Where does balance come from?

Proprioception is a fancy science word for body awareness. This is how you know you’re on dry land and not in water, are at home and not in a box, and why it’s very hard to move you to an undisclosed location while you sleep. Increased proprioception means we keep neural connections live and flowing with information for the brain to use. Issues arise when the brain is overwhelmed with work and has a shortage of workers. When this happens, the brain loses the ability to do things that were once commonplace. (Remember spinning to nausea on a g-force carnival ride after 12 beers and 3 corndogs then running a ½ mile home because you’re two hours late for curfew?) Me either.

If you imagine the brain as a security guard with the option of watching one big screen displaying the entire property, or many screens allowing more detailed examinations of bloodspots and shadows, the preference seems clear. This is not unlike how the brain uses proprioception to move. When it comes to fluid movement, the more information the better. Unfortunately, balance and proprioception fade with age, as does our ability to move. But there are ways to prevent this.

To maintain balance we have to be balanced. As Zen as that sounds, it’s not far from the truth. Imagine you have imbalanced tires. The car drives, but pulls to the right or left. Now misaligned, it creates drag and is much less fuel-efficient. Over time, the tires wear uneven increasing the chance of blowout. But that’s hardly the only problem. The struts, shocks, wheel wells, brakes, frame, and any number of other things are threatened by the imbalance. The car will have to work harder and consume more fuel to get the same done, and this worsens unless it’s realigned.

Now imagine a muscle is off. This happens when a muscle adaptively shortens or lengthens in response to repetition. Do something enough times and the brain adapts muscles to the length or breadth demanded most. This is why we need to work change of direction into our training.

The RAMP Method creates directional changes using the pivot, or rotation on the ball of the foot. Pivoting is essential to rotating the body, as doing so from anywhere else opens us up to compensation. The shoulder joint is also a fantastic place to create massive force, yet few lack the requisite reach to create such power.

Creating rotation from the joints best suited remains essential. At Meso Fit Boca, we believe rotating from the spine or creating any force with this structure is contraindicated. Rotation is a powerful force that when harnessed creates the kinds of athleticism we are in awe of and wish to emulate. But we are warned by the likes of Sahrmann and McGill that the spine needs stability above all else. 

So what is it that athletes tend to have that we lack?

Balance.

It might be a stretch to say only imbalanced bodies injure. But if the balanced body is destabilized, it shouldn’t topple without blunt force. Ask any quarterback, goalie, or sprinter, and they’ll agree if something is out of whack, production suffers. Most professional athletes have body workers working around the clock on their recovery.

Notice I didn’t say training.

Although training is paramount, if the body cannot recover fully from performance to performance, it cannot sustain optimal levels of output. Diet is helpful, but only when applied to fully recovered bodies. So how do bodies become balanced?

Balance is a lot more nuanced and cannot be applied to single situations. Physics tells us if you keep falling off the earth, something maybe wrong with how your body relates to the laws of gravity. When athletes dazzle us with feats across fields of ice and snow, we see perfectly balanced bodies adapting to multiple destabilizing forces. Can you imagine being crosschecked and come out with anything less than permanent brain damage?

So why can they and we can’t?

Each client presents a lifetime of movement. Some of that movement, depending on the amount of trauma the body sustained, is compensated. To the extent that it’s compensated, movement integrity suffers and is replaced with uncoordinated movement.  This body will produce very little power but will still produce. Now imagine taking this body onto a field, court, or mall parking lot and you’ll see why orthopedists and physical therapists aren’t in low demand.

But to say our idols walk away unharmed is ignorant as any pro-athlete will tell you the price for waging daily war on their bodies is tagged high. As the long-term effects of this lifestyle become more and more apparent, we’ll be able to learn more about what happens to those of us focused on recovery and balance.

Our focus is looking at each client and asking; what would make them better? To answer, we have to know what the body in front of us is capable of producing. Overloading an imbalanced body with more work is completely counterproductive and counterintuitive to the brain.  Exercise becomes endless beatings applied to a misaligned body.  

At Meso Fit Boca, our assessment answers simple questions as we detect what might hinder your progress. We’ll explain what we find and how to fix it. We do not place demands on misaligned bodies until they show an ability to align; and we cannot progress any client without proof our interventions are maintained from week to week. We do that with constant check-ups to make sure our programming is working. If it isn’t, we know early, and make course adjustments that get you back on track. 

Let’s talk about how we apply the four phases of our method: Restore, Align, Maintain, and Progress to clients. The RAMP Method shouldn’t be considered linear, it’s possible to restore one part while the rest of the system is being aligned or maintained. The question is whether or not to attempt progressing systems that don’t show dysfunction, i.e. if the legs show no signs of restriction, can they be progressed while the upper body is being restored?

The simple answer is that no system can progress while a joint is still being protected or hasn’t been re-integrated into the system. This is the type of isolationist thinking we’re hoping to avoid. Our job is to progress those that present minimal or no restriction. But this doesn’t mean our clients have to sit on foam rollers waiting for the day they can take a HIIT class.

The RAMP Method’s intent is to get people thinking about the list of available musculature the brain has to work with. When given a task, most think about the task, add up the materials available to complete the task, check the desired outcome, and decide whether or not they can proceed. No one attempts to build a shed with two nails and a pile of sticks.

We get this mentality from the brain because this is exactly what it does when you think it’s a good idea to snowboard, golf, or garden. But the list of resources dwindles when the brain is faced with muscles caught in skewed length-tension relationships with their counterparts.

Muscles happen to be fiendishly simple. They lengthen or contract. That’s it. The importance placed on the muscular system may be comparable to crediting your tires for powering your car. They certainly add to the experience, but they ‘re not necessarily why the car can move. Tom Myers, in Anatomy Trains, tells us the biomechanical view, that compartmentalizes human movement into the same category as coils and camshafts, ignores the seamlessness fluidity that accompanies perfectly orchestrated movement.  

We need to stop thinking mechanically when it comes to human movement.

The Biotensegrity theory states movement occurs within a fascial matrix that forms a system of tension. The bones float within this matrix creating relationships of discontinuous compression that connects through the whole system.

“A model based on Tensegrity…may also be utilized to demonstrate the structural integration of the body. All our previous concepts of biomechanics of the body will have to be reassessed in relation to this model and our therapeutic approaches to the musculo-skeletal system will have to be revised.” ~ Stephen Levine

It’s funny to think this all started as a spin concept, one we’ll roll out soon, but it has grown into a great source of pride for us.

We are about to embark on a crusade of sorts. This is our attempt to expound on the work of our predecessors for which neither of us would be here today. I’m talking about the heavy hitters whose knowledge has given us the truest means of training the body. Shirley Sahrmann, Tom Myers, Dr. Peter McGill, and Gray Cook merely top a list of pioneers in the industry we all should be listening to.

But we need to also understand that science is incredibly hard to apply to a topic as multidimensional as the human body. Throw in the fact that we stand on a planet ruled by gravity, and things get even murkier when we try to apply a one size fits all mentality to training.

The crusade we fight against is misinformation. Isolation machines still take up most of the square footage of conventional gyms yet we believe all movement is connected. But anyone who has trained a client knows very few people can move within industry standards. The debate over how to move will rage on for the foreseeable future. Until then we have to do more than judge exercise beneficial because it’s the opposite being sedentary.

From the isolationist point of view the muscular system loses the very value we place on it in training. What we know about fascia today pales in comparison to how we treated this tissue in the past. As a system, this tissue is so prevalent, it’s changing the role we thought muscles played in transporting the body through space.

So how do we combat improper, and therefore unhealthy, movement?

Let’s take a systematic approach to the question. Your doctor says you need to exercise. I don’t care which doctor, because they all recommend we move more often. Leaving us all to ask, “Where do I start?” So you hit the gym, maybe even hire a trainer, and do some classes thinking, “In just 6 months to a year, I’ll look and feel better.”

If that were true there would be more gyms than doctors.

But exercise applied to an overtaxed system can only be seen by the brain as trauma. Yes, trauma. Imagine your brain as a crane operator, perched high above the structure it’s currently building. With age and repetitive movement, imbalances appear, and the crane operator is forced to work with less and less material. As muscles become imbalanced, the crane works harder to get less done. This explains why our functioning declines as we age. We cannot build on weak structures.

This is where our method of measuring the loss of function associated with age, repetitive movement, or injury becomes paramount if we are ever to get the body to move as it once did. That’s why we assess every client. Until a concerted effort is made to measure movement capacity, no exercise can be considered beneficial. This led the development of The RAMP Method.

It stands for Restore-Align-Maintain-Progress and is a phase system based on our client assessment.  Once we understand what restricts the body, we find ways to bypass those restrictions, while restoring all joints back to their natural middle. This is why we call the studio, Meso Fit, because meso means middle. We think all exercise needs to contribute to life outside of training.  Our job is to get you to stop exercising and start moving. 

As we begin to roll out The RAMP Method, we’ll soon add a unique cycling class that finally adds the upper body in a way that makes sense. We’re creating unique hybrid classes, combining the best of all worlds into programming that gets results fast. You can also stay connected to the method through our online programming suitable for those that find it hard to stay put. 

People often ask, how did we learn this? We started with discovering and treating our own dysfunctions. But the answer isn’t as simple as the feeling of utter frustration we had in applying old tactics to new movement issues. Our clients face a much different world as evidenced by how much training has changed over the years. We just can’t seem to lose the machine mentality, like a surgeon that keeps antique scalpels around as a reminder of a primitive past. But he wouldn’t dream of using them.

 So why do we?