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Hey friend!
I recently told the story in my online program of what’s best described as a lighting bolt moment one morning eight years ago.
Only problem was said lightning bolt struck right in my lower back and short circuited my lower half for a good 15-minutes.
No little piggies were going to the market that morning.
Some context.
The day before I’d busted out a brutal deadlift session, and on one of the reps, stupidly not the last one, I felt a subtle but real twinge in the lower right side of my back.
Fast forward 18 hours, and as I roll over to turn off the alarm clock the next day, I quickly realize…I can’t.
A searing pain ran through my back as I tried to twist over, and, yep, not a single toe would wiggle.
I stilled myself for a moment, calmed into my breath.
After 10-minutes or so of doing my best Uma Thurman impression in the back of that bright yellow Chevy Silverado, I started to move my toes, and up the chain, everything else gradually came back online.
The next few weeks was a painful, hobbling attempt at getting on with things, including looking after what was at the time a very excitable, boisterous French Bulldog puppy.
That period confirmed something for me.
That the previous 15 years of training had gotten me strong, but they’d also gotten me extremely fragile. But it wasn’t so much what I was doing that caused the issue, it was what I’d been neglecting.
Over that time, not one muscle was stretched or fibre loosened.
Foam rollers served as excellent door stops and trigger point balls became the latest victims of said needle-toothed teething pup.
Something needed to change.
Ironically I’d done a lot of courses in human movement as a trainer back in London and I’d just bought Dr. Kelly Starrett’s awesome first book, Becoming a Supple Leopard. (Link at the end)
It was time I put things into practice.
One of the first things both the book and my training education asserted was that, in the human body, dysfunction originates from one or more of three key areas.
1 - Foot and ankle
2 - Hips
3 - Thoracic spine (starts at the base of the neck and ends at the bottom of your ribs)
The first thing all three areas have in common is a high degree of articulation.
They all move through hundreds of degrees of movement.
The body relies on them for the majority of it’s dexterity, balance and function.
The second is that these are the three areas affected more than any others, by spending too much time in what’s become the dominant posture of modern life, crouched over sitting.
Crouched over a laptop, a steering wheel, a dinner plate, a phone.
This isn’t me getting all judge-y, I promise, I have to do it too, I’m just pointing out that if we’re so much time doing all of that, and nothing to reverse those postures and loosen resulting tightness, we’re going to run into problems. Painful problems that don’t go away easily.
So let’s take one at a time, including what to do to improve them.
1 - Foot and ankle
Overwhelmingly, the foot is the part of the body that contacts the ground the most.
A redundant statement, perhaps.
Not when you consider that it’s the first point on the body through which a massive amount of force passes, day after day, year after year, decade after decade.
Think about it.
The recommended 10,000 steps a day.
5,000 times you’re putting your full bodyweight through each foot, every day.
The average bodyweight of an adult in the western world is 181lbs/82kg.
That’s a total of 905,000lbs or 410,000kgs of accumulated weight going through the foot and ankle of the average western adult, in one day!
And that’s only walking.
When running, each foot strike produces force equal to 3 or 4 times your bodyweight on each foot!
I geek out on feet.
For good reason.
The whole complex is a work of unfathomable genius.
26 bones, 33 joints, over 100 muscles.
Not to mention the tendons and ligaments that create this beautiful efficient spring mechanism that supports, propels, and stabilizes us everyday.
As miraculous as the foot and ankle complex is, any structural imbalance will magnify problems further up the chain in equal measure.
You see, and this is true for the hips and thoracic too, but especially for the foot, any tightness or restriction forces the body to look for extra movement elsewhere in the bodily chain, usual places it’s not designed to have it.
The knee, for example, is as simple a joint as you’ll find.
Like a door hinge, it bends one way, and not the other. As a high % of athletes and their surgeons will attest, the knee can’t handle lateral forces well at all. It flexes and extends (only so far), that’s about it.
So when there’s restricted movement in the foot and ankle, a place typically capable of a wide range of hinging and rotation movements, that movement needs to be stolen from somewhere else.
The next closest place, aside from tearing a tendon or muscle in the ankle, calf or shin, is the knee joint.
A site really poorly designed for it.
Big problems.
So what to do to maintain or improve the movement health of the foot and ankle?
These three are a great place to start.
1 - At least 60-seconds of a standing wall calf stretch, on each leg, every day.
2 - At least 60-seconds per foot, rolling the plantar (arch) surface of the foot.
This will likely be painful.
Your feet are workhorses, they need the TLC.
Stick with it.
3 - At least 60-seconds sat in a butt-to-heels squat position. Support yourself by holding onto to something if needed.
In that deep squat, start to move your bodyweight around. Shift side to side, forwards and backwards, easing movement into the feet and ankles throughout.
2 - Hips
If there’s one body part that’s suffered in the modern age, it’s the hips.
Sitting in chairs the majority of the time has switched off some of the strongest muscles in the body, the glutes and hamstrings, and tightened others like the quads, hip flexors, erectors (lower and mid back) and calves, resulting in a system that’s both weak and restricted at the epicenter of movement throughout the whole body.
This has clear implications for general day-to-day movement.
But the hips are the core of our athletic ability.
When I say athletic ability, I don’t just mean sports ability.
I mean our capacity to perform athletic type movements.
To crouch, push off, rotate, run, and throw.
To be human.
So what are the big daily three for the hips?
1 - 60 seconds each side of the kneeling couch stretch.
2 - 15 reps rolling hamstring reach. Take this one slow to begin with.
3 - 15 reps wide stance unweighted good-mornings.
3 - Thoracic Spine
The thoracic spine is the driver of movement in the upper body, and plays a hug role in determining the quality of movement in the shoulders and neck.
Again, modernity hasn’t been kind to the thoracic spine.
Not only are we hunched over a lot more now than we’ve ever been, the western world at least is set up in systems of straight lines.
Road networks, city grid systems, grocery store aisles, office blocks.
We need never turn our heads ever again.
I remember reading something over a decade ago, I can’t for the life of me remember where, that said that we release 6 times more endorphins from transverse (rotational) movement as we do from frontal plane (crab walking) or sagittal plane (forwards/backwards).
And that makes sense evolutionarily. Endorphins make us feel good. They serve as a reward. The biggest reward for 99.9% of human history was staying alive long enough to reproduce. Our best chance of that would literally have been to have our heads on a swivel.
Moving through forests and woodland was risky business.
Who knew what or who was lurking about, ready to pounce. It behooved us to rotate, to swivel, to turn.
If you haven’t seen the movie Apocalypto, I HIGHLY recommend it.
Aside from it just being a solid movie, seeing what it must have been like to move around a forest, barefoot, carrying spears, hunting and being hunted, brings it home just how integral these capabilities are to us as humans and our mental and physical expression.
I went into greater detail on a lot of this in one of the February Edge newsletters, Move It Or Lose it. Go give it a read if you haven’t yet.
So what to do for the thoracic spine?
Here’s your daily three.
1 - 60 seconds kneeling thoracic stretch.
2 - 60 seconds cobra pose or upward facing dog. You can break up the time here if needed. 60 seconds accumulated.
3 - Seated spine rotation. 20 each way. If you have a random broomstick lying around, hold that across your shoulders while you do it. Failing that, either bring your arms up to right angles or cross them over your chest.
Ok! The three pillars of movement in the human body. Your keys to lifelong mobility. As with mostly everything I talk about here.
You won’t get away, if you’re seated for more than a few hours a day, with paying them attention every once in a while.
They absolutely need to be a regular point of focus.
Clearly, there’s so much personal variability with movement, so please seek out a professional physical therapist or movement coach if you have specific concerns or restrictions.
A final note on resources.
Any of Dr. Kelly Starrett’s books are an awesome place to start. Here’s a list starting with his most recent.
Built To Move
Ready to Run
Becoming a Supple Leopard
And Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall (https://www.amazon.com.mx/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/dp/0307279189) is a fun and fantastic read!
Until next time.
In love and health,
Alex
Disclaimer: This post is for general information purposes only and is not intended to treat or diagnose any medical or psychological conditions. This information is not intended as a substitute for medical advice and readers should always consult their doctor, physician or registered healthcare practitioner before implementing anything they read in The Edge.