Equine and Canine Structural Integration

A real test

2010-05-22T05:50:00.000-07:00

About a month ago a got a phone call from Dr. Kerry Ridgway of endurance racing fame. Dr. Ridgway is the US Olympic Endurance Team Veterinarian and someone I hold in very high regard. It seems he had read my book and was impressed enough by it to call me and arrange a time to come to Colorado to spend some time with me.
Well today's that day, he's come out and we'll be going out to work with some horses I've arranged for. I'm seeing this as a chance to talk to someone who knows a hell of a lot more about horses than I do about my ideas. It's intimidating for me since I hold Dr. Ridgway in such high regard and he's been very gracious in his praise of my book. The problem is that the book is just an attempt to get people started--create a common vocabulary--from where we can actually have a conversation about how one could integrate the structure of a horse. I'm hoping that I'm not being pigeon holed by the techniques that are presented in the book, since that's not how I work or teach in my courses.
I'm definitely going to take the opportunity to ask Dr. Ridgway about the nerve hypothesis I've been working up.
I'll try and remember to write more about what happens in our exchange of ideas.

A Zen Goodbye

2010-04-02T07:30:00.000-07:00

About eight years ago I was called to work with horse. The owner/trainer informed me when I arrived that I was the horse's last chance, if he didn't improve he was going to be euthanized. When I asked why I was told "he stops when you ride him". Huh?
At the time my horse was alone--my wife's horse broke his leg and had to be euthanized (put down)--and so I decided that I would take the horse that "stopped".
The previous owner brought the horse to my place and as I was taking off the halter to let him out into the pasture they warned me "you'll never catch again...". They were sort of right, it took me a while but I did catch him. He was always difficult to catch--and I mean we had to catch him, he never just came up to us to be haltered--but once we had him in halter he was a sweetheart. Since his only role in life was to be a companion and a model for my students when we did nerve work--he had sciatica--being in halter wasn't that important.
My son, who names all our animals, gave him the name Zen.
Yesterday we euthanized Zen after a year of his struggling with feet problems. Seven weeks ago my trimmer suggested that there wasn't much hope for him, I ignored him. My thought was that as long as Zen was willing to hang around, could get up and eat, he could lay down as much as he wanted. Even though he was addicted to eating my barn I still kept him alive. I couldn't come to the conclusion that death was the answer.
That's until two days ago when my wife had to feed for me while I worked late and she couldn't get him to come in from the pasture. When I got home that night I saw Zen lying in the pasture, where he was went I left that morning, I thought he was dead. Then as I turned into the drive he raised his head to look at me. I figured he just didn't know my wife well enough to realize she was feeding and he was waiting for me, like he had almost every day for the last eight years. I had to go out to the pasture put a halter on him and force him to get up. I thought he might have a heart attack walking to the barn.
Yesterday morning I went out to feed and he was lying down in the stall. I forced him to get up again and out of the barn--I was being disgustingly strategic knowing that if we had to put him down it would be easier to move the body outside than in a stall--where I feed him in the paddock so he has to move. He came out, I fed him and while I was leaving for work I noticed he was lying down. It looked like it was going to rain or snow and I couldn't bear pushing him anymore to move. I called the vet.
As Zen died a really light snow started to fall. It only lasted a few minutes and then the impending storm started to clear around our property and the sun came out. This is common here since we live in the "shadow" of a fourteen thousand foot mountain, but I like to think it was a sign that Zen was better off.

The Busy Season

2010-02-19T06:25:00.000-08:00

It seems like the year is already flying by. While I'm really excited about what this year holds I'm also a little bit intimidated by it.
I just got back from four days at Equine Affaire in Pomona California where I did two talks and two demos with horses. It turns out that the hotel the Equine Affaire people put me in put me in the wrong room, on the floor where the banquets rooms are. This meant little sleep as the wedding parties went on into the night. Me being from a place that is really quiet--out nearest neighbor is a quarter of a mile away--was woken up by every strange sound, which most were. I didn't complain since I assumed the noise was just a normal "city" thing.
Looking at my March and April schedule I don't get a weekend off for two months. I'll be at the Colorado Horse Expo in March for a weekend--they've scheduled 6 demos! I love it. I really do, there's nothing better for me than to work with the animal and to share a different view than people may normally have about what is happening with the animal.
In April we're having our first--of hopefully many--two day seminars in Illinois. The people who are putting this on are working really hard and have found a great venue for it.
My normal class schedule starts in March--looking out at the snow falling right now I can't wait until the spring thaw. Of course March is our snowiest month.
This year I took and passed my Structural Integration Certification exam, so I can now call myself a Board Certified Structural Integrator.
The online course is close to release which is a relief after such a long birthing process.
What's up with you folks?

Are we helping?

2010-01-08T19:57:00.000-08:00

Many years ago I was providing a demo of Equine Rolfing, to a number of people, one of which was a reporter for the Boulder Newspaper. During the demo the horse released some manure and me being the smart aleck I am said "Oh, he's having an emotional release". This made it into the article the reporter wrote, which didn't bode well for my reputation. But I can imagine that in some bizarre way their are people who would read this article and think that when this happens during one of their horses sessions that the horse is releasing held emotions.

I am continually asking myself how I know that what I think is helpful is actually helping.

With structural work we are not looking for simple reflexive indicators from the client that our input is having the desired effect. We look for structural changes to indicate that we are on the correct path.

But these structural changes can not be whimsical--as I would suggest measures such as yawning, licking lips...are--they have to be orderly and have a predictable effect on how the body is used. In other words, if we are releasing a shoulder so the thorax can rise--this is something we want for people, horses and dogs--than we should see the effect of this on the arms and legs in humans, the front and rear legs in quadrupeds.

Our system of working has to follow a scientific criteria of : Observable, Measurable and Repeatable.

Observable -- of course we have to be able to observe the change. If we can't somehow "see" it, than we can't really know that it occurred. This "seeing" could be very precise, I flip a light switch and a light comes on. To more inferred, I leave out cheese and mice come and eat it leaving mouse droppings behind. One problem with observation is that it's prone to some corruption from our desire to "see" things that are not connected to the causal agent as connected, i.e. yawning as an indicator of tension release in the musculoskeletal system from our intervention.

Measurable -- we should be able to measure our observable change. I personally think that releasing the axial skeleton from the upper appendicular skeleton--what I call releasing the shoulders--is paramount to freeing the legs to move (front and rear). Unfortunately, "releasing" while observable and measurable. It is not precisely correlated to the change. I would love to be able to say " if you see a x inch change in the shoulder of a horse towards vertical this will increase their stride length by y inches.

Repeatable -- our observations and measures should be repeatable over a large population. If we say we have a particular intervention that has a resultant change associated with it, then this change should be repeatable over a large population. This is why I stay away from what people call "moves" or "techniques" as any thing other than potential tools to a more global structural change.

If you observe a change or response from your clients to some intervention make sure that you can measure and repeat it before you attribute it to something. Otherwise you risk the possibility of looking very foolish.

Re_thinking old Ideas

2010-01-07T11:12:00.000-08:00

Recently I've been engaged in a new exercise routine: CrossFit. This routine doesn't map well with the normal health club with their use of machines--in CrossFit machines are evil--or to any other "routine" for fitness.
Since CrossFit doesn't map well with what most Rolfers would consider appropriate exercise I've been re-thinking some of these Rolfing myths as I gain more benefit from the CrossFit. For instance most Rolfers don't think that weight lifting, using free weights, is good for us. Yet when we use free weights to exercise we have to learn to balance the weight or get injured. The learning to balance weight is as important, in my mind, as the lifting of the weight. Learning to balance free weights--groceries, bags of grain, dog food, hay...--requires that we use more of our joint surface which "wakes" up the musculature.
Squatting is a big component of CrossFit, yet this is almost completely missing from our western culture of overly tight hip flexors. We bend from the hips to pick something up and strain our back in doing so. Recently my son--the one who got me involved with CrossFit 2 years after he started--and I were repairing fence on our place. We had to replace a wooden post that the horses--part beaver--had eaten down to almost nothing. I tried to pull the post out of the ground and it broke, I couldn't get it to budge. When I told my son to go get the tractor and a chain to pull it out with he asked if he could try. He squatted over the post and used his legs--that same move that is used in deadlifting--and pulled the post out. Proper mechanics!
As I use the mechanics of the squat to get myself out of chairs, lift hay, do anything with weight I started to notice that my knees don't hurt. This got me thinking about how many myths we have about body mechanics and especially conformation and how these thoughts may not be working since we continue to see injuries or should I say breakdowns in bodies that utilize these mechanics.
Through CrossFit I have come into contact with Pose running. (you can Google it) One of the concepts in Pose running is that the point of contact of the runners foot with the ground shouldn't be the heel but the ball of the foot. How many people where very expensive running shoes and still break down? Try 83% of all runners!
Think about the implications for the horse. We normally shoe, trim our horses so the land heel first. Toe first is a fault--I always suspect heel pain in horses that land this way--flat footed is barely acceptable but may actually represent the equine equivalent of the "ball" of the foot. (Let's not go all anthropromorphic with this!)
What do you think?

Equine Affaire Pomona CA Feb. 4-7 2010

2009-12-27T11:12:00.000-08:00

I'm putting the word out that I've been asked to present at the 2010 Equine Affaire in Pomona California. I'll be doing two demos and two talks, two on Saturday and two on Sunday. I'll let you go to the Equine Affaire site http://www.equineaffaire.com and look at the schedule to see when and what, since I don't remember off the top of my head.
If you have any ideas--within the context of what's scheduled--about what I should present please let me know by commenting here.

Old Ideas Die Hard

2009-12-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

I haven't written in awhile, mainly because I had a very busy September and October, followed by a month of pneumonia in November and a slow recovery up to now. I'm feeling great right now, with more energy than I've had in a long time. I made this huge mistake of thinking that I either had the flu--wasn't H1N1 what we were all worried about--or a really bad cold. I was wrong but I had my really good logic for being wrong and I kept repeating my logic for my only having a "cold" until it was mistaken for fact.
This happens a lot in our world, the repetition of an idea until it is mistakenly taken as a fact. It's how advertising works. The message is repeated until we stop thinking about it as a message and start to accept it as a fact. "How do you spell relief? ROLAIDS!". A number of years ago there was a test of some 4th. grade students where they were asked this question and answered this way!!!
There are a number of myths or messages that I have believed in around how bodies, human, canine and equine, should be structured, move and be used that have been exploded recently.
My son introduced--convinced me--to try a "new" way of exercising called CrossFit, which does not really comply well with my myths about how the human body should be used. One exercise in particular is the "squat" which ones learns to do using only body weight, later progressing to using free weights. I rebelled against the squat because my myth told me that it was bad for my achy knees. (This is a particularly important point. I rebelled about this new concept while my myth concept produced achy knees! Am I dumb or what?) After squatting the CrossFit way for a couple of weeks--it's part of my pre-workout warm up--I noticed that my knees didn't ache anymore, no pain going up stairs, especially if I changed my walk a little to a very un-rolf like movement.
I won't bore you with the details of a squat--you could look at almost any indigenous non chair owning culture and see it in everyday life, or look at olympic weight lifters--I'm leaving that for an article you can find at www.animalsi.com.
One thing I will say is that the squat mechanics are very much like a horse that toes out in the rear. You know that one that isn't cow hocked but had a rear leg sagital plane that's laterally rotated, which is considered a comformational fault. I wonder if these horses, like Olympic weight lifters, have adapted to this confirmation to be able to lift/move more weight without damaging their stifles?
What do you think?

Form to Function

2009-11-02T09:06:00.000-08:00

There's an old Osteopathic saying that Form dictates Function and Function will alter Form. What this means at its simplest is that a bird can fly because it has the form to do so, and that it's flying--the function--will contribute to this form.
We see this quite often when working with bodies, especially those that are injured in some way. Take for instance a horse that has a problem with its fetlock that makes it painful to use that joint. The nervous system will change the function of the leg to reduce the pain it experiences from the fetlock. The change in function will result in a change in the form. Initially the functional change will require some muscular effort, as this goes on the myofascia will change to support the new pattern without muscle effort. At some point in time the original pain may resolve but the new "holding pattern"--shortened myofascia--will mimic the painful gait with the appearance that the horse still has pain. Until the myofascial restriction is released the horse will move like it has fetlock pain. This could cause a lot of unneeded vet bills as myofascial phantom is chased down.
On the other hand there is the possibility that one of us therapists is called in to work with this horse. If we decide that the holding pattern is the culprit--that is our training--and release it only to find that the painful fetlock is still painful and the horse gets worse.
It's a Catch 22, damned if you do damned if you don't. What I do in these situations is explain this Form to Function principle to the animal's owner and let them take the gamble. Sometimes it works out fine that the horse--in this example--is much better after the release, sometimes they're worse, and sometimes they're worse and then get better.
When I say the animal is worse it's relative to how they were moving before you released the restriction, the body will rebuild that holding pattern over time. In fact if you are experiencing time when you are always removing the same holding pattern you'll need to look somewhere else for the cause.

Becoming and Artist

2009-09-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

Lately I've had a desire to learn how to draw. This comes about when I'm trying to do an animation or an illustration for a course or article. The problem I'm having is that I don't think I know how to draw and therefore have to acquire a new skill set or sets that will accumulate to my knowing how to draw.
My Rolfing studio in Longmont has white boards all over where I can draw, make notes to myself, illustrate a point to a client. I even painted 70 sf (that's 7 feet by 10 feet) of one wall with whiteboard paint so I can draw on it. I framed this area of the wall with Japanese style Shoji panels
so it looks like you're looking through to the wall. I can draw little things on the wall like a landscape and when I don't like it I just erase it. An ever changing picture.
I also project things onto this during classes--like a horse--and point out, by drawing on the image, places where I see something of interest.
The problem I've had though is that I still think that I need to acquire something to be able to be an artist. What I forget is that there's the art that seems to add to something, like drawing or painting, and that which removes or uncovers the art, like sculpting in marble.
It's this later type of art that we practice in our body therapy work. We look at our client and "see" that there are things--adhesions, holding patterns...--that if removed the art form of the body will change.
There's a poet who writes his poetry by blacking out the words in a newspaper that he doesn't need for the poem. This is what we do, in our work. Don't you think?

Lifting Weights

2009-09-19T08:08:00.000-07:00

I've been involved in an exercise program called Crossfit for a few months now. It started with my son, who's been doing it for a couple of years, convincing me to get involved. He's been my "coach" since he's taken weight lifting classes in school and was a TA for the instructor. But now that he's gone off to college I had to find someone else to be the coach.
To start off with CrossFit you go through a series of classes which introduce you to the exercises that are used. It's all free weights, no machines allowed, and pullups, pushups, squats... Each with their requirements for precision in how they are executed. It is dependent on the coach to assure that one learns how to perform these with precision, so you don't get hurt.
What I have found is that the language or jargon if you will, is very specific and associated with an ability to perform atheletically at a high level. For instance the Squat has a very precise set of requirements to be a CrossFit Squat: chest up, lumbar curve, tibia perpendicular to the ankle... If you aren't doing it this way, it's not a squat. Squat has a precise definition.
Our work with body's also has a vocabulary that is precise. The proper use of our precise vocabulary is one way that we can tell if one of our colleagues is well trained or educated. Becoming familiar with our vocabulary takes effort, that's what learning or education is; the expenditure of effort to acquire some new skill or knowledge. Once we've acquired the knowledge or skill its application requires much less effort.

Pushing a Rope and more Collection

2009-09-03T13:45:00.000-07:00

When I was in engineering school to become an electronics engineer, we had a joke about mechanical engineering that the only thing you needed know about it was "you don't push a rope...".
This week I decided to re-arrange my horse paddock so that the gate to get out was closer to the manure pile. My son has left for college which means that I have picked up all of his chores as well as mine which has doubled my manure moving time. So, being the inventive type I decided that the gate being closer to the manure's final destination would save me time. I also had 20 tons of pee gravel delivered for the paddock and needed to open it so I could get the tractor in.
My ordeal was pretty simple: disassemble the panels, re-arrange them and re-assemble them. No big deal except the 12 foot long panels are pretty heavy and the ground isn't flat.
By now you're thinking what the heck does this have to do with collection? Here it is; the panels hook together with one panel having a fixed prong (male) on the bottom and a "U" shaped bolt the moves up and down on the top, while the other panel has two receptacles for these (female) that are fixed. What you do is pick up the the panel with the receptacle and drop it down over the prong on the other and then position the "U" shaped bolt over the top receptacle and drop it to connect the two panels. The problem is that when the ground is dropping away from the connection it's not easy to position the top attachments without raising the end that's dropping away. Easy enough when there's two people working on the problem, one lines things up while the other lifts the other end up so they come together. So you go from this ----|/---- to this ---||--- the right side needs to come up in this example.
What I found was it was impossible for me to be able to lift the weight of the panel by pulling from one end such that the other end came up. But this is what we are expected to believe happens in the "top line" theory of collection. The front of the horse is lifted from the rear by the back muscles.
I'm going to build a model of this theory and test the amount of force required. Of course I could just do the math, if I remembered how.

Stretching Harms Horses?

2009-08-25T16:07:00.000-07:00

In a recent study carried out in Britain and reported in the Veterinary Journal, horses can actually be harmed by too much stretching. I've written about my thoughts that stretching could injure a horse and my concern that there are so many books and videos on the market that show a rote routine for stretching that doesn't involve the animal. I wrote a chapter on "myofascial stretching" in my book because of this concern.
The study that was conducted used 30 horses in 3 groups: a control group no stretching, a group that received periodic stretching and a group that was aggressively stretched each day. It would be unfair to suggest that there is some universally accepted discription of stretching with controls on the range the leg is taken through, etc. that were used in this study, but there aren't and therefore we don't really know what the study's authors thought was acceptable.
The study concluded that horses that are stretched every day will actually begin to lose joint ROM, as exhibited in movement. Horses that are not stretched do not improve their ROM or lose it. Those that are not stretched every day will have a ROM improvement.
The authors of the study attributed the decrease in ROM in the everyday group to delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMS, which makes no sense to me. DOMS is what you feel a day or so after vigorous exercise which was once attributed to lactic acid--this is wrong--but is probably more likely attributable to muscle cell rupture and the release of histamines and calcium into the intra-cellular space.
What I worry about in the case of aggressive stretching is the violation of anatomical barriers both hard and soft. I'll put an article up on the website on this in the next few days.

Moving Hay

2009-08-20T07:32:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year around here where we have to find hay to buy, luckily this year there is plenty, and get it moved to our place. We purchase the hay in "stacks" of 160 bales and hire a retriever truck to go get it and bring it to our place. It not inexpensive at $0.50 a bale.
This morning I went out to the hay stack to meet the retriever, the hay is only about 1/2 mile from my place so I got a break on the cost. The retriever is a truck with, what looks like, a fork lift on the back with the addition of a set of "claws" to hold the stack.
The driver of the retriever is an artist in his field, it was a pleasure to watch him position the retriever at the stack, pick it up and place it. I was freaking out that he was going to run into a horse trailer parked near by, or knock over the stack of stacks, over spill my hay over the side. What I was freaking out about was the ease with which he went about his job and how precise he was in the execution of it.
The battery in my truck went dead so I hitched a ride back to my place with him to get someone to come jump me. As we drove I asked him what he did for a living besides moving hay. "This is it. I do this from January until November most years." That's how he got his 10,000 hours and became a Master at hay retrieval!
I watched again in awe as he placed the stack outside of my barn, within six inches of where I asked him to. Now I get to watch in awe as my 18 year old son moves 160 60# bales of hay the 60 feet from where it is to where it will be stored. This is his last chance to make money before he leaves for college in two days. which means I get to move the next stack myself. Having horses at home requires a lot of time and energy!
On another note, I've decided to start using Twitter, the link is www.twitter.com/animalsi

Simplicity Accompanies Mastery

2009-08-08T09:21:00.001-07:00

It seems that one of the Hallmarks of a master of any discipline is the simplicity in how they perform their particular thing. It doesn't matter what the thing is; painting a house, gardening or writing software.
When I was an engineering manager at Hewlett Packard, we had a joke about making our designs more simple. "Take out parts one at a time until the design stops working and then put in the last part. That's the simplest it can be." Of course that's a joke!
Think about this joke in the context of your body therapy work. How many times have you tried and tried with no change occurring, and then when you were about to give up the a shift in the tissue happened? I don't know about you, but I usually explain this as the effort prior to the shift was the setup--I call this chopping vegetables, like when you're cooking--and providing the needed opening for the change, when in reality it may just have been wasted effort.
But I also spend time--as I'm sure you all do--in reflection about my work with my clients. Luckily, after 15 years, I've been able to make changes to my work to the point where it is fairly simple and efficient and is predicated on a philosophy of less is more. (The book "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell explores this in great detail.)
In my courses I try and force simplicity in the way the participants work, by informing them
about the need to work within the animal's "adaptive capacity". Most of the time I fear that this
is simply too complicated a theory for people beginning this work. However, during the advanced course I've been thrilled with the "aha's" that the participants get, and how their work becomes much more refined. (I also force this in this course by having the participants work on fewer horses, trading off with each other. I tried this in some beginning courses this year with less impressive results.)
The point of this post is that we can all learn to be more efficient in how we work. To do this we need to reflect on our work, the amount of time we spend touching the client, the amount of time we think about what/where we are going to touch and the making the ratio of thinking to touching closer to 1. Simplicity = thinking/touching. capice?

The Nerve of it All

2009-07-25T15:45:00.000-07:00

One of the course subjects of the recent Equine Advanced course was working with the nervous system. This isn't working with a nervous horse, but rather working with the nerves themselves and understanding where they may be contributing to the many of the common issues we see in horses.
Anyone who has had a lameness exam to the extent that the vet does a nerve block, knows that the nerves contribute to the perception of pain. Hell anyone who's hit their "funny bone" knows this. What if many of the common movement problems we experience with horses are caused by a problem with entrapped nerves?
Eight years ago I started on a journey of working with nerves in my human practice when my friend and colleague Christoph Summer introduced me to this work. At the time the only book on the subject was in French.
Three years ago I attended a 3 day workshop developed by another rolfer and chiropractor Don Hazen, who has been investigating the implications of nerve entrapment in postural issues.
It was after this workshop that I started to develop the work with animals which requires some "translation" from the human context.
If you are interested in this check the website www.animalsi.com in the next couple of weeks or sign up for the newsletter on the site to be notified when new material is put up.

I Learned to Moon Walk

2009-07-07T07:30:00.001-07:00

I have a client who is a professional dancer and Michael Jackson fan. She told me that when she was a young girl she bought the Michael Jackson video where he revealed Moon Walking to us. I think it was Thriller?
She watched this video, over and over, rewinding it until she was able to pick out the particulars of how he did the Moon Walk. Me being me, asked her to show me. She Moon Walked across the carpet in my studio, not hard wood floors, carpet! Then she told me the secret and coached me in how to do it. I Moon Walked! Now this might not seem like a big accomplishment, but when you're as big as I am, it is impressive.
But that's not what I want to write about. In Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book "Outliers", he talks about the need to practice a craft--10,000 hours--to become competent in it. What my client did was analyze the video and the movement of Michael's feet to determine the mechanics of Moon Walking. She spent hours rewinding and mimicking his movements until she determined the secret and was able to pass it on to me.
This is what we pay teachers for. Those of us who teach spent hours studying, researching and practicing so we can figure out some of the secrets to our profession and pass them on to others so that it looks simple.

When pain limits your motion

2009-06-23T15:51:00.000-07:00

I have a wonderful human client--I feel like I need to clarify the species--who has extreme shoulder restrictions on one side. I don't want to write about the mechanics of the human shoulder girdle--the most complicatedly orchestrated joint complex in the body--suffice it to say if one part of the girdle isn't working properly it can reflect pain to other parts of the girdle.
In the case of this client there was/is a restriction in the soft tissue scapula on thorax portion of the shoulder girdle which prevents the shoulder from rotating when the humerus is abducted over the head--the scapula has to rotate to accommodate the deltoid tuberosity's "bumping" into the glenoid fossa. What happens is that the nervous system rather than damaging the joint causes the arm to abduct across the clavicle when the arm reaches 105+ degrees.
The client wants to raise his arm. This is his measure of success or shoulder freedom. But each time he raises his arm to test two things occur: 1. the movement is prevented by the lack of scapula rotation so the arm is abducted across the clavicle 2. the pattern of abherrant motion is more ingrained in the nervous system.
I see the same thing happening in the horse world, where riders are not happy with their horse's foreleg extension and try to stretch the leg to increase this. The problem is that the horse's gleno-humeral joint has to accomodate the greater and lessor tuberosities and rotate out of the way. When we passively stretch the leg--the only kind of stretching we can do with an animal--we are not engaging the nervous system to rotate the scapula and can impinge, during the stretch, on the gleno-humeral joint.
Often these horses with restricted movement that have been "over" stretched will have over developped and hypertonic supra and infra spinati, which are gleno-humeral stabilizers.
To increase fore limb extension we have to assure that the horse has scapula that are free to rotate.

More danger of anthropomorphism

2009-06-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

Those of you who read this blog--thanks for your time--know that I am concerned about how we assume that therapeutic interventions used with humans are being taken without translation into the animal therapy world. I call this "anthropomorphism".
The latest trend in this has been in the idea of "core" muscular strength as a deterrent to back pain in humans. This idea is now being promoted in the equine world. There are now such things as equine "pilates" that are pilates in use of the name only. It is a sad situation to me, that two medical professionals decided that a series of stretches, using enticements like reaching for a carrot, to get the horse to move in a non-traditional way is the same as Pilates. This is an obvious rip off of a branded name.
But beyond this there is still the problem of taking the concepts of "core" strength and equating it to something useful for the equine, when, in fact, it is still a controversy in the human context as pointed out in this NY Times Article: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/core-myths/?em
Let me get off my soap box and state that anytime we humans or our animals can be encouraged to perform non-traditional movements our body will benefit from it. Getting up from the computer and stretching, teaching your horse carrot stretches or better yet clicker, taking your dog for a swim will all tend to increase the options for movement available to the body. Increasing the movement options--or as Rolfers say "adaptive capacity"--allows the body to choose from a greater repetoire of movements to remain energetically efficient.
Any thoughts?

Fascination

2009-06-18T09:09:00.001-07:00

My dog, the star of my canine mfr video "Jake", has come up with a new game. He goes into our backyard. This causes the rabbits to run under the deck to get away from him. This in turn keeps Jake on the deck looking and smelling through the spacing in the decking to "chase" the rabbits. He runs from one place to another, chasing after the rabbits, as they move to avoid his scrutiny. If one of the rabbits decides that the best solution to the dog is to stay still he scratches at the deck to get them to move. It frustrates the you know what out of him but he loves it. Or should I say he's addicted to it. It's really not much different to my addiction to TV or the internet.
As I'm writing this Jake and me are outside on the deck. He's taking a break from the rabbits. Perhaps he got bored with his cure for his boredom, who knows why he's on break?

It has me contemplating how much of my time is spent in my habitual pattern. This is something we talk about in Meditation as well as Rolfing. How we become habituated to our simple activities, the easy ones, or easy way of doing things. I have taken this a little bit further to suggest that this is how we survive. Through the a minimum expenditure of energy to accomplish a task. If we habituate something than it becomes "natural" and easy. From the Rolfing body view we can say that this habituation originates in an avoidance of a restriction, which makes it easier to follow a certain movement path. In meditation we could say that each action plants a karmic seed which will come to fruition later when the same conditions arise. In other words if Jake scratches on the deck to get at the rabbits and I get mad at him this plants a seed of being mad. The next time he scratches--the condition--that karmic seed of mad can come to fruition. If through meditation I become familiar with my mind and its speed I can make a break the habit and decide if I want to get mad or ? That plants the seed of decision which eventually may over plant the seeds of mad. Complicated eh?
Back to the body's habitual patterns. My premise is that a body will not, should not change what we consider a habitual pattern if that pattern is energetically efficient, unless we propose to it one that is more efficient. We can experience this on the micro level as a guide to our work at a more macro level. We all approach our work with hoping to see a change in our client's structure, movement, etc.. This is the macro. We all have to try and translate this macro strategy into a series of smaller micro interventions that will hopefully accumulate into the resulting macro change. Unfortunately we sometimes get hooked into a habitual pattern while working with our client that is not supporting the micro.
What I am saying is that every micro intervention has to be accepted as an energy efficient change by the body to be accepted. If not than we risk depleting the client's available adaptive capacity and not getting the results we hoped for.
My suggestion to people who train with me is to make small interventions. If these are accepted--as evidenced by local tissue change--than continue with that. If they are not accepted stop and reconsider the local intervention in favor or a different one that is accepted.
This is contrary to what happens in most massage settings or anything that promotes a routine--read habituated pattern--that does not allow for local evaluation of efficacy. This is a sacrifice of the local in hopes of a larger global change--usually one where the client becomes "spaced" out. I'm advocating for local change in support of a more global one. With this strategy we are working with the body and allowing it to direct its own change, one that benefits it more energetically.
Any thoughts?

Where have the Innovators gone?

2009-06-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

I've been on this tantrum about the lack of adaptation of human therapies to animals. For those of you who haven't been bored by this in the past, what I mean is that too often human therapies are applied to animals without thinking about how they may need to be changed/adapted to better work with the animal. For instance, massage therapists who are taught to keep their hands on the animal for the entire massage, similar to what occurs with human massage training, with no thought to how this affects the animal's nervous system.
There was a time when we had some pioneers in the animal world who were willing to "translate" their human therapeutic specialty to animals. For instance Linda Tellington-Jones, who pioneered the use of Feldenkreis techniques to the animal world, especially horses. Some would suggest that Jack Meagher did this with the work of Travell and Simmons and Trigger Point therapy, but I disagree that this was translated--it was simple copied over with some mistakes, like "rotator cuff"...
Recently I saw two examples of simply taking a human therapy's title and applying it to animals: Pilates for Horses, Yoga for dogs. The Pilates for horses is really troubling to me, since as a Rolfer I am concerned when someone who is not trained in Rolfing calls their work this. (It's an irrational response but one I acknowledge having.) This so called pilates therapy for horses consists of some simple stretches that are induced by using a treat--this is the only way my horses get any "finger" food, they have to work for it by stretching. (When I was first developping my equine series I videoed my horse before and after while inducing these "treat" stretches since they repeatable and the tissue response was evidently different.)
Calling these new interventions by a name associated with human therapy--pilates or yoga--is a misleading way of subsuming the reputation of the human therapy and suggesting that these animal "versions" have the same therapeutic benefit as the human one enjoys.
This use of a human therapies branding leads to a dumbing down of the therapy when it is applied to animals, which in turn leads to a dumbing down of the therapist who applys these therapies with humans. What I mean is that the animal therapist stops their critical thinking about how the animal views the world, moves through the world and is motivated. I read another article in which an equine massage therapist was qouted as saying that horses will, I'm paraphrasing hold emotional stress in their shoulders. just like humans in stressful jobs will. Huh? To me this kind of statement can only come from ignorance of the difference in how humans and horses view their environment.

How much translation is needed?

2009-05-26T18:35:00.001-07:00

I've been working on a tantrum lately about how little the animal body therapy world is doing to develop itself as a unique industry. Rather than approaching the quadruped's body and mind as unique and requiring it's own approach, we too often just take the work being done with humans and assume that they'll work with animals--by this I mean animal quadrupeds.
In the past I worried that animal massage therapists were simply taking human techniques and applying them to animals without any translation for the structural and nervous control differences of between the species. Anthropomorphism in body therapy if you will. This even goes so far as to have the ridiculous measure of time--a marketing measure, not a therapeutic one--applied to the animal in the same way it is to the human. I mean where did 1 hour come about as anything more than a possible way to sell oneself? Chiropractors don't sell their services by time! Neither do medical doctors or dentists or farriers... but the animal therapist copying the human therapist sells their services by the hour, rather than the benefit or by surface area of the animal. OR, perhaps more appropriately the animal's ability to remain focused on the work.
The latest contribution to my tantrum is an article I read on "Pilates" for horses. This was a report on how one of my favorite researchers has fallen into the trance of thinking that work developed for humans--in this case core stabilization, which I'm not sure about--can be used with horses with translation. This requires that the quadruped's transverse abdominus acts the same in both species. The the quadrupedal "core" is the same as the human "core". (It seems to this simpe Rolfer that standing on two legs is more difficult than standing on four, and that human back pain may be caused by a completely different action than bi-pedal pain is.)
I'm really concerned that unless we animal therapists start to do our own research and develop our own methods that we'll be marginalized.
It's time to feed the horses and walk in the mud.

Caution Pay Attention

2009-05-11T18:30:00.000-07:00

I just finished instructing an basic myofascial equine course. We worked with horses at the Colorado Horse Rescue (CHR). The staff at CHR picked a number of horses, two per student, for us to work with, when I spotted one that I actually liked the look of. It turns out that this horse was a "surrender", which means that the people the had it previously gave it up voluntarily for some reason. The horse had a very bad wind sucking addiction, the horse would crib on every wooden post in the pasture. When I inquired about the horse to the manager of the day I was told he had a vicious habit of biting people.
In the fifteen years I've been rolfing horses I've drifted towards wanting to work with horses, or dogs, that are more "challenged" in their relationship to humans than to those that are simply having performance problems. So, the next day we brought out this troubled horse to work with him. When working these kinds of horses it's imperative that one be fully aware of what is happening. I like to work with them alone, in a round pen is best, with the handler outside the pen so I can fully concentrate on the horse.
I worked with the horse for two sessiosn with no real attitude problems. There were a couple of minor bucks when I tried to work around a vertebral subluxation, but nothing too dramatic.
By the third session the horse came up to the pasture gate to meet me when I went out to get him. I was really confident that he was sooo much better that I stopped paying attention to him as a potentially dangerous horse and worked on his back. It happened with lightening speed, all I felt was the teeth racking my back. Luckily--this is actually a terrible thing to say--the horse had cribbed so much that he had worn his teeth down to knubs and what I felt on my back was the knubs scratching my back. It was actually kind of pleasant. There was no aggression in what this horse did, it was just his way of protecting himself, and when it was over I, assisted by one of the students who is very fine horseman, was able to continue to work with the horses back, no more trouble.
Ok, a little more trouble came when I decided to work with the horse's adductors in a way I never work with them and I got a lightning face kick to the lower leg. It sounded horrendous, but didn't really hurt that much and in fact I don't even have a mark on my leg--thick boned Italian.
The point I want to make is that horses are fast and their size relative to us makes them dangerous. We need to always be aware of where we are with them and what they are telling us.
In 15 years I've been bit twice now and kicked twice, by two horses not a bad record, but I would prefer that it was still at one time instead of two.
Be aware and be careful.

Playing Hooky

2009-04-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling a little guilty, since I'm supposed to be finishing an article for a magazine and instead I'm writing here. But that's not the only thing that's keeping me away from the article. I've been working in a number of animations for the online course, which leads me to what I wanted to write about.
One of the things I like to do, to get inspiration for doing the animations, is look at the work of other people. I was having a problem with a "particle system", which I'm using to illustrate an embryology concept--this is one of those things that Rolfers seem to all do when we are explaining fascia, that being we resort to embryology to show that the body is not made up of "parts"--and searched the net to see if anyone else had solved this problem. What I found was a great website for a film/media school that had a montage of their work. www.brandnewschool.com
At the beginning of the montage the video had a roll of welcome text in different languages. Each language was in a different color and each sentence was on it's own line. So, the first line in each language came first. Then the second line in the paragraph...so that the languages were interspersed and you had to pick yours out of each paragraph. At first this was really confusing to me, but soon, within one or two lines my eye was locked on to the white english text.
This really interested me, so I ran the montage again and tried to not read the english but the concentrate on the german. Again, my eyes locked on the english.
Now I'm fascinated and wonder if this is indicative of how we see things we "know" but don't see things we don't know. You know?
Do any of you know if there's research into this kind of thing--beyond "what the blib do we know..."?
Ok, back to the article.

How much should we "dumb-down"?

2009-04-15T17:08:00.000-07:00

When I decided to leave engineering for health care, I took a year long anatomy and physiology course at the University of Colorado. Since I was late in applying to school I had to get on the "wait" list for the class. There were 300 people in the auditorium when I went to the first class!
I asked the professor after the first lecture if there was any real chance to get in the class. He, told me to wait until after the first exam and there would be plenty of room. He was right. After the first exam over 50% of the class dropped since it was so hard.
When the professor was challenged about how difficult the exam was he responded " So many of you want to be doctors. If I ever have to go into surgery and one of you are the surgeon I will be very comfortable knowing you know your A&P.".
This is how I run my classes, they are for people who are willing to push themselves to learn what they don't already know.
It seems like we--this is the collective we of people who instruct others--try to dumb things down so much that I wonder if we know what we are talking about. This will only harm the field of animal body therapy.

What to do?

2009-04-04T18:24:00.000-07:00

These days people are all trying to figure out how to make ends meet. This may mean that they won't be spending as much on their and their animals alternative health care. This will be mostly true if they don't perceive a direct relationship between the therapy and they achievement of some goal they may have.
When I worked for Hewlett Packard as an engineering manager the country went through another recession, companies weren't buying our products. During this time I heard about the strategy that Intel Corporation had for these types of economic downturns; they spent more money on the research and development to be able to produce better products and lead the market once there was a turn around in the economy.
We can and should do something similar to Intel, by investing in our own training. By gaining a new skill or, better yet, improving one we already have, we'll be poised to help our clients when they are able to afford our work again.
Spend time keeping in touch with your clients so they know you are still out there and that you are continuing with your development. You want to be on the "top" of their mind when they think about alternative therapies for their animals again.
Take time to get together with your colleagues and share our knowledge with them. If you belong to a discussion group participate in it. I recently started a discussion forum on www.animalsi.com please feel free to join it. I am asked every week for referrals to good body therapists, this is a way to make yourself known.
I like to spend my down time going over my course notes from my previous trainings, re-reading books, and looking for new ideas.
The most important thing is to stay involved with your work, keep your hands tuned up and let people know you're still out there.

The 10,000 hour rule

2009-03-29T08:04:00.000-07:00

When we look at the performance of horses in sports like racing, or sports that have a definitive measure rather than a subjective one, horse performance has not improved much over the years. This lack of performance enhancement becomes even more pronounced when we compare it to the advances in human athletic performance. I used to think that this discrepancy was caused by the fact that the coaches of a human athlete can communicate more effectively--verbally--with their athlete than a horse trainer can with theirs. I think this is a factor. But two things have happened in the last week to make me aware of two other possible causes: reading Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" and watching Dr. G. Heuschmann's video "If Horses Could Speak" for the umpteenth time.

In Gladwell's book he dismantles our long held myth that high performing individuals--from athletes to the Beatles--are born with a natural talent that pre-disposes them to sucess. This myth leads many of us to believe that we'll never be extraordinary--except in our Mom's eye--because we weren't born with "natural" talent. Rather than natural talent being the deciding factor, Gladwell suggests that the opportunity to practice that thing that we'll be noted for. In the case of an athlete it's practicing their sport. For the Beatles it the opportunity to play music together. He further suggests that the amount of the time--therefore the opportunity--has to equal 10,000 hours; this is the magical number of hours we need to apply to become an "expert" in our chosen art. (I won't spend more time on the book; you can read it for yourself.)

The second event in my transformation was watching Dr. Heuschmann's video. I was asked to attend a showing of the video to a group of dressage riders by one of our local trainers, to help answer any anatomy questions, a very nice opportunity. While I watched the video I was struck by a point raised by one of the interviewed trainers on the difference in the way we train a dressage horse today and the way they train at the Spanish Riding School. At the Spanish School they wait until the horse is ten years old before starting them in any real training. This allows them to develop mentally and physically for the demands of riding. In the world of modern competition horses are started as 2 and 3 year olds. I have certainly bought 3 year old horses with 90 days of training on them thinking they were ready to move on. Has the Spanish School somehow learned the 10,000 hour rule?

Is this rule the reason Sea Biscuit did so well? In his early life he was used as a training aid to other horses, racing against them and forced to lose. The number of these races he ran could have gave him the hours he required.

The 10,000 hour rule doesn't just apply to rock stars and horses; it applies to dogs and body therapists. If you wish to become world class you need to put in the time in practicing your chosen art. But this is not just elapsed time, it has to be time with a feedback mechanism to assure you are on the right track. The Beatle's had their fans and the music critics.

Something to think about.

Are we stretching into injury?

2009-03-01T16:27:00.000-08:00

Those of you who know me or have read my book, know I am not a big fan of strain and hold type stretching. One problem that occurs in the stretching of animals is the "anthropromorphic" view that they are the same as humans and will not allow us to harm them. I've seen photos on the covers of books where the animal's legs are being levered into an anatomical barrier.
Even without that the idea the we can simply stretch our muscles into some type of opening without engaging the nervous system is seriously flawed. This why I advocate for PNF stretching or Muscle Energy or what I called myofascial stretching in the book.
A study done by the Australian military--12000 army recruits in the study--where one portion of the study stretched before exercise and the other did not, resulted in a higher injury rate for those that stretched.
This article in the New York times suggests that same type of problem. So, the next time you think you want to stretch ourselve, dog or horse before a competition you may want to re-consider.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/sports/playmagazine/112pewarm.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=stretching&st=cse

More Collection

2009-02-23T10:33:00.000-08:00

I received this email response to one of the entries here. This is pretty auspicious since I was going to write something about collection today for the blog. So, I thought I would answer it for a wider audience. I’ll have to write about what I wanted to say today later.

I was able to take a quick look at your blog and was interested in the
entry about collection. This is something I have been making a matter of
study for some time so it caught my eye. I am not a proffesional dressage
rider by any stretch, but classical riding and Haute Ecole have been a
personnal passion for many years. I have studied mostly the french and
spanish schools and find little to nothing of true colletion in modern
dressage riding.
I am by no means an expert in anatomy or biomechanics, so sometimes i
have to admit what I read goes right over my head and I can get confused.
I have been reading alot of Dr. Deb Bennets writings but I am also
increasingly a fan of Dr. Claytons. I recently purchased her "core
training' dvd.
I would love to get more of your opinion on Dr. Debs understandings, it
seemed from your post you maybe don't agree with her, or were you saying
you felt their was some truth in all three of the theories? I know deb
talks alot about raising the base of the neck and freeing up the
forehand,and I know a couple of her students that also study the work of
Dr. Clayton and I havven't heard anyone complaining that they couldn't
reconcile both.
Like i said though this stuff can go over my head pretty quickly and I can
sometimes think 2 people are agreeing with each other only to find out
later they don't agree, soooo if in all your free time (lol) you would be
interested in sharing anymore of what you have found to be similar and at
odds in these two theories I would love to hear from you.

Collection is probably THE most misunderstood aspect of horsemanship. If you haven’t gone to the website www.animalsi.com and read the chapter from my next book on collection (it’s coming out in the IASI Journal) I encourage you to do so, I’m going to write here assuming you have.

Before I start I want to assure you that I am a very big fan of Dr. Deb. I’ve been following her work for 30 or years, since she was writing for this Arabian Horse newspaper that I can’t remember the name of. I still think her three volume set on confirmation is the best, but disagree with her use of “woody” to describe equine movement.

The theories, or schools, of collection have three components to them:

1. when in the horse’s training they take place

2. how the body looks and acts

3. how to train the horse to arrive at collection.

(It seems like the latest part of training is the appropriation of the misguided idea of “core” strength from the human athletic training and applying it to the equine. I’m saying “misguided” because I’m not a believer in the core strength concepts and as such may be leading the parade of the misguided!)

One of the main problems with understanding collection is, as you point out, reconciling all of the confusing viewpoints and terminology that’s used; rounding the rear, pushing from behind, round frame… It’s like that telephone game where people get the message completely scrabbled by the time it reaches the end of the line. I contribute this to the westerner’s inability to listen. I have this problem in spades, I’m a visual learner so when someone says “round” that may mean one thing to them but a completely other one to me.

I thought that collection and round was the same thing, until I rode a collected horse! I used to take dressage lessons during the winter when I wasn’t conditioning my endurance horse on the trails. (From Dr. Deb’s confirmation books there is a description of how to attain “round” that I used to think was the way to collect a horse—squeeze into closed hands, like a toothpaste tube with a cap on…—but I now know this is inaccurate.) The feeling of riding a collected horse is one of power coming up through the withers. Do you agree? Not, of being pushed from behind.

To remove some of this confusion people have resorted to using bio-mechanical terms, which if they don’t understand them or if their audience doesn’t understand them, can result in more confusion. (I’m developing an online course which will explain some of the more commonly used bio-mechanical terms as well as the kinesiology.) Understanding physics, (statics and dynamics are called “mechanics” in physics) is a pre-requisite for fully understanding bio-mechanics.

To answer your question more directly, I think that the top line theory and the bottom line theory both have merit and problems.

The top line theory is what could be called “classic” where the idea is that the horse “pulls” the forehand back onto the rear end. (This looks quite a bit like a speed skater bent over while racing.)This was tested by Dr. Clayton’s lab with Paul Belasik riding the horse into a Levade. Obviously an upper level movement, which implies the horse, was in training for some time. Which insinuates; that many horses may have not been able to make it to the end of the training to where they could do this maneuver. There lies the rub for me in the top line theory, the dropout rate due to injury to horses in training.

The bottom line theory, I call it this only to contrast the two and in response to something Dr. Deb wrote that there is no top line muscular development required to achieve… This theory is based on supposition of a “ring” of muscles that encircle the thorax and cooperate to bring the rear end under the horse. There are two problems with this, one is the coordination required by the horse’s nervous system to achieve this and the actual inclusion of the psoas muscle as part of the ring. (The psoas is postulated as a prime stabilizer of the equine spine in this theory; I see it as a flexor of the femur and a reset mechanism for the spine’s rotation. So, this is where I have one basic disagreement.) Again, with this theory there is a lack of training methodology and long term general success.

Both of these theories seem to neglect some bio-mechanics, motivation for the horse and some basic musculo-nervous physiology.

The last theory is the thoracic sling theory that has been put forward by me since 1994, long enough ago that I don’t know who I stole it from, and by Dr. Clayton’s labs’ work, as documented in 2003? (I don’t have my references in front of me, or even behind me.) This theory, as I propose it not necessarily Dr. Clayton’s view, is that the thorax is propelled upwards and backwards by the rhythmic contraction of the thoracic “sling” muscles… I’ll let you read about this in the chapter that’s online at www.animasi.com.

In some sort of conclusion, I think that thoracic sling theory is the unifying theory for collection of the normal ridden horse and if training methods are used to free the shoulders that we will see more horses make it to the level of Levade. That both the top and bottom line theories describe places on this path of training, with the bottom line coming before the top line in the training cycle.

While this discussion is fun for me, I am not a trainer of dressage horses and don’t offer any real suggestions on how to train. What I am more interested in is how do the therapists that I train use this information to make intelligent well thought out interventions to help the horse. Freeing the shoulders is incredibly easy to accomplish and should be incorporated in all horse training.

Thanks for spending the time reading this and for sparking the discussion.

Online Course Commercial

2009-02-05T08:54:00.000-08:00

Signal to Noise

2009-01-17T08:22:00.000-08:00

Have you ever struggled to tune in a weak radio station? Static fills the speakers as you strain to hear the station while tweaking the dial. Of course today's radios jump electronically to the station with the strongest signal when you push the next button. In electronics what determines a "strong" signal is the signal to noise ratio. Signal is also called intelligence. Noise is what we want to reject or filter out.
When we work with out client they are going through a very similar process of trying to determine what in our input/touch is intelligent and should be listened to and what is extraneous noise and should be rejected. Each time the client makes a decision about this their ability to adapt or change is reduced a little--I subscribe to the theory that we have only so much adaptive capacity and that it is not measured in time but in decisions like described here. If we are inputting a lot of extraneous noise into the client's body, through touching them with no purpose to the touch--petting--than they will use their adaptive capacity on filtering out that touch and not gain as much benefit. If on the other hand, no pun, we are sure about what we are trying to achieve with our touch than our signal to noise ratio will be high and the client will benefit more, if only in that we did the filtering for them.
The next time you are working with a client ask yourself before you touch them if you are sure of what you are trying to achieve with our intervention.

Collection Part 2

2009-01-14T08:03:00.000-08:00

I finally got the video "If Horses Could Speak" which I ordered in December! The video goes along with the Dr. Heuschmann's book "Tug of War: Classical vs Modern Dressage". If you are a therapist reading this blog save the $60 and buy the book first. The video is more like a documentary of what Dr. Heuschmann believes to be "classic". It is a beautiful piece of work from a film perspective, and wonderful to watch. It won't however teach you anything that you can use in your therapy sessions. I buy these kinds of things to use in my course, so they pay for themselves in the long run. Even as a rider you won't learn any new or old ways to train your horse.
Dr. Rolf stated that if you wanted to come to a new conclusion about something you needed to start with a new premise.(Actually this isn't her statement, she was repeating it.) Dr. Heuschmann encourages us to come to an old premise in training our horses--which I totally agree with--while using old premises about anatomy and biomechanics--which I disagree with.
The old premise that Dr. Heuschmann keeps to is that locomotion is caused by muscular contraction, that muscles are separate entities within the body and that fascia is found in specific "spots". He holds to an old style anatomy view of a trained veterinarian. I seriously doubt if Dr. Heuschmann uses any type of alternative therapy with his horses. He most certainly doesn't discuss the skeleton, nerves or fascia, other than as mentioned above, in this video or his book. (I haven't finished the book yet.)
I have a lot of respect for what he is doing and would love to talk with him. I plan to go to a clinic if and when he comes to the US. Or, perhaps, I should try and go to Germany and work with his horses, they could certainly benefit from it.
The lastest on the collection front. There are 3 main theories which I will call: the topline, the bottomline and the shoulder freedom theories.
The topline is a theory that is proposed by the "old" school represented by Dr. Heuschmann and Paul Belosak and such. This theory holds to the pyramid of training which has collection as the last part of training of the riding horse. It holds the supple back as sacrosanct--I totally agree--and assumes that the horse's front is lifted up (dorsally) and back (caudally) by the muscles of the rear and topline. This was seen to be so in experiments carried out at the McPhail research center with Paul Belasik riding a horse in piaffe, which is an extreme dressage movement.
The bottomline theory is proposed and championed by Dr. Bennett. She proposes that collection occurs throught the contraction of the "ring of muscles" on the bottomline of the horse, with little or no activity in the topline. This hasn't been tested in a research setting.
The shoulder theory has two parts to it: the shoulder only theory and the shoulders as the instigator theory--this is my theory so it gets the tricked out name. In this the shoulder only theory, proposed by Dr. Clayton the soft tissue of the thoracic sling propels the front end dorsally and caudally shifting the center of mass towards the rear. In my theory it is the thoracic sling that "allows" collection--moving the COM dorsally and caudally--through the freedom of two forelimbs coming more vertically,and the contraction of the topline and bottomline--sans psoas. Maybe this should be called the unifying theory of how a quadruped can start to move like a biped.
Any comments?

The great collection debate

2009-01-10T06:21:00.000-08:00

I put a copy--draft--of a chapter from my next book on the website wwww.animalsi.com. The chapter is on "collection" of the horse. Collection is a term/concept that is really misunderstood--one author called it "mythunderstood--and as such it is difficult for someone to know what to believe it is.
There are those people who go back to the classics and read them to gain a better understanding of it. Throughout my riding career, in taking lessons, I've been told that I/we need to "collect" the horse. Often this was accompanied by an indication that the horse should "round" its back to indicate it was collected. It didn't seem to matter that the horse may be round behind while tight along the top line as in some champion cutting horses I watched on TV last week.
In my research on what collection means anatomically, I've come across three main, what I'm calling, themes: 1. the topline, 2. the bottom line and 3. the shoulder freedom theme. I've always been a proponent of the shoulder freedom theme and designed my work around this. This theme has been backed up by research by Dr. Hillary Clayton as has the first theme. What I've come to conclude is that collection occurs through the interaction of these three themes.
I'll write more on the website, so I can add some illustrations and animations. If you get a chance to visit and read the chapter, let me know what you think.

Chasing the long tail?

2008-12-31T08:23:00.000-08:00

It's a been a great year for me. I hope you are feeling the same.
One of the things I like to each quarter of the year is look at how my business as gone and make any needed adjustments to it for the rest of the year. At the end of the year I take some time to review the year and dust off the business plan and make adjustments as needed.
We all love our practices working with people or animals or both, but may be somewhat ambivalent about the business side of our business.
One of the problems that I see with the body therapy world, a service business, is that we may get caught in the "Long Tail" of the service world. The long tail is a statistical term to describe an event over time. If we look at our practices as a service we may see some of the long tail in the way business has been: We open our doors and have a number of clients use our service, then someone else--the competition--opens their doors and our practice suffers. Rather than being happy that we have competition, which we seek for our own lives--we like that there are more than one oil change places driving price down--we get freaked out. Now instead of looking at our own business and why it's not doing as well, we chase after some other modality or product to offer, which returns us, if only briefly, peak before we're back in the long tail.
If you want to read more about this and some ideas on how to make the long tail profitable visit free articles at www.animalsi.com.

Strokes

2008-12-29T08:34:00.000-08:00

It's pretty ominous to label a blog entry "strokes". What I'm going to talk about here is the "strokes" that are used in working with animals. I've been asked by many people about the differences between a Structural Integration stroke and those used in other modalities, like massage.
My answer is that there is no such thing as an SI specific stroke and that all other strokes come in two flavors: those that are disruptive and those that are organizing the tissue. The focus of SI is organization of the body. As such most of SI occurs with the appropriate application of an organizing stroke or touch, which usually follows some disruption of a tissue holding or lesion.
Some Background
About 15 years ago the AMTA brought together a group of high level practitioners to lay out a map of the different types of body therapy. Two of the members were Rolfers, Tom Myers and Jeff Maitland. This group came up with a "hierarchy" of body therapy in three distinct paradigms: relaxation, symptom relief and wholism. Each level of the hierarchy includes aspects of the level below it but not the one above it. So, relaxation can occur when a symptom is relieved but rarely--I won't say never--does a relaxation modality relieve a symptom, nor should it be used for this. The paradigms are labeled first, second and third, and have come to be used in the Rolfing community to describe different types of interventions. For instance, a Rolfer might say that helping a vertebral segment that is stuck in a rotation to de-rotate is second paradigm. Pure Rolfing is considered,by us Rolfers,to be third paradigm or wholistic in its view and application. Of course one may move up and down this paradigm ladder to achieve a specific goal.
Back to the strokes.
Most people are very good at disrupting the tissue but organizing is a skill that takes years to learn. This is why most of the description of body patterns lend themselves to disruption; knots, spasm, holding... Contrast this with third paradigm descriptions like; the feet are not relating to the knees,or there's a strain in the AO which is causing a rib to come up, etc.
What this leads to is a plethora of modalities which all aim at symptom relief through disruption with very little relational, or whole body organization consideration--I'm not saying none just little. This focus on disruption leads us to create measurement tools like Myofascial or Body Mapping (this is a system developed by Sharon Giammetto Ph.D, PT, who copy righted the term). These systems focus our attention on the "problem" holding areas that need to be released rather than on the whole body organization. If one is releasing holding patterns than everything is good, even if the ultimate cause of the pattern remains.
Don't get me wrong, the release of these holdings, if you will, is highly effective in helping a body. If there is a restriction to blood flow to an area and the restriction is removed this is beneficial to the body. It's just not SI, it's second paradigm work of relieving symptoms, which is not a bad thing.
Modalities like sports massage, neuromuscular, MFR... are all second paradigm. Very effective but not at the top of the hierarchy. Most of what people call SI, is, as I mentioned before, second paradigm until it becomes relational. Too often the new SI practitioner gravitates towards the second paradigm modalities to provide them with some "ground" that pure SI work seems to lack.
Dr. Rolf gave us a series of sessions that provide us with a container or safety net while we practice and learn SI. She asked us to stay with this program for at least 5 years, until we could learn from it how a body could be organized.
She admonished us that anyone can take a body apart but few could put one back together. As such there are no SI strokes there is only an SI view which utilizes the strokes of the other two paradigms, just like a paint brush in the hands of a house painter puts paint on a wall while in the hands of an artist creates art. (No offense to house painters.)

How smart are our animals?

2008-10-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

This isn't going to be some cogent dissertation on animal intelligence, rather it's more of my early morning musing.
This morning at 6:45am I went out to feed my horses, which this time of year means letting them into one of my pastures. I have a routine that I follow: I go into the barn, say good morning to the horses, and get the halter for the most dominant horse. Usually this horse walks in out of the paddock in "his" stall and I put the halter on and lead him to my larger pasture, which can take more feeding pressure. Some mornings the dominant horse doesn't come in, and instead stands by the gate to the paddock to be--I assume--to the pasture which is off the paddock. I always think this is because there is something that grows in this pasture which isn't in the other one and he wants a change in his diet. That is an Anthropomorphism on my part the assignment of a human characteristic to an animal.
Most mornings I have to lead the horses across the driveway to another larger pasture. I take them across one at a time since I'm pretty sleepy in the morning and the chance's for a mistake are higher and safety rules!
Now that it's getting colder, 28 degrees this morning, I feed hay in the morning, summertime is pasture only in the AM and hay in the PM. For my larger pasture I set up some hay feeding stations, one more than the number of horses so they can eat and not fight.
In anticipation of having to do this the next morning I set up the stations a couple nights ago. Yesterday when I went out to feed and the dominant wanted to go out in the closer pasture... The hay I put out stayed out in the other pasture.
This morning when I moved the horse, pretty exciting on a cold morning with a hot horse and turned him loose he immediately went to the hay, which was covered in frost, that I had put out two nights before.
When I brought out the next horse I thought I would have to show him where I had put out more hay, but he walked right to it, even though it was 60 feet from the first horse and across my irrigation "ditch"--a two foot wide by two foot deep cut in the pasture.
Here's the intelligence question: Did the first horse see, smell or know that there was the hay out? Did the second horse use some logical reasoning, deduction, to determine that there was another hay pile, or did he see, smell... it? By logic I mean he's thinking: Horse one is eating hay, he'd have to see this and associate what is being eaten as hay and not pasture grass, therefore there must be another hay pile and it's usually over there...?
A little more,when I came into the house the cat came up to me and meowed until I said "show me what you want", she then ran over to her feed dish, one of those autofeed things, and it was empty, she needed food and was telling me. Was this a sign of intelligence or of habit?
Any comments?

Seabiscuit part 3

2008-10-05T15:24:00.000-07:00

First let me say thanks to Jerry B. for pointing out that Phar Lap wasn't a small horse. I think I got this from a picture which may have been Seabiscuit and I got confused.
Never the less--that's how you imply that you're still correct--his power came from his lumbar coiling and his ewe neck contributed to his ability to coil, especially if he had restricted shoulders. Whereas Seabiscuit had a really nicely set on neck and an ability to rise between the shoulders to coil the lumbars.
Lumbar coiling is a very important feature in promoting power in the rear, this is what Dolphins and whales do. While other marine life, fish, don't have this movement. They have lateral bending but not coiling. If we postulate the whales and dophins evolutionarily returned to the oceans from land; then we can postulate that this movement is terrestial and returned with them. So what does this imply? Why was lumbar coiling so important to terrestial life that it adapted it, and that dolphins and whales retained it? I'm still pondering this one.
I first started on this track of analysis in 1995 when I read the proceedings from the "Second Congress on Low Back Pain", my initial interest was applying this to humans--my primary practice--but it quickly mapped over to my work with horses and then with dogs. The key to the coiling--take this with a grain of salt--is the lumbar aponeurosis which is a large fascial "sheet" in the lumbar region of the back. The aponeurosis acts like a spring in that it stores energy from the coiling of the rear end and returns it during the ground phase of the stride. (I'm defining the ground phase as the from the time the foot hits the ground to the time it leaves it, this is obviously part of protraction, or the stance phase.) The aponeurosis is stretched by the coiling as well as the brachiocephalicus stretching the latissimus which attaches into the aporneurosis and the humerus.
By the way it's this aponeurosis that gives Tiger Woods his phenomenal driving ability.
The question is: Why did this adaptation take place in evolution and only in mammals? Was it a part of the legs moving under the body? (amphibian legs are on the outside of the body)
Much more to think about.
By the way, if you look at Seabiscuits pictures you'll see he's really over at the knee on the left fore. I'm writing a two part article about working with one cause of this in Natural Horse Magazine, the first part is the next issue. I'll venture that this didn't slow him down because he was able to dynamically move his Center of Mass towards his rear legs, this is what dressage people call "lightening the forehand".
thanks for reading this.

Seabiscuit Part 2

2008-09-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

I've written in the past that I am concerned about how erroneous information gets propagated as fact. To hopefully not propagate erroneous information I want to write a little more about the SeaBiscuit article.
In my analysis one reason why Seabiscuit was so effective was his ability to coil his lumbars and therefore have his rear feet on the ground for a long time, transferring energy to the job of moving the body (center of mass or COM. Seabiscuit could do this, lumbar coil, because his shoulders were free enough to allow the thorax to rise between them. This is obvious when watching him walk, the initiation of the movement happens with the upward movement of the sternum. The free shoulders allows Seabiscuit's neck to rise at the base and round at the top. This is what we want.
Contrast this with Phar Lap, who also had a phenomenal lumbar curving movement but not free shoulders. To allow for the tissue length needed to coil Phar Lap, since he couldn't raise his thorax, brought his head up and bulged the base of the neck out--ventrally--causing a ewe neck.
The error that I am concerned about spreading is one that postulates that the important function in lumbar coiling is the rounding of the back, its not! The rounding is a secondary effect, and important one, but not the initiator. What allows and causes the rounding is the thorax rising between free shoulders. This is often called "lightning the forehand" or "collection" or moving the weight to the rear...which all happens as a result of shoulder freedom.
The next time you look at a horse moving at a canter or gallop--this is where the lumbar coiling is obvious--look for the rising of the thorax between the shoulders that precedes the coiling. If there isn't much coiling than there isn't much shoulder freedom.

Seabiscuit

2008-09-29T07:58:00.000-07:00

I rented a documentary on Seabiscuit that was a compilation of "lost" newsreel footage about him.
What was really impressive is how small he was relative to the horses that he raced against, 15hh, how much lumbar coiling he was able to achieve and how fluid his body was. The lumbar coiling is the transfer mechanism for energy to the ground to allow the Center of Mass to be propelled forward. Through the coiling the spring mechanism of the lumbar aponeurosis is engaged as is the lattismus dorsi muscle/fascia. The greater the coil the more time the rear feet are on the ground and therefore the greater the energy exchange that occurs.
Increased lumbar coiling is one of the things that I look for in a horse that I am working with as a sign that the work is progressing well.
Another small horse with phenomenal lumbar coiling is the Australian racing legend Phar Lap.
If you go to youtube and watch the match race, here's the link, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcnawQ7DFaE pay attention to how the two horses move their rear at the walk, around 51 seconds into the video. You can see that Seabiscuit is much more "reachy" with his rear legs a sign of a topline that can lengthen. You can also see, for people who've trained with me, the "wave" of energy from the GRF moving along the spine and out the head.
Phar Lap on the other hand was not as subtle along the top line and got his length through turning his neck upside down, or ewe neck, which positioned the poll closer to the rear feet.
enjoy

How Important is Gravity?

2008-09-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

I've been writing about what I'm calling the movements of evolution.
This started when I noticed that my dog Jake has a "fish" walk, not a trot just a walk. This journey was also sparked by my reading Serge Gracovetsky's book, "The Spinal Engine" that premises that bipedal locomotion starts in the spine and not the legs.
I took Jake swimming the other day--actually he swims a lot but I noticed something the other day--and noticed that his swim gait is a walk, not a trot, and that while he was swimming or walking in water--not on--his pelvis movement was that of a mammal and not a fish! Can we postulate that water removes the effects of gravity? If so than we can also postulate that whatever causes him to walk like a fish is dependent on gravity.
More thought is needed.
I'm working on animations of the different pelvis movements and will post them to the website when they're done.

Evolution of Movement

2008-09-19T19:37:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start this discussion--is that a correct thing to say in a blog?--with the evolution of movement, from fish to mammal, with some talk about bipeds but mostly about quadrupeds. Then I'll talk a little about my thoughts on how movement deviations, or those things we see in our animal clients that aren't right, and what they may mean from a therapeutic intervention perspective.
Let's start.
Evolution has a interesting characteristic--it doesn't like to replace things that are working with new features, unlike computer programs! What this means is that potentially all of evolutions movements, or perhaps better put, all of the movements that were experienced in evolution are still present in the body, not removed but built on.
I'm suggesting that there are 4 movements that are in a mammalian body:
1. The notochordal movement of the cranio-sacral rythm. This is the opening/closing movement that we see in a flower or a notochord!(that makes sense) This movement isn't always considered in a list of evolutionary movements.
2. The lateral movement of the fish. The fish moves laterally, or side to side. The evolutionary separation from the jelly fish is the introduction of a spine, which allows for a counter or antagonistic relationship of the muscles. The fish's muscles are found laterally. The fish has limited movement control because the muscle orientation only allows for one force vector.
3. The amphibian and reptile. Here we see the first limbs, fish with legs and a neck, which makes it easier to get the head to the food. The limbs are not under the body but to the outsides. Movement is still primarily laterally controlled.
4. Mammalian. Here the legs are under the body and the movement is more in the sagital plane rather than lateral. The lateral musculature has moved into the dorsum and ventral aspects of the of the body. Think about this. In the mammal we don't encounter much muscle in the lateral aspects of the body, this is where the ribs are.
When we look at a biped or a quadruped we can see these later 3 movements if we watch the pelvis. Some individuals will walk with a rear the wraps around the spine, I call this the Marilyn Monroe walk. This correlates with the fish.
Next is the hips that move up and down which is in the next phase of evolution, or the reptile/amphibian.
Lastly is the mammalian which moves in the sagital plane of dorsal/ventral, anterior/posterior.
This is all good but what causes the body to assume a pattern that is lower in the evolution scheme of things?
More later.

A Little Help

2008-09-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

Hello All;

I need a little help. People have taken the survey and want to know more about movement. I'm happy to write about it but need to know at what level? I could start with the evolution of movement, this is my current passion. Or I could start with the simple, how to you look at movement?
What would you like?
I'll post on evolution tonight since that's what I'm keen about right now.
thanks

What makes a myth stick?

2008-09-16T18:15:00.000-07:00

I taught a course in July where I presented a theory about how horses develop a cyclic on/off tissue pattern. The graphic I used was of a horse with the "on" portions one color and the "off" portions another. This looked like bands and I used the word band to describe them... the "on" band, etc. Later as we were working with horses the question came up about the "bands" and this seemed to be a new term that was being used. I put a stop to it, I hope, but it could have been the start of a new myth that horses have "bands of tissue", perhaps even different colors!
In my profession, Rolfing, there are a lot of myths that have propegated over the years. When I talk with someone and one of them comes up I label them a myth. My definition of a myth is something that hasn't been independently verified to exist. It doesn't mean that they don't exist just that they don't have more than one source.
It seems that with animals we "alternative" therapists promote a lot of myths. Of course one could argue that the conventional therapists are also guilty of this, like the myths that they understand everything about the drugs they use.
Another source of myths is the new breed of horse owner, that is not satisfied with their horses being horses but need them to be something mythical. They're not satisfied with the manure, the wood chewing, the rolls in the mud or the impatient neigh as you walk out to feed in the morning. They need to have something akin to a Unicorn that is magical beyond their mundane view of the world. But, I'll challenge, the mundane is actually where the magic is, the "ordinary" magic of the sound of wind in the grass, of geese flying overhead, coyotes howling in the night after eating the neighbor's dog. We don't need to look outside of the phenomenal world to find magic because it already is. And, it doesn't need to be mythical if we just pay attentions to it.

New Article in Natural Horse

2008-08-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

Leave it to me to forget about writing while writing.

I was asked to write an article about "sway" back in horses for Natural Horse Magazine. Randi the publisher is a great editor and is very patient with my lack of writing education.

I approached the article from the soft tissue perspective and what I called "saggy" back. There is a discussion of the coupled spinal movements in the article. It also covers some physiology and techniques for working with this condition.

The article should be in the Sept. issue.

More Spinal Movement musing

2008-08-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about Dr. Gracovetsky's talk is that it answered some questions and posed many more, at least for me. The information presented was at a fairly high level and not directly useable in a body therapy practice.
I want to write a little about what I'm doing with it. There will be more on the website www.animalsi.com, as I develop it.

The spine can be modeled as a semi rigid column--remember that the orientation and adaptation of the human spine is not identical to a quadruped's and a dog is differet than a horse--as such it is subject to certain rules of coupled motion. The motions that the spine can do, are: Side bend, flex/extend and axial rotation. If any two of these motions occurs, the third is introduced or coupled with them. In other words, if a horse is landing after a jump and turning towards the next one, its spine is in extension and side bending, therefore it will also axially rotate. You can see this in some of the dramatic pictures of Grand Prix jumpers.

One of the things that I got confused about in my evolution of movement was the idea that fish only had lateral side bending as their main movement, without the flex/extend and axial rotation. Dr. Gracovetsky cleared this up for me in his talk.

Look for more about this on the website www.animalsi.com in the free article and video section.

So little time...

2008-08-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

It seems like it takes me more time than I like to write to this blog. But, I am very busy, all of my private practices are very busy this summer. We've started the Equine Myofascial Release DVD, videoing. I'm hoping it will be available by December. I am reviewing new books for the online fascial anatomy course. AND we put out a new website last week, www.animalsi.com, give it a look and let me know what you think.

I went to a talk by Serge Gracovetsky last night. He's the author of "The Spinal Engine", the talk was supposed to be on the evolution of spinal movements from Fish to Humans, but it really wasn't. Even so, it was a wonderful talk by a very funny Nuclear Physicist, is that possible? I learned a lot, had a lot that I have been thinking about confirmed and had many new ideas sparked.

The Equinemyofascialrelease group on Yahoo has been pretty active. We've had one person who's been realy sparking things for us with a discussion of her horse. I'm working on an animation of some of the concepts I've been talking about on the group which will be on the new website.

That's all for now.

Way too long since the last one

2008-06-11T19:40:00.000-07:00

WOW! It's been way to long since I last wrote anything here. I decided today that I need to start writing every week at least or?
It's been 5 weeks since I had a day off. Some great courses in May. A tornado during the equine course!
Last night we shot/video'd the first shots of the Equine MFR DVD. If you have any requests for what we should cover send and email through the website.
I've been really working hard on a new website, the problem is that when I go into an intensive teaching and practicing schedule I forget what I wanted in the website. It takes me a day to get back up to speed and then I'm back into practicing... Anyway I hope to have the new site up by this weekend.
I've also been reviewing an number of books Kinesiology, Biomechanics for the online course, which takes a long time, at least for me--I read every word--and time is at a premium for me.
My latest passion is the spinal movement I've written about in the past, worm, reptile and mammal. I've been doing alot with this, mostly study and modeling. I'll be producing some videos--I bought a Glidecam 2000 pro over the weekend--to illustrate what I'm talking about. They'll be posted for free on the website.
Enough for now. Country internet is not that reliable.
jim

Uncovering or working with?

2008-02-28T18:33:00.000-08:00

Rolfers are famous for the modality we use and it's ability to change the structure of our clients. When the practitioner thinks that it is something that they are introducing into the clients structure which is creating the change this creates a problem. In other words these practitioners think that they are intruducing some "thing" into their clients which didn't previously exist.
I rebelled against this somewhat egocentric way of working with clients. My rebellion led me to a different concept; what we were doing is "uncovering" something inherent in our client's structure which was good by chipping away what was hiding this inherent "better" posture.

My analogy was that Rolfing a body was like sculpting was to a piece of granite. The sculptor didn't add to the granite but rather freed the scuplture that was bound by it. This is different than the idea that we don't to work with resolution of a body's problems but rather enhance the good, functional parts that exist in the body and that these somehow can rise above the restrictions to express themselves.

This is a nice concept but rather simplistic to my current thinking, I reserve the right to change my thinking. To my current thinking the body will always be as energetically efficient as it can be in that particular moment. In other words, the body has no allegiance to anything, postural, habitual, movement... that it doesn't deem to be energetically efficient. Given this the posture we see, the movement we see will be the BEST that that body can perform at that time, in that moment, if you will.

What we, as change agents, want, is not induce change in the structure but rather suggest to the body a new, improved--more energy efficient--way to be. If this suggestion is accurate then the body will accept it, no questions asked. If it's not then it will be rejected also without bias. The trick, to me, is to make a number of small suggestions, to break the interventions down into easily discerned parts and then step back and see if they were accepted. This is in leiu of making larger broader less discriminated interventions that may not be accepted in whole, but who's smaller parts may have been.

Energy efficiency is the name of the game. From this perspective, every posture we see is predicated on its being the most energetically efficient one, for that body at that time. The danger of learning concepts like conformation and postural analysis is that we can become fixated on what we think is important for a body and forget to let the body show us what it needs. By making small interventions and seeing if they've been accepted before making another suggestion for change we can; build on our successes, work more efficiently, not waste the nervous system attention we need for change to occur...
What do you think?

You gotta love computers

2008-02-28T17:54:00.001-08:00

I love computers. They allow us to communicate with others like never before. They allow us to see how our business is doing with just a little effort. They provide us with the opportunity to really understand what's important in life, what's happening now or what you've worked on for the last 9 months. They do this when they crash!
I had a disc drive crash early this year. The day that I was going to finish my canine video. Got up in the morning, got ready to go into my office at home and work. I hit the keyboard, which usually brings the computer back to life in the morning, failed this time. The blue screen of death is what they call it in the windows world.
I spent the day, that I had scheduled to work on the canine video, running around to the computer repair people, I could care less about the computer I wanted the info on the drive.
I finally decided, late that night, to buy another computer, I could always return it if I needed to and external enclosure so I could pull the drive out of the old computer and continue to work. Unfortunately, what had crashed was not my computer but the drive. Windows has a problem that can corrupt the initial indentity block, this isn't what it's really called but I'm not writing a tech report, that tells drive where it's identity is! This renders the drive useless, actually less than useless since it will crash the computer, or not let it boot.
Now I'm really incensed and mad even. This is when my meditation training comes into perspective and I realize that there's nothing I can do unless there is. But either way it doesn't pay to worry about it, besides I have to see 6 human clients the next day and I'm booked for the rest of the week.
Thursday's I'm in my Longmont studio and luckily Adam Silver www.silverliningproductions.net, has his video and photography studio in the same building. Adam is an Apple guru. What does this have to do with my Windows disc drive? Alot! It turns out that the Apple operating system, so scoffed at by windows folks, doesn't need to see that first ID block on the disc to know what's on it, that's a windows thing. Adam is able to "see" all of my disc info and, that's a big and, get it to another drive for me.
To make an already long post shorter, we were able to get the video information, not the formatting which is another story, and recreate the video after three weeks of work. This puts not only the video but every other project I'm working on, behind by three weeks. This isn't to mention the problems we had with our replicators.
Moral to the story, back up to another drive frequently, you never know when a crash will occur. The bigger the drive the more you lose!
We hope to have proofs of the Canine Myofascial Massage/Release DVD next week. It's a 2 disc set due to the amount of information on it.
take care

Evolutionary movement #2

2008-02-10T20:13:00.000-08:00

I've already talked about how mammalian movement has evolved: from an dorsal/ventral undulation that we see in a worm, to the addition of lateral spinal bending that we see in fish, snakes and reptiles, to the anterior/posterior movement of the legs and arms that we see in mammals. These three movements are not only 3 distinct movements but are also a integration of one on the other. In other words, the primitive movement of the worm is still present in the body and contributes to the amphibian movement. The summation of the previous two, worm + amphibian, plus a change in leg position = the mammalian movement.(The mammalian leg position, under the body rather than to the side of it, as in a reptile, predicates the mammalian movement.)
Since the mammalian movement is the highest order--at least to us--or most complicated, it depends on the foundation of the other two being present for it to occur. If there is a deviation or loss in one of the lower two movements the higher ordered one can not occur. While the lower two movements are always present they are usually hidden by the higher order movement.
The reason that I am interested in this, is the implications it has for the therapeutic intervention we choose. When we see these "lower" movements in a quadruped or biped this indicates that there is some thing restricting the higher movement. If we can see the parts rather than the sum--the sum being mammalian movement--then that implies that there is some disruption of the summation function. If we can determine where and what is disrupting this summation we can potentially make more informed therapeutic interventions. This seems like a worthwhile endeavor to me.
The key to being able to "see" where the dysfunction is and, therefore, where we can intervene therapeutically, is in understanding the relationship between the spinal movements and their place or sequence in evolution.
For reference you may want to read Phillip Greenman's "Principles of Manual Medicine", Luigi Stecco's "Fascial Manipulation for Musculoskeletal Pain" and Serge Gracovetsky's "The Spinal Engine".
The spine has the following movements: Flexion/Extension, Lateral or side to side Bending and Rotation. Two of these are "coupled", which means that when one occurs the other occurs as well. The third is the product of the first two occuring. If one laterally bends the spine the coupled motion of rotation also occurs, with these two occuring there will be a flexion as well. The coupled movements occur due to the spinal mechanics, which is dependent on the anatomical barriers of the spinal vertebrae, their form or structure. The third movement occurs as a physical law applying to a semi-rigid column. (I'm making a video of this principle for the new website www.animalsi.com and for the upcoming equine myofascial massage/release video.)
I'm going to stop here, the key points are simple:
Mammalian movement is the summation of 3 evolutionary movements.
Mammalian movement, as a pattern, will be absent in the presence of a restriction. (The restriction is probably in the spine.)
The more "severe" the restriction the further backwards in evolution the movement will be. (This is the summation collolary: if mammalian movement is the summation of two early movements worm and reptile, then reptile movement is built on the worm like one. Therefore the restriction of the mammalian movement will result in a reptile like movement and the suppression of this will result in the worm like movement. This isn't a negative in itself, it is the body's seeking the most efficient movement for it has available. In other words there is no struggle in this.)
I'll write more as the investigation reveals more to write about. If you want to comment on this please do.

The Roached Back

2008-02-03T14:32:00.000-08:00

Both horses and dogs can "suffer" from a condition called a "roached back". Condition may be too strong a word to describe this. What it is, is a dorsal curve in the spine, usually in the thoraco-lumbar junction. In my opinion it occurs because of a restriction in either the shoulder blades or thorax. For instance my Labrador Retriever has a roached back that I think is the result of a surgical scar in his rib cage.
The roached back takes a while to develop and prevents the animal from fully extending.
My theory is that the restriction in the thorax prevents a complete movement of the energy wave of locomotion to move through the spine. The restriction causes a reflexion in the wave which is opposite of the original wave with less amplitude. The two waves, the one coming from the movement of the rear leags and the reflected wave add and subtract from each other, causing "standing waves" in the spine. Since the spine didn't evolve to accomodate these standing waves it roaches.
If you've ever watched a horse with restricted shoulders being ridden you'll see these standing waves being reflected in the rider's arms. The unskilled riders will flap their arms in response to this like they were wings.
In response these restrictions the horse and dog will change from a walk to a trot to a canter... earlier than they would without the restriction. I'm not sure why this is.
They will also exhibit either the amphibian or reptile style walk, rather than the mammalian walk.

Canine Myofascial Massage/Release

2008-01-31T06:21:00.000-08:00

We finally sent the Canine Myofascial Massage/Release video to the replicators two days ago. It's a two disc set, an hour and 50 minutes long, but more important it's packed with information.
It's been a long jouney that started in May of last year. We filmed during my canine mfr course, with course attendees graciously sitting through my demonstrations.
The end of December I had one more day of voice overs to do when the computer disc crashed. Luckily we were able to get everything we needed off the drives, the video was on one drive, that was fine. But the support material, and the online course material, was on the drive that failed. It was two weeks before I could schedule the time to work on the project again.
If you are interested in the video look to the website www.animalsi.com for ordering information and out takes.

The Three Movements of Evolution

2007-04-13T05:42:00.000-07:00

I think I mentioned, somewhere, that we were planning to shoot some video of my dog Jake and the problems he was having in his back. The night before the "shoot" I was rehearsing what I wanted to say, with Jake in the family room. Long story, short, I was showing how one could treat with myofascial release the issue Jake had when I realized it was being resolved but not on film. Luckily the work I did has not held up six weeks later and Jake can demonstrate, through his body the concepts I want to present. Which are the subject of this post.

About a year ago I bought a book by Luigi Stecco "Fascial Manipulation", it is a very interesting and complicated text. One piece of information that he presents is the development of the fascial planes throughout evolution and there contribution to movement. I have been "playing" with this information as I look at the movement patterns of both my animal and human clients.

What I have noticed for years is that there are certain movement patterns that I always thought were adaptations to a lack of mobility in the spine. I thought these patterns were "added" to the movement repetoire as an adaptation.

What I think now is that these movements have always been present as more primitive movement patterns on which our more complicated movements are based. Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen (founder of Body Mind Centering) talks about the "alphabet" of movements which are mixed and matched to create more complex motions.

What I want to present is that there are three pelvic/rear limb movements that we have developped through our evolution and that these three movements are each correlated to an evolutionary process. You can replace evolution with development, since these movements also correlate to our personal movement timeline--this is the Bain-Bridge Cohen message as I understand it.

I call these three movements, at least today: the fish, the reptile and the mammal. In the development of the fetus there is another movement, the JellyFish, which I assume happens since the person/animal is born. (This movement is the cranial sacral motion that us CS therapist work with. It is very important but taken as a given for the purposes of my small brain thinking about this.)

There is a heirarchy to these movements in that the fish is built upon to arrive at the reptile and the fish/reptile to arrive at the mammal. These loosely correlate to the three brains, reptilian, mammalian and Neo Cortex (Read Temple Grandin's book "Animals in Translation" for a description of this.)

The theory is simple: When we have a movement issue, a spinal restriction for instance, we will resort to a lower movement in the heirarchy as an adaptive strategy. The lower in the heirarchy the adaptation has to go to resolve the issue the more global the restriction. This could be called structural dis-integration.

I'll be putting much more about this, along with videos and animations to illustrate on the website www.equinesi.com, including some discussion of how to work with these restrictions from a structural integration view.

2007-04-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I posted anything. I apologize.
We just finished an MFR basic course with some great attendees. I can't believe how well my horse is moving since they worked with him.
Of course I planned this course for late March to assure that the weather would be better, we get most of our snow in March, and it snowed. This weekend, first in April we are dealing with ice rain and snow. So, for next year I will flip a coin for the March dates.
Our online courses have been delayed since Macromedia bought the company whose software we are using and won't release it until May. Until then we'll shoot more videos and put them on the website. We've decided to post a portion of our canine video which deals with structural analysis. We have to edit it a bit more. Hopefully it will be up this week.
If there is anything you would like to see let me know and we'll try and get it done.
One of the attendees in the last course is working with a number of race horses. I was talking with the course about the concept of "reach" versus "push" for the initiation of movement and how understanding which one a horse uses would give the jockey and advantage at the starting gate of a race. We just recorded the start of the Santa Anita Stakes with some easy to see reachers and pushers. Hopefully we'll get that up this week.

Working hard

2007-02-12T18:48:00.001-08:00

I've been working hard on providing additional support to the book Equine Structural Integration: Myofascial Release Manual on the website www.equinesi.com. There's a couple of videos of the work I did with a young horse about 10 years ago.
This horse "Skippy" was about to be euthanized when the owner asked me if I could help the horse. Skippy's main problem was a severely laterally rotated left front leg. You have to see the video to get an appreciation for how bad it was. I decided to work with him and the results of four sessions (hours) of work on shown.
I also put up a video, linked to a pdf, on working with scars. The pdf explains a little bit about scars with the video available as a link from it. I'm playing around with the best way to deliver course material for the animal structural integration course. We are working on the curriculum for the course hoping to have it completed by June.
Ive been working on a number of flash automations for the course and the website I'm hoping they'll be done in the next week or so. I still have a full client load to keep up with.
Please keep checking the website.

Working hard

2007-02-12T18:48:00.000-08:00

The Book is out.

2007-01-17T08:58:00.000-08:00

The new book Equine Structural Integration: Myofascial Release Manual is out on both Barnes and Noble and Amazon.
We'll start working on the next book once we've got all of the "issues" with Amazon ironed out.
You can order it from Integrated Body Therapies or Amazon at the website www.equinesi.com.

2006-12-30T08:43:00.000-08:00

I got the book off to the printer last night! The proof should be here next week and if it all looks correct it will be available next week. It should be available on Amazon the following week. Web orders will be sent out first.
After getting the book done I decided to clean my office, and found a video of a horse I worked with who was severely toed out. It was so bad that the owner's vet suggested putting the horse down. I was asked to work with the horse; which I did in exchange for video and photo rights rather than money. I didn't really know how much help I could be. The changes in the horse after one session was remarkable. After four sessions they are even better. This horse went on to become a Reining horse! He did quite well in the sport.
We'll try and post the video on the website www.equinesi.com.

2006-12-30T08:30:00.000-08:00

Good Morning. I started this blog as a means to effectively communicate with the people who are interested in Structural Integration and its application to horses and dogs (equines and canines).
Over the next few weeks I'll be putting some video and more thoughts up.