Meet my client Erik. Erik came to me through the suggestion of a good friend. He has a long history of very stuck in movement patterns from a youth full of fun but very one-sided sports. His story displays the fruits of dedication as the laundry list of compensations Erik had in his first session was nearly a record for me.
When I first met Erik he had very turned out flat feet and a hunched posture. He kept getting 'twinges' as he calls them in lots of parts of his body that never seemed to make much sense.
Erik loves being active. He goes on regular hikes, takes horseback riding lessons and sees a personal trainer several times a week. No matter what activities he got up to his body kept frustrating him.
His youth was spent mastering the sport of fencing, which is a very one-sided kind of activity. And when I first met Erik I could see all the telltales signs of his fencing position. Just getting him to put the other leg forward was a mystery to his brain!
But we got to work. We worked on restoring how his feet interact with the ground. In his picture you can see that being grounded and trusting his feet under him were a welcome improvement.
I helped him gets his head, ribs and pelvis stacked on top of each other and got his stuck ribs moving so he can finally take a full breath. (Now I can see my typo in my whiteboard message!)
He also had frequent shin pain whenever he ran or did impact sports. Nothing he tried seemed to keep it at bay. Getting him to bend his knee with the participation of all the bones from his toes to his hip has kept the shin pain away.
Finally, Erik is grateful for being much more body aware after working with me. At first my weird exercises and prompts had him questioning whether he was actually doing what I was asking. But as his body trusted the movements, he was able to develop a much better sense of what his body needs while hiking, working with his trainer or horseback riding.
That's one of my greatest hopes for my clients is being able to understand what your body is telling you and knowing exactly how much to push, when to back off and what reprogramming exercises it needs in the moment.
Erik has turned into a super fan of my work and comes out to a lot of my workshops. You may just see him one day making the movements look easy.