About a month or so ago I wrote about my struggles with recurring calf strain, when my lockdown running frenzy left me limping up hills and clutching an ice-pack to my legs. No amount of rest or massaging would get me out of the cycle of injury, rest, re-injury etc. Unfortunately, since writing that last blog post I shifted my website to this new platform (I hope you like it) and swiftly lost access to every single blog post I’d written over the last 4 years! Which means that if you missed part 1 of this blog post, I apologise, there’s no way I can bring it back. However the general gist was that I expressed how frustrating and humbling it was, after 14 years of teaching bodywork, to be dealing with an injury.

In grappling with my frustrations, I stumbled across this quote from Andrea Olsen’s Body Stories, which I found particularly illuminating at the time, though I was yet to discover just how apt the quote was for me:

'Injury or illness can be seen as the body’s way of calling attention to a particular area. It often reflects misalignment or stress which has been occurring for a long time; when an impact occurs, it settles in our weakest area. This “weak” area is often, in actuality, a place of strength that we use to exhaustion, injure, and then label as “weak”... Rehabilitation involves recognising the relationship between our weaknesses and our strengths, and attending to the underlying patterns as well as healing a particular area. A problem can be an invitation to learning.' (Andrea Olsen, Body Stories, a guide to experiential anatomy, 1991)

In my first blog post I wondered whether a site of injury might be better thought of as a site of over-use, a link in the fascial chain that was over-called on. Rather than fixating on that specific area, we are more likely to resolve the injury if we consider the integration of that site within the whole body movement.

As a Pilates teacher I consider myself to have a holistic approach to movement. We always think of the whole body, we always move the whole body. But I know that I am equally drawn to isolating or deconstructing movement, sometimes at the cost of losing sight of the whole, or even, dare I say it, at the cost of allowing functional movement itself...

On reflection, I know that I often ask clients to restrict their movement. In the context of a matwork session this is quite appropriate. Most people are not aware of their tendencies to swing or hang into what I call their ‘spiral slings’. The result is torsion related injuries. The 1.01 of core stability is essentially to restrict torsion in the lower back and pelvis, thereby bringing the internal oblique and TVA muscles into play to support the lower abdominal/ pelvic region.

Another tendency to restrict movement in pre-pilates repertoire is the classic lazy angels or open books where most teachers will ask clients to ‘keep the pelvis absolutely square’. This is, yet again, a perfectly appropriate cue, aiming to restrict movement in the lower end of the chain in order to encourage movement in the upper back area which becomes rigid from too much hunching over computers.

On my journey to understand what I was getting so wrong I sought out a combination of yoga, pilates, massage and Feldenkrais. I thought that massage would fix the problem at first because I thought I just needed to break down the inflammation. My local sports massage therapist recommended a full body massage, saying that it was probably related to my hamstrings, hip, back etc and only by working through each of these areas could we fix it. She was not totally wrong. If it weren’t for Covid I would probably have given in and had several sessions of deep tissue massage. But I’m always very distrustful of anyone who suggests that they probably know more than me about my own body, especially since they had not looked at my movement as a whole. It’s likely that several sessions would have fixed the immediate problem but I might never have been able to change the habit that caused the problem in the first place.

I found it interesting that when I attended an online workshop on running and Pilates (the title had my name on it) yet again I noticed a tendency to just go to the Pilates repertoire. Even though the workshop started with looking at images of people running, which was quite illuminating, this did not carry into thinking about the whole body movement, by which I mean: how each part of the body moves in relation to the whole. For example, the importance of rotation in the upper body and the swing of the arms was highlighted and the workshop leader encouraged us to do this movement in the standing sequences. But this was never integrated from the foot into the hip into the opposite ribcage, shoulder and arm. A whole body perspective is thinking about the entire fascial continuity from little toe to little finger. A deconstructed approach is to swing the upper body, keeping the hips and knees square. In a pilates session we often cue the latter.

It so happened that I had arranged to have some one to one Feldenkrais sessions with my wonderful teacher Caroline Scott. I explained my ongoing issues with my calves and she asked me to stand up and twist from side to side. She noticed, firstly, that, being a Pilates teacher, I was not twisting my lower body, so she asked me to let the whole sling rotate from ankle to head. The next observation was that rather than transfer my weight onto the leg I was twisting towards, my tendency was to shift my weight onto the leg I was twisting away from. Hmmm. When I allowed my weight to shift towards the rotation, I found a greater range of motion, obviously. Yes it was slightly uneven from side to side (that’s because of my dear scoliosis), but otherwise it was a lot freer. Caroline suggested that perhaps I was being too rigid in my upper body when I ran, perhaps this restriction made my running less efficient, leading to an overuse of my calf muscles. She suggested that my calves were acting like guy wires hoisting my legs through the gait cycle, and over-straining in the process. Olsen’s quote comes strongly to mind.

A few days after this session I went out for a tentative run. I noticed that my entire left side tended to remain absolutely rigid, whilst my right side did all the twisting and pushing. Now I was able to bring in some appropriate Pilates hat thinking by working on releasing the soft tissue down the left outer thigh to allow myself to rotate in towards this side. I noticed that I has holding the wires of my head phones in my left arm, which kept it rigid. So I got rid of my wired head phones and bought some over priced ear pods instead which left my arms totally free. As I ran, I focused on allowing the rotation to move through my body from foot to opposite shoulder, so that the torque travelled through the entire sling. The result is that I have now been running for over two months with no pain. My last run was over 10K. Not only have I not had a recurrence of my calf strain, but my calves no longer feel stiff the day after a run. The truth is that my Feldenkrais session in and of itself did not fix my calves. It was just the adjustment in my thinking that changed things. The problem was not in the calves. The problem was in the integration with the whole.

As a result of this experience I have included more permission to rotate within my classes, and attendees will recognise my cues to allow the knee to lift in open books, for example, or allowing the lower body to twist in standing rotations, which are a direct result of my new found love for spiralling. But the lesson here is not as simple as allowing more rotation. It’s a lesson of trusting in the functionality of natural patterns, and a warning that when we disrupt or interfere with our natural propensity to move, we might lose out on efficiency. That’s not to say that restricting movement isn’t sometimes appropriate. It’s just not always functional in the long term. In hindsight, I guess it was my over-correcting that caused my injury. Sometimes we have to let it go and allow ourselves to just swing with it.

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