Healing the Core: Lower Body Sequence

In my last blog post I talked about how in order to heal our core we need to stop holding our breath and tensing our abdominal muscles all day long.  In that post I shared a movement reeducation drill for the core by moving the upper extremities.  In this post, I would like to keep with the theme of noticing our patterns of holding and tensing and over activating.
We want our breath to change with the demands of a task and we want our muscles to scale and adapt to the tensions required for the task.  Quite often, our body has been hard wired to prep for the task with an overzealous strategy such as: pushing out into the front body wall, firing up the neck muscles and back extensors, turning it all on in excess.  

In order to heal the core we need to create new neural circuits to our muscles

In both of these moves below, you should be able to maintain your breathing pattern as you move the legs without any tensing of the neck & back muscles or gripping at the ribcage.

Susan McLaughlin is a physical therapist who specializes in the management of pelvic floor and orthopedic dysfunctions. She is the owner of ALIGN integration|movement in Salt Lake City, UT.  Helpful tips and other self care strategies can be found at www.alignforhealth.com.