Muscle tension in the neck will limit your ability to rotate both your neck and shoulders. In this video, you will explore that relationship. You will begin to feel the connection between neck position, muscle tension, and shoulder mobility. You will also practice movement with less muscle...

Explore this movement series to retrain your spine to twist, your chest to open, your neck to rotate, and your hips to expand. In normal daily activities, we turn our head and chest on a fixed lower body. In this movement improvement session, you will turn in the opposite manner twisting your...

Perform a series of reaching exercises to expand your cone of balance. This series will help you identify which directions you are most vulnerable to balance loss and help you to improve. You will learn to use the mobility in your spine that you gained in the "flexible  Spine" series to...

Your balance system is comprised of 3 main sensory inputs, vision, inner ear, and joint receptors. In this series of progressively challenging balance exercises, you will test each of the systems and learn which of them might be deficient and contributing to balance loss. 

You will also test...

This video is the final of the three-part series on making your spine more flexible. In this video, you will explore how your spine twists and work on allowing it to move with greater ease and comfort. This movement improvement session starts with smaller, less taxing movements and then gets...

Spinal side bending mobility is often overlooked, but it is a key component to many daily activities such as walking or standing on one leg and even breathing. In this video, you will perform a series of movements that allow you to explore your ability to side bend and discover where restrictions...

 'You are on as young as your spine is flexible" - Joseph Pilates

The spine can move in 3 planes of motion.  In the first of this three-part series, you will explore moving your spine into flexion and extension or bending forward in backward. This gentle but challenging movement...

Gravity is constantly pushing down on your body. You can either absorb those downward forces, compressing your joints, and straining your tissues, or you can resist that downward force with longer, stronger legs. In this movement improvement session, you will learn how to lengthen your legs...

Undo all of those hours of sitting with this movement improvement session. If you feel like you are a little rounded in the upper back, or your shoulders sit a little forward, or your head hangs in front of your shoulders, then you need to try this video. You will explore how easily your...

As a practicing physical therapist for over 20 years, I can’t look at someone and not notice their posture. It would be like trying to look at these words and not read them. I will involuntarily begin to analyze how they carry themselves and consider the reasons their body has adopted that...

If I was only allowed to do one movement improvement routine for the rest of my life it would be this one. Shoulder circles are a great way to free up the entire spine, from neck to mid-back to low-back. They also create freedom in the hips and shoulders. In this session you will learn to find...

Getting your arms over your head is a very complex coordination of actions between the arm, the shoulder blade, and the ribs and mid-back. People often subconsciously hold down their shoulder blades or stiffen their torsos restricting arm movement. This makes raising the arms strenuous and can...

We don't live life laying down, so it is important to practice core control skills in a standing position. In this session, we will take the skill that you have developed in using your core from laying, to standing against the wall, to standing with support, to freestanding. By the end of this...

You can’t pick up any health or fitness magazine these days without seeing an article about “strengthening your core”. Usually flanked by pictures of well-muscled models with washboard abs doing planks or sit-ups. The idea of the core has become so misappropriated in the media...

Healthy movement begins at your center. The ability to use your core muscles to drive movement in the limbs will make you stronger and allow you to move more easily and with less pain. Being strong is important, but if you are not able to coordinate that strength to harmoniously engage with the...

Discover the strength that is already inside of you. In this session, you will learn how to unlock your pelvis so it can move freely. This will enable you to position yourself in more efficient positions with standing, walking, and climbing stairs.

Going downstairs is a significantly different activity than going up. Descending stairs requires different muscle coordination, produces strain in different areas, and requires your muscles to work in a different way as compared to ascending. Last week we broke down the process for going...

Marathon runners are less likely to have knee arthritis than the general population. That was the conclusion of a 2018 study in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. Of the 675 distance runners studied, each with a minimum of 5 marathons completed, and a mean age of 48, arthritis was reported by...

Climbing stairs is a complex movement that requires a number of different skills to all come together seamlessly. Inability in even one piece of the movement can cause compensations leading to joint breakdown and pain. 

In this video, I break down the act of climbing stairs into its key...

All month long we have been discussing movement patterns, why we have them, why they are important, how they can lead to pain, and the process we go through when re-learning movement. Today I will discuss the 4 principles of teaching yourself how to move differently. Training yourself to move in...

In this session, I demonstrate how to create new movement patterns by putting unlikely movements together. When you confuse your brain with unlikely combinations of movements it has no hose but to let o of old ways of moving that have caused pain and stress. Thankfully it worked for me. 

Nearly every movement you make is driven by an underlying movement pattern that you have developed over the course of your lifetime. These patterns develop to make movements easier to coordinate and protect you from perceived vulnerabilities. From time to time these patterns can cause certain...

In our last session, we explored standing taller by changing the position of your spine. Today we will build on that by examining how you use your hips when you are standing. Most people who lose height from the hips have no idea that it is happening.

In this session, we will perform a diagnostic...

In my last post, I discussed the utility of movement patterns and how they help us navigate our lives. Today we’re going to talk about the dark side of movement patterns… when they lead to pain. I say that in jest because really there are no such things as good or bad ways to move....