Pilates & Somatics by Jen

Good morning SPINE !
Feels great to move the spine in all directions after waking. What's the most challenging spinal movement for you ? definitely thoracic extension and rotation for me. Located in Melbourne, Australia and feel your spine is stiff and you'd like some help to increase it's mobility to feel young again - DM me. COVID safe studio and online options available.

REFORMER FOOTWORK, Great for feet, ankles, calves, shins, knees, thighs, hips, pelvis and spine. Email [email protected] for classes in Melbourne's east.

Using Melbourne's latest lockdown to come up with new stuff for my body and for my client's.

Coming up with inspiration for my Reformer clients.

THE INCH WORM
Ever scrunched up a towel under your toes for toe mobility ? Wouldn’t you agree that the inch worm is toe towel scrunches on steroids cause it uses the whole foot ?

Such a simple exercise you can do anywhere, watching tv, sitting at your desk. It’s a great foot mobility exercise to do if you can’t reach your feet to give them a hands on massage.

Anything you can do to keep those 30 joints in your feet mobile and the 29 muscles in/associated with the feet strong is going to give you a good basis of support for good posture and help you walk correctly giving you a good foundation for correct movement patterns throughout the whole body.

The take home message with all my feet posts is shoes and immobility block the natural movement of the feet. We need to actively work to reverse that to have good full body posture and movement patterns.

Enjoy the inch worm.

How do you keep your feet supple and mobile after wearing shoes all day ? Often the shoes we wear during our chosen sports keep our feet locked in place and while they enable us to carry out those favourite sports they are not conducive to foot mobility.

What type of footwear is that for you ? I favour snowboard/hiking/mountaineering boots and rock climbing shoes so I need exercises like these at the end of the day when the shoes come off.

Our toes don't have muscles that cause them to twist so we can use our fingers to do it for them. We need our ankles to twist side to side, our forefoot to twist around the length of our foot, and the forefoot and ankle to twist in opposite directions. Our feet make these twisting movements as we walk, without them we may have sore feet, and a poor basis of support for our body hence it can affect our entire posture and movement patterns.

Try these exercises to keep your feet happy and healthy and therefore the rest of your body functioning well.

CALF MUSCLE SOMATIC RELEASE - Have you been stretching your calves and they still feel tight ? Maybe it's your nervous system sending signals to your calves to keep them tight. If your calves are always tight your nervous system interprets it that your calves should always be tight and sends appropriate signals to keep the calves tight. You need then to teach your calves that you don't want them always tight. If you very very slowly relax the calf muscles you will send the message back to the nervous system to release the tension in the calf muscles. The trick however is that the nervous system is a slow learner so you need to actively and very slowly release the tension in the muscle to get the nervous system to stop retensing the muscle. Try these exercises everyday for a week and comment below if your calves feel less tense. Note that this is not an exercise it is the nervous system learning.

Another simple exercise for keeping feet and ankles happy after snowboarding, hiking and climbing. If you’re on holiday and don’t have access to a rolling pin use a sturdy water bottle. Fill it with ice in summer and hot water in winter and look forward to pain free calves and ankles after a full day of leg exercising. Try it for yourself, comment if it works.