The Client Choice Practice
Building Your Exercise Practice & Educating Clients
Steven P. Weiniger, DC / Founder, BodyZone.com
A Client Choice Practice cares for the client as an educated consumer by integrating common sense knowledge with intelligent health choices.
Aging Baby Boomers do not want to stop “doing” as they age, and many will choose and pay for goods and services to help maintain an active lifestyle with age. Teaching people to understand the importance of conscious motion through posture exercises such as Yoga, Pilates, Alexander, and Feldenkrais, to name a few, is the key to helping clients create new LifeHabits incorporating intelligent exercise.
Posture is widely acknowledged to be important for a youthful appearance and continued good health, and keeping good posture is one reason people will continue therapy. The Posture Principles are helpful in teaching clients about posture. Empowering clients with commonsense knowledge, and teaching exercises which “feel right”helps them to understand the role massage plays in helping people to move, feel, and be well.
One of these concepts is that an acute injury can create a chronic problem, and is taught in the Posture Principle, “The Body Learns What You Teach It”.
Pain teaches the body to move differently. The body moves in patterns of motion which adapt to each individual’s BodyType, history of injuries & daily habits. If it hurts to move like this, the body will not move like this, and the body will adapt into an unbalanced pattern of motion.
The body’s motion patterns are like a folded piece of paper which folds at a crease. The paper follows the fold because the fibers have been bent in a pattern. Similarly, the muscles, ligaments and nerves change as they adapt to moving the body in a pattern of motion. Strong muscles lift more. Weak ligaments stretch more. The body’s posture adapts, creating a postural change, or distortion. Over time, adaptive patterns of body motion cause increased body stress and breakdown.
Teaching patients about massage and posture is one way to enhance the value of your care. The Posture Principle demonstrations allow people to experience kinesthetically these ideas, and help people “get” the posture principles. The BodyZone.com posture demo’s were recently featured on Oprah’s site, Oxygen.com!
A demonstration for the Posture Principle, “The Body Learns What You Teach It” is “Don’t Be Cross”, or “The Reverse ArmCross”. This demonstrates how the body moves in patterns of motion, and begins to communicate the idea that many chronic problems begin when the body learns to move in a distorted pattern of motion.
Don’t Be Cross (Reverse Arm Cross)
1. Cross your arms in front of you.
2. Observe: Is your left forearm or right forearm on top?
3. Now, cross your arms with the opposite forearm on top. (Look down and be sure you have a different arm on top this time!)
Crossing the arms “backwards” feels awkward to most people. An individual’s pattern of motion is with either the left or the right forearm on top. Reversing the top forearm makes the arms, shoulder girdle, and neck move differently from the body’s trained patterns. As a very general rule of thumb, the more stuck in a pattern of motion (and therefore out of balance) a person is, the more imbalanced one feels on doing a Reverse ArmCross. Some people are so fixed in their pattern of motion they are unable to cross their arms backwards without assistance!
Another observation of fixed motion patterns in the Reverse ArmCross is noting if the hands are tucked above or under the arms, and then tucking them the opposite way.
Teaching clients about how their body moves is the first step to their understanding the vital role posture exercise plays in keeping their body moving.