Whole-Body Alignment Program

106 Pages·2011·103.241 MB·English

by  Katy Bowman

Katy Bowman’s Whole Body Alignment
Whole-Body
Alignment
Program

RESTORATIVE EXERCISE INSTITUTE

Developed and Written
by Katy Bowman, M.S.

Manual Version July 2011
Whole Body Alignment
Copyright C 2011 by Katy Bowman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles or reviews.
Restorative Exercise Inc.
5550 Telegraph Road, Suite A
Ventura, CA 93001
www.restorativeexercise.com
Send feedback to [email protected]
Produced in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.
ISBN
Editing by Michael Curran
Cover design by Carol Gravelle
Artwork designed by Katy Bowman and Michael Curran and Shelah Wilgus
Photos by Cecilia Ortiz or Breena Maggio
all unless otherwise notated
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
The History of Biomechanics, Movement and Exercise 5
Movement is Medicine 9
The Science of Anatomy 16
The Paradigm Shift:
Out With Exercise, In With Natural Movement 20
Biomechanics of Muscle and the Cardiovascular System 24
Cardiovascular Health and Geometry 33
The 25-Point Alignment Program 39
The First 50 Exercises 46
Trunk, Core, Pelvic Floor Physics 69
Shoulder Girdle 78
Foot, Lower Leg, & Gait Basics 86
BoSU Protocol 93
How to Design Your Program 100
Becoming a Restorative Exercise SpecialistTM 104
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Whole Body Alignment

The History of
Biomechanics,
Movement, and
Exercise
Bio: Life; living organism
Mechanics: Classical mechanics is a branch of physics concerned with
mathematically describing the forces that create motion of bodies and the effect of these
motions on their environment.
Biomechanics began at the beginning -- not the beginning of the century, not the
start of the Christian Era, nor did it bloom from the Ancient Olympics. The movement
forces began with life, as the very definition of “life” includes mechanical concepts of
Work (movement):
The property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and
inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction,
and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the
organism.
The written history of biomechanics is generally recognized to begin with a series of
Aristotle’s essays De Motu Animalium (Movement of Animals), in which he uses the not-
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Whole Body Alignment
yet-termed mechanical concept of ground action force as a starting point to deliberate
where movement comes from. The body? The spirit? These are good questions.
Biomechanics as a United States university program began just after the First World
War. The first-time widespread use of explosives in battle resulted in unprecedented
numbers of amputees. These weren’t old men who could live out the rest of their lives
with a peg for a leg. These men needed to start and support families, take over family
businesses, and fully participate in the country they had just defended. The use of
heavy explosives created a situation in which military technology had exceeded medical
technology. Medicine was obliged to deal with the situation, and had to adapt.
Designing a prosthetic wasn’t a medical emergency nor a chemistry problem.
Doctors had to turn to mechanical engineers in the University system for
help. Engineers took a look at the arm or leg from a mechanical perspective and
attempted to create a replacement with as much of the same functionality of the original
limb as possible. At this point, biomechanics became a university study option for
mechanical engineers. In modern science where they were previously separated, this
was the first marriage between the biological and physical sciences, and required a
mastery of anatomy, physiology, physics, and mathematics.
Exercise. As the effects of the Industrial Revolution set in, Americans became more
and more sedentary, which gave rise to the concept of “exercise,” where to compensate
for the decrease in regular, daily movement, we would intensely move the whole body in
short bursts. Fifty years later, biological movements like walking, squatting to birth or
defecate, flexing, extending, and rotating all the joints on a regular basis were
decreased to the point that new generations had no handed-down knowledge of how
people moved before the population had stopped moving (if you watch Disney’s WALL-
E, you can get a nice visual of this phenomenon).
Around the 60s and 70s, programs of kinesiology (technically, the science of human
movement) began appearing in university curriculum, but these programs were
incorrectly named. The departments of kinesiology should have been called sport
science, as the programs offered contained only those movements used in modern
athletic and sport-related activities -- very different from the science of movements
humans have been doing for the last 200,000 years. Biomechanical programs, following
the trend of kinesiology, have since focused the bulk of their curriculum and funding to
study “exercise” instead of movement, and athletics (golf, golf, golf!) instead of health.
Both science and research have shown that fitness does not equal health, not in the
heart and not in the joints. This is confusing to many. If the cause of most ailments
affecting affluent populations -- ailments like osteoarthritis, diabetes, osteoporosis -- is
lack of movement, shouldn’t exercise be the solution? The answer is, no.
Exercise is not the flip side of the sedentary coin -- movement is. While the
difference may seem like an argument in semantics, these two habits are quite different.
Movement, specific to the requirements of biological survival, not only keeps us fit in the
terms set by pop magazine culture, but also matches the mechanical requirements of
human tissues. These are movements like walking long distances, squatting to
bathroom and birth, hauling your weight up and over, or lowering full body weight.
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Natural motion respects tissues threshold for loads, requirements for vibration, and
provides other mechanical necessities like gravity assisted functions of the internal
physiology. Doing natural, reflex-driven movements from birth not only utilize the large
muscle groupings we commonly thing of at the gym, but the other 500 muscles as well,
including the muscles between the ribs that open and close to inflate the lungs, the
intrinsic muscles of the feet that create the arch shape of the foot, or the constant force-
generating sheets that make the pelvic floor.
Exercise, while having much of what makes movement good, carries with it
elements that make it far less superior, such as small quantities, high intensities, and
large unnatural and repetitive forces in the joints. It is these characteristics that leaves
exercise a poor substitute for movement and is why professional level athletes,
weekend warriors, and gym rats do not have better health (in such terms as surgeries,
medications, and death from cardiovascular disease) than those who sit and do nothing
at all.
Like any natural organism functioning in a natural world, balance is the key to
survival. Survival of the population, survival of the individual, and survival of the cellular
structures that make up said individual all depends on the delicate balance of forces
within the body. Movement, when mimicking the habits of those humans long passed,
provides us with the required mechanical stimulation without which we die. While we
tend to think of death only in terms of the whole person, we allow small deaths like that
of cartilage, bone, or parts of organs to fall under other names and categories. It does
not occur to us that a lack of movement is the cause of these deaths, but blame other,
uncontrollable things like age or genetics.
It is very easy to understand how whole-body movement keeps our body in a state
of re-generation (and not de-generation), through the application of simple geometry
and physics to known processes of physiology and anatomy. Our physiology functions
much like a self winding clock. Actually, we are comprised of 600+ self winding clocks,
for each muscle has its own responsibility to feed itself. The “original blueprints” for the
human, no matter the source, surely couldn’t have accounted for a time when body-
owners would spend so much time spent ignoring biological signals of stress, hunger,
and fatigue; the owner of a human-machine would render itself inert by choice first, and
then eventually by habit.
Since Aristotle and Newton, we as a population have become less concerned with
our understanding of the laws of nature and natural movement and more familiar with
cardio machines, hand weights, and high-tech footwear. Movement has been a void in
our lives for so long, that to become moving creatures (as opposed to exercising ones)
seems impossible. Rearranging our lives to accommodate less -- less work, less stress,
less furniture, less driving, less sitting, less convenience -- seems too much to ask... at
first.
This platform, that you are about to study, is the content of the ever-elusive human
manual. A guide to the nuts and bolts of the biological machinery under the influence of
mechanics, this book shall first be a service to one’s self. Before taking this course as a
practitioner, you must first take this course for yourself. Get to know yourself and then
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Whole Body Alignment
spend the rest of your life mastering yourself. If there is time, you can work on yourself
with others, allowing them to learn via your example.
In both Aristotle’s writings and Isaac Newton’s equations, full stability (a fixed point at
each joint) gives a human being the ability to live using every single one of their
muscles -- all 600 of them. But the lack of moving for years (or, as a population, for a
few hundred years) has left us overusing a few joints, while the rest of the body sits
dormant and inert. Leonardo da Vinci would likely say that the result would be
decreased output and function of the machinery. Cells would die. Disease would ensue.
Aristotle would say that, under sub-optimal conditions, one’s spirit and life force would
be unable to express. Both would probably be correct.
There is a solution. Freedom from disease is attainable, by using the whole body in
a biological, reflex-driven way. First, we must be careful not to force the concept of
movement into an inaccurate paradigm To isolate parts of the body when strengthening
or to think of strength as something any less than a whole-body event is to miss the
point. You were designed to be a strong-yet-supple dynamic creature of endurance. Its
time to start acting like one.
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Movement is Medicine
“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest her or his patients in the
care of the human frame, in a proper diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.
- Thomas A. Edison, US inventor (1847 - 1931)
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-
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Natural Movement
Approximately 10,000 years ago, mankind embarked on a new frontier: farming. This
change from a long-distance roaming culture to an agricultural one has also become a
tick on our human timeline, marking the greatest catalyst for the rise of affluent disease.
These diseases of affluence -- osteoarthritis, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease,
low bone density, pelvic floor disorders, obesity, asthma, allergies, chronic pain,
fibromyalgia, and many more -- all share a common root in our lack of movement as a
species.
Billions of dollars spent in researching solutions, pharmaceuticals, and discrete
causation have done little to affect the growing numbers of diseases across the board.
The prevailing medical solutions, ranging from drugs to low-fat diets to health-club style
exercise programs, are not reducing the number of people suffering with these
diseases.
So what’s going on here?
When you look at the timeline of human evolution, 10,000 years is surprisingly little time
in terms of our biological make-up. Recently, researchers of the Paleolithic diet were
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Whole Body Alignment
able to establish one broad factor in modern diseases -- eating anything not available
during the development of our current genome is metabolized with great penalty. So,
processed foods out, natural foods in. Simple.
If we take the simple-yet-brilliant theory -- there is a “correct” way to use the body -- and
apply it not just to what we eat but also to how we move, BAM!, you’ve got yourself
another, simple-yet-profound solution.
When it comes to movement, the answer to getting your body to move and feel well is
along the same line as the paleo Diet. The types of movements that were utilized while
our genome was developing included massive amounts of walking, squatting, and just
regular use of all your bending, twisting parts, making these movement qualities (and
quantities) a requirement for optimal function of the human machinery.
The American Journal of Medicine released in 2010 a new position on solutions to
endemic, chronic ailments for which medicine provides no cure. While not the magic
bullet that most sick Americans might wish for, it is still a magic bullet:
The systematic displacement from a very physically active lifestyle in our natural
outdoor environment to a sedentary, indoor lifestyle is at the root of many of the
ubiquitous chronic diseases that are endemic in our culture. The intuitive solution
is to simulate the indigenous human activity pattern to the extent that this is
possible and practically achievable.
These are a lot of fancy words that say: you, who sit at a desk inside your office all day,
get to most places riding inside your car, have worn shoes all of your life, and have
done your exercise on the machines inside the gym, are most likely going to suffer from
an “affluent disease.”
What would natural movement even look like?
First of all, gone are the days when 30 to 45 minutes of exercise was “good enough.”
Ninety minutes per day seems to be the minimum to even come close metabolically to
the 800 miles a year walked by average Paleo women, while carrying their children. And
dispersing that mileage evenly over 365 days a year doesn’t equal the hunter-gathering
habit either. Your new habits should include walking longer bouts, of up to 10 miles,
followed by days of rest and shorter distances, until the next long trek.
And, after they’d have walked (and walked and walked), the movement of hunter-
gathers would have looked something like a natural version of cross-training,
interspersing lower intensity movements with random peaks in intensity -- like trying to
climb a tree every now and then, squat to use the bathroom, and quickly build a shelter
a la Nanook of the North.
High-intensity cardiovascular activities are out on the hunter-gathering plan. Hooray!
Long-distance running and machine-based activities (cycling and treadmills) do not use
natural movements. The hunting-gathering prescription finally fits what cardiovascular
research keeps showing in study after study -- that exercise does not need to be intense
in order to strengthen your heart and lungs.
P.S. No long-term or well-designed study has ever shown cardio-vascular exercise
reduces death from cardiovascular disease.
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