Movement is different from exercise! If you can teach your body to move efficiently in all the activities you perform during the day, you will be performing all the functional movements you aim to make at the gym. These many hours of functional movement add up to far more than the three hours a week you spend at the gym. Our body's do not adapt to three hours a week of exercise. They adapt to a lifetime of habits and movement patterns.
Whats the point in stabilizing your core at the gym if you spend 9 hours a day slumped in your chair at work and then come home to lounge on the couch? You need to change the habits and movement patterns you use in daily life in order to make global bodily change. If you can learn how to move better through life then you won't need the gym!
Better movement through life
Sitting with a neutral spine and no artificial chair support incorporates great core strength.
Using full range of motion in your joints keeps them healthy.
Structural Integration is about giving you options or choices for movement. Different possibilities of how you function. Part of this is possible through sensory motor control. Chances are you have been walking, standing or sitting the same way for many years. This pattern is engrained into your brain and the way you move. It is also engrained in the fascia of you body. It can be difficult for the body to change a habitual pattern.
Through soft tissue manipulation, movement and new sensory motor connections Structural Integration can open up new ways for you to align your body.
I will give you a personal example to help clarify this.
I have been a full-time ski instructor since 2006 clocking up over 200 days of skiing on average a year. I am quite in tune with how my body functions and moves and how I relate this to the sport of skiing. So I thought......
During my ten sessions of Structural Integration the practitioner Claudia would work on different areas or lines of my body. On my fourth visit my inner thighs, knees and lower legs were worked on. I went out after the session to go skiing and try out my new legs. I had noticed some different sensations walking and wanted to see if they could be felt in my skiing.
It was quite amazing to go out and feel some new sensations and movements on snow that previously I had not been able to access. My legs felt like they been upgraded from used car to BMW style suspension. I also felt a greater efficiency in my movements to turn the skis and make them grip. I had thought that I knew most of what there was to know about skiing but what I realised was I didnt know what that FELT like.
The Structural Integration work gave me access to different options of movement that I had not been able to perform prior.
I have also been working for many years on keeping my spine neutral while I ski. What I failed to realise was outside of skiing, in my daily life, I was not focused on keeping this neutral alignment. Structural Integration helped me become aware and also made my body loose enough to focus on a nuetral spine while sitting, standing, running, walking, cooking and doing the laundry. I now find it far easier to find good alignment while skiing because my muscles and structure are used to performing this on a regular basis.
