Lifting Weights

I've been involved in an exercise program called Crossfit for a few months now. It started with my son, who's been doing it for a couple of years, convincing me to get involved. He's been my "coach" since he's taken weight lifting classes in school and was a TA for the instructor. But now that he's gone off to college I had to find someone else to be the coach.
To start off with CrossFit you go through a series of classes which introduce you to the exercises that are used. It's all free weights, no machines allowed, and pullups, pushups, squats... Each with their requirements for precision in how they are executed. It is dependent on the coach to assure that one learns how to perform these with precision, so you don't get hurt.
What I have found is that the language or jargon if you will, is very specific and associated with an ability to perform atheletically at a high level. For instance the Squat has a very precise set of requirements to be a CrossFit Squat: chest up, lumbar curve, tibia perpendicular to the ankle... If you aren't doing it this way, it's not a squat. Squat has a precise definition.
Our work with body's also has a vocabulary that is precise. The proper use of our precise vocabulary is one way that we can tell if one of our colleagues is well trained or educated. Becoming familiar with our vocabulary takes effort, that's what learning or education is; the expenditure of effort to acquire some new skill or knowledge. Once we've acquired the knowledge or skill its application requires much less effort.

Pushing a Rope and more Collection

When I was in engineering school to become an electronics engineer, we had a joke about mechanical engineering that the only thing you needed know about it was "you don't push a rope...".
This week I decided to re-arrange my horse paddock so that the gate to get out was closer to the manure pile. My son has left for college which means that I have picked up all of his chores as well as mine which has doubled my manure moving time. So, being the inventive type I decided that the gate being closer to the manure's final destination would save me time. I also had 20 tons of pee gravel delivered for the paddock and needed to open it so I could get the tractor in.
My ordeal was pretty simple: disassemble the panels, re-arrange them and re-assemble them. No big deal except the 12 foot long panels are pretty heavy and the ground isn't flat.
By now you're thinking what the heck does this have to do with collection? Here it is; the panels hook together with one panel having a fixed prong (male) on the bottom and a "U" shaped bolt the moves up and down on the top, while the other panel has two receptacles for these (female) that are fixed. What you do is pick up the the panel with the receptacle and drop it down over the prong on the other and then position the "U" shaped bolt over the top receptacle and drop it to connect the two panels. The problem is that when the ground is dropping away from the connection it's not easy to position the top attachments without raising the end that's dropping away. Easy enough when there's two people working on the problem, one lines things up while the other lifts the other end up so they come together. So you go from this ----|/---- to this ---||--- the right side needs to come up in this example.
What I found was it was impossible for me to be able to lift the weight of the panel by pulling from one end such that the other end came up. But this is what we are expected to believe happens in the "top line" theory of collection. The front of the horse is lifted from the rear by the back muscles.
I'm going to build a model of this theory and test the amount of force required. Of course I could just do the math, if I remembered how.

Stretching Harms Horses?

In a recent study carried out in Britain and reported in the Veterinary Journal, horses can actually be harmed by too much stretching. I've written about my thoughts that stretching could injure a horse and my concern that there are so many books and videos on the market that show a rote routine for stretching that doesn't involve the animal. I wrote a chapter on "myofascial stretching" in my book because of this concern.
The study that was conducted used 30 horses in 3 groups: a control group no stretching, a group that received periodic stretching and a group that was aggressively stretched each day. It would be unfair to suggest that there is some universally accepted discription of stretching with controls on the range the leg is taken through, etc. that were used in this study, but there aren't and therefore we don't really know what the study's authors thought was acceptable.
The study concluded that horses that are stretched every day will actually begin to lose joint ROM, as exhibited in movement. Horses that are not stretched do not improve their ROM or lose it. Those that are not stretched every day will have a ROM improvement.
The authors of the study attributed the decrease in ROM in the everyday group to delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMS, which makes no sense to me. DOMS is what you feel a day or so after vigorous exercise which was once attributed to lactic acid--this is wrong--but is probably more likely attributable to muscle cell rupture and the release of histamines and calcium into the intra-cellular space.
What I worry about in the case of aggressive stretching is the violation of anatomical barriers both hard and soft. I'll put an article up on the website on this in the next few days.

Moving Hay

It's that time of year around here where we have to find hay to buy, luckily this year there is plenty, and get it moved to our place. We purchase the hay in "stacks" of 160 bales and hire a retriever truck to go get it and bring it to our place. It not inexpensive at $0.50 a bale.
This morning I went out to the hay stack to meet the retriever, the hay is only about 1/2 mile from my place so I got a break on the cost. The retriever is a truck with, what looks like, a fork lift on the back with the addition of a set of "claws" to hold the stack.
The driver of the retriever is an artist in his field, it was a pleasure to watch him position the retriever at the stack, pick it up and place it. I was freaking out that he was going to run into a horse trailer parked near by, or knock over the stack of stacks, over spill my hay over the side. What I was freaking out about was the ease with which he went about his job and how precise he was in the execution of it.
The battery in my truck went dead so I hitched a ride back to my place with him to get someone to come jump me. As we drove I asked him what he did for a living besides moving hay. "This is it. I do this from January until November most years." That's how he got his 10,000 hours and became a Master at hay retrieval!
I watched again in awe as he placed the stack outside of my barn, within six inches of where I asked him to. Now I get to watch in awe as my 18 year old son moves 160 60# bales of hay the 60 feet from where it is to where it will be stored. This is his last chance to make money before he leaves for college in two days. which means I get to move the next stack myself. Having horses at home requires a lot of time and energy!
On another note, I've decided to start using Twitter, the link is www.twitter.com/animalsi

Simplicity Accompanies Mastery

It seems that one of the Hallmarks of a master of any discipline is the simplicity in how they perform their particular thing. It doesn't matter what the thing is; painting a house, gardening or writing software.
When I was an engineering manager at Hewlett Packard, we had a joke about making our designs more simple. "Take out parts one at a time until the design stops working and then put in the last part. That's the simplest it can be." Of course that's a joke!
Think about this joke in the context of your body therapy work. How many times have you tried and tried with no change occurring, and then when you were about to give up the a shift in the tissue happened? I don't know about you, but I usually explain this as the effort prior to the shift was the setup--I call this chopping vegetables, like when you're cooking--and providing the needed opening for the change, when in reality it may just have been wasted effort.
But I also spend time--as I'm sure you all do--in reflection about my work with my clients. Luckily, after 15 years, I've been able to make changes to my work to the point where it is fairly simple and efficient and is predicated on a philosophy of less is more. (The book "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell explores this in great detail.)
In my courses I try and force simplicity in the way the participants work, by informing them
about the need to work within the animal's "adaptive capacity". Most of the time I fear that this
is simply too complicated a theory for people beginning this work. However, during the advanced course I've been thrilled with the "aha's" that the participants get, and how their work becomes much more refined. (I also force this in this course by having the participants work on fewer horses, trading off with each other. I tried this in some beginning courses this year with less impressive results.)
The point of this post is that we can all learn to be more efficient in how we work. To do this we need to reflect on our work, the amount of time we spend touching the client, the amount of time we think about what/where we are going to touch and the making the ratio of thinking to touching closer to 1. Simplicity = thinking/touching. capice?

The Nerve of it All

One of the course subjects of the recent Equine Advanced course was working with the nervous system. This isn't working with a nervous horse, but rather working with the nerves themselves and understanding where they may be contributing to the many of the common issues we see in horses.
Anyone who has had a lameness exam to the extent that the vet does a nerve block, knows that the nerves contribute to the perception of pain. Hell anyone who's hit their "funny bone" knows this. What if many of the common movement problems we experience with horses are caused by a problem with entrapped nerves?
Eight years ago I started on a journey of working with nerves in my human practice when my friend and colleague Christoph Summer introduced me to this work. At the time the only book on the subject was in French.
Three years ago I attended a 3 day workshop developed by another rolfer and chiropractor Don Hazen, who has been investigating the implications of nerve entrapment in postural issues.
It was after this workshop that I started to develop the work with animals which requires some "translation" from the human context.
If you are interested in this check the website www.animalsi.com in the next couple of weeks or sign up for the newsletter on the site to be notified when new material is put up.

I Learned to Moon Walk

I have a client who is a professional dancer and Michael Jackson fan. She told me that when she was a young girl she bought the Michael Jackson video where he revealed Moon Walking to us. I think it was Thriller?
She watched this video, over and over, rewinding it until she was able to pick out the particulars of how he did the Moon Walk. Me being me, asked her to show me. She Moon Walked across the carpet in my studio, not hard wood floors, carpet! Then she told me the secret and coached me in how to do it. I Moon Walked! Now this might not seem like a big accomplishment, but when you're as big as I am, it is impressive.
But that's not what I want to write about. In Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book "Outliers", he talks about the need to practice a craft--10,000 hours--to become competent in it. What my client did was analyze the video and the movement of Michael's feet to determine the mechanics of Moon Walking. She spent hours rewinding and mimicking his movements until she determined the secret and was able to pass it on to me.
This is what we pay teachers for. Those of us who teach spent hours studying, researching and practicing so we can figure out some of the secrets to our profession and pass them on to others so that it looks simple.