I love organization. It is not, however, a word that springs to mind when I think about my head, neck, and shoulders. I mean, I don’t want a disorganized head, neck, and shoulders, but, until Pilates, I didn’t really even know what that meant.
Basically, head-neck-shoulder organization means that our bones and muscles are moving the way they should. We reduce tension. We improve our breathing because we’re not relying on our neck muscles to do everything. We learn to keep our highly-mobile shoulder joints stable in all kinds of positions.
In terms of posture, this means that most of us need to shift our heads back a little, so that our ears are over our shoulders. We may need to draw our shoulders back and down a little so that they line up with our hips.
When we are moving, we want our shoulder blades to be able to glide over our rib cage in appropriate directions without popping away from the rib cage.
One way to practice this is by doing arm arcs, with or without a foam roller. We get to lie down, either on the floor or with the roller along our spines with our head and behind both on the roller. Our knees are bent and our feet are flat on the floor. We begin with our arms at our sides. As we inhale, we lift our arms up toward the ceiling and then toward the floor over our heads. We return the arms along the same pathway with the exhale. Simple, right? Now we take a moment to notice what our shoulder blades are doing as we go through this motion. They may want to go gallivanting up toward the top of our heads. We want to avoid that if we can. Practice helps.
One good reason to do this practice is that it can help us avoid shoulder injury. Shoulder injuries are often extremely frustrating and long-lasting. It’s better to skip that step if at all possible.
Go play.
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