Make your heart beat faster!

Thomas Myers has been working with the body for over four decades. In Moscow, he shared his experience with Pilates and physiotherapy specialists, osteopaths and chiropractors at the seminars “Reading the body” and “Endurance: take on the challenge and become stronger.” And then he answered a few questions from Psychologies.

What do you see as your task as a chiropractor and in general the super task of body-oriented practices such as yoga, Pilates, Feldenkrais movement?

Each of us has a complete image of our body. We acquire this image in the womb, and then recreate it throughout our lives. How is it formed? There are many stretch receptors in our body – in the intestines, lungs, joints, skin. They send information to the brain about what our body is like – how it is located in space, how it feels.

If these receptors are not set in motion, they will not be stimulated. And then a certain part of the brain that is associated with this receptor begins to be used for other purposes. We simply forget about the part of the body where there is no movement. The task of the bodyworker is to bring these forgotten areas back to the body, to bring them back to the level of awareness. And then they must be integrated into a single movement, which must become coordinated.

Movement today is in great deficit …

And this is the main problem. We live at a frantic pace. Because of the desire to accelerate, we trust our body to cars and planes in which we sit for hours in hunched postures. We get off the plane and stand on the travolator. Then we arrive at the gym and look for the nearest parking space to the entrance. We don’t have enough time to move!

What, besides movement deficits, can lead to impaired body image?

First, habit. If we walk and stand in a certain way for several years, we will form a certain posture, posture. The repeated gesture becomes a habit, the actions become automatic. My head has been pushed forward since childhood (due to impaired vision), in order to maintain this posture, I had to push my pelvis forward. As a result, an impaired posture was formed, which then had to be seriously worked on.

At one time I worked with the London Symphony Orchestra. When one of the musicians came into my office, I looked at him and immediately asked: “How long have you been playing the violin? How many years have you been playing the flute? The instrument does not go anywhere, despite the fact that the musician does not hold it in his hands. He plays not only for long hours, he plays with his soul, this is his passion.

Everything that you do passionately, with feeling, takes root even deeper in your body system, is recorded even more firmly in the tissues. You can’t tell a musician: play differently. It is important for the whole world that he plays in this position.

So the task of a body specialist is not just to balance the halves of the body, making it more symmetrical. It is necessary to balance the musician with respect to the instrument with which he works. Or teach him to take the necessary posture during work and get out of it when the rehearsal is over. Learn to return to yourself at the end of the work.

Are there other reasons?

These are injuries that a person has suffered. Due to injuries, certain parts of the body are excluded from a single image. Sometimes this can be seen even with the naked eye: if a person moves excessively with some part of the body while walking, this means that he compensates for the lack of movement in another place.

I once had a patient whose one leg was deformed, the knee was bent inwards. He said that in adulthood he skied into a tree. But then it turned out that this shape of the leg was not the result of a fall on skis, but of an earlier childhood injury. As soon as I touched a certain area in the knee with my hand, the patient immediately remembered it. At the age of three, he fell off his bike and injured his knee. Called my mother. Mom looked – the bones were intact, treated the wound and waved her hand: everything is in order. Mom did not attach importance to soft tissue injuries. And as a result, the boy “pushed” this problem to the back of his mind.

When a movement does not acquire the desired pattern in the cerebral cortex, it does not exist in real movement either. This part is relatively immobilized and simply excluded from the body image. If it doesn’t move, it means it doesn’t hurt and you don’t have to think about it. This phenomenon is called the sensory-motor amnesia loop. And so, when my patient, already in adulthood, drove into a tree, he subconsciously protected those parts of the body that were in the body image, but this part of the knee was not in the ideal picture, and it remained unprotected.

Such injuries can happen to anyone.

Of course, each of us has our own “Achilles’ heel”, we are not symmetrical, imperfect by nature. But body exercises – yoga, Pilates, therapeutic exercises help us balance the body, form a new type of posture that will increase our individual capabilities. After all, you can change not only the habit, but also the state of the tissues. That is, restart the program. And this will allow you to feel differently and experiment in new ways in movements.

You are known all over the world as the author of the unique system (and the bestseller of the same name) “Anatomical Trains”. What is the essence of this system?

Man is closer to a plant than to a machine. In today’s industrialized world, this idea is not easy to accept. We increasingly feel like beings made up of separate parts that need to be repaired and replaced. But we grow just like a plant – from a seed, more precisely, from a fertilized egg.

For 25 years now, I have been trying to abandon the concept of individual muscles and consider the human body as a living organism in which everything is interconnected. My theory of “anatomical trains” is based on the fact that whatever tasks each individual muscle performs, it is functionally integrated and works within the fascial web. (Fascia is a connective tissue sheath that covers organs, vessels, nerves and forms sheaths for muscles in vertebrates and humans; it performs supporting and trophic functions. – Approx. ed.).

It is the fasciae that help us not to crumble into separate pieces. These lines and layers follow the interweaving of the connective tissues of the human body, forming clear “meridians” of the myofascia. Accordingly, specialists must work not only with individual muscles, but also with fascial tissue, develop it, strengthen it and remodel it if necessary.