it right.”
From my many years ski jumping and observing the performances from some of the best athletes in the World, I came to a realization that there was an optimal way to perform a complicated, athletic skill like ski jumping. Taking it to a functional level, I knew there had to be an optimal, ideal way to mechanically stand, sit, squat and perform the activities of daily living.
The human skeleton is structured so that all its isolated joints of the lower extremities down to the feet including the pelvic girdle can be and should be directly in the line of gravity while at rest. That is, perpendicular to GRF. Deviation from this ideal, optimal template, however, causes skeletal alignment changes both from an integrated and isolated view that creates excessive muscle tension, loss of movement and isolated joint range of motion, and increased probability of being injured during movement. It is as simple as this statement, “dysfunctional holding patterns both at the integrated and isolated view creates dysfunctional movement patterns.”
The human body is inherently an unstable structure against the vertical forces of its environment. Even when at rest, it can be viewed as being constantly in motion, constantly vibrating like a tuning fork around its point of mechanical balance located at S2 of the sacrum. The closer the body approaches its integrated, mechanical balance point in the sacrum, the greater the balance of muscle action to keep the body upright and vertical and the greater the balance of muscle action around its isolated joints. This minimizes the stress on joints and ligaments and lessens the possibility of chronic pain and injury with movement. In summary, if the muscles around an isolated joint at rest are all working together synergistically in a balanced way, no one muscle is contracted more than another and none is constantly at rest. When the muscle action around its isolated joints are balanced, so is the muscles of entire body around its COG.
However the further the integrated body is away from this point of mechanical balance at rest, the result is poor balance with one’s weight not being transferred through its COG. In addition, their weight is not transferred through an isolated joints ideal, optimal axis of motion causing some muscles to contract continuously in order to counteract the forces of gravity and GRF.
This limits one’s integrated mobility, movement because stability is foundational. That is because some muscles will have to contract constantly causing that muscle to be fatigued and inflexible while other muscles will be constantly relaxed that results in excessively unstable joints that cause rapid fatigue during movement.
Through my forty years of practicing physical therapy, I have seen many people with various skeletal deviations or holding patterns at rest that run the gamut from an asymmetrical occiput down into the sacrum, shoulder and pelvic girdles, and the extremities. By no means were these people ready for action, movement against ground and gravity. How could they when their neuromuscular and fascial systems are tied up in the holding pattern?
Have you ever had the privilege to watch a great athlete in action? Some one like Michael Jordan in basketball, Wayne Gretzky in hockey, and Simone Biles in gymnastics. They make it look so easy and almost effortless. They hold themselves in an upright and vertical manner that makes them look regal. That is because their bodies are centered over the ideal, optimal COG when they move into action.
If the benchmark of a human being supported on two legs is the verticality of their structure, then the strength and power of that individual must be expressed by the intentional actualization of that posture. Something that has been taught for centuries in the Eastern ideology of human posture and movement, but neglected in our Western way of thinking.
When a body is centered over it ideal, optimal COG at rest, it allows optimal and ideal tension and length of the neuromuscular and fascial systems during movement. It allows the muscles only to do what they are innervated to do in an optimal way which is to contract and move the bones or lengthen against gravity and GRF.
The neuromuscular patterning, the sequencing that occurs in the subcortical area of the brain as already mentioned is dependent upon the position of the body’s COG at rest. What muscle’s work, what muscle pattern, sequence utilized during movement is dependent upon the position of the body’s COG at rest. That position sets the tone, the stiffness of the neuromuscular and fascial systems in preparation for movement.
If you desire to change, to transform these neuromuscular patterns, the first step has to be to “neutralize” the old pattern. That can only be done by becoming aware and altering the position of the body’s COG at rest. Otherwise, the body continues to do what it knows best, following a “path of least resistance” within the nervous system.
In everyday function, the relentless repetition of these neuromuscular patterns utilized in creating the stability and mobility of the structure guarantees that the neuromuscular and fascial action will become constant and habitual. In fact, this action response will become so steady that eventually you cease to notice it. It becomes so automatic that it fades into oblivion.
To change this, one first begins with awareness because one can’t begin to change and create new possibilities until one knows there is something to change. Then, there has to be a new possibility, pattern offered for the body to access.
Without this new possibility, the system will only go back to what it knows. It can’t do something it doesn’t have access to. Giving the body a new pattern, sequence gives the body another choice and with repetition of this new pattern or possibility, one creates a stronger impulse for the new pattern which is a foundational principle of M.A.T.
After reading and studying Thomas W. Myers “Anatomy Trains,” I started to integrate more the fascial and neuromuscular systems in my treatment strategy. I understood more about the fascial component in posture and movement thanks to Thomas Myers, but I felt there was something missing in my knowledge of neuromuscular system. That was my motivation in the creation of M.A.T., a system to transform muscle memory thereby changing one’s posture and movement.
Just as with the concepts of Thomas Myers, my concepts and ideas in M.A.T. are still being worked out and refined. However, M.A.T. is based both upon my knowledge and experience. Whereas knowledge is the distributed information and data we have acquired in our heads based on theory, experience is the systemic information and data linked to each other based on both theory and practice.
In reading and studying the information out there on posture and movement, I knew a “paradigm shift” in our view of the body was required. I can’t thank Thomas Myers enough for starting the momentum to this shift, but it is my hope that M.A.T. will become just as much of a game changer in our understanding posture and movement.
Thomas Myers surely brought the World’s attention to fascia, but just as important is the neuromuscular system in the world of muscles, tendons, and myofascia in creating one’s posture and movement. Through my research and studies and clinical experience, I have found many consistencies that I define as the neuromyofascial patterns of M.A.T.
These neuromyofascial patterns are the Anterior/Posterior Occipital/Sacral, Anterior/Posterior Vestibular/Ocular, Lateral Vestibular/Ocular, Oblique Vestibular/Ocular, and Spiral Vestibular/Ocular.
In my next article, I will go into deeper detail about these neuromyofascial patterns of posture and movement and how I try to transform them through the creation of M.A.T. Until then, stay and be well. Don’t let your guard down. COVID-19 still exists and keeps looking for a host.
Terry