Healthy joints
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Options for lying on your front
Many of these lessons ask you to lie on your front side. Rather than skip them, experiment with making yourself comfortable. It’s worth doing as these lessons are useful for balance, easy walking, and unraveling years of chronic contractions.
Roll up a towel into a thick tube. You decide how big. Turned to the right, support your right upper chest with the towel to take the torque out of the neck. The end of the towel will stick out near your chin, meaning it’s more or less parallel to your spine.
Roll a large towel into a thick tube. Place it horizontally across your chest at armpit level. The ends will stick out at your armpits. Put your arms above it on the floor. This will support the neck and reduce the strain between the shoulders.
Move in and out of the position frequently.
Do a neck or upper back lesson, then come back to the feet.
Experiment as much as you can. Keep testing and stick with it. It will get easier.
Use this lesson to stay mobile in all the joints, allowing the connection to feel fluid and enhance walking and running. It also helps release the low back.
Habits of the feet are profound. With our narrow base of support and high center of gravity, the brain, the vestibular system (balance) and sense of safety is wrapped up in how we use our feet. The second anything goes wrong with the feet, it throws us off in countless ways and can cause compensation patterns throughout the musculoskeletal system, especially in the knees, hips, and low back.
Here are Moshe's remarks from his book, Higher Judo, on Factor 1: Bare feet.
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Many of my clients have what I call “stuck calves.” It’s like there are ropes wrapped around the lower legs, which limit movement in the feet and up into the back. The classic “calf stretch” of hyper-extending is not advised for changing this pattern as it just pulls harder on an already short muscle.
Instead of pulling, simply cease contracting. It's possible. This lesson, and those after it, can help.
Then, the muscle will be a normal length when you start to contract, giving you some slack to work with. This slack helps you feel more powerful as you have more contraction to use.
This lesson is particularly good for anyone with neuropathy in the feet, or with balance issues or fatigue when walking. It's amazing not only for proprioception—that is, knowing where you are in space—but also for restoring function of the lower legs and ankles without damaging your muscles.
Awareness of the heels, who knew? This is another lesson turning the calves. It reminds me of the Charlie Chaplin sequence where he’s dancing with his potatoes on the end of a fork. In any event, turning the lower legs unravels all kinds of stuck patterns you might not even know you had.
Feel how this lesson changes your stride!
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Getting to know your heels is useful for balance and walking. Plus, turning the ankles affects the joints all the way up the leg. It can be an eye-opening experience to make these connections more and more clear.
Personally, I find the foot and ankle lessons some of the most effective lessons for noticeable, immediate improvement in how I use the legs in the back!
This lesson integrates the legs into the middle of the back. Notice how heavy your legs feel at the beginning compared to the end. This lesson offers a new appreciation for how the sum total of the joints of the leg influences our balance, stride, comfort, and mobility. I love all the wiggly, flowy lessons, of which this is one.
This move is amazing for runners, cyclists, and skiers. (It's also in the skiing section!)
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Our ankles stabilize our upright posture—often with more tension than necessary. Plus, our feet grip or yield to the floor depending on our emotional state. Where exactly are your ankles? What do they do? How do you use them to balance, to move?
We have the potential to move in a graceful, integrated and powerful way as we walk and run. Use this lesson to improve the way you roll over the foot in walking. It drills down into the sensory detail of each toe as it connects to the ankle, hip, and back.
Test walking after this. You might notice a smooth, gliding sensation.
More clarity of the neurological connection between toes, ankles, and leg. It’s amazing to link these up and feel the way your leg was meant to move!
“Learning takes place through our nervous system, which is so structured as to detect and select, from among our trials and errors, the more effective trial. We thus gradually eliminate the aimless movements.”