Balance

As a follow up to yesterday’s post about how we are whole bodies, I’d like to point out that one of the implications of this is that we need whole body strength and whole body mobility for good function.

Because we move as whole bodies and not as disembodied legs or backs or arms or heads, all of our parts need to coordinate with each other.  If one of our knees doesn’t bend particularly well, the motion has to come from somewhere else (i.e., the ankle or hip, as the joints on either side of the knee).  When one of our muscle groups is significantly weaker than another, the rest of the muscles need to take up the slack for us and we end up trying to do everything with our neck muscles (the codepence champs of the Muscle Olympics!).  In the short term, this is all fine.  We want our body parts to cooperate with each other.

 

In the long term, though, we set ourselves up for imbalances, inefficiencies, and injuries when we let some parts slack off and other parts do more than their share.  This is where corrective exercise, flexibility training, and Pilates come in.  They help us restore the balance so we can move with grace and efficiency our whole lives (in our whole bodies!).