Heart of Motion

Organizing Your Movement: A Path to Strength, Freedom and Joy

• Susannah Steers • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Can organizing your movements really transform your life? Discover the surprising intersection between Marie Kondo's organizational methods and movement patterns on today's Heart of Motion podcast. We share an inspiring story of one client's journey from debilitating back pain to newfound freedom and joy through tailored movement practices. This tale highlights the profound impact of organizing our movement patterns just like we organize our living spaces—leading to a more efficient and enjoyable life.

Patterns have power! Our everyday movements shape the very structure of our bodies, influencing our posture and interactions with the world. From the experimental phase to habit formation, consistent actions create lasting imprints on our physicality. Insights from developmental biology and early life experiences unveil how genetics and environment collaboratively mold our movement patterns from a young age, emphasizing that our bodies are ever-evolving processes.

Finally, the episode underscores the value of personal satisfaction over relentless optimization, advocating for a movement and fitness approach tailored to individual needs. We delve into a curiosity-driven assessment process to understand unique movement patterns and life contexts, building new habits in a thoughtful, step-by-step manner. From gaining control to increasing strength, this journey ensures sustainable improvements and a more enjoyable experience in your body. Tune in for heartfelt appreciation and an invitation to engage with us again for more enlightening discussions on movement and well-being.

Here's a link to the TED Talk Susannah references in this episode:
Daniel Wolpert's TED Talk: The Real Reason for Brains.

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Heart of Motion Podcast host Susannah Steers is a Pilates & Integrated Movement Specialist and owner of Moving Spirit Pilates in North Vancouver, BC. She is passionate about movement, about connections and about life.

Through movement teaching, speaking, and facilitating workshops, she supports people in creating movement practices that promote fitness from the inside out. She loves building community, and participating in multi-disciplinary collaborations.

Along with her friend and colleague Gillian McCormick, Susannah also co-hosts The Small Conversations for a Better World podcast – an interview based podcast dedicated to promoting the kind of conversations about health that can spark positive change in individuals, families, communities and across the globe.

Social Media Links:
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Susannah Steers:

Welcome to the Heart of Motion podcast. I'm Susannah Steers and I'll be your host as we explore the heart, soul and science of movement as a pathway to more active, vibrant and connected living. Nothing happens until something moves, so let's get started.

Susannah Steers:

What do Marie Kondo, the queen of home organization, and movement work have in common? Well, more than you might imagine, and it might just make you think about your movement in a new way. We're going to talk about that and why it matters, but first I want to start with a story.

Susannah Steers:

A few years ago, a woman came into my Pilates studio with severe back pain. She was finding it hard to get around, and if you've ever experienced severe pain, you'll probably relate to this. She had to strategize how she was going to do simple things like picking up her purse or getting up and down, cooking, doing laundry. She had to think carefully about what she would do in any given day in anticipation of the increasing pain she was used to feeling. As the hours wore on, she came looking for some help to get stronger, in the hope that it would help her manage her pain. She'd done all the things the medical community had available for her, and yet she was still having a hard time just getting through her day. We worked together for several months on different aspects of her movement, from how she was breathing and stabilizing her spine, to how her pelvis and her ribcage were relating to each other, to how she was carrying groceries and even sitting for her meditation practice. We took a deep dive and found ways to release tension by creating deep support where she needed it most. She built healthier daily movement habits and along the way she improved her strength, her stamina and her mobility too. She began to feel more confident and more capable of doing the things that were most meaningful to her. Her pain became way less prominent in her life, and in describing her new capacity, she said it's like finding a new room in my house. What did she mean? Well, let's jump back to Marie Kondo. Remember her? The woman who revolutionized home organization by asking people the question does it spark joy?

Susannah Steers:

For those who might not know her name, marie Kondo is a self-proclaimed tidying expert, a best-selling author and star of the Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Her website claims that she helps people to transform their cluttered homes into spaces of serenity and inspiration. Form their cluttered homes into spaces of serenity and inspiration In clearing spaces and reorganizing the stuff inside them, marie Kondo is improving their function, their flow and their overall livability, and I realized that, in a way, this client I was telling you about was having her own Marie Kondo moment. She felt space in her body, freedom, access to new things and a sense of happiness, even joy, in the new life that opened up for her. She had found a new room in her house. Now I love working with movement patterns. Instead of just isolated muscle activations, it's an approach that helps organize and improve people's experience of inhabiting their bodies, in much the same way that Marie Kondo helps people to feel better by tidying their homes.

Susannah Steers:

Let's think about it when Marie Kondo's KonMari method encourages people to evaluate their belongings based on whether they contribute to their lives in positive ways or not. Working with movement patterns puts a focus on key movements that are crucial for functional health, emphasizing quality over quantity to ensure that movement is contributing positively to physical well-being. Well, I'm not an expert on condos work, and one look at my apartment would tell you that Her approach seems to create a more efficient and organized living space, reducing people's stress and improving their energy. Well, when we can improve the efficiency of our movement, we can improve function and performance in our physical activities, reducing strain and likely increasing our enjoyment of whatever it is we're doing too. Konmari emphasizes mindfulness and intention when people select or discard the stuff they have in their spaces, fostering a mindful connection with those belongings. You know what's really important when a relationship with particular things no longer has meaning, she encourages people to discard them.

Susannah Steers:

Working with movement patterns inspires us to be mindful of how we move, paying attention to form and technique and enhancing body awareness, while also preventing injuries. We start to recognize what movement habits might be getting in our way. So when we evaluate movement patterns, we look at individual differences in physical capabilities. Patterns we look at individual differences in physical capabilities, tailoring movements and exercises to suit a person's specific body, circumstances and goals. Kondo's work takes our personal preferences into account, recognizing that particular items may be important or spark joy for each individual. So I like to think that Pilates and integrated movement work are ways to kind of do a Marie Kondo on your own body.

Susannah Steers:

Movement patterns are all around us and nowhere more tangibly than within our own bodies. We all have our unique ways of moving in the world. Did you know that recognition software actually exists to identify individual people based on their gait pattern and the way they move. It's not just in spy movies, it's actually a thing your movement is literally your signature. Beyond the recognition factor, our patterns help us do complex physical tasks efficiently without having to consciously strategize every single step along the way. By observing and analyzing these patterns, we can recognize how different parts of our bodies are working in harmony or not. Patterns are how my brain works and from dance to Pilates, to swimming, to work and to my own aches and pains. Looking at patterns is how I make sense of what's happening. Exploring intersection points between patterns helps me more easily identify incongruencies, imbalances and things that just plain don't add up. Through the lens of patterns, the body becomes not just a collection of isolated parts and individual muscles but a beautiful, integrated whole performing an intricate dance of every movement of every day.

Susannah Steers:

Whether we appreciate it or not, when our patterns are well organized, movement tends to be smooth and efficient. Even when it's not biomechanically perfect, the felt sense experience of good patterning is generally positive. The body can be relatively relaxed even when it's working hard. There's a flow. When patterns are less good, movement can feel effortful and uncoordinated. Flow goes out the window. This might feel like weakness, struggle or even pain. This might feel like weakness, struggle or even pain. Sometimes, a sense of weakness is more about non-optimal patterning than it is about the strength of an individual muscle. If you've ever found yourself doing endless exercises to strengthen a particular muscle and you just can't build it, you might want to look at the whole movement chain instead. I'm not a science fiction fanatic, but somehow I keep coming up with a reference to Star Wars. There's a disturbance in the force. When the forces flowing, seemingly impossible things become possible or even probable. It kind of sounds like magic, doesn't it?

Susannah Steers:

The human brain organizes movement by creating patterns that we call on to move our bodies every day. These patterns allow us to unconsciously engage the very long chain of sequenced nerve pathways and muscle activations needed to lift your arm or turn your head or play a game of tennis. If we had to consciously activate every single element required for all the movements in our days, there would be no room left in our brains and no time left for anything else. In a 2011 TED Talk, the Real Reason for Brains, neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert suggested that our brains evolved not to think or to feel, but to control movement, and when I think about the magnitude of the brain power required to move the body in even the simplest ways, I'm inclined to agree with him. It's an old video on the TED platform now, but well worth a watch. If you're interested, I'll pop a link in the show notes.

Susannah Steers:

Our patterns begin from the very first flow of cells in utero. They continue to develop as we grow from infancy to adulthood. They are like the living, breathing archive of all our genetics and all our collected experiences breathing archive of all our genetics and all our collected experiences. We're all human, though, so how different can they possibly be? Think for a minute about the differences in people's handwriting. Most of us have had the same kind of lessons in how to shape and space our letters, to do cursive and line things up on a page, but rarely do we see two people with the same handwriting. Your handwriting differs from mine in the amount of pressure you use to put pen to paper. It differs in the size and the shape and the flow of the letters. Your handwriting is uniquely yours, and if you pay attention, you might even notice that your own handwriting changes with your moods.

Susannah Steers:

Movement patterns are really just habitual neuromuscular pathways from brain to body and back. With every movement you make, your brain has sifted through bazillions of data points anatomical and biological realities, structural integrity, connections, strength, distance, velocity, load, environment, safety, threat, emotions, capacity all the things For movements you repeat on the regular. Your brain has crafted a clear sequence of internal activity and muscle activations that results in the action you want. It's worked before, so your brain bets it will work again. The more successful experiences you have with that particular pattern, the more deeply ingrained it becomes. The more you repeat it, the more that pattern goes from being a little path through the woods to a superhighway on the way to your desired movement. And if you've ever been on the Highway 401 in Toronto at rush hour, you'll understand just how difficult it might be to get off that super highway too, when you realize it's taking you in the wrong direction.

Susannah Steers:

For the most part, the creation of these patterns is unconscious, unless we're being particularly mindful about it. This stuff happens all behind the scenes, we don't have to think about it, and gradually, as the patterns get more robustly established, they just feel like our body's normal. Even when the pathway we've laid down are a little skewed or a little corrupted, we don't feel anything awry until the body either can't do what we're asking it to do in the way we want, or we start to feel pain Once upon a time. Rehab and strength training mostly focused on the strength and capacity of individual muscles. As a kid, I suffered from knee pain and dysfunction that impacted my life in what felt like big ways. Back then I remember sitting at seven years old, all alone on the edge of a bed in the hospital physio clinic doing leg extensions with a sand bag on my foot. The physio said okay, do 100 of these and I'll be back. Strengthening my quadricep muscles was the only thing she was interested in, and while that did get me off crutches, I had ongoing issues with my knees for decades. The problem was really something else.

Susannah Steers:

A Czech neurologist and physiatrist by the name of Vladimir Janda rocked the world when he discovered how important accessory muscle activation could be in looking at movement in a rehab setting. Accessory muscles are the ones that might help with the work of a task, but they aren't usually the main players involved. He discovered that people use accessory muscles way more often than was previously recognized, and that this could lead to functional complications and injury. His findings highlighted the importance of evaluating patterns rather than isolated muscle strength and activity when looking at movement deficits. His most notable contribution to movement and rehab was called the CRUST syndromes, which underscored systematic and predictable muscle imbalances across the body. It helped to be able to look at these in a systematic way. Much has been researched and debated about the cross syndrome since then, but Yanda had a quote I appreciate Experimentation becomes gesture, gesture becomes habit, habit becomes posture becomes habit, habit becomes posture, and posture becomes structure.

Susannah Steers:

In essence, the movements that we do often gradually create a structural reality in our bodies. That's a sobering thought. Our activities day after day create the architecture of our bodies and impact the way we interact with the world. These patterns quite literally shape us. Let's break it down. If we talk about experimentation, this is a new movement, something maybe we haven't done before or done very often, and we're trying it on. We're experimenting what happens if we do it this way or that way. Our bodies aren't used to it, and we haven't yet developed a smooth and seamless path. We're a little uncoordinated and not terribly efficient. Eventually, though, we start to find a way of doing the new movement task in a way that feels, at least temporarily, more successful than others. So we do it again Gesture this is still in the early phase of adopting a new movement.

Susannah Steers:

It's not natural yet, still takes a little conscious thought and certainly doesn't feel seamless yet. While it's a little smoother than the experimentation phase, it doesn't feel fully coordinated or integrated. We're doing it more often, but we're still trying it on, refining it, playing with it. Eventually, though, with enough repetitions, it starts to become habit. While common wisdom suggests that it takes about 21 days to create a new habit but mostly research has shown that to be untrue A 2009 study in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine found that it could take anywhere between 18 and 254 days for a new behavior to become automatic. I think the wide range of timing probably shows the diversity of habits people want to develop, you know, from very simple habits to more complex and involved ones, and motivation, repetition and the environment you're working in may play a role too. Let's just say this if you practice a movement enough, you're going to start to develop a pretty reliable movement pattern that you don't have to think about too much. With enough of that habit and we're doing this all the time we start to develop a posture around that.

Susannah Steers:

Our posture is a reflection of how all our various movement patterns stack up in our bodies overall the muscle development, the internal structural support, our breathing, our prevailing emotional states. Think about people you know in various jobs. What kind of postural differences do you see in your mind when you think about someone who works an IT job versus a construction worker versus an athlete or a dancer? There are repetitive movements in each of these jobs. I think we can all relate to the stereotypical slouch of someone who spends all day at a computer. The movements we do often have a way of imprinting themselves on our bodies. So then we get to structure. If a given posture stays with us long enough, all our tissues adapt to support it. Fascial tissue thickens, our bones move into or out of alignment based on the actions of the muscles that support and move them. Our breathing changes.

Susannah Steers:

What was once a movement-based activity now seems to solidify into our structure, and when patterns get to this point, it takes a whole lot more effort to make any kind of change. It's not impossible, but it will require some concerted effort. The good news is that change is the only constant in our lives. Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen, a movement educator and researcher and founder of Body Mind Centering, has been quoted as saying that there are no bad postures, only postures we've forgotten how to move out of. She sees the body as a process instead of a product, and if we think about it that way, really we are creatures with virtually endless possibilities and rather than viewing structure as a fixed, permanent thing, we can see it as something infinitely more plastic than we typically imagine. So what does all this mean practically speaking? The reality is that we are consciously and unconsciously creating and recreating patterns in our bodies all the time.

Susannah Steers:

Let's look at the life of a movement pattern, let's say your gait. We could go back to evolutionary and developmental biology in and before the womb, but for practical purposes right now, let's start with you. As a baby. You arrive into the world. Everything is new. You observe, you explore, you reach, you roll, you yield, you push. You are a little sponge soaking in every little piece of information. You can get your developing brain around. You try, you fall over, you try again, you learn, you crawl and then you walk as a baby. You observe and mimic the actions of the people around you as you begin to interact with your world in very basic and meaningful ways. We often hear people say things like bad hips run in my family.

Susannah Steers:

Many of your first patterns develop as a result of genetics. Yes, many of your first patterns develop as a result of genetics, yes, but also as a result of what you saw, experienced and attempted in those early days. The length of your bones, the density of your connective tissue, your overarching physiology is determined. That's nature. But you also observed, mimicked and learned a lot about how to walk from the people closest to you in your life at the time. And if grandma decided you should have sturdy shoes to get you walking before your little body was really quite ready, or if you sat in a stroller or didn't get a chance to play much, those things would have had their own impact on your physical development, your skills and your capacity. The environment you were in, the people you were with and the activities you did would all have contributed to movement. That's the nurture part and that's the part that I think we can likely negotiate with over time, moving into later childhood and adolescence.

Susannah Steers:

These are important years. If you were an active kid who got lots of physical playtime and moved your body in all kinds of different ways every day, your muscles, your bones and your fascia likely developed in a relatively coordinated way and your brain patterns likely developed in an organized and flexible manner. If you got little to no activity, both your physical and brain development could have been affected to the point that normal gait patterns were affected. Maybe your stride is now a little too short or a little too long, maybe your push-off isn't great or maybe your muscle tone isn't good enough to prevent something like knock knees. On the other side of things, maybe you were a child athlete. If you focused on one activity for several years during your developmental years, your bone, your muscle and your brain development are skewed toward that activity. The physicality of the activity was undoubtedly a good thing, but the specificity of those early athletic years may not have been. If you were a hockey player, your patterning would have been different than a ballet dancer's, and that's simply because of the way you worked and moved your body every day during those years. I know a lot of dancers in my generation who kind of walked with duck feet because we were walking around in a turnout all the time. If you sat at your computer for hours on end, the way you move will reflect that too. Computer for hours on end the way you move will reflect that too. The frequency and intensity of those activities during the developmental years consolidated your patterning in a particular direction.

Susannah Steers:

It's important to note here that some of the best athletes in the world were not specialized in their sport early in their lives. I spoke to Silken Lauman, a celebrated Olympic rower and medalist for Canada, after she wrote her book Child's Play. She talked about how important it is for kids to have experiences of unstructured playtime to fully develop their potential. The exploration, the whole body movement, the problem solving on the fly, just doing what the body feels like doing in the moment and having fun, is one of the best ways to build good pathways for the future. Silken described how some of the most talented and celebrated athletes she knows, including NBA star Steve Nash, didn't specialize in their sports until later on. I'm sure that part of what makes them such stellar athletes is that they have such a wide range of movement choices available to them, not just the ones that fit into the box of basketball or rowing.

Susannah Steers:

Okay, so enter early adulthood, when things get a little more tricky. As you start your working life, your priorities change and you may find there's less time for the physical activity you enjoyed as a kid, where you might've been super active in your teens and in college. Now you're at work all day and you're lucky if you make it to the gym or play a sport or get physically active at all any more than a couple or three times a week. Maybe you bought your first car so you're not riding your bike or walking around town as much. You're sitting at a desk. Your body begins to adapt to a more sedentary life. Maybe your hip flexors start to get tight, your core gets a little weaker and that makes it harder to shift from sitting at a desk to walking and running, even just a few hours a week. If good movement habits get lost here, the aches and pains that most people attribute to aging could start sooner than you'd like. Maybe you became a weekend warrior type, which pushed the stress of short bursts of intense activity on top of a week of sedentary behavior. Your body works hard to be good at sitting all day to support you in that task and then you ask it to suddenly shift into beast mode for your CrossFit training.

Susannah Steers:

That transition can be tough. Your body could start putting together some pretty fancy compensations to make up for shortcomings in your current capacity by around the age of 28, physical development stops and degeneration begins. Now don't get depressed. It just means that at that point we have to work a little harder to maintain the strength, the mobility and the stamina that we once took for granted. By now your body has maybe collected some interesting patterns as a result of compensations. So remember that knee injury in your right leg that sidelined you for months as a teen. He did your rehab, but that right thigh muscle has been somehow a little weaker ever since. Well, let's not forget the hours you're spending at your desk. Your hip flexors are getting tighter and your core is getting a little less responsive. To complicate the core issues, maybe you had a baby and you never really did take time to fully rehab that cesarean section incision or pelvic floor tear before you started training really hard to get your body back In your haste to get moving again. Without solid core relationships, you might have been compressing your rib cage and tucking your butt to get the work done. You're still getting a good workout, but things feel different. Where did that core go and why can't I get it back? Maybe you're beginning to experience a little low back pain or stiffness due to the accumulated stress of all those things while picking up little kids, working, doing all the things you do, both the fun stuff and the not so fun.

Susannah Steers:

There's another thread that moves through all of these stages too your emotions During all these varied stages. Did you feel safe, confident and loved, or were there times when you felt vulnerable or unsafe? Were you sad, stressed, exhilarated, bored, joyful? The way you felt at various times can imprint itself in your physicality in pretty powerful ways. Brene Brown often talks about the quality of armoring that can show up for people when they feel vulnerable, and that armoring shows up in the body in a whole bunch of different ways.

Susannah Steers:

So here you are, at age plenty something, and you decide you want to maintain or renew your commitment to an active lifestyle. You remember something you love to do was, let's say, running. Everybody knows how to run right. You still know how to walk. Running just takes a little more effort. But your body has a different physiology than when you ran track at university. Your accumulated experiences and compensations means that what you once did with ease at 14 or even 25 may be different today, or even 25 may be different today. Your brain remembers a previous physical prowess, but your body isn't there now. A certain degree of your physical literacy may have been lost over the years, even if you consider yourself to be fit.

Susannah Steers:

More often than not people decide that age is the problem and figure that they're just getting too old to run anymore. Well, maybe that's true or maybe not. Perhaps if you were able to restore some balance to your body and to your movement, you'd find that running still is possible. Maybe taking a look at the patterns that exist in you now today would be helpful Me. I'd like to try whatever might help me find a way to get back to doing the things I love before I decide I'm too old. Because every time you make a choice to eliminate some kind of movement from your life without doing everything you can to preserve it, your world starts to get a little bit smaller.

Susannah Steers:

Dr Perry Nicholson, a chiropractic physician witha primary focus of treating chronic pain and inflammation through the lymphatic and vascular system, says this the body always does the best it can with what it's got in the moment it's in to heal and protect you. Now, if I've learned nothing else in my career, it's that we and our bodies are insanely adaptable, even in cases where there are all kinds of reasons that a particular movement should not be possible. People will often find a way to get it done. It might not be pretty, but they make it happen. I do believe that our systems will do everything they're capable of to do what we're asking of them. As positive and life-affirming as that is, I think it also reinforces the idea that bringing awareness to the patterns that are working for us and those that aren't is a valuable way to keep moving for the whole of our lives.

Susannah Steers:

Since fitness and sports are so often where people find meaningful connections to their own movement, let's look at, maybe, how patterns show up there. When we go to the gym to strengthen our bodies, our habitual movement patterns come with us. If the patterns you walk in with are pretty good, then your ability to build strength and movement capacity is probably pretty good too. If the patterns you bring to movement challenges are less than optimal, you may find obstacles that show up as difficulty building the muscle you want. Challenges with technique difficulty, breathing, spine and pelvis control issues are all kinds of things that feel like you just can't get the job done. Good physical conditioning programs are all about problem solving. How is this body moving in general? Can this body move well relative to its regular load demands. And is there any room in this body for more or for different? Where are the holes and the gaps? What needs more support through stamina and strength? What needs more space or release? How hard can we go to build new capacity while also respecting the current needs of the structure of the individual and the life they lead? Choices to go after an individual muscle really only come in when I can identify it as a weak link in a movement chain.

Susannah Steers:

As Yanda discovered in his work, there are some common criminals. Let's take the gluteal muscles, for example. With our largely sedentary lifestyles, many people have weak gluteals and overactive hip flexors. If you've been doing endless repetitions of squat, bridges, lunges and all kinds of things to build glute strength to support your gait, your push-off and your balance, but the glutes never seem to get stronger, the solution to the problem is not doing more glute work. It's time to widen your perspective. Maybe the glutes won't fire well until you get some length in the head flexor muscles. Perhaps you have a habit of gripping your pelvic floor muscles, which can make it harder to fire the glutes well, or if the core is so weak that you can't manage the movement of your own trunk over your pelvis very well, and the glutes just take second fiddle to other parts of you that are compensating to take the slack. Well, that's a different pathway.

Susannah Steers:

If you've eliminated the possibility of a specific pathology, many of the chronic issues around function and pain can be about balance Balance of the musculature in the body, balance of things around the joints, those weird non-specific back pains, the knee pain that only shows up when you go down the stairs, the way you can twist your head to the right with no issue but you can't shoulder check where the hell of beans in your car all those things may have elements of pattern dysfunction in them. If a movement problem or pain keeps showing up, no matter what you do to resolve it, it's time to look at whether a funky and well-entrenched movement pattern is at the root. Remember this. It may not seem logical to you and the body doesn't have to explain. It's doing the best it can with what it's got in the moment to support you. It can sometimes come up with some pretty wacky compensations to keep you going and unraveling those can take some attention and some time.

Susannah Steers:

Before we go any further, let me just say this If you are moving around in the world and you are happy with how you feel and with what you're doing. There is no need to optimize for its own sake. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I think this world is a little too caught up in optimizing everything just because we can. I'm not a believer in productivity at all costs. I don't think that's necessary. You do, you Move as much as you can and enjoy every moment of it. But if you're not feeling confident in your movement, if you're not happy with the experience of life in your body, know that there are pathways to feeling better. The standard fitness track might not be what you need right now, or maybe it's a yes and scenario fitness and something else. Your path might look different from the kind of training you've done before.

Susannah Steers:

Here's how I go about it with my clients. First of all, we assess. At this point it's all about curiosity. What's working for you? What's showing up? When does it show up? Does it appear in other places or just when you do that one thing? What's your movement history? What's the larger picture? What else is going on in your life? I ask so many questions at this stage. I want to know all about your movement, your life and how you feel about it all. I don't like to come to concrete conclusions too fast. I might have ideas about what we're dealing with and why, but if I put my own spin on things before we've really investigated the possibilities I might miss something really important. So I'm very, very curious and I keep my mind open as much as I can.

Susannah Steers:

Once we've really explored your movement to see where it works well and where it falls apart, we can start to build a hypothesis around what might be happening and what we might choose to do about it. We try some things, test our theories and then move forward. If the overall experience is better, the next stage is working to create some access, and this can feel like mental gymnastics. If we're trying to introduce a new pattern, it may be challenging at first. I find this is particularly true with core training and core rehab.

Susannah Steers:

Core function habits, including breathing, are so closely connected to survival that our bodies are often hardwired to protect them At first. We may not initially be able to even feel a different way of doing things. We might just have to start with a picture in our head of what we want and it might result in the tiniest of movements. At first, you might not feel that you're doing anything worthwhile. You might be learning to feel what it's like to engage your deep abdominals in a way that supports your structure instead of just bracing your abdominals, your back and maybe your pelvis too. This is trial and error or, as a colleague describes it, the got it lost it phase. It starts with the picture in your mind. You may not be able to repeatedly create the connections, but you know that if you play with this thing a little differently, you start to experience something different, something better, and with mindful and consistent practice, you can start to find this new thing again and again more quickly and reliably.

Susannah Steers:

Taking time to notice is critical here. It's the first step to rewiring new connections, and then we've got to establish some control. Once we get our brains and bodies to connect in a new way consistently, we have to start finding our control. If you've been able to engage the deep abdominal wall repeatedly, can you also do it while you lift your leg, squat or swing a bat? You may be able to do it in some circumstances and not in others, in which case the next job is to explore what gets in the way of your control in different situations. I like to start with movements that are meaningful in your life, places that you can notice and connect to easily, and then we'll broaden our attention as necessary. What happens when you lift up your kids or carry groceries? Can you support it as you sit at your desk for a while? What happens to it when you go skiing? The fun part here is that it often builds on itself like a snowball effect. As you begin to establish better control, you're gradually able to recreate the desired pattern under different loads more reliably. Those neuromuscular pathways get more robust and it starts to be able to be more automatic.

Susannah Steers:

The next phase is building stamina. Sometimes people like to jump from control right over to strength and they miss the stamina part. If this is a new pattern, a new movement, you won't be used to maintaining the connection for any length of time. The got it, lost it thing comes back as soon as you begin to ask a little more of the pattern in terms of support. So I like to make sure that people can keep their connection for a while. This is particularly true for postural and deep system support patterns, which are all about low level engagement for long periods of time. And then this is the part everybody loves when we start to increase strength. Once we know we can access a pattern and control and work with it long enough to actually do a few things, then we can work more intentionally on building strength. We want to increase the body's capacity to sustain this new pattern at higher loads, in a greater range of motion, at speed, in whatever environment we might want to. As we increase the load we have to keep coming back to see whether we're actually continuing to execute the movement with our new capacity or whether we're reverting to old patterns because we're tired. Then we get to integration. I think this phase is important for everybody, but I think particularly important for athletes.

Susannah Steers:

If you are used to high level function in your movement, you have pretty high expectations for how quickly your body can take on new stuff. Once you experience a degree of better with a new pattern, you naturally want to take it into all your high-level activities. But new patterns take some time to integrate. You might be able to support them while you're doing your basic practice, but things might fall apart when you're playing a game of basketball, with all of the things competing for the attention of your body and mind in an intense environment. The patterns aren't yet automatic. They require lots and lots of mindful and consistent practice, often slower and less exciting than you'd like, before they start to show up reliably in your high performance situations. There are strategies to manage this, but you should recognize that it takes time. Your body and your brain are involved and they're working on new stuff, so it's not just a matter of popping off reps at the gym.

Susannah Steers:

The process of uncovering the movement patterns that drive us, that support us and literally shape us takes some time. For my money, though, it's a great way to explore your strengths and your weaknesses, to understand the way you approach or attack movement and what that means for your sport or your comfort in your body in general and for the overall experience of living in your body. In the process, you may come to know yourself, your thought patterns, your beliefs and your relationships with a whole lot of things in new ways. If you can approach it with a sense of playful curiosity, you can build a wonderful relationship with yourself and your own physicality, based in presence and what is really there in your body, not just where you wish you were there in your body, not just where you wish you were. Where you take this new understanding and this new capacity is up to you. It might just be a sense of feeling better, moving in your body. From what I've seen, though, it can start a quiet, gentle fire of inner strength and confidence, create a sense of relief and new possibilities, or ignite a spark that leads to greatness. Your movement matters. Your path is your own, and I think that's powerful.

Susannah Steers:

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Subscribe and, if you love what you heard, leave a five-star review and tell people what you enjoyed most. Join me here again in a couple of weeks. For now, let's get moving.

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Susannah Steers

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