10/06/2026
Helping a destabilized neck to find stability and changing the entire feel of the exercise. It was small but still there: her head moving forward and back as she did the Roll Back on the Cadillac
So what am I wanting to see in this exercise? Where is there stability and where is there mobility?
Shoulders and hip joints are stable. So that is 4 points of stability. The spine is articulating in sequence from bottom to top, so is the neck moving or stabilizing? It should be stabilizing. The pelvis rolls around the stable hip joints. The arms ( shoulder joints) move back as the spine rolls back- they come with the spine and are stable as that happens and the spine rounds and lengthens through those two points
So telling my client not to move her neck ( which has a history of trauma and injury) wasn’t working. She couldn’t notice it. If she can’t notice the movement, she cannot make any changes. Her brain has to recognize it. So her proprioceptive sense wasn’t going to work. So I went to the eyes. I told her to keep her eyes on the bar and as she rolled back not to change the distance of her head to the bar.
And then it was a whole new beautiful Roll Back.
I only had her go to the shoulder blades and back up without changing that distance and keeping her eyes on the bar.
With consistent success with that precision (so all the things needing to be stable stay stable and all the parts needing to be mobile are mobile), I then added going the rest of the way to the mat where that particular cue no longer applies. If you were doing a roll up it would because the bar can go up to the ceiling with the spinal movement all the way to the mat, but it can’t with a spring load attached to the poles.
This visual cue worked great for her as she is on the more mobile side of things which can make her proprioceptive mapping a bit murky. Since that option was out, I went to the eyes instead and it was extremely successful and she felt the difference immediately and resoundingly and she already had a pretty good Roll Back. But, she has nagging neck pain. And perhaps that instability is the cause. So we will see if cues like this to help her stabilize the neck help in that area.
Recap: So eyes on the bar and don’t change the distance. That was it. That’s all I said to my client and what I wrote out for you guys was all that happened because of that very client specific,targeted, and simple cue