Marcia out riding!
Marcia has been training with me for about 2 ½ years. Her main objective was to age with strength and grace. She feared having a fall, causing an injury that would cost her the ability to do the things she loves or losing her independence as she was living alone since the loss of her husband months earlier. Marcia lives a very cerebral (and successful) life - she’s an educator at the University level, a published author, an accomplished singer and musician and strongly involved in her community church.
During her initial assessment, it was determined that Marcia’s kinaesthetic sense and movement patterns needed some TLC. In particular, she was stuck in perfect posture. Unfortunately, Marcia’s takeaway from the practitioner who diagnosed her with osteoporosis was ‘Don’t move your spine!’ Marcia is also predisposed to having high muscle tension as her body’s natural factory setting. Creating task appropriate tension and finding a sustainable mobility practice has been a big focus during her training.
Marcia is extremely busy in her daily routine. Yet her progress and commitment of consistently putting in hard work only training twice a week has proven to be effective and more importantly, life changing. Marcia and I have covered a lot of territory over the past few years, including many wonderfully honest heart to hearts, but her work on addressing her fears surrounding falling and hurting herself have been a highlight.
Falling to the Side and Backwards
We first focused on Marcia’s reconnection with the tri-planar movements of her pelvis. For the posterior/anterior tilt we laid on the floor and imagined the pelvis as a bowl of soup spilling onto our belly and onto the legs. To get the feel for pelvic rotation we “split the soup” laterally left and right. For vertical pelvic tilt, we kept the bowl of soup from spilling as we lengthened and shortened the distance between rib to hip. Once Marcia was able to control these three movements we experimented in various positions like kneeling, standing, sitting on a fitness ball, etc.
The process of Marcia relearning to get her spine to act like a spine instead of a femur started with spine segmentation exercises. We started first on her back and with the intention to peel her back off the floor in three sections - lower back, mid back and upper back. Once that was established, she envisioned her back as five sections and eventually vertebrae by vertebrae, moving on to exploration of the segmentation in various positions.
Then we were on to the fun stuff - learning to fall! Marcia started her relationship with becoming soft with the ground by falling sideways from kneeling progressively moving to taller kneeling and standing. It took a while for Marcia to trust herself with backward falling even though she had a keen grasp of what her pelvis and spine should be doing. We started with getting comfortable with rocking backwards and getting a feel for the task appropriate tension needed to rock back up into the starting position. From there, we incorporated exhaling and “greasing the groove” of protecting her head with her hands on the ’fall’ and eventually practicing falling backwards from standing.
Falling Forward
Learning to fall face forward takes a lot of courage. Marcia’s belief in herself (with lots of cheerleading from me) to commit to this practice makes my heart full! Marcia may disagree with me but her progressive work through bent and straight arm strength was actually quite easy as she already had a very good sense of where her scapulae were in space. All that was needed was to connect her pelvis and spine into her push ups. She went from doing elevated, eccentric push ups to doing a 20 second eccentric push up on the floor from her knees within a few months. Back to falling forward, we simultaneously worked on finding less tension and more elasticity in the eccentric push up first from hands and knees then gradually falling from a tall kneeling position.
Making Joints Harder to Kill
Every session Marcia does resilience building for her wrists and ankles, key for mitigating damage if she should fall. She explored joint circles for her wrists and ankles and put them into positions of unusual strength. We do funny walks on the sides of our feet, rolling our ankles over intentionally. We load our wrists from all angles while on our hands and knees. The takeaway - you may not have control in what position you may fall in but you can prepare for it.
The Proof - Marcia Takes Dive
Earlier this year when the world went into Covid lockdown, Marcia and I started training remotely via FaceTime. About three months later, Marcia had some concerns before starting one of our sessions. On the weekend, she had fallen going up the concrete steps of a friends house for a socially distanced visit. She had a lot of pain in her ribs on the right side. Instead of going forward with the session, we agreed that it would be best if she checked in with her GP and Osteopath. She received good news, she had only sustained minor soft tissue strain.. Marcia expressed disappointment at the setback, as she perceived all the success she’s achieved up to that moment was out the window so she was a little shocked to see me grinning ear to ear. “This is success”, I told her. She integrated the movements we were working on and therefore she was able to fall ‘properly’ and mitigate the damage of that fall - no broken bones, no smashed up face. High five!
We dialed her training back and gave her ribs space to heal. In her most recent 6 week block of training, Marcia went from doing a 20 second eccentric push up from her knees on her step up box to a 30 second eccentric push up on her knees from the floor!!! Not only that, Marcia did her first forward fall from standing - well, her second but this time on purpose.
By Senior Coach Jill
