Teaching Restorative Exercise (TM)

Recently I have been asked what my experience teaching RES (TM) is and why it works for some and not others and because I thought my answer would interest other people as well, here it is:

My experience with teaching RES(TM) is confined to my own experience and my friends and family. I taught a little while I was on the Wholebody alignment course, but the reason I stopped quite soon, was mainly that I didn't feel I knew enough of why we are doing what we learn in RES(TM) and about how to evalute it on the individual.

I am sure there are a lot of people out there who will benefit from RES(TM), but mainly because there are very many people out there. Why I think it works for some and not other is, that Katy Bowman has made a diagnosis of society and this will be true for some but not for other. She has concluded in the RES(TM) course that:

- People don't move enough

- If people move they move in the wrong way (walking in alignment is the right way) Katy makes some expections like climbing, but I don't know why, because climbing has side effects if done wrongly or in excess (finger joint problems, excessive kyphosis etc.)

- People sit too much and therefore have short hamstrings.

- People sit too much and don't walk enough and therefore have weak outer thigh muscles and gluets

- People sit too much and work on computer and drive too much and therefore have short chest muscles and hyper-kyphosis.

- People wear shoes too much and therefore have lost nerve connection and mobility in the foot.

- People wear high heels too much and therefore have forefoot problems and short calves.

- Peoples muscles are generally too short and therefore circulation is below optimal

- People with short calves and hamstrings and weak gluets and outer thigh have a mis-aligned pelvis and therefore pelivc floor issues

etc.

There are more but I think these are some of the main. Some of the conclusions above are strong points in that they are well researched or have a clear physical cause and others are weaker - a little less well researched. Katy covers some common causes that affect alighment, but there are many more and a lot of them didn't make it into the RES (TM) course and there is no real definition of what is in what is out and why.

Now if you fall in most of the above categories you are more likely to feel the benefits and with X billion people on this planet this will work for quite a few. I personally have found by going to a fascial stretch therapist and sports and rehabilitation PT that my gluets and outer thighs are too strong and RES exercises focus on the wrong areas for me. Also hamstring stretches are not great for me. My main misalignment is left/right imbalance, which is not really well covered in the course eventhough it affects also many people.

I found with friends and family that some of RES (TM) worked and some didn't. I found there were quite a few expections to the above diagnosis such as my sister likes to wear heels but has some of the best toe mobility I know even compared to my little children.

Some of the relief has been temporary through RES(TM) stretching and I think this area had the greatest success. RES(TM) seems to work well when is used as a tool to release tension.

The other area where being aware as in the RES(TM) method works well, in my experience, is when someone is in pain. In these cases there is already a signal from brain to body to stop the pain and if re-alignment can help them get out of pain, then it is well worth being aware of how to do this. This works for my mum, eventhough what she is doing to get out of her lower back pain is not a RES(TM) exercise or alignment adjustment but something else I noticed with her. Staying out of pain is a great motivator for behavioural changes.

Where is RES (TM) doesn't work so well is for exceptions, and because there are so many people on this planet, there will be many. If I or my sister focus on the aligment points that Katy brings forward, we are not focusing on the areas that are weak in us but the areas Katy thinks are weak in everyone. My next move now is to learn or use a method that is able to give me very specific individual advice (and I could kick myself for not doing this first).

The other problem with RES (TM) is the requirement to be aware of your alignment and movement as much as possible. The problem with this are:

As described above they may be the wrong alignment point to focus on. But mainly it is just not possible to be aware of something for a significant continious amount of time. Even Katy Bowman when walking at the RES week, and not being aware, still turns her feet out. How many years will it take for the alignment to stick, if even Katy Bowman is still reverting to previous patterns when not being aware? But even if you were able to keep your awareness with alignment all the time, you will miss other signals from your body or environment that may be more important.

I can see two non-intrusive ways to change your alignment:

1. You are aware of your alignment and the alignment that is optimal and try and change your alignment to be in an optimal state by consciously changing it and keep changing it as much as possible. This way your body will adapt to the new optimal alignment and your muscles will adapt and restrengthen to aid the new optimal alignment. This requires a lot of being aware and therefore long periods of practice. I wonder if one is able to be aware a significant amount of time to cause change. But if you can get it to work, you can get all the muscles just at the right length and strength and balanced. Main caveat of this method is that you need to know what your own optimal alignment state is. I think of this as the mental cast method.

2. You can find out which muscles are strong and which are weak, which are long and which are short and try and balance the function of your muscles by isolating the muscles and retraining them to be more balanced. This tends to be a faster method as you can strenghten and lengthen muscles specifically and balance opposing muscles pairs. You can work with joint mobility and try and balance the muscles around a joint for best results. So you work on the muscles/fascia/joints first and the result is your optimal alignment as defined by your balanced muscle set up. The main caveat of this method is that you need to know, what each muscles/joint is supposed to be doing and how they are supposed to interact and with which set-up you get the best, least degenerative result. You don't have to be aware of you alignment. You concentrate on doing your re-balacing and the body alignment will follow.

RES (TM) is a combination of the two with lots of the first and some of the second. The bits of the second method being non-specific to the person though.

I am trying the second method now with Fascial Stretch Therapy (FST). I went to a session last week and after working on my hip for an hour, I walked very differently and I could feel my feet working differently, in a way I have been trying to get them to work for a while with RES (TM). But this has only been one session, so I will see how I progress. FST says that the results are only temporary and we'll see if it's more like a massage you need to have once in a while to reset you.

How sane is sane

I am still working furiously on the Think again! Coursera course, trying to finish the material in time for a certificate, yeah!

In one of the exercises I came across an example of an unsound argument that reminded me of the article I read for the Restorative Exercise course called "How sane is sane" and it helped me understand, why the article did not quite gel with me. So this is for Restorative Exercise fellows again.

In the article, the author questions if we are not all mentally ill as we have similar ways of reacting to the outside word, as people, who are being labelled mentally ill, but maybe we are better at hiding them or controlling our strange behaviours. The article goes through a list of people with severe to moderate mental problems and compares them to similar everyday behaviour. The article concluding that we should not look for the illness in anyone but health. I agree that finding the good bits in anyone is a great starting point for recovery/treatmnet and labeling patients with their illnesses may not be productive (I am absolutely no expert in this field and have no experience, by the way). I was a little worried about the fact why generally more accepted behaviour is suggested to be equal to very unusual behaviour, just because it is similar and but happens less often.

While working on the Think again! course, I was reading the following argument and we were asked to looked at why arguments go wrong or become unsound or invalid.

"Consider the following argument: “‘Mental illness’ is just a phrase that the medical establishment uses to label people who do very strange things frequently. But each one of us does very strange things at least some of the time. And there’s no important difference between someone who does very strange things some of the time and someone else who does very strange things just a little bit more of the time. So there is no important difference between mentally ill people and everyone else.”

The exercise asked us to find the reason why this argument is not sound and the answer is:

"The correct answer is “(a) conceptual slippery slope argument.”

  A conceptual slippery slope argument is an unsound argument, which claims that, since a series of particular actions cannot change the quality of a certain thing, there is no real difference between cases that have that quality and cases that do not. Typically, the problem with a conceptual slippery slope argument is that its second premise claims that something is not a matter of degree, when in fact it is a matter of degree.

  In this case, the second premise in the argument from (3) treats “mental illness” as an all-or-nothing matter. The argument assumes that either one is mentally ill, or else one is not.

  Suppose, however, that mental illness admits of degrees. Suppose that one could be a little mentally ill, or more mentally ill, or extremely mentally ill. Suppose further that, depending on how often one does very strange things, one will be more or less mentally ill. If that is the case, the sentence, “there is no important difference between someone who does very strange things some of the time and someone else who does very strange things just a little bit more of the time” is false. It is false because, in fact, there is a difference between someone who does very strange things some of the time and someone who does them a bit more. That difference, furthermore, is important to being mentally ill. The difference is in the degree to which one is mentally ill, though, rather than whether one is mentally ill at all."

Now this may seem mind bending but this exercise is almost at the end of the course and a lot has gone before. But I hope this gives a little flavour, why the above argument is not sound.

There is so much instereting material in the Think again! course. There was also an example of an argument concerning evolution, which I though was very interesting and is relevant to the Restorative Exercise's perspective of evolution. I have written up my thoughts on it and am at five pages at the moment, so will have to shorten that a little before putting it on the blog.

Happy learning!