All About the Shoulder Girdle
FUNCTIONAL MOVEMENT RESOURCES
Basically, The "shoulder girdle” connects your arms to the bones along the sides of the body. The shoulder girdle is one of the most interesting aspects of the body because of its high degree of movement and its natural lack of stability or anchoring to the rest of the trunk. The shoulder girdle is comprised of four bones: scapulae, clavicle, sternum, and humeri and attaches to the rest of the torso via two very small joints in the front of the body called the sternoclavicular joints.
Watch the video as you take these key points away when it comes to how the bones actually move together in common/every day movemets:
Flexion/lifting the arm straight in front of you: Upward rotation of the scapula
Abduction/taking the arm away from the midline: Upward rotation of the scapula
Flexion above 90 degrees/lifting the arm over head or above shoulder: Slight elevation of the scapula
Extension/reaching the arm behind the waist: Downward rotation of the scapula accompanies
Extension of more than 50 degrees: Slight anterior tilt
Remember to look at the whole body: Functional and healthy movement of the scapula depends largely on the placement of the ribcage and the position of the thoracic spine. The 🔑 is to make sure that the ribcage is wide and stacked on top of/or in alignment with the pelvis and that the head and neck are equally aligned.
TIP 💡Allow the shoulder blades to rise and fall with ease for scapular mobility and stability. Keeping the “shoulders soft” rather than down is one way to make sure that the upper trapezius and neck muscles aren’t over working, but that elevation and depression can happen effortlessly as they are meant to.
Planes of Movement
FUNCTIONAL MOVEMENT RESOURCES
This quick video addresses some common vocab words, but more importantly it reminds you of a key concept — to move the body in all ranges of motion, or “planes of movement”. This will help your students improve muscle and soft tissue function, as well as alignment, because you’ll be working with your students on strength and mobility of areas that are chronically tight, overused, or not functioning optimally because of their activities of daily living. Just remember that someone who’s an Uber driver vs a hair dresser, vs a construction worker, will require very different approaches based on what planes of movement the “live in most”.
TIP 💡Also, whenever you’re observing your student move, make sure that you change your visual perspective and body position as you teach, and move the body in all planes.
Hip Flexor Release
FUNCTIONAL MOVEMENT RESOURCES
In this video, we show some simple ways to hydrate the “psoas”, our deep core muscle/ hip flexor. If you refer back to the “Anatomy of the Inner Unit” lecture, you’ll hear me going into the details of why the “psoas” is especially important in core stability. Because it’s such an important one, and also chronically tight and weak one, due to how much we sit in western culture, it’s important to both hydrate and release it, and also ensure that is is functioning optimally.
Reminder: because it helps to flex the hips (as in sitting) over time the cellular structure morphs to a shorter chain. This shortening keeps breathing shallow and limits core stability.
TIP 💡hip extension and psoas hydration are your students’ friends. Include as much of that as possible, especially for people who sit a lot or do sports such as cycling.
Breathing Basics
FUNCTIONAL MOVEMENT RESOURCES
This video is short by mighty because goes through a pretty complicated (internal) process of breathing, in a fairly simple way. The idea right now, is to understand that how we breathe, impacts our entire torso — how it moves, how it feels, and how the muscles respond to a simple act that we often don’t even think about.
One of my favorite analogies of the movement of the thoracic cage, is a bell swinging in the air. Picture this: as you inhale, the front of the bell swings up, while the back of the bell drop down, and on the exhale the front of the bell swings down as the back of the bell slightly lift up.
Anatomy of Breathing
FUNCTIONAL MOVEMENT RESOURCES
This video builds on the “Anatomy of the Core” lecture, and goes in depth into the core muscles that are involved in breathing. After you go through both videos and your homework PDFs, remember the key takeaways from this section.
Why We Care About Breathing
Inhalation naturally facilitates extension of the spine.
Exhalation naturally facilitates flexion of the spine.
The health of the diaphragm is directly related to core strength because 80% of our breathing muscles are core-stabilizing muscles!
The diaphragm gently pulls on the psoas during exhalation creating a slight elongation of the psoas. If the breath is shallow then this elongation cannot happen and the psoas remains short and tight (especially if it already is due to sitting a lot or poor posture.
The inverse is true. If the psoas is tight it will limit the retraction (on exhalation) of the diaphragm.
The same relationship is true for the diaphragm and qudratus lumborum, which helps to tip the pelvis forward during breathing and stabilizes the low back as well as extends the low back.
Pre Pilates
Functional Movement Resources
In this section we go through the 🔑foundational principles you can teach your students right away. Why? Because these key principles show up all the time in all the Pilates work that you’ll be teaching them.
Once they understand those principles, they will be able to move onto the more complicated aspects of the work — like the actual exercises that have more complex choreography. Teaching your students these concepts, will help them connect to their body in a new way as they begin to understand the the bones, muscles, and alignment in their own body.
This is the most essential aspect of your teaching — you get to educate people how they might connect to the basic (but often obscure) ways that their body feels and moves.
TIP 💡Be sure to refer back to these concepts often, and by name, ie., say “torso hug”, when that’s what you want them to do. This way, it becomes a way you communicate with them, and they communicate with their body in your sessions.