Mobility: Building body faith and balance
“By consciously practicing all of the things that we used to take for granted,we can make amends and apologize for all the times we ignored what our body needed or was asking for. And rebuild trust. ”
-Ericka Thomas
Transcript
Episode 221
Mobility - building body faith and balance
Body faith revival
Hypervigilance in the body, whether from chronic pain or previous injury or our beliefs about our health can break our faith in our body and its capabilities. Mobility is the pathway back to body faith and freedom of movement. Basically it’s reconnecting with all of the things we took for granted when we were younger. Strength, stamina, balance and coordination. That’s our work IN today we’re looking at using mobility to stage our own personal body faith revival.
Anyone who has experienced chronic pain ever in their life, which is statistically 8o% of the population, will tell you that even long after the pain has subsided or even gone away, there is still this sense of hypervigilance every time a new sensation comes up, painful or otherwise. It’s that hypervigilance in the nervous system, that feeling of being on constant high alert, that breaks the innate trust in our mind body connection.
For me I experienced that over years with my gut dysbiosis and IBS. For a long time I couldn't tell the difference between hunger pain and pain pain. And for almost 9 months after I had corrected my diet and found some relief from the cause of that pain I still felt pain, until one day I just didn’t. That was a strange day. It’s a strange place to be when you feel like something is missing, like you forgot something and that something is pain. And that was a day when I had to start relearning to trust what I felt in my gut, literally and figuratively. The same is true for any other source of pain and discomfort in the body or the mind. Much of the physical sensation that comes from the body to our brain via the vagus nerve in any given moment informs our understanding of our environment, our relationships, our intuition…literally how we see our world. When we’re in discomfort or pain all the time, the message is “we aren’t safe.” And when our conscious experience is telling us something different like “I shouldn’t feel this way.” or any other mismatch in communication, overtime it breaks our internal trust. It feels like our body is lying to us.
And on the flipside there is a body betrayal, when the sensations sent from the body are ignored or overridden. There’s always more than one side to the story, right? The same is true within our own skin.
Last episode we talked about several pathways that we could use to actively change and affect the experience of pain in the body. We talked about changing tension, breath, our thoughts and emotions. All of those tools are great. But at some point we need to start to replace the pain experience with something that we can trust again. We need to rebuild our faith in our body and eventually our body’s faith in us.
First let’s just acknowledge that not trusting what we feel in the body is common. Sometimes it makes sense, because we don’t always understand what we’re feeling in any given moment. Maybe we’ve been taught to override any sensation of discomfort or pain. Just suck it up buttercup, no pain no gain, pain is weakness leaving the body. Or maybe we’ve become so sensitive that all discomfort feels like the end of the world as we know it. We might believe that all pain of any kind means something is broken, that we are broken.
The mind (through those protective pain pathways) will always try to convince you to quit long before the body actually needs to. That doesn’t mean we ignore them, it just means we need to learn what they are actually saying.
One way to do that is to explore mobility as a practice.
We hear about mobility a lot in the longevity space. It’s big with folks who talk about aging well. It doesn’t always get explained very well. Sometimes it’s confused with flexibility, which is not the same thing. So we’re going to discuss it here.
Mobility is the ability to move freely and easily. In the wellness world that means moving our joints through a sufficient range of motion and being able to do tasks and activities of daily living. Along with range of motion this includes strength, stamina, balance, and coordination.
Interesting that nowhere in that list is flexibility mentioned. Mobility is not the same as flexibility.
One of the biggest fears people have as they age is the fear of falling and rightly so because falls are the leading cause of injury related death for adults 65 and older. And as of a 2019 review, post hip fracture mortality in aged 50 and up is anywhere from 22-30% with the year.
Maintaining mobility is the key to avoiding, preventing that kind of outcome. Mobility is a movement practice that can help rebuild trust within the body and has ripple effects throughout our system.
When the body is in any kind of pain or discomfort it changes a lot of things. Our posture changes, there’s heightened tension throughout the muscles and fascia, we tend to limit our range of motion, slow down or hold still, change our activity. All of those things might be ok in the short term for an acute injury but over the long term can be catastrophic for our long term health and increase the risk of falls as we get older. The body adapts quickly to anything you do.
How?
Stop moving > lose strength > lose range of motion > Lose balance/stability > lose coordination > lose reaction time > inability to catch yourself = fall
Not to mention we stop being able to take care of ourselves.
But mobility exercises are not complicated. They aren't always what we think of when we say “exercise”. We aren’t talking about maxing anything out. When we say mobility we really are looking for sufficient range of motion and balance.
When should be able to catch ourself when we slip or trip, we should be confident enough to pick up our feet when we walk, we want to be able to reach behind us to buckle our seatbelt, we need to be able to get up and down off the floor, get out of a chair, use the bathroom, tie our own shoes. These are the kinds of things that will put a person in a nursing home. They are the kind of things we take for granted until something happens and we can’t do them.
So how can we keep those abilities?
The first “exercise” is to be able to get down on the floor. I can hear everyone groaning. But this is so important. Mobility isn’t about going to extremes. It’s about being able to move freely within your just right (and sufficient) range of motion. That means being able to get down and up from the floor. And it’s not easy.
There is a sit to stand test that is a longevity predictor. You cross your ankles, lower yourself to the ground without using your hands and then stand back up, no hands. I wish I could say I can do it. I am not there yet. The crossed ankle thing isn’t great for me. I can get down, not gracefully but I still need one hand to get back up. There’s another sit to stand test for cardiovascular and low body strength and endurance. It’s a test where you count how many times you can sit and stand up out of a chair in 30 sec. The good news is you can practice and get better.
Both are good assessments but it’s important to be able to get down to the floor and get yourself up. So forget the crossing ankles. Use a chair at first and lower yourself to the ground and climb back up. Doesn’t have to be pretty. Maybe sit down on the floor to watch tv. Once a day is good at first. Take your time and work within your just right range of motion. If you haven't been down on the floor in a while maybe get a friend or movement professional to help just in case. Then slowly as you build confidence you can add more times.
I can’t tell you how many people have told me the reason that they won't do yoga is because they can’t get down on the floor. That’s fine but what I want to say is you can’t get down on the floor because you don’t get down on the floor. Not because you can’t.
Well we can’t talk about mobility without talking about stability. The 2 are linked. We stop moving with confidence because we lose confidence in our stability. And that comes from the core. An interesting side note, Manipura chakra at the solar plexus is the seat of our confidence and it’s centered in our physical core.
Our core strength is key and it’s a great place to start. These are the Mcgill big 3 designed particularly for back pain and disc herniation however because they are so simple and are isometric (8-10 second holds) they are a perfect foundation of strength around the core that will lead to better stability and then mobility.
Curl ups from neutral spine
Side planks
Bird dog
I’ve included a link to Huberman's demo of these but there are a lot of examples on Youtube.
So many people jump into crunches to strengthen the core. That skips over some fundamental connections. Personally I’m not a fan of crunches , I don’t get much out of them and there’s way more muscle in the core beyond the six pack rectus abdominus especially when we need better balance. Basically these exercises create an internal muscular corset so we can do everything else we want to do with ease. And they can be modified if you aren’t ready to get down on the floor, to the wall. Just use a wall as the floor.
And finally we can talk about balance. Balance is one of those things that people think they need to already have in order to practice. We say I have terrible balance and refuse to stand on one foot. The truth is that you get better balance by putting the body in unstable positions. Like a one leg or a wobble board or sitting on a stability ball. The idea isn’t to be completely still, it’s to let the body practice making all the micro movements it needs to make in order to keep you upright. And it quickly adapts to be able to react to other unstable positions. To be able to catch you when you trip or slip, or whatever. If you never put yourself in an unstable position you can’t expect your body to come to your rescue. That’s unfair.
When we talk about these things the expectation for many people is that you have to already have them in order to do things that require them. For example, when people say I can’t do yoga because I’m not flexible. That’s like saying I can’t take a bath because I’m too dirty. What they’re really saying is I don’t trust myself or I won’t risk being uncomfortable mentally physically or emotionally. Where else in health or wellness does the result require that you already have the skill? Nowhere. In fact, if you want to improve anything related to balance and stability you must put yourself in unstable positions.
But sometimes we skip steps and one of those steps to balance is waking up the feet. Most of us take our feet for granted until they start hurting. The feet are the farthest from our brain and a lot can go wrong in between. There’s a simple tool that I found through my somatosensory training in Yoga Fit that’s called a Naboso ball. This is a type of spikey call that you can use to roll out areas of the body. It can break in half and you can use it under your feet to reawaken the nerves there. It feels great and really helps with standing balance. I’m using it right now actually. It helps recover after a night in heels. You don’t need anything fancy though. You can use a lacrosse ball or golf ball. Your feet will thank you. And your overall stability and mobility will improve.
Mobility exercise is a way to repair that mind-body relationship and really befriend the body again. By consciously practicing all of the things that we used to take for granted,we can make amends and apologize for all the times we ignored what our body needed or was asking for. And rebuild trust.
And that’s what this is all about, being able to trust not just what the body tells us but also to regain the confidence in what it is capable of. That’s the body faith we’re looking for.
Thanks for listening
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Hey there!
I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a health coach and trauma informed yoga professional bringing real world resilience and healing to main street USA.
I offer trauma release + yoga + wellness education for groups and individuals…regular people like you.
Book a call to learn how I can help.