7

About the Exercises in This Book

THERE ARE LOTS of excellent and easy-to-follow exercise books and programs you can buy; they seem to multiply daily. The intention of this book is not to add to the collection but to make any other books and programs you choose easier to follow.

The exercises you’ll find here are all corrective in nature; in other words, their aim is to balance and realign you. That is why I have written so extensively on the specific way you should do each one and have suggested lots of props. It’s really important that you do each exercise correctly. That may be tedious, but the payoff will be that you’ll feel a lot better, and hopefully, you’ll reduce both pain and your risk of injury.

I’d much rather you do one exercise exactly right than lots of them with poor alignment, so please follow along and do them as prescribed!

How are these exercises different from core exercises—that is, programs that are designed to strengthen and stretch deep postural muscles? Well, there is a certain amount of crossover, because postural muscles do determine a lot of your alignment patterns. But take a look at any very simple core exercises and you will see how easily they can be done wrong.

For example, consider the “swimming” Pilates exercise, where you lie on the stomach lifting the legs and arms simultaneously and fluttering the legs. I’m looking at a photograph of a very well-proportioned, well-aligned model doing this exercise. She’s doing it correctly and will no doubt reap the benefits, a strong, evenly developed, and pain-free back.

But imagine what happens if one of this model’s hips is higher than the other, one shoulder is tighter, or she’s pushing up the back of her neck with her jaw pushed to one side. Well, she probably wouldn’t notice because it would feel right to her; after all, she’s used to this alignment. However, it would change the way the exercise affects her. She would work her muscles quite unevenly, actually making her condition worse. She might give up on it and wonder why it’s not helping, or the exercise might just feel bad and she’d stop anyway. She certainly would miss the point of it; without correcting her basic alignment, the exercise wouldn’t help her.

FAMILIAR IMBALANCES

Most of us have numerous imbalances that are reflected in everything we do. The imbalances feel right to us over time because they’re familiar to us. Anything we’re used to starts to feel right, even to the point where the correct movements and more balanced alignment feel wrong. And mostly it’s these chronic imbalances that cause pain and aging. It can also set us up for injury.

So somebody may come to me for an injury that she thinks just happened out of the blue. She just bent down to pick up a book she dropped, for example, and her back went into spasm “for no reason.” Many of us are accidents waiting to happen. How can we prevent all these and correct them once they’ve happened? First, by becoming more aware of our habits in an objective and distanced way.

You can take one typical day and notice every single thing you do, how you wake up, what position you are in, how you get out of bed, which foot goes onto a stair first, which hand holds the toothbrush, what position you’re in in the shower. Do you sit most of the day or stand? How do you sit (are you twisted at all)? What do you look at? Where is it? And so on. You can reverse everything you have control over. You don’t have direct control over your waking position in bed, for example—or maybe you do. Picking a different spot in the bed to go to sleep in or using a different pillow gives you some control over how you sleep. Concentrate on shifting your habitual patterns. Use the other foot to go upstairs, shift onto the other buttock or leg as you sit or stand, change hands to dress, wash, and so on. What does that feel like? It could feel liberating, opening up a different part of your brain, or maybe it just feels awkward and annoying. Anyway, you’ll learn what your habits are, and you are bound to come up with some insights.

Perhaps you chronically stand on one leg—no wonder that hip is tight. Or you sit all day at a desk with your head tilted to see the computer screen; that’s why you have a neck pain. More subtly, you see better with one eye than the other, so you keep your head at the optimal angle for seeing but not for structural health. You may be able to change some of your physical imbalances just by realizing how your habits create them. However, the chances are that even though you become aware of some habits, you don’t know how to correct the imbalances they set up. You may have not used certain muscle groups for so long that your brain doesn’t register them, and you don’t know how to engage them consciously. This is not a lack of physical strength—it’s a neurological blind spot; we generally develop more and more of these as we get older and accumulate injuries and compensations. Some people, healthy in all other respects, end up with only a few restricted movement patterns. This is where the corrective exercises come in.

If you go to the gym, you’ll notice that each machine has an illustration showing you (usually in red) which muscles you are using when you do that exercise. Unfortunately muscles don’t work that way. Your body under stress will naturally use whichever muscles are already strong and you are accustomed to. The weaker, less used areas and the weak side of your body will be employed as little as possible. This is your body’s wisdom to avoid injury by not stressing the weaker areas and so preventing injuries, but in the long run this pattern may lead to damage since the weak areas will get weaker and the strong areas will get stronger.

  Using Kyo and Jitsu to Increase Body Awareness

1. Lie down on your back, and scan through your body mentally, from your feet to your head. You will notice that some areas—your jitsu places—are much easier to feel than others. They may feel tight, sore, hot, cold, anything—but not numb or dead.
2. Normally, your attention would gravitate to these places. This time, do the opposite—place your attention on the hard-to-feel areas. Of course, as soon as you pay attention to the less aware and sensitized parts of your body, they’ll change. Maybe you will locate some places that you can’t feel at all, no matter what you do. Don’t force it. See if you can find the edges of the kyo area—the places where you can just begin to feel something.
3. Now, forget all that, and still lying on your back, pay attention to both feet. Equalize the sensation in the two feet. Whether you visualize, imagine heat, whatever, just concentrate on making the sensation equal in both. Do the same with your knees, hips, hands, elbows, eyes, and ears. Again, don’t worry if you can’t get it—just imagine you have done it.
4. Now, relax and notice the kyo/jitsu relationships all through the body again. Have the kyos changed at all since the beginning?

This is a good way to increase body awareness, begin your exercise sequence, and just relax. Sensing the kyo like this will automatically shift the nervous system into parasympathetic mode, which is a necessary preliminary to achieving any kind of positive shift in the physical state.

The most difficult aspect of working with yourself in any way is the quite natural unawareness of your own kyo, which means you may never become conscious of your underlying energy patterns. A simple exercise like this can help you experience the unfelt, inexperienced, and unconscious patterns that underlie what may be troubling you.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CORRECTIVE EXERCISE

If you work hard at correcting your alignment without specific corrective exercises, you will get somewhere. Your muscles will probably feel more relaxed. But your job will not get easier—you will have to keep correcting yourself consciously, and it will get progressively more difficult as you become aware of all your compensations.

For example, say you notice your left shoulder is higher than your right. You change the position of your computer, the way you carry your bag. You keep reminding yourself to drop the shoulder. You will definitely help your shoulders, but then, since the underlying muscle imbalance is not corrected, your neck may start tilting more to the left, or your right hip may start compressing. Your body will find another way to attempt to balance itself, and it will struggle as hard as it can to avoid using the weak muscles. So I suggest at least trying the corrective exercises—they will actually make you work much less in the long run, since only through isolating the weak and stiff areas progressively will you correct the underlying imbalance.

Corrective exercise is different from other types of exercise in that it targets the specific muscle pathway you need to activate. This isn’t easy. A compound exercise, like a push-up, uses a lot of muscles, and if you have some “switched-off,” that is, inactive, muscles, your instinctive body wisdom, wishing to avoid injury, won’t let you use them. Unused muscles tend to be hard to feel and use, not only because they are weak, but because the nerve pathways that conduct the impulses from the muscle to the brain are not developed. They are not damaged, but exist as potentials rather than being available to the conscious mind. The instinct to not use them is so profound that you can do almost anything while using almost any muscles. The push-up of a person who has injured his shoulder is going to be quite different from the push-up of a person with a lower back injury. So most exercises won’t, on their own, correct muscle imbalance.

On Changing the Reflex to Avoid the Inactive Muscle Pathway

It takes careful attention to the placing of your body, your alignment, focus on the area you want to help, and a slow pace (usually) to change the reflex to avoid the inactive muscle pathway. Mental focus will send blood and nerve energy to the area, helping to connect the nervous system to the muscle. The exercises in this book will force you to use the weak muscles and not any others, which can be very hard to differentiate on your own. It may take some practice to do them easily, but with patience you will. You will then be able to transfer this feel for the muscle to your everyday life.

When the muscle group has truly engaged, you will probably be able to use it in compound exercises also. Don’t underestimate your body’s desire to avoid the muscles you want to use. That’s why I give repeated instructions about how the exercises should be done.

Learn to distinguish between unnecessary discomfort in a position, which you must alleviate to have a good result, and the kind of satisfying or productive discomfort of working an underused area. You should not be able to drift off mentally when doing corrective exercise. The mental focus should always be slightly greater than the physical.

Go five times more slowly and with smaller movements than you want to. This is the correction I make for almost everyone, so I’m assuming you will go too fast and too big also.

The shape of the movement doesn’t matter, for now. Let that come from the inside. Feel the movement deeply in the nervous system, and focus your mind on it. Your gaze, usually straight ahead, should not wander or become blank. Your eyes and your breathing control your mental focus, so keep both open, receptive, and deep.

On Correcting Alignment

I’ve learned this one through experience, so I pass it on to you. Don’t work the body in asymmetrical and one-sided ways to correct alignment. Many advanced exercisers make this mistake, and it’s a subtle and tricky problem.

To elaborate, don’t start standing on one leg because you’ve noticed you always stand on the other. Balance your weight in the middle. Otherwise, you will create another imbalance. If you carry a bag over one shoulder habitually, alternate shoulders or wear a backpack. The tricky aspect is when you correct more complicated patterns that have several parts to them. For example, a client of mine tried to correct her neck alignment by using all but one of the steps I outlined, leaving the natural curve of the neck. She changed her upper back, absorbed C7, used the hyoid smile and a yawning technique to relax the occiput—but she continued to flatten her neck. As a result, she tightened her larynx to such an extent that she could hardly breathe.

The general principles—staying relaxed, listening to your body, and understanding the purpose of the movements—are more important than the details. Being mindful of the larger areas, such as the general curve of the spine, matters more than knowing exactly where each bone is.

Also, remember that distortions are always related to movement, so you should experience your body as a moving, living being, with pulses and rhythms, not an object that you can mold into shape like a sculpture.

  Taking a Kinesthetic “Photograph”

If you can both visualize and feel a movement—that is, if you can sense the muscles and other tissues involved—you will be able to strengthen and stretch those areas so you can do the movement (eventually). If you can’t visualize it, that’s where you start.

1. Pick some movement you want to do and visualize yourself—not somebody else—performing it.
2. Now put yourself in the picture kinesthetically. Experience as fully as possible in your body how it would feel to make this movement, all the way from the starting position to coming out of it. Which muscles would engage, where would your eyes look, how would the various pressures of the points of foundation feel? See if you can slightly engage these muscles.
3. Then, if possible, put yourself in a modified, supported version of the posture or part of the movement. For example, if the movement is a split, you come into this position only as far as you can with good alignment and no strain. Give yourself support under your legs with pillows and under your hands with yoga blocks, remaining comfortable. Then stay there. Align yourself, engage the appropriate muscles, feel like you’re doing a full split. Actually, you are—full for yourself at this moment. Relax and feel pleasure in the position. You have to be comfortable enough to stay in the position for at least two minutes.
4. Then come out of the posture, memorizing the feeling of how this felt, the sense of the muscles and tissue expanding and contracting. Feel the whole body as well as the working areas.
5. Then file this kinesthetic photograph away in your brain for future reference. That way, you can work the neurological connections between brain and muscle, which will open up the movement channels from the other end.

HOW TO STRETCH

Muscles need to expand and contract fully to be healthy. Some of our muscles, for example the biceps, get a good workout in our everyday activity and need less stretching in general. Others, like the psoas (fig. 7.1), are deep, run close to the organs inside our bodies, and often get very stiff. A chronically tight muscle will also become weak, even though it may look and feel strong. It becomes prone to injury and, even if not injured, will form fascial buildup around it as a protection, which restricts movement further.

 

Fig. 7.1. Front view of psoas

Flexibility, our natural range of motion, has little to do with how much we need to stretch. Flexibility is determined primarily by genetics and is created by (a) the length of ligaments and tendons, which cannot be stretched safely and which control the types of joints we have, and (b) the density of our tissue. Some people have muscles with bigger, thicker, and closer fibers than others, and they will be naturally less flexible. Our body proportions have something to do with our measured flexibility. If you have a long torso and short legs, for example, it will obviously be easier to touch your toes. If you have very long arms, it will be even easier. So the markers of flexibility aren’t that important.

What matters is that our muscles are evenly stretched, long, and elastic. To understand the place of stretching in our exercise routine, it is important to know what kind of natural flexibility we have, because it will change how we approach it. There is a continuum of mobility, with hypermobility at one end—that is extreme contortionist-type flexibility—and hypomobility, poor range of motion, at the other. You probably know where in the continuum you are. Hypermobile people tend to have trouble developing strength, especially in the core muscles and upper body. They have joints that “pop” or even dislocate and may have muscle spasms if they go beyond their safe range of motion.

In my practice I have found most people (especially men) to be hypomobile. Hypomobile people will have better balance than hypermobile people, who have wobbly ankles. Some joints can be either hypermobile or hypomobile in the same person, and some joints are happier with hypermobility, such as the hip joints, which are deeply set in their sockets and tend to stiffness. Others do less well, especially knees, which can be injured easily if they go out of alignment.

The hypermobile person should concentrate on stretching muscle only by stabilizing the joint and focusing on isometric contractions of opposing muscle groups to release safely. The temptation to “show off ” and fling into hyperextended postures must be avoided. Postural muscles are likely to be both tight and weak and will need extra attention.

Timing and Taking Time

Hypomobile people should focus on stretching slowly, taking the muscle through its full range with care. They tend to bounce in all stretches, because that way avoids the discomfort of stretching. For the types of stretches in this book, don’t do that! There is a good system of stretching, the Wharton Method, that works well for hypomobile types and does involve somewhat bouncy movements. But the system presented in this book, where we go into deep muscles and work alignment, must be done very slowly. So go just to your edge (the place where you feel discomfort but not pain, and your breathing stays open), support yourself with a pillow or bolster as you need, and stay there—three minutes if you can. You’ll get much more out of this than bouncing around.

Stretching is more effective when the muscles are warmed up with some type of activity, or if they’re done at the end of the day. Hypomobile people must warm up before stretching; the hypers don’t need to do as much. But it can be discouraging to stretch “cold”—you won’t go nearly as far, and the desire to go farther can cause injury.

These stretches require time, about one to three minutes each, so you need to go to your edge, whatever that is for you. The stretch should release after a while, not feel more uncomfortable. It is better not to go far enough than to go too far and back out.

Make sure your breathing is slow, even, and relaxed. Check the rest of your body to make sure no other muscles are working. Do a body scan—you’ll have time—and breathe into each part of your body, releasing it, including the muscles you are stretching.

If you cannot stay at your edge without effort, if you’re tightening your body in some way, then support yourself with pillows or a bolster, anything fairly soft that allows you to let go and also open the muscle.

Which Areas to Stretch

I’d like to share with you a stretching routine that works for me and may work for you. It goes like this: (1) Stretching the Back and the Neck (chapter 12), (2) Wall Hang Stretch (chapter 12), (3) Advanced Psoas Stretch (chapter 13), (4) Shoulder Stretch Series (chapter 11), (5) Wall Hang Stretch again.

I hold each stretch until I feel a significant change in my body, from one to three minutes. If I skip it or even change it very much, I’ve noticed I tend to lose the advantage of working my whole body in a fairly general way. After I do that, I can focus on other, more specific stretches.

My experience has been that it is not a good idea to focus on opening up one area without a sort of general stretching and releasing sequence. An overly precise focus in one place can lead to destabilizing the structures there and result in injury. I’ve done it!

So after you have stretched and warmed up your whole body in a more general way, you could focus on your “problem area.” Here’s a rule of thumb if you are not sure what your problem area is:

If an area won’t strengthen, no matter how much you try to strengthen it with focused resistance exercise, you need to stretch that area.

If muscles don’t stretch, despite your diligent efforts to stretch them, you need to strengthen those muscles.

TYPES OF STRENGTHENING EXERCISES

Most of the exercises in this book are strengthening exercises in the same way that lifting weights, and even yoga and Pilates, can be. I give attention to postural muscles, whereas most strength exercises will target mostly the phasic, active muscles, although there is some overlap.

Lifting weights is a common cause of injury, just as lifting anything else can be; so many people shy away from it and go to the subtler, gentler exercises. Yet I have found in my own practice and through observation that a simple improvement in overall strength can correct a lot of physical problems.

Shoulder and neck tension come from weakness in the supporting muscles of the back; it’s amazing how these tensions melt away when the back gets strong. Stretching a tight muscle is our instinctive response to discomfort, and it helps short term (calming the jitsu), but the tension originates in a weak muscle somewhere else (a kyo), and probably won’t be resolved until that area is strengthened.

Weight lifting has a significant disadvantage, though, aside from its injury potential, and that is that it usually works the concentric part of the movement (positive) much more than the eccentric (negative). For example, the effort of a biceps curl is in the curl itself, rather than the lengthening down of the muscle as the weight moves away from the body (fig. 7.2). This can result in shortening the muscle. It is not necessary to shorten or bulk a muscle to strengthen it—ideally the muscle should be long and strong.

Therefore, the eccentric (negative) part of the movement needs to be strengthened equally. You can do this by using TheraBands; the cable machine, which uses a similar kind of resistance; certain types of weight-lifting machines; or the super-slow strengthening system.

Fig. 7.2. Bicep curl

Trainers seemed like a luxury thirty years ago when going to the gym started becoming so popular. Now, the industry is booming, as people have realized that weight lifting, for most people, requires instruction to be safe. If you do lift weights without a trainer, and even if you are working with a trainer, follow the alignment rules I’ve outlined for the exercises here, pay attention to the parts of your body you are not using, gaze straight ahead, and focus on what you are doing. Work very slowly, and do not use the momentum of the weight to complete your movement. Work through the “glitches” in your movement; don’t rush through them. Make each move slow and continuous, and don’t stop moving until you can’t work any longer.

When you go to the gym, don’t just use the machines you like. Usually these favorite exercises will strengthen us where we are already strong—that’s why we like them. Instead, concentrate on working your whole body.

One client of mine was having knee trouble, though she used the gym regularly. Her hamstrings and gluteus muscles were so weak that she was having trouble going up steps. These muscles are easy to work in the gym, so I was at a loss to understand how she had not strengthened them more. On further inquiry, I found out that all the hip and hamstring machines in her gym were up a flight of stairs that she didn’t like to negotiate, so she had never used them. The result was an even greater imbalance between her strong quadriceps muscles and her weak hamstrings, giving her even more of a propensity to lean forward and injure her knees.

That said, if a machine doesn’t feel good at all, and you don’t seem to be targeting the right muscles in the right way, don’t use it. Find another way to use the same muscles. Some machines are just going to be wrong for your body dimensions.

There are also different types of strength, and again, we will tend to gravitate toward working the areas that we are already strong in because that feels good. It’s important to develop the capabilities of our bodies as evenly as we can, so pay attention to which types of strength your body doesn’t naturally have and then what might shift if you could develop them.

One type of strength is aimed at by building muscle through weight training. This kind of exercise targets one particular type of muscle fiber, the fast twitch, which everyone has. If you’re the type of person who bulks up quickly, then you were probably born with more of it. The types of moves that develop this part of your muscle are contractions against resistance.

Another kind of strength training is isometric exercise, which is static contraction against resistance. The parts of the tissue that can hold difficult positions for a long time, such as in yoga, are included in this category. This has to do with the strength and size of the tendons and ligaments—again, that’s probably genetic, but can be developed. The reason to do isometric work is primarily therapeutic. If you think about it, all the postural muscles do isometric work all the time, supporting your body in a static position upright, which is effortful. Including isometrics in your workout will help your alignment and “use” of gravity and space. You can also increase your flexibility safely with the right isometric contractions.

To an extent, isometrics in the muscles will increase endurance (the slow twitch fibers). The other type of endurance work, aerobics, uses the slow twitch fibers, of course. Aerobics, running, biking, swimming, anything that brings up your heart rate and forces your body to use more oxygen is vital for good health and stress relief. Aerobic exercise will benefit your heart, your lungs, and your body chemistry and will improve your mood. It does not build muscle. The slow twitch fibers are not the same ones that lift weights. Aerobics may give you stamina, however, so you can lift weights for longer periods. Prolonged aerobic exercise, like marathon running, actually breaks down some muscle fibers, so you should always balance aerobic exercise with strength training of the same muscle groups. In other words, if you are a runner, you need to strengthen your legs with resistance exercise. It will help you run faster, too.

The other type of exercise that we need for most sports is plyometric; that is, forceful, explosive moves like jumping (fig. 7.3). Many people, myself included, hate this type of exercise because we’ve hurt ourselves doing it. If you have alignment problems, very loose joints, or damaged cartilage, approach plyometrics with caution. But don’t give up on them! Jumping is an interesting example. The only way to use the muscle pathways involved in jumping is to jump. You could jump just a little, on a soft surface, or run, or use a trampoline.

Fig. 7.3. Plyometric sports

Surprisingly, yoga can be plyometric—inversions, lunges, and balance poses have plyometric elements. Ashtanga yoga is extremely plyometric. The better your balance is, the easier these types of explosive moves will be for you.

Sometimes we need to move fast and reflexively in life. For example, we use plyometric moves in emergency situations and in playing with children, who are relentlessly plyometric themselves. Grandpas, or even dads, who have long given up all sports and their neurological components, injure themselves time and time again playing with their bouncy grandkids.

AVOIDING TILTING AT WINDMILLS

Our bodies can be subject to various structural idiosyncrasies, which can impact our capacity to change. They can occur in our skeletons, in the positions of nerves, and in the placement of organs. It is important to understand these kinds of idiosyncrasies so we don’t end up tilting at windmills, so to speak. There’s not much point fighting what will not change. Most aspects of physical structure will strengthen, however, if we pay attention to the obvious, and let that guide us to work around our natural difficulties and exploit our genetic strengths.

Yoga is great for teaching you the limitations of your body structure and how to work around them. It amazes me how some “easy” yoga postures are very hard for me, and some so-called advanced or difficult poses come naturally to my body. A deeper understanding of the body can be gained by reflecting on the reasons for the ease or difficulty of a move—is it a true limitation, to be worked around, or a malfunction, to be worked through?

Skeletal Structure

Your skeletal structure may prevent you from performing certain moves, or types of moves, with ease. You can change your skeletal alignment to some extent. If you get very strong and find there’s still some exercise you can’t do, no matter how you approach it or how hard you try, the fault is probably in your bones.

For example, the Pilates roll up and roll down (abdominal flexion in slow motion) is impossible for people who cannot round their spines properly. There will not be enough space between some of the vertebrae to create room for the flexion. You can see from the illustration (fig. 7.4) how the scoliotic distortion of the spine could cause this condition. Understanding ths is only the first step toward changing it. In this case, the same flexion exercise performed while sitting will change the spine enough to allow the muscles to strengthen. Or the roll up/down can be repeated with support. The difficult part of the move can be held isometrically, also with support if necessary. And the distortions in the spine can be worked with separately.

Fig. 7.4. Spinal distortions

The placement of the hip joints can create a problem with pelvic stability, which affects balance (see fig. 2.14). Obviously, if one joint is placed farther forward or back, or more to one side than the other relative to the pelvic girdle, any kind of balancing and, possibly, coordination will be negatively affected. Strengthening gluteus medius and the hip rotators evenly may help. Keeping the pelvic girdle deliberately still when balancing or lifting one leg will also assist.

Natural differences in body proportion will make a difference in how you benefit—or don’t—from strength training, and of course these can’t really be changed. Small feet are harder to balance on, as are small hands. A long torso means touching your toes will be easier, and abdominal work will be harder since the torso will be longer and heavier relative to the legs. Petite, compact body structures will generally have fewer structural problems.

Nerve Position

Then there are the quirks of nerve positioning. Sometimes, a nerve bundle will be placed so that there’s uncomfortable pressure on it in certain positions. The ulnar nerve is often a culprit for some reason (fig. 7.5). If your arms “go to sleep” easily, you may have some compression along this nerve pathway, or the nerve may simply be positioned in a touchy place. The former can be changed, the latter probably not.

I was always told in yoga class that if I got used to sitting cross-legged, after a period of time, my legs wouldn’t go to sleep as they invariably do. I can easily sit cross-legged for hours with a straight back—but my legs still doze off after five minutes or so. I think the tendency for limbs to fall asleep is mostly due to nerve positioning, superficiality of nerve bundles, and density of tissue. People with loose, open connective tissue seem to have more nerve sleepiness than the tighter, denser-bodied types. These things don’t change, no matter how long you sit or how much strength you develop.

Organ Placement

The relationship of organs to structure can also affect the ability to do an exercise. The following section will be confusing to anyone who isn’t familiar with the energy meridians of Oriental medicine. For a much more complete understanding of this fascinating system, read Zen Shiatsu by Shizuto Masunaga with Wataru Ohashi or any of Ohashi’s books (see bibliography).

If a meridian (energy channel) is blocked, the muscles along that pathway will be tight or weak or both. Since the meridians correspond to organs and physical systems, you can both identify and treat internal problems with certain exercises.

Fig. 7.5. Ulnar nerve position

Some of the paired organs may seem strange, but that’s how the Chinese, who developed this system, did it, and it makes sense if you study it. Briefly, here are the correspondences:

ORGAN MERIDIANS AND ASSOCIATED PARTS OF THE BODY
Organ Meridian	Related Parts of the Body
Lungs and Large Intestine	Pectoralis major and minor, sides of neck (Upper Chest Stretch is beneficial; see here)
Heart and Small Intestine	Triceps, rotator cuff muscles (see Rotator Cuff Muscle Exercise)
Bladder and Kidney	Hamstrings and spinal erector muscles, Achilles tendon (Wall Hang Stretch is beneficial; see here)
Stomach and Spleen/Pancreas	Quadriceps, front of body in general (Supta Virasana is beneficial, see fig. 7.6)
Liver and Gallbladder	Iliotibial band (ITB) abductor muscles, sides of body, sides of neck especially
Triple Warmer and Pericardium (these have to do with the endocrine and immune systems)	Inner thighs and inner arms

Fig. 7.6. Supta Virasana pose

POPULAR MISCONCEPTIONS

You may get bored with and not need the material in this section, in which case, skip it. However, in thirty years of practice I’ve found that certain misconceptions come up again and again. So even though these themes appear throughout the book, I’m giving them some extra space to emphasize their importance.

Myth No. 1

The first myth is the one about “functional” exercise. That’s the idea that you can do sports and other strenuous activities to build strength. This misconception also includes the belief that to do better at a sport, you need to do it more. There is some truth in this, of course—an athlete is going to be stronger than a sedentary person in a general way. And a manual laborer will develop muscles undreamed of by the person who sits at a desk all day. So why do I see so many dancers and athletes who have serious physical problems when we know strong muscles are healthy muscles? And why do some muscles actually get weaker over time in active, strong people?

I decided to explore this question very thoroughly, testing muscles in athletes for specific imbalances, and sure enough, lots of skilled athletes are very weak in some areas and have developed extreme imbalances between very strong and very weak muscles. What happens over time, as we do our favorite activities in our favorite ways, is that our tendencies, whether healthy or the converse, increase. If we favor our biceps in a sport, perhaps because of compensation for an old injury or a genetic quirk, our biceps will get stronger and we’ll gradually use them more and more, because it feels good to use a strong muscle and it feels bad to use a weak one. This is a natural tendency of the body to avoid injury—but we have to outsmart it. Otherwise these imbalances get worse over time, and we end up with a problem.

Generally speaking, gym exercise is used more as a corrective type of movement (changing the body so it functions better, feels better, and, maybe, looks better) than as a sport (exercise for its own sake). On the other hand, few people play golf, for example, because it aligns their bodies—it usually does the opposite; they do it because they enjoy it as a sport.

This is how it works. In an unbalanced activity, or any activity performed with an unbalanced structure, some muscular and neurological pathways get stronger, and those pathways that are not used will weaken. The body, to avoid injury, will continue to strengthen the strong ones, so the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker. Eventually, the strong muscles will tighten until they can’t move enough to maintain strength. Then the entire system will weaken to a place where injury or pain is felt, somewhere in the body.

In my own case, for many years, I worked on people in a very body-damaging position: my clients lay on a futon while I worked on them with my knees, forearms, and hands; I was working hard and crawling around on the floor. After doing this for twenty-seven years, I started to get lots of pain. An unrelated injury caused compensation, and I ended up with constant pain in my back.

I understood then why people panic when they experience pain while doing familiar movements, such as in the sports they love and their work. I knew which imbalances I had developed, but not how to correct them. The corrective exercises that follow in this book come out of my experiences with my own pain, mostly the trial and error approach. It took me many errors, some more pain, and about a year of time. The result was that I could work as much as I liked, with a few minor positional adjustments, while continuing some of the exercises two or three times a week.

I want to share these with you so that you will not have to give up any of your favorite activities as you get older, as long as you balance out your muscles over time. My goal here is to enable you to work with your body enough that you can enjoy your favorite body-damaging sports indefinitely. This probably means changing how you do the sport and also doing some corrective exercise.

Myth No. 2

The second myth is that doing an exercise correctly means copying some preexisting shape. This misconception comes from a mental state in which one is focused almost exclusively on appearance, where one is outside of the body, looking at it as though separate from it, and probably judging it in comparison to an idealized image. Dance and many sports exploit the use of the body toward ends that may not be in its best interests. For those movements that focus on making the body function and feel better, we need to focus internally on the feeling of the exercise and the internal visualizing of movement in order to gain benefits and also not to injure ourselves.

The difference between a great dancer or athlete and a less than great one is that the best dancers and athletes integrate mind and body in their work. They have mastered their form to a point where they inhabit their bodies fully all the time.

Remember that corrective exercises work on the nervous system too, so if you don’t feel the stretch or the contraction of the muscle, you miss half the equation.

Myth No. 3

This myth relates to the first one; it is the idea that muscles function as isolated units and that they will necessarily be strengthened by using, for example, the weight machines that are designed for that purpose.

Most isolation exercises don’t work because muscles don’t work the way we imagine from looking at diagrams or the illustrations of what muscles you will use that are on the sides of weight training machines. You might get the result you think—or you might not. This is because muscles do not operate as named units—that notion is just a convenience for the sake of understanding their locations and functions. In real life, pathways of muscle tissue involving areas of named muscles are used. These are complicated and obscure in origin, probably neurological in nature. You may have to isolate a pathway—one particular part of one or more muscles—to really strengthen a function or area.

For example, abdominal crunches don’t necessarily strengthen the abdominal muscles, even though they are considered an isolation exercise. You could do them in a convincing way (by that I mean they’ll look right to an untrained eye), using your back, hip flexors, even legs. The only way you would know that this is happening is if you try another movement that requires abdominal strength—you won’t be able to do it. And of course, once again, our psychological tendency is not to use the weak pathways because it doesn’t feel good, and that discourages us from trying further.

Electromyography, the measuring with a machine of the firing patterns of different muscles in exercises, does not (cannot) take into account the parts of the muscle being used, their relative depth, and so on.

This is starting to sound very complicated and possibly discouraging. The good news is that you can effectively isolate these pathways with controlled, modified movements, and you can try out various exercises to find out where your weaknesses lie. Many of the exercises I share with you in part 2 have modifications, so you can do them even if you are very weak in the areas that they utilize. You can do all the muscle pathway exercises to see which pathways need strengthening.

Correcting Misconceptions

The first misconception mentioned above is illustrated in the story of M., who had hip dysplasia and could not decide whether to have hip replacement surgery. In the meantime, to optimize her chances of recovery, with or without surgery, I gave her a series of isolation exercises for the hips and worked carefully with her on them. I could tell it was a bit of a struggle for her to focus so intensely on small movements, but that reaction to isolation exercise is quite common.

Anyway, a month later, M.’s hip rotators felt just as unbalanced to me as they had before. I asked her if she’d done the exercises. “I’ve exercised a lot,” she said. “So do you think I should have the surgery?” I would probably have advised her more strongly toward the surgery if I hadn’t asked her to show me how she’d done the exercises. That’s when it turned out she hadn’t done the exercises I gave her at all—she had just exercised. She had been swimming every day. That was wonderful but would not help her hip directly.

So the first misconception is that all exercise is the same. All exercise can be useful, and of course, movement is essential for health, but to fix a specific problem in the body, generally speaking, you need to isolate (identify) the weak muscle and then work only that muscle. That will mean suppressing all the natural protective impulses the body has to use strong areas so you don’t injure yourself.

So please move, swim, dance, whatever you enjoy, but remember, all compound movements (movements where you use a variety of muscles) may increase health but will not correct imbalance in the body.

Psychosomatic Illness

Finally, let’s look at the idea of psychosomatic illness. This whole concept comes from another era before we really understood anything about neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and all those chemical and neurological properties of the body, which really do affect emotions. I think Candace Pert’s book, Molecules of Emotion, published in 1997, changed the way the general public regarded the mind/body relationship.^*4 People began to understand that the mind and body are one functioning unit, not two separate entities that might have a relationship.

It is useful sometimes to separate in our minds “the body” and “the mind” for the purposes of understanding both. However, don’t forget the reality, which is that body events, injuries, and so on, affect the mind, and changes in the mind and emotions profoundly influence our denser, more visceral functions.

I find it more useful to see the self as a being composed of various levels of density, from the physical, through the emotional, to the invisible layers of spirit.

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?

“How long will it take?” is one of the most common questions I am asked, often by people I have not yet worked on. This is, of course, a legitimate question—they are spending a lot of money and want a clear sense of the benefit they will receive in return. I may be able to give them some idea of how long it may take to get some relief from the pain, but that’s different.

The only true answer I can give to the question of how long it will take is: “Probably a lifetime of changing deeply entrenched physical habits. Because, once you correct the habits it has taken you years to create, you will uncover even deeper spiritual and psychological issues, and once you start to unravel those—well, your whole life could change. I think this shift is a fascinating journey through the self, and I love it, but you may not want that.”

I chuckle a bit when I think of all the stories of all the people who came in to have their little toe fixed, or something equally inconsequential, and ended up, through the exploration of this work, leaving a mate or finding one or changing their inner and maybe outer lives profoundly.

Or you could just take a pain killer. . . .