Structural Balance is the Key to A Strong Healthy Body & Living A Long Life
Anatomy of Bone and Muscle Relationship
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Athletic success and physical activities depend heavily on effectively dealing with the forces of gravity acting on the body. Meanwhile, some research suggests that one's mental and emotional health is also impacted by their physical relationship to gravity.
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Effective bodywork plays a significant role in helping clients rediscover their natural and proper relationship with gravity, which is often disrupted early in life due to muscular, myofascial, and musculoskeletal conditioning and habits. As children, we naturally possess proper posture and fluid movements, as the body inherently incorporates natural forces at birth. However, a lifetime of accumulated tension, stress, and negative habits can obstruct these natural forces, causing some children to lose their unconscious relationship to gravity at an early age and the impact of structural imbalance can become very painful.
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When it comes to assessing the skeletal body, learning the interconnections between bones and muscle-tendon tissues is essential. Understanding the bone structures and how to palpate them while performing postural assessments is fundamental in developing skills for analyzing the body's structure and identifying muscular imbalances and postural distortions.
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A crucial starting point is ensuring that the bones on both sides of the body are level. During a postural assessment, palpating and comparing the bones on each side for bilateral symmetry is key. The ankles, ASISs, ilium crests, and shoulder girdles' ebony landmarks should be level and exhibit a mirror image to indicate symmetry. Any lack of symmetry points to a functional imbalance.
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Palpation is an invaluable tool in the clinical massage therapy and structural bodywork training of practitioners. Developing advanced palpatory skills helps the therapist identify chronic nerve and muscle tension, primarily in the myofascia and muscle bellies. Expert therapists will use the bones' distinctive landmarks as guides when performing palpation, allowing them to identify and isolate specific muscles that need treatment. For instance, the spine of the scapula is a bony landmark used to identify and isolate the two rotator cuff muscles. The supraspinatus muscle originates superior to the spine, while the infra spinatus muscle originates below the spine, making it easy to differentiate between the two muscles.
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Positioning one's hands to effectively isolate a specific muscle and its fibers requires a thorough understanding of the muscle-tendon attachments' exact locations. The therapist can use the bones as guides to find the landmarks that guide them to the tendons and, ultimately, to the muscle bellies and begin to isolate active and latent trigger points that decrease muscle action or relaxation.
Muscle action is responsible for creating movement by pulling or contracting, which is delivered to the bone through the tendon. All movement and action are derived from the contraction of discrete muscle fibers. The soft-tissue therapist's role is to identify which muscle fiber groups are causing discomfort for the client and reduce the excess muscle and nerve tension that contributes to the issue.
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1 hr 30 min
90 US dollars