Human Movement

Greetings from the road. I’m still on the first leg of my JAG Fitness West Coast Tour 2010.  In Santa Monica today, I attended a very inspiring workshop taught by Glenn Black. The workshop was called Human Movement and it went over some of the basics of how our joints should optimally move.

For example, I discovered that maintaining proper spinal alignment while raising the arms overhead or while deep squatting is a lot harder than it would seem. And sitting with the shins stacked one on top of the other requires a great deal of external rotation in the hip (more than I have).

Glenn’s Human Movement workshop exposes some of the movement shortcuts we take and forces us to deal with our limitations by being impeccable with our movement.

Laying down, sitting, standing and walking, says Glenn, are our basic movements and most people do all of them incorrectly.  Poor posture will deform your body over time and lead to imbalances which could hinder performance and eventually lead to pain.

The workshop was mainly focused on retraining our bodies to be properly aligned. 

I said the workshop was inspirational; and it was.  It made me want to teach this stuff to my students.  You can bet that this work will start to find it’s way into my classes and private sessions. 

I would think doing this work and including some self-care techniques that loosen tight muscles and reduce painful restrictions, would be very popular with an aging population who may be discovering that they aren’t as comfortable in their bodies as they once were.  People who just want to get more limber, or to move better, will love this class.

Human Movement isn’t a workout per se.  What I mean is that it isn’t about losing weight or gaining muscle. It is more about just simply moving your body like a human. I’ll be teaching you what joint movements are inherent, and if you don’t have those movements, we can work to get them back.  So, it’s more about finding ease and freedom.  But, that said, it can be awfully strenuous and challenging to hold your arms up in the proper position without letting your torso become pulled out of alignment. 

So, let me know (by leaving a comment) if you think this Human Movement class is something that you’d be interested in. If I get enough people interested, I’ll start one up.