We tie ourselves in knots

The shoulders and the hips tie the arms and the legs to your body, don’t you think?

But in order to function properly, a knot cannot be too loose. It comes undone and your shoe comes off, or it’s too tight, and you can’t untie it to even get your shoe off. In order to have a functioning knot you must have a perfect balance of strength and flexibility.

We must be like flexible steel. It’s strong like no other, a force to be reckoned with. And flexible steel bends, but does not break.

And the most flexible steel I will try to get is in my hips and shoulders. The points where those knots really work their magic. Because I’ll always get a very big bang for my buck if I can make even small improvements in these key areas.

And then there’s the bow tie of those knots. My thoracic spine or tspine. Not over tight, never over flexible (tho I’m sure there just be people out there who are?!). Any gains I can make here come from those shoulder and hip knots. They’ll inevitably get tighter or stronger than each other as life happens but through mobility practice daily I can take them all through their motions and in doing so free up one of all of our postural, structural, emotional holding body parts, the tspine. Then I can truly breathe easy: my lungs are right underneath right?!

Tight muscles are not functional on the outside and especially not on the inside of our body. Mobile muscles are both strong and flexible: resilient for helping us help ourselves through each day no matter which way it turn.