Clients often ask what exercises or stretches they should be doing? They ask about foam rolling and other disciplines such as chiropractic and massage. If this are things you do and enjoy, then great but the problems you experience in your muscles and connective tissue might have more to with your mind, and your nervous system then your muscles. The muscle tension is often the end result of a deeper problem. When someone comes in with a physical issue, I am faced with the question "is it a hardware problem or a software problem"? Is it just something that needs be worked out, is it a mechanical issue, or is it a question of how they go about their daily life? If it was the first issue, ie. muscles and connective tissue that need to be worked out, the solution would be pretty easy and the session would be more like a deep tissue massage, but that is where Rolfing is different.
If a muscle or a group of muscles need to be tight to hold a person up, a person can stretch all they want and that muscle will be tight again soon afterward. For example, if a person stands forward on the balls their feet, their hamstrings and probably their calves will have to engage even in a relaxed standing position, just to keep them from falling forward. That person may come in saying they have issues with their hamstrings, but the Rolfer may see that they are standing more toward the balls of their feet, and the real problem is that they are not stacked well in gravity. Maybe the issue is that they they have high fixed arches and the ball of their foot is closer to their heel, in this case the Rolfer may work on their feet to lengthen the arch and allow them to stand more over the middle of their feet. This in turn could allow the hamstrings to finally relax.
Not all physical problems are mechanical in origin. It could be behavior. If a person tenses up their shoulders as a reaction to stress, this is at its root, a software problem that becomes a hardware problem. Waking around with locked up shoulders does not allow for natural movement. The free swinging of the arms while walking allows kinetic energy to escape out the arms. When not allowed to do so, shock will go up into the neck, and one might develop neck problems. There are many examples of things like this happening, but it all boils down to learning how to relax and allow for free fluid movement.
In the west we still have a mechanistic view of biology, which is somewhat outdated. Looking at the human body as a machine was a product of the industrial revolution, it made sense back then but the human is more than a machine, no machine has the adaptability of an animal, and humans are most certainly animals. Our ability to adapt to our environment is the key to our success, but can also result in all sorts of compensation patterns that may remain long after the initial issues that caused them have been resolved. Developing a relaxed awareness of our bodies and movement can help to correct unneeded compensation patterns. Western solutions to things often revolve around force and over efforting. From the Rolfer's perspective, taking a walk and allowing the attention to take in physical sensation are far better than going to the gym, though being physically active is obviously important. If you find yourself regularly needing to stretch this or that part of your body, you might ask yourself why it continues to tighten up like that in the first place?
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