Why

movement

matters.

Massages are amazing but…

…Hear me out .

We are making our bodies stuck

You spend most of the day sitting down with your knees and hips at 90 degrees, you have done this since you were 5 years old.

Before that you had many nutritious sitting positions to choose from but now you are pretty much locked into a right angle situation when you sit down.

Then, about 20 years ago, technology brought us gadgets that demand we constantly look down at something for most of the day.

Before this we enjoyed looking upwards, to the side and even over our shoulders!

Of course we still looked down to read, cook, clean maybe but now we have just added a huge consumer of our movement time that also requires looking down.

Now without going into too much technical detail, let me explain what this means for your body.

Your body adapts

Your muscles are very helpful so they adapt to become strong in positions that you use all the time.

They make it easier for you to be able to sit at 90 and look down but this is at the expense of the other, opposite ranges of motion.

They do this by lengthening or shortening the muscle fibres which is a fairly permanent thing that takes a good while to un- do. *read: you can’t just stretch out years of sitting in a chair with a few hip flexor stretches.*

Just as your body will focus attention on positions you use all the time, what do you think happens to the movements and ranges of motion you don’t use anymore? They are lost!!!

“ The physical expression that is your body is sum of the loads experienced by your cells over your lifetime. ”

- Katy Bowman; Move your DNA

Compensations

Muscles that we hold in specific positions for long periods become strong and short pulling their counterpart muscles into unhappy lengthened positions and they become long and weak. The friends of the weak muscles try to help and then they become over worked and unhappy too — hello pain.

Adhesions

The unused tissue becomes sticky and immobile making it difficult for blood and other essential nutrients to reach them. Over time the nueropathways that tell those muscles to move just disappear— goodbye range of motion.

Bad positions

Joints are pulled into positions that don’t allow muscles to fire properly or at all (good bye glutes) so we develop dysfunctional loading patterns and postural misalignments. There is butt loss epidemic, for reals!

Still with me?
Rad.

The main reason I massage people? The cause of 99% of back/ shoulder/ pinky toe is pain?

A lack of movement or too much of a particular movement pattern.

“Movement should feel glorious, energy bringing and cathartic. It shouldn’t feel like a chore — if it does, find some other way to move that excites you. ”

— Silver Circle (or Anna)

It is poor movement nutrition.

So we agree that massage is amazing. Preach.

It can help unstick bits, bring nutrition and help things that are unhappy to find some reprieve.

But I hope what you now see is that this is only a tiny piece of what you should be doing to un-do what living in this modern world has done to your body.

It is imperative that we give our bodies a variety of nutritional movement just like we eat a variety of nutritious food.

Do you want a life that is full of nutritious movement that builds the strength, mobility and connection that your body needs?

Come and move - rest - connect with me and we can do it together.

Still need massaged though right?

Like the vibe here?

Sign up to our mailing list to find out about more about how your body works, ways to feed it nutrition snacks, workshops, retreats and all that jazz.