Breaking Free from the Habit of Pain: Understanding Pain Patterns and Recovery

Do you have a habit of pain?

Photo by Hailey Kean on Unsplash

Pain is an essential part of life. It protects us by alerting us to injury or danger, such as touching a hot stove or pulling a muscle. However, pain doesn't always serve this protective function. For some individuals, pain can persist long after the physical injury has healed, creating what can be described as a "habit of pain." This concept, while not new, sheds light on how our nervous system can become "addicted" to the sensation of pain, even when no injury is present.

Many people have come to me in my practice over the years and in courses that I teach that have said, “I find it really strange. I injured my knee 20 years ago. And then I got over it. I'm fine. And now lately I'm getting exactly the same knee pain, but I haven't done any particular exercise that would create that. I don't have trouble walking up the stairs. It just hurts.”

Now, is it because there's a newly formed pain?

No, none of this is from an injury.

Your body is filled with nerve receptors—sensory receptors, called proprioceptors. Proprioception tells you, where are you in space? Where are your hands in relation to your mouth so that you don't stab your face with a fork, but get it in the mouth? When you take a step, what muscles do you need to use spontaneously to balance so you can take the next step? Your body's full of receptors for that kind of spatial awareness and body awareness of yourself in space.

Then, of course, you have pleasure receptors. We eat foods that are good and not necessarily good for our health, but hey, they're addictive, right? Oh, crunchy salt and pepper chips. How about things with loads of ice cream with saturated fats? There are a lot of things like this and people can become addicted to food altogether. Some people overeat and overindulge because that's satisfying. They get sensations that are pleasurable. Same thing with sex. Some people kind of overdo it, and they don't even realize they're overdoing it. They're just seeking to get a certain sensory satisfaction.

However, throughout your body, along with all the proprioceptors and other sensory receptors, there are also nociceptors.

Just as the brain can develop patterns around pleasurable experiences—like craving sugary foods—it can also form patterns around painful experiences, causing the sensation of pain to persist long after the injury has healed.

Nociceptors are specialized nerve fibers responsible for transmitting pain signals to the brain. These receptors are distributed throughout the body, and their function is to alert us when something is wrong, such as physical damage or inflammation.

Now, you have to understand that pain is a good thing. That sounds funny, doesn't it? I mean, pain is a good thing? Well, yes, it protects you.

The worst thing that could happen to somebody is to be born without adequate nociceptors. And what we know is, when that happens, they're in great danger. They could put their hand on a hot stove and not even realize it until they just singed themselves badly.  People can also break a bone and keep on running not because they have will power. Rather, their nociceptors didn't respond. Later on, however, they might just be sitting around and they’ll get up out of their sofa or chair at night and move themselves in a certain way where the bone moves a little bit where it was broken, and suddenly there's a shooting pain, and they have no explanation for it because when they ran, it didn't hurt them. There have been marathon runners who ran on broken legs. They just never realized it until after the race.

This network of nociceptors is essential for understanding how our experiences of pain can become habitual. Just as the brain can develop patterns around pleasurable experiences—like craving sugary foods—it can also form patterns around painful experiences, causing the sensation of pain to persist long after the injury has healed.

We can have an addiction to the feeling that we get from pain.

Photo by Mitchell Hollander on Unsplash

The concept of being addicted to pain might sound strange, but it’s grounded in how the nervous system works. When pain becomes a habitual experience, the neural pathways that carry pain signals are reinforced, much like how habits are formed through repetition. Over time, this can lead to a situation where, even after healing from an injury, individuals continue to experience pain because their brains are so accustomed to the sensation.

Some people can go for a walk and feel, “Oh, man, my ankle hurts, my balance I was struggling with, my hip hurts. Ah, maybe I should go to a surgeon and have them take a look at my knees and my hips.”

Well, fine. And, you know, a doctor might find something wrong with your hips and knees.

Years ago, when people had pain from their backs, right, they had a back problem. And the back problem means it hurt. And it hurt in a variety of ways. You know, bending down, picking something up, getting up out of a chair, a lot of things.

So with this problem, they began to go, “Well, what can I do about this except go to the doctor?”

And the doctor takes, let's say, an MRI and an x-ray. They look at the spine, and they go, “Well, you're fine. There's nothing wrong with your spine. We can't find anything. It looks perfect. You're lucky. The cartilage is intact. Nothing's slipped too much in your vertebra. Sorry, sir, but let's send you to physical therapy to do some exercises.”

Okay. But here's an interesting thing about nociceptors.

Now, that person, however, might have had a severe pain when they went to the doctor and got this information.

However, somebody else might get in a car accident, and it is terrible. And they got serious damage to their spine. Their back is hurting for a very good reason. Muscles are pulling hard to hold the bones together. And they get out of their car. The police have to help them out, get them into an ambulance, go off to the hospital.

And you'd wonder what the doctors would find.

Well, sometimes nothing.

They go to the hospital and they're in the same condition as the other person. This time, doctors can see damage of all kinds that's revealed in the x-rays and the MRIs and tests that might be run for them.

But actually, they're the kind of person to whom they become inured to their pain. They just don't pay attention to it much. And in fact, they heal very quickly and the pain goes away even sooner.

Discrepencies between these two examples led researchers to start thinking of pain in a different way.

The different experiences of pain can occur because the brain has formed what is often called an attractor well—a concept used to describe how certain patterns, including pain, can become deeply ingrained habits and difficult to break free from.

I get a lot of clients complaining that they just get out of bed in the morning and felt, “Oh, man, I must have been sleeping funny. My neck is killing me or my back is hurting me.” But maybe, their nociceptors are firing as they habitually do.

In an interview you find this out, that these kinds of things happen to this person throughout their life, and quite often. And you have to look at it as the nociceptors falling into what's called an attractor well.

An attractor well is a term, if you could think of a rock rolling along the ground, or a ball rolling around the ground. And somewhere in the ground, there's a well, a hole in the ground. And that ball heads for that well. And what's it going to do? It's going to roll into the well. It's not going to keep going over it. So it falls into the well. Now, how do you get the ball out of the well, you see?

That would be a question like, well, how do you have a solution for your pain? What do you need to learn? What do you need to feel or change so your nociceptors aren't screaming at you?

So, okay, you might find you've done something or other and you feel better. That means the ball would be out of the attractor well.

But whenever you roll that ball, it's going to probably go to the lowest point, and it's going to roll by itself easiest downhill a little bit. It doesn't have to be much, and it'll roll faster and faster and fall back into the well.

All of us have attractor wells.

Some of us have a shallow attractor well, and in fact, things don't stick, meaning, “Wow, that hurt. I remember when that really hurt. But actually, it's not bothering me anymore.”

Somebody else may have had a very mild strain, but it keeps hurting as a mild strain for 20 years, and some people even longer.

So that somebody whose attractor well is creating the habit of pulling the person's self, if you will, into pain.

All of this is part of what's called the neural matrix, meaning the matrix of varied possible ways that your brain organizes basic information about our body to us, like, “Ouch, that hurt. I shouldn't be touching a flame.” Or, “Ow, my knee hit something hard. Damn it.”

Or, “Oh, if I just avoid stepping a certain way, I stop hurting. Ah, I can walk now without a back pain. Great. What am I doing differently so I can learn from that and so I don't have to go to the doctor and I don't need any specialized treatment? Instead, I need to change the way in which I organize the pleasure and pain wells that are all part of what's called the attractor wells.”

In other words, some people, unconsciously, are attracted to pain. And it's a wicked problem.

Pain habits are devious. They're difficult.

To reorganize your painful sensory habits, it’s helpful to work with a professional one-on-one, but one approach to get started is to return to the exploratory movement of your youth.

The Power of Moving like a Child

For example, to move at all as a child, as an infant and a young child, you had to perform repeated movements again and again and again until you felt what you needed to do to, let's say, get your legs working and your trunk working so you could stand up, that kind of thing.

Now, you may think, what's the attractor well there? There are people who at the age of even 40, 45, look at the floor and go, “Oh, man, once I get on that floor, I don't know how I'm going to get up again without strain. It hurts so much. My back hurts. My knees hurt.” My whatever. Anything can hurt.

And that's a person for whom the floor becomes something like an attractor well. It pulls them in, and they go back to childhood. And it's like, “Uh-oh, I don't know what to do. I can't get up.”

Children cry over a lot of things. They fall down. They hurt themselves. They cry. However, I've never seen a kid, I've never heard of a child who cried because they learned to stand up.

Photo by Juan Encalada on Unsplash

That's a happy moment. That feels good, apparently.

So that's a great attractor well, therefore, for the child to have and carry throughout their life, including when they might want to lie on the floor at the age of 60 or 70 and get back up again.

So think about it. Do you feel that pain for you might be a habit?

Pain is a complex and necessary part of human experience, but it can also become a habit, ingrained in our neural pathways. Understanding how the brain processes pain and how we can retrain these pathways is essential for overcoming chronic pain so individuals can break free from any attractor wells of pain and live healthier, more comfortable lives.

The goal is not to eliminate pain entirely but to differentiate between protective pain and habitual pain that no longer serves a purpose.

I’d like to describe a case study of one of my patients and their encounters with the habit of pain.

I worked with a 60-year-old woman who had pains everywhere in their body. They had experiences of waking in the morning with extremely tight hands and itchy pains that they felt often in their skin. And stepping on the floor out of the bed for the first time in the morning was an unpleasant experience, meaning their feet didn't feel good and the beginnings of just bearing weight and having to walk those first steps were uncomfortable. She had pains everywhere. It was really not a matter of finding out which pains finally; there were just many of them.

Now of course, what I had to do was avoid having her hurt in relationship to my touching her and moving her.

I didn't trust her moving her own body at all because, in fact, every time she did, it hurt her in some way.

Lying on her back, I said, “Could you bend your knee on your right leg and could you stand your right foot on the table?”

And she could do it, but it was a great effort. Incredible stiffness in the breathing and in her face and chest. But she did it.

I thought, “No, no more.” So I moved her into that position. But I had to do it in a way that was felt by her nervous system as easy and hopefully, pleasurable.

I did this with many movements that you might call ordinary and fundamental movements of the human body that hurt her.

Finally, after only a couple of sessions, when she got done, she felt like weeping.

Now, at first, when I saw that in her face, I felt, “Uh-oh, did something go wrong here?”

But in fact, she was weeping from the relief that she felt and a sense that she could sense her body. She could just simply sense her body. Where she was in space, the pressure of sitting and her feet on the floor, the whole thing, she could sense herself without pain.

And that meant, for the first time, she could sense herself without having a sensation of herself related to pain.

Breaking that habit is really important. Now, she's an extreme case.

However, everyone might feel this way a little bit at times.

The secret ingredient to improving Body Intelligence and acquiring new skills

Something hurts. Let's just say it's a leg. A knee hurts. That's a common one, right? A knee hurts. And so the person can't do certain things well, right? It hurts to walk. It hurts to climb stairs, especially with the knees hurt. Downstairs, even worse.

And then we tend to go, “Well, it's a knee pain, maybe meaning there could be orthopedic damage at the knee.” That could be, but that's not true for a lot of people because I see clients whose doctor said, “No, their knees look fine on the x-rays and they're structurally okay.”

But they come to me with pain. They have to learn—and my job is to help them to learn—how they can move their pelvis differently, how they could stabilize on the other leg not stepping down to a stair. What are they doing in their back?

Let's say the left foot's going down. Well, then that means the right leg has to be exceptionally stable to allow them to land on the left leg without it hurting the knee. They have to control that with many muscles that they may not be aware of at first.

So it takes time. However, once they develop that greater awareness, they get the idea that they have control over their pain and they can develop their own pleasurable attractor wells. And so can you!

If you are looking for help relieving your pain symptoms, book a free 15 minute consultation with me, here.

How to Develop a Body of Qualities

If we can improve the quality of our movements, we can better preserve our bodies and continue to do the things we enjoy for a much longer time.

Too often we consider our exercise programs by focusing on measuring the quantities of our movements -- how far did we run, how fast, how many reps did we do -- instead of evaluating the quality of our movements -- how smoothly did our joints move, how lightly did our limbs feel, how agile was our experience.

It's easy to understand this emphasis on the quantitative: cultural factors can in effect push us toward quantitative movement. As we watched the latest Olympic games, we can reflect on millennia of measuring our movements in numbers in order to compare ourselves to each other -- how fast can we run, swim or bike, how far can we throw, how high can we jump. With advent the Industrial Age, researchers studied how the human body could move in mechanical harmony with the machines of the assembly lines.

Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times

Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times

Questions like how far or long a person should run were researched endlessly, but with what agility a person runs -- the quality of the running -- was not investigated. So more and more today, the emphasis on the measurable aspect of movement pervades our perceptions of our own movement and how we exercise.

We may be enthralled by the quality of athletes' movements -- the gracefulness of wide receivers snagging a catch along the sidelines, or the sleek, long-limbed guards of the NBA negotiating the length of court, or runners with beautifully smooth strides, or dancers, skaters and skiers who define elegant movement, but we rarely value the same grace of movement in our own exercise. We focus too much on the quantity of our movement (How far did I walk? Did I exercise enough?) and too little on the quality and gracefulness of our movement. This emphasis on quantity over quality can lead to our bodies breaking down and reduce our movement abilities altogether.

Imagine a car with one half-flat tire and a transmission not fully lubricated. It probably wouldn't keep moving for long and would deliver a bumpy ride until its breakdown. Similarly bumpy or ungraceful movement of our human bodies can lead to more damaging injuries and the inability to do loved activities or even day-to-day tasks.

If we can improve the quality of our movements, we can better preserve our bodies and continue to do the things we enjoy for a much longer time.

Consider some of these questions when evaluating your workout routine and determining how much emphasis you put on the quantitative vs. the qualitative.

  • Are measurable quantities -- repetitions, time, weight, speed -- more important to you than your quality of motion?

  • Can you assess your typical workout's success to include your gracefulness in performing the movement?

  • When you move, do you feel you move more like a machine or an animal? What image of a graceful animal could you bring to your workout?

Imagine the next time you exercise not counting or measuring in your mind, but instead freeing your ability to feel sensations. Use exercise as a way to increase your sixth sense, your proprioceptive sense, your ability to observe the inner workings and feelings in your body rather than the five senses that relate us to the outside world. Can you observe yourself running smoothly, how hard are you on your hips, legs, joints? How can you make your limbs move more lightly, your landing softer?

By aiming to only achieve goals that are easy to quantify, we can create excessive tension in the effort to achieve those goals, which ends up being counterproductive.

If you intend to exercise regularly all your life, the quality of your movement trumps quantity.

Oiling Your Hips the Easy Way

In this lesson, you’ll learn an enjoyable and exhilarating way to release stiffness in your hips, knees, and lower back. 

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1.    Take a moment to observe your contact with the floor while lying on your back. Calm down and focus your attention inside your body. Then, come to sitting with your knees bent so the bottoms of your feet stand on the floor. Take your left hand and reach around the outside of your left knee holding on to the outside edge of your foot, near your toes, thumb together with your other fingers. Lift your foot in the air and set it down a few times and feel what your pelvis and lower back need to do to help you. Feel free to use your right hand on the floor for support.

Each time you lift the foot up and set it down, have the knee cross underneath your arm so it flips to the outside of the arm and back to the inside several times. Do it slowly so you can feel what happens in your hip joint to create this turning of the knee under the arm. Rest on your back.

2.    Come to sitting and hold on to the foot arranged exactly the same way as before. Lift the foot up and set it down somewhere else on the floor. In fact, lift it up and set it down in as many different places on the floor as you can.

Cross it to the other side of your body and even find a couple of ways to set the foot behind you, over your head. Rest on your back again.

3.     Now, arrange yourself the same way with your right hand reaching around the outside of your right knee and holding on to the outside edge of your foot. As in step 1, explore how to flip the knee back and forth under the right elbow. Rest.

4.     Sit again with the right hand holding the outside edge of the right foot. As in step 2, explore all the places you can touch on the floor around your body with this foot. Rest on your back with your legs long.

5.    Come to sitting with both of your knees pointing to your right and both of your feet to the left. This means you will be side sitting with your left foot just in back of you on the floor and the right foot relating to the left knee.In fact, the left knee will probably be touching the bottom of the right foot.

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At the same time, hold onto the outside edge of your left foot with your left hand and the outside edge of your right foot with your right hand. Lift both feet from the floor and simultaneously flip both of your knees under both of your elbows. As the knees get straighter, come to side sitting in a mirror image of your starting position. Your knees are now to the left and your feet to the right, with your left foot touching your right thigh.

✓Awareness Advice:
As you move your feet from one side of your body to the other, in side sitting, you will experience yourself rolling on your pelvis from side to side and you will need to lift your feet high in the air for the knees to flip under the elbows. Make sure you don’t strain or hold your breath. Work to make it easy.

Take your feet and knees from side to side this way, several times. Make it easier each time. Rest on your back with your arms and legs long.

6.    Come to side sitting again. Choose your favorite side. Again, hold on with both hands to both outside edges of your feet. Once again, you’ll be changing to side sitting on the other side by flipping your knees under your arms, but this time try to do it by sliding your feet on the floor the entire time, as the knees change from side to side. Rest on your back.

✓Awareness Advice:
As you do this movement, you will discover that your feet slide out away from you and back again along the same line on the floor while the knees flip from side to side and your pelvis rolls from side to side.

When you get up to walk, notice if your legs and back have more freedom.

-Frank Wildman, PhD

This “Oiling Your Hips the Easy Way” exercise is excerpted from the book, The Busy Person’s Guide to Easier Movement, by Frank Wildman, PhD, which has common-sense lessons connecting the mind and body through movement to help people move with more ease, comfort and efficiency.

Tired of Sitting in a Chair? Try Walking on It with Your Pelvis

The purpose of “The Pelvic Walk” is to help you discover how to sit more lightly, move your pelvis more easily while sitting, and turn in your chair while performing activities in the workplace or home

1.    Sit comfortably in the middle of your chair without leaning back. Make sure your feet are flat on the floor. Feel yourself sitting as tall as possible. Separate your hands and rest the palm of each hand on your thighs.

✓Awareness Advice:
Make sure you don’t slump in your chair as you progress through the movements. To heighten your sensation of the movement, you can close your eyes, but remember to maintain a physical attitude of being upright and looking outward.

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2.     Slide the right side of your pelvis forward in the chair as if you wanted to reach straight ahead with your right knee. Then, slide your pelvis and leg back in the chair. You will be pivoting on your left buttock and sitz bone. Repeat this movement several times until it becomes lighter and more comfortable. Rest briefly and then return to your starting position.

✓Awareness Advice:
Be sure that the work performed in these movements is done with your torso. Keep your feet flat on the floor and do not push too hard with your legs.

3.    Repeat the same movement moving the left buttock and thigh forward and backward, pivoting on your right side. Which side glides more easily on your chair?

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4.    Explore each side again and observe how much your head and shoulders turn. Rest briefly and then return to your starting position.

5.    Keeping both feet on the floor, lift the right side of your pelvis off the chair and bring it back down. Do you tilt your whole body to the left, or can you do the movement shortening the right side of your waist and keeping your head approximately in the center?

✓Awareness Advice:
If at any point you cannot feel the movement clearly, or cannot perform it to your satisfaction, stop, close your eyes and imagine performing the movement. Then imagine what it would feel like if you were moving and picture the movement happening.

6.    Repeat the movement on the other side. Again, which side is easier? Rest.

7.    Return to your starting position in the middle of your chair and place your hands on your knees and walk your buttock forward. Then walk the other side forward until you reach the edge of your chair. Then walk your pelvis backward. As you walk your buttocks forward and backward in your chair, make the movement easier.

8.    Return to sliding each side of your pelvis forward and backward alternately while looking straight ahead. Work to make the movement easier as you slide one side after the other

 -Frank Wildman, PhD

This “Pelvic Walk” exercise is excerpted from the book, The Busy Person’s Guide to Easier Movement, by Frank Wildman, PhD, which has common-sense lessons connecting the mind and body through movement to help people move with more ease, comfort and efficiency.

The Power of Moving like a Child

As we age, a lifetime of injuries and poor movement habits can limit our capabilities, coordination, and mobility. The best way to break through these restrictive boundaries is to explore and discover new ways to move and babies offer a great example of how to do that.

Babies have to learn new ways to move every day, all day. Rolling, reaching, putting a foot in the mouth, twisting, turning, scooting — these are all ways that babies learn to observe their world, to eat, and to move.

All humans learn to walk, to sing, to dance by first learning new ways to move. Think of any skill you ever acquired in your entire lifetime, and you can appreciate the fact that you acquired that skill by altering and redesigning your habits.

So to change our inefficient and possibly painful movement habits, we need to expand our repertoire of movements like a child. The first step in this process is first sensing with precision how we move and how our whole body is involved in any movement. Rather than exercise, we need to think of sensercise — moving to increase our sensory capacity.

Often it’s very difficult for many people to sense parts of their body that don’t seem obviously connected to a movement they are performing. For example, if you lift a weight in a standing position, traditional ways of thinking would focus attention on the bicep muscles of the arm, which need to contract to lift something. However, in the real world of gravity, if you lift something in front of yourself using just your biceps — even a bottle of water — you would fall forwards as the weight shifts your center of gravity in front of yourself.

In order to become more efficient, effective, and stronger, you need to sense the other parts of your body that are involved in the act of lifting. Sense how the calf muscles push the front of the foot into the ground a small amount to help counterbalance the weight in front of us. Sense how the back and belly work to take the weight from your hands and arms through your shoulders and down your spine.

We need to sense how any movement requires an integration of all body parts — not just the obvious major muscle group that’s acting the hardest.

This kind of attention is how we improve our ability to sense and change difficult movement habits and painful postures. The awareness of how different parts of our body contribute to accomplishing an action can unleash the power of an integrated body and lessen strain on any one set of muscles.

Greater awareness can mean the difference between strain, excess tension, and even the feeling of weakness and smooth, confident, coordinated movement.

How do we move to gain awareness? If our mind is captured by the effort of achieving a goal or we count how many repetitions we’re performing, that’s where our attention is trapped. Instead, learning to move in order to feel how we move can restore our integrated, whole body movement we once had as children and is the secret to gaining greater awareness.

With greater awareness, we can begin to explore movement like a baby in non-linear ways with twists and turns, breaking free of the linear movements exercise equipment can limit us to.

This lesson is an example of the sort of exploratory movement I’m talking about; it asks you to learn how to trust yourself to be in touch with your body and brain through your sense of movement.

Before you start this lesson, read through it and look to the photos for guidance. This mental rehearsal will help you unleash your physical imagination.

  • GO SLOWLY — Take your time, you’ll learn more!

  • INSIST ON COMFORT — If it hurts, it’s not helping you. Never try to override pain if you feel it.

  • USE YOUR IMAGINATION — Allow the movement to become very clear and lucid in your mind, like a scene from a movie.

  • REST FREQUENTLY — These movements, while gentle and pleasurable, may cause slight strain because you are using parts of muscles you may not have used in a long time, or you may be using them in ways that are not familiar.

  • CHOOSE A COMFORTABLE SPACE — Make sure that you have space around you to move and that your clothes are loose enough to not restrain your movement.

Releasing the Hips into Pleasure

Photo RJ Muna

Photo RJ Muna

Intention: To find a comfortable and pleasurable way of releasing excess work in the stiff muscles of your inner legs and hips.

Starting Position: Lie on your back with your arms down at your sides and your legs long.

1. Feel the pressure under your heels and notice whether you feel more pressure from the floor touching your left heel compared to your right. Is the pressure on the outside of the heel more apparent on one side than the other? Also observe the pressure under your calf muscles. Does that pressure help tell you which of your two legs is pointed more to the ceiling and which is pointed more to the outside? Make sure your legs are relaxed. Don’t try to hold them in any particular way.

2. Very gently turn your right leg farther to the right and let your knee softly bend so that the outside edge of your right foot begins to slide on the floor up toward you. Then, slide the edge of your foot back down the same track it went up. Repeat the movement several times, very slowly, searching for the path of least resistance and effort as you slide the outside edge of your foot up and down on the floor.

Change Your Age Tip: As you slide your foot up and down, make sure your knee hangs open completely so that there’s no work happening in the inner muscles of your thigh. The more unnecessary muscular work you perform, the more difficult, heavy, and resistant the movement of the leg becomes. Every so often let your leg rest, with your knee bent and your foot pulled up, to make sure you are letting go of your inner thigh muscles.

After exploring the movement of sliding the edge of your right foot up and down the floor, rest and observe what has changed in the way your leg rests on the floor. Is your leg softer? Is it pointing in a different direction than earlier? Does your hip feel softer? You might even find that your lower back has released to the floor on the right side.

Photo RJ Muna

Photo RJ Muna

3. Perform the same exploration of this soft and lazy movement on the left side. Is it easier or harder than on the right? Notice whether your eyes or even your head want to move to the left when you move your left leg up and down. Rest. Feel the expansion in your pelvis and the release of excess work in your legs. Pause with your legs long and arms down at your sides.

4. Turn both of your legs open, with the knees hanging apart, and slide the outside edges of both of your feet up toward yourself at the same time. As you go up and down this way, slowly and gently, feel what your back and your pelvis are doing to assist the movement.

As the edges of your feet slide up, keep some distance between them.

Photo RJ Muna

Photo RJ Muna

5. Rest with your arms on the floor above your head and your elbows slightly bent out to the sides. Once again, slide the outside edges of both feet up toward yourself and leave them there with your knees hanging open. Now let your head easily roll from side to side while breathing deeply.

Rest in this position, with the knees suspended and the arms open, and feel the comfort of being like a baby sleeping on the floor. Let your ribs move freely as you breathe. If letting your knees hang open feels uncomfortable, place a pillow under the side of each knee to give yourself more support.

-Frank Wildman, PhD

Sensercise: The secret ingredient to improving Body Intelligence and acquiring New skills

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Why do some people get great benefit from resistance machines or weights, yoga, and rehabilitation and others derive little to no benefit or find exercise of any kind difficult and often painful? The answer lies in how we sense ourselves.

Exercise—whether for rehab, getting stronger, or having fun—should first require being able to sense your whole body when you work out or move at all.

As a movement scientist and therapist, I saw Sandra who had been hit on the passenger side of her car. The accident created an injury to her right leg and right hip. She presented to me with a limp and a barely mentioned irritation-into-pain in her right hand.

Sandra was aware of her limp and was afraid of it getting worse. The issues with her right hand, which she attributed to too many hours working on the computer, made it difficult for her to write or even type. She had been sent to physical therapy rehabilitation, but the exercises she received did little to benefit her and created more pain, so she stopped.

That she had a limp was obvious so I began to look for the invisible, a strategy I frequently employ.

I was interested in why she didn’t better use her other hip to balance the pelvis so the limp could diminish. Instead of giving her exercises for her injured right leg, I helped her to sense how she was using her left leg, her back, and her upper body (her arm swings, etc.). I helped her through a touch that would direct her to feel what she was actually doing with the rest of her body instead of being preoccupied with her right leg.

She was curious if I could help with her right hand and arm. Though her hand and arm were not injured in the crash, I began to understand the connection between the right leg and hip and the right hand and arm. In response to her accident, she reduced the motion of her head and neck, which in turn led to the stiffness and pain in her hand.

Sandra needed to feel the connections and integration of her body parts until she could sense the relationships as much as I could see and feel them. More than any exercise, she needed some Sensercise.

What happens after injury?

After any insult to the body, your brain will tend to withdraw sensation from the area that’s been damaged, in pain, rigidified, or collapsed.  This is called sensory motor amnesia.

Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

An insult to the body can be caused by anything from a car accident to an athletic injury. We also feel insults to the body when someone successfully insults us. A punch in the gut or a public humiliation tends to have virtually the same somatic effects: a sucked in diaphragm and a collapsed chest—a protection while waiting for the next insult. 

In response to injury, our brain will try to protect us from pain—by developing a limp to allow a wounded hip to heal, for example. Right after an injury, this is helpful, but as time goes on, it can cement clumsy and stiff movement habits with wide ranging consequences.

All insults diminish our sensory acuity, which then leads to less coordinated movement, decreased spatial awareness, insecure balance, and can lead directly to further insults like accidents and re-injuries. Diminished sensory acuity helps explain why some people benefit from rehabilitation, yoga, or strength training while others do not.

To regain our sensory motor memory, we need to improve our body awareness through Sensercise.

As Sandra began to sense how she was using her entire body, including her breathing and the use of her head and neck to orient herself in the environment, her limp began to improve. Only after several sessions of altering her movement habits did I begin to work directly with the right leg or hip. After about a month, Sandra began to walk normally. She was startled to find that her right hand and arm pain disappeared. How could this be?

I gave her some Sensercise movement strategies. I asked her to intentionally reproduce the limp that she previously had and also to tighten her neck and reduce head motion as she had the habit of doing after her car accident. Her intentional limp created pains in her back and hip and her reduced head and neck motion ended up creating the stiffness and pain that she felt in her hand and arm. By exploring how she could create the pain, she discovered how she could not only diminish pain but also improve her movements because she sensed the integration of her body.

Photo by Picsea on Unsplash

Photo by Picsea on Unsplash

Rebuilding our sensory maps

To improve body awareness and help our brain to protect ourselves, we have to rebuild a sensory map of our body in the same way we originally built a sensory map of our body from the day we were born until somewhere in the beginning of adolescence.

How do we build and rebuild our sensory maps as needed? First of all, though something we call exploratory movement. A baby learns to explore all the time. Children explore not only with themselves and their own movements but also how their movements relate to playmates as well as adults. This involves continuously attending to kinesthetic information in order to know what movements to perform and how to relate to other people.

Here’s an example of how you can examine, sense, explore, and change your sensory map. Suppose you wanted to go from sitting to standing more easily. How would you learn to do it?

A typical exercise approach might say build stronger, larger thigh muscles. And then perform a regimented manner of moving up and down from a chair to standing then sitting. This would be called performatory movements. In other words, take the internal understanding of yourself for granted and exercise your habits accordingly.

  • A more exploratory approach would be to first sense in a sitting position, without back support, if you are sitting with equal weight on each buttock and sitting bone? Try standing with your feet well in front of your knees. See if you can do it. This involves a lot of momentum as well as strength as you throw yourself forward. How about exploring the same movement with your feet closer to yourself than your knees. As you rock forwards on your sitting bones, do you find it easier to stand? What about if you explored the best position for your feet? Maybe one foot could be a little closer than the other. Can you discover in this way the best place for your feet?

  • Then as you begin to stand, do you orient your face down? Why? Since you want to stand up, what if you looked forwards and reached your mouth and head in the direction you want to move? Does that make it easier? You could even reach your arms out in front of you as you reach your face forward and rock up to your feet.

  • How about sitting back down? Could you reverse the act of standing in order to sit down? This means if someone took a series of photos of you moving from sitting to standing, you couldn’t tell if they were photographing you from standing to sitting because the movement is completely reversible. Standing up and sitting down would have the same shape.

  • You could further explore how wide you want your legs apart, if you want your feet pointing forwards or out to the side.

  • Additionally, do you have a habit of using your arms to stand up? If you eliminate pushing off the armrests, you’ll naturally develop strength in your legs, coordinated with your balance.

  • Finally, do you breathe in or out when you come to standing? Perhaps a better question, do you breathe? Or do you clench your throat and tighten your diaphragm as if you were lifting a heavy object? This is called the Valsalva maneuver. If we become aware of and eliminate those unnecessary Valsalva contractions, we can breathe and move more easily.

This exploratory approach to movement and rehabilitation—Sensercise—is the way to recover after an insult to the body as well as the way to achieve greater coordination and mobility in general. With Sencercise, you can better experience your body and your life—and to enjoy any activity.

-Frank Wildman, PhD

How To Change Your Age By Moving Like A Child Again

Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash

Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash

As we age, we change how we move. Our mobility is the strongest indicator of our real age. A recent study correlated one’s ability to sit and rise from the floor to mortality so it is important to maintain our mobility and ease of movement.

As infants and children, we learned to move — to reach, crawl, walk, jump, climb — in an exploratory fashion, twisting around as we interact with our environment. We spot our parents or a toy we want and need to figure out how to get to them. We rock on our bottoms, shift this way or that and even fall backward as we learn how to navigate the space around us. Once we learn how to move, most of us stop the exploratory learning that got us moving and lock ourselves into habits of movement.

As we age and start to encounter some limitations on our mobility, it is crucial to return to moving like a child and learning in this exploratory, nonlinear fashion. We don’t need to avoid linear movement like the ones we often perform at the gym — in fact, many common daily activities are linear movements — but in order to expand the range and repertoire of our movements and feel real pleasure and sensuality in our movements, it is extremely valuable to practice nonlinear and exploratory movements.

My four decades as a movement specialist, studying biology, dance, psychology, and movement sciences, as well as teaching thousands of students around the world, have taught me how to observe my clients’ bodies to understand their movement habits and abilities — their strengths and weaknesses, their pains and pleasures.

Pain, stiffness, fatigue — these are issues that affect us all as we age. But if we reframe how we look at pain, stiffness and fatigue, we can come to understand them as the result of ineffective movement habits.

In this column, I hope to help you move with greater ease, reduce some pain, and, most importantly over time, help you prevent the pains of the future.

Habits that make us look old and tips to avoid them

  • Do you have difficulty climbing up and down stairs?

I observe many students who might lean heavily on a banister or uncomfortably shift their weight from leg to leg. To me, this is a clue that stairs can be a challenge for these individuals.

Tackling the stairs is an unavoidable part of many of our lives. Experiencing pain in our hips and knees can limit us by restricting our activities to avoid a flight of stairs or by spoiling our mood when we have no choice but to negotiate some stairs.

As we age, both our hips and knees tend to stay slightly bent, limiting the length of our stride. This can, of course, interfere with our ability to climb up and down stairs. We must be able to extend our hip backward and straighten our knees if we are to have the full use of the upright gait that has evolved in humans.

So, could you bend your knees more than you are used to and then straighten them? Be sure to look out at the horizon as you bend and straighten your knees slowly several times. Now, do it quickly, as if you were about to jump. If your heels leave the floor when you come up, that’s good. Do the same movement, pushing harder through one leg and then the other, until you push more quickly and bend more quickly through either leg.

Practicing bending and extending your knees as if you were going to jump will help you climb your stairs and increase the length of your stride.

Go for a walk up the stairs and see for yourself. When walking, notice if there is more of a youthful bounce in your step.

  • Do you find yourself pushing off with your hands to get out of a chair?

Pushing off with your hands to get out of a chair instead of using your leg muscles is an example of a lack of ease in moving from one position to another, such as going from sitting to standing and vice versa.

Moving from sitting to standing is only part of a full range of movement that allows you to go from squatting to standing and jumping.

Sit in the middle of your chair and push your pelvis forward and back on your chair without using your hands. Then, before you stand up, think that you’re going to jump. Don’t actually jump — just feel the act of standing from a chair on the way to jumping. It should be a feeling of lightening the load.

Changing basic habits of posture, movement, balance, and coordination can transform our sense of aging. And anyone can do it with the pleasure they enjoyed as a child.

-Frank Wildman, PhD

From Injury Prevention to High-Level Performance

Most people believe that the road to athletic success comes from working harder. Although there are benefits that come with keeping a disciplined regimen, the toll of stress injuries that accumulates throughout an athlete's life can be nearly incapacitating.   A common routine of athletes is to work hard to get in shape, get an injury, then work in pain or not at all, recover and repeat.

I would like to suggest a different model.  I think it is critically important to work smarter rather than harder.   The best way to improve performance is by moving in ways that prevent injury and the best way to prevent injury is to perform with greater agility.

How can we do that? By learning to move like a child again with non-linear movement.

Traditionally, athletes and active individuals have performed warm-up and flexibility exercises in a rather boring, mechanically linear manner. We have treated our bodies as if we were stick figures drawn on a chart, stretching first our hip flexors, then our hamstrings, moving one side of the joint in one isolated part of the body and then the antagonists muscle group on the other side of the joint.  Most recommended flexibility routines involve a significant number of linear stretches, which are eventually supposed to affect all of the joints and muscle groups in the body.

But how many of us, against our better judgment, have rushed through such routines simply because they are boring? The very attitude of treating ourselves like trivial machines contributes to a body image that perpetuates diminished flexibility and consequently, a dangerous propensity towards injury.

A better approach involves learning to move like a child again. Moving like a child means a complete break with linear exercise.  This means using all of your joints at once in every flexibility and warm-up routine. As children, we learned to develop bodily movements more rapidly than at any other point in our lives. 

© Anton Novozhilov - Dreamstime.com

© Anton Novozhilov - Dreamstime.com

We would never think of stretching our babies to increase flexibility, nor would we think of tying weights on their limbs to improve strength.  Instead, the way a baby moves on its own is sufficient to develop very complex movements like tumbling, rolling, falling and recovering, etc.  Imagine performing movements similar to the way a child moves as it develops control and coordination of its body.  Now imagine performing those movements with the understanding of an adult.

Photo by RJ Muna

Photo by RJ Muna

To replace typical stretching, warm-up, and rehabilitation exercises, I encourage "neuro-muscular tune-ups," movement lessons that are intriguing and stimulating, require very little effort and most importantly, teach athletes how to pay attention to themselves with the same high level of awareness required while engaging in a sport or activity.

The awareness that a baby develops simultaneously with its movements is part of what makes us unique in the animal kingdom.  While other animals know instinctively how to walk and run, humans must learn.  Yet amazingly, this attribute of bodily awareness is rarely used, except at a very crude level of operation when we are told to twist a little more to the left or right.  Ironically, athletes and dancers are most aware of their bodies through feelings of resistance, effort and finally, injury.  If most of us as babies underwent this experience while developing motor control- resistance, effort, injury, it is doubtful we would ever want to learn to walk!

The key to injury prevention and improved performance is to learn how to move without resistance, how to become more nimble, agile and deft, and just as importantly, how to develop awareness. Awareness of how we move should be the goal of physical education. 

-Frank Wildman, PhD

Freeing Your Middle Back, sample lesson

This lesson will help you to integrate your upper and lower back, as well as your shoulders and neck, into a fuller, more efficient posture. This lesson could also be of benefit to people who experience stiffness or pain in their lower back.

1.     Sit comfortably tall in your chair with your feet flat on the floor. Place your right hand on your left shoulder and allow your elbow to hang against your chest. Take your left arm across your chest underneath your right arm, and with your left hand, hold on to your right shoulder. Your right elbow should be resting on top of your left arm. You are now giving yourself a big hug.

Freeing_your_back1a.jpg

2.     Keeping your hands on your shoulders, lift your elbows straight up and point them forward, then bring them back down to rest against your chest. Repeat this movement several times, each time allowing your elbows to go higher until you can point at the ceiling, then down to the floor. Look up and down as your elbows are pointing and feel the movement in your upper and middle back, as well as your lower back. Rest in the middle of your chair with your arms in your lap.

3.     Repeat steps 1 and 2 with your arms crossed the opposite way. Place your left hand on your right shoulder. Reach with your right hand underneath your left arm and hold on to your left shoulder. Allow your elbows to rest against your chest. As you point your elbows up and down, from ceiling to floor, be sure to let your head follow. Feel how your pelvis can assist you. Rest your hands on your lap or desk and observe any changes in your posture.

Freeing_your_back1b.jpg

4.     Cross your arms again as you did in step 1. Raise your elbows to point directly in front of you. Now turn your elbows to your left as if pointing at something on your left side. Look where you are pointing and move your elbows from the center to the left several times. What does your pelvis want to do? Let the right side of your pelvis slide forward and backward in your chair to assist you as you go back and forth. Rest in the middle and re-establish your hands resting on your shoulders.

5.     Again, lift your elbows to point in front of you and point them to the right and back again several times. Be sure and allow your head to turn with your arms and let the left side of your pelvis slide on the chair. Rest completely, leaning back in your chair.

Freeing_your_back2.jpg

6.     Once again, sit in the middle of your chair and cross your arms as in step 3, with the left hand going to the right shoulder first and the right arm underneath the left shoulder. Point your arms forward and begin to turn them right and left several times, while feeling your pelvis pivoting in your chair. Rest your elbows against your chest and re-establish your hands on your shoulders.

7.     Lift your elbows again. Keep your nose pointing straight forward and turn your elbows left and right several times without moving your head. Pause. Point your crossed elbows from side to side again and let your head follow. Do you find yourself able to point farther than earlier? Rest completely.

Freeing_your_back3.jpg

✓Awareness Advice:
Be sure you are relaxing your jaw and face. Some people have been caught smiling while doing these movements. It’s possible. Observe where you prefer to inhale and exhale.

8.     Cross your arms again as in step 1. Let your elbows hang down and slowly raise them as you turn to the left so that you find yourself pointing up to your left side. Then bring your elbows down to your chest as you return to the center. Raise them up to the right as you turn to the right. Your elbows will be making a large arc reaching up at the sides and down at the middle. Rest in the middle with your hands on your lap or desk.

-Frank Wildman, PhD

 This “Freeing Your Middle Back” exercise is excerpted from the book, The Busy Person’s Guide to Easier Movement, by Frank Wildman, PhD, which has common-sense lessons connecting the mind and body through movement to help people move with more ease, comfort and efficiency.

What is a Sensory-Motor Concept and Why is it Important to Know?

Understanding sensory-motor concepts is the crucial element to moving well as we age or regain lost skills after an injury, trauma, or cerebral accident.  This understanding is not cognitive in the ordinary sense.  It requires sensing how we perform an action so that we can improve our motor skills with a deeper felt sense.  It’s called a sensory-motor concept because if we have not developed a sufficient felt sense of our own movements, we will have a much more difficult time coordinating any and all of our movements.  For example, if you don’t feel the difference between left and right, no amount of strengthening or stretching will help you.

Our fitness-crazed culture might suggest exercise—weight lifting or endurance exercises to strengthen muscles or stretching for our muscles and tendons—as the solution to our movement problems however they came to be, but without involving our brain in the way we organize our movements, all of the exercise in the world won’t restore our movement abilities in a lasting way.

The good news is that there are three primary sensory-motor concepts that we all mastered as babies.  These sensory-motor concepts determine how we organize all of our actions as well as how we orient ourselves in the environment.  The coordination that results from highly developed sensory-motor concepts is a matter of what occurs in your brain when you explore movement. 

The first and most critical sensory-motor concept is to fully feel and move in what’s called anterior-posterior directions, i.e. front and back.  Without this concept, reaching for something in front of you and bringing it back, to let’s say your mouth, could not occur.  Babies first learn the movement of front to back as they start to understand and connect with their environment.  For example, they see some food or a toy in front of them and bring it back to their mouth.  Discovering how to put things in the mouth is critical for survival, but also, for a baby, it means to understand something through the senses and to develop the movement skills involved to bring the world to the mouth so it could be understood.  Eventually as movements become more expansive, the baby brings the mouth to the world.

The second great sensory-motor concept is called vertically, i.e. moving up and down.  To move all your weight away from the ground to standing up is a complex activity.  It’s not only difficult, but also impossible to do without a developed sensory-motor concept of orienting ourselves vertically.  We can see babies learning this concept as they explore many different ways to bring themselves to standing or sitting.

The last of the three major sensory-motor concepts is laterality.  Laterality includes knowing left from right and being able to turn easily or rotate one’s body.  Infants learn this concept of laterality as they master how to turn, sidestep, or reach left or right.

Understanding these sensory-motor concepts is essential for survival.  With out the concept of front and back, we couldn’t feed ourselves.  Mastering the concepts of verticality and laterality is crucial in being able to flee danger or to seek pleasure or satisfaction.

Beyond survival, feeling and understanding these sensory-motor concepts can result in tremendously complex movements.  Imagine a high diver: You can’t jump off a high board or platform, do a triple somersault, half turn and hit the water perfectly without a felt understanding of your sensory-motor concepts.  If you make a mistake and hit the water at speed, you could break your neck.  You have to know when you jump off a board or platform where left and right is, where up and down is, and where front and back is.

Another example illustrating how this felt understanding of sensory-motor concepts works is getting up from a chair.  A person without a developed felt sense of verticality may awkwardly try to bring their head and body higher by pushing down on the armrests with their arms.  If you have a better feel for the concept of verticality, you may organize yourself to lean your torso forward to shift your weight over your legs and then push through your legs to raise your body up.  This would indicate a better understanding of how your body relates to gravity and how you might need to reorganize to move with less effort and greater clarity.

As we age or after an injury or trauma, we lose these sensory-motor concepts in the reverse order that we learned them as babies: First our lateral movement becomes more difficult or limited, then our ability to get up and down becomes compromised, and finally our movement options shrink to just dealing with what is in front of us.

With loss of laterality, you may experience an uneven gait, balance disorders, and the inability to play sports you once enjoyed like tennis.  You can live a good life but you might feel stiff, which no amount of stretching will improve.  Relearning the motor concept of laterality can melt this stiffness. 

If damage is so severe that the second sensory-motor concept of verticality is compromised, then the person would have to be in a care situation because getting up and down and walking towards objects would be difficult. 

If the damage were even worse so that the first sensory-motor concept of anterior-posterior disappeared, then the person would need to be in a total care situation, since without this sensory-motor concept, they would be unable to even feed themselves.

Happily we can reverse the loss of these sensory-motor concepts by relearning how to feel them.  Physical education, various forms of physical therapies, training, coaching, practicing (be it dance or sport of any kind) should be approached from a point of view that strongly involves sensory-motor skill development.  This is so completely different from our current fitness craze as to make the concept of conditioning, sculpting six-pack abs, and working out to your max actually artificial and unnatural.

Teenagers and adults need to re-learn sensory-motor concepts in the same style that we all originally learned as children.

My work with people of all ages and abilities focuses on developing coordination, offering the possibility of regaining forgotten movement skills and expanding our movement repertoires and improving our skills.  Both students in my programs as well as in my private practice have found themselves able to perform activities they gave up because they didn’t feel successful or found the activity hurt too much.  Many of them not only enjoy dancing again, playing tennis or golf again, but they also find themselves able to perform new skills that emerge out of a superior sensory-motor understanding.

This is the first part of series of articles on sensory-motor concepts.  More to follow.

-Frank Wildman, PhD

Learning How to Fall Begins in Your Head

The fear of falling is one of the most basic anxieties anyone can experience.

For some people, if they walk on a trail by the edge of a cliff, they cannot look down from a height without feeling a little dizzy. Sometimes people even freeze in their movement because the fear of another step near the edge will lead to a fall. This fear can even follow us while we sleep, as you know if you’ve ever dreamt of flying and woken up with a start at the moment of sudden descent or landing.

This fear of falling can carry over into our day-to-day lives, when we walk on uneven pavement, or even think about having to walk in the dark.

Most people try to prevent themselves from falling by stiffening their hips and the muscles of their back in such a way as to pull themselves away from the ground. But let me suggest another approach to organizing your body for a fall in a way that won’t hurt.

Instead of crashing to the ground, imagine that in the moment of descent, you knew that you could trust your body to land safely and softly—without bruises or broken bones.

If you feel like you are going to fall, the safest thing is to learn how to do so. If you stiffen the muscles of your back and hips, you are more likely to hit the ground harder.

The Importance of Making Friends with the Ground

It would be helpful to anyone who feels afraid of falling to practice getting down to the floor and up again as a mind-body exercise. One of the best strategies would be to learn over time to move to the ground as easily and efficiently as possible so you have control of your landing.

By practicing going down to the ground, you will eventually be able to move faster.

In learning how to fall, you’ll eventually learn to move as fast as gravity.

The first step to master these new physical concepts is a simple thought experiment that asks you to imagine (rather than perform) movement.

Without actually moving, imagine going down and up from the floor. The next time you imagine going down, go all the way down to lying on your back. Not only will this imagined movement melt your old habits, but it will also enable you to create new movements by expanding your embodied imagination and adding new neurons to your brain.

 

Next bring your imagination to the physical movement: move from standing to the floor and back to standing as you saw yourself doing it in your mind. If you feel at all insecure, make sure you are near a wall or a piece of furniture that you can hold onto if you need. Please be careful.

You might even find that it’s good exercise to go down to the floor and onto your back, then return to standing—something you could practice every day. It helps you retain flexibility and fitness. You can do it as many times as you like. Feel free to invent your own variations, as long as how you do them is clear to you.

Try going at various speeds so that you can go up and down from the floor without bumping. Feel how smooth the movement can be and how light you can make your return to standing.

Within a week or two, you’ll find going down to the floor and up easier and you’ll have less fear of the ground.

 

Once you’ve mastered each step, you can then speed it up as quickly as you want.  Then, starting on the floor and getting up, you’ll learn to reverse the trajectory perfectly when going back down to the floor.  This principle of reversibility in movement will help you control your body if you go at high speed.

Photos by RJ Muna

Imagine if photographs were taken of you getting down to the floor and returning or coming up from the floor to standing and then returning to the floor. A controlled movement would be completely reversible. A viewer would not be able to distinguish from any given picture which direction you are going because your movement, if controlled, would be completely reversible.  

Photos by RJ Muna

This up and down movement is very stimulating to the inner ear, and sometimes we need to take time to adjust to that. When you increase your speed, you might find yourself getting dizzy. If so, simply rest sitting in the chair for a while. Eventually the exercise will strengthen your vestibular system and improve your balance. You’ll find yourself becoming less concerned about approaching and leaving the floor.

Photos by RJ Muna

And your future, falling self, will thank you. If you find yourself in sudden descent (tripping over a tree root, or a uneven sidewalk), you’ll have the body/muscle memory that will help you avoid panic and move through your fall.

By learning how to fall in this way, you can overcome basic anxieties and lessen the chance of injury with your new smooth landing.

-Frank Wildman, PhD