Improve Core Stability by Activating Your Transverse Abdominis You're likely familiar with your rectus abdominis muscle: this is the muscle that forms a “six-pack” when it's highly developed. You may also be familiar with your internal and external obliques, the muscles on each side of your torso that bend and twist you from side [...]
How to Approach Exercise When You're in Pain There are endless benefits to physical exercise, and you should keep up with regular physical activity while you're learning Clinical Somatics exercises—unless your workouts are making your pain worse or preventing you from making progress. In this post, I'll discuss: The benefits of working out while learning [...]
What type of exercise, and how much, is ideal? Most chronic diseases that humans suffer from are mismatch diseases. Daniel Lieberman, a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University, uses this term to describe health conditions that result from our bodies not being adapted to our modern lifestyle and environment. It's not old age that makes us [...]
How to Use Clinical Somatics Exercises to Heal Achilles Tendinitis What is Achilles tendinitis? The Achilles (calcaneal) tendon is located at the back of the ankle, where it attaches the calf muscles to the heel bone. Overuse injuries to the Achilles tendon—whether they be inflammatory tendinitis or degenerative tendinosis—can be very painful and limit [...]
How Clinical Somatics Prevents Injuries and Enhances Training for Ballet Dancers Ballet dancers make their movements look effortless, but in reality, ballet is just as physically, mentally, and psychologically demanding as American football. It takes thousands of hours of rigorous training to develop the strength, stamina, finely-tuned muscular control and artistry necessary to perform ballet [...]
Slow Burn: Burn Fat Faster By Exercising Slower I just read Slow Burn, an outstanding book by ultra distance running champion Stu Mittleman. In 1986, Stu set a world record by running 1000 miles in 11 days. He currently holds the US record for running 578 miles in 6 days—that's 96 miles (more than [...]
What really causes muscle cramps? Muscle cramps have long been attributed to electrolyte depletion and dehydration, especially when they occur in athletes. However, research does not support these theories, and instead points to altered neuromuscular control and muscle fatigue as the culprits. In this post, I'll summarize the research and explain why muscle cramps [...]
The Diverse Ways in Which SMC® CEI Instructors Use Clinical Somatics to Help People The Somatic Movement Center® Certified Exercise Instructor (SMC® CEI) program was born out of a desire to make Clinical Somatic Education accessible worldwide. With the three in-person training schools all located in the United States, bringing the training online has [...]
This week I got to be a guest on the Running Rogue podcast, hosted by competitive runner and coach Chris McClung. We chatted about how Chris healed an injury using Clinical Somatics exercises, how the exercises work, how athletes can benefit from them, and lots of other fun stuff. Thanks so much for having me [...]
How to Get Your Inactive Muscles to Wake Up and Fire People often ask me how to strengthen or “activate” weak or inactive muscles. Well, there's a difference between weak and inactive, and it's important to understand this difference. Do you feel like you can't get a certain muscle group to “fire” no matter [...]
How to Take Care of Your Knees for the Long Haul Knee pain is one of the most common types of chronic pain that people experience, and it's no wonder why—our knees support the weight of our body throughout our entire lives! And while the U.S. population is getting older and more overweight, rates [...]
Tendinitis vs. Tendinosis: What's the Difference? And 8 Steps to Recovery Injuries to tendons are not only painful, but they can be very frustrating for two reasons. One, they are slow to heal and two, a change in behavior is often required in order to allow the healing process to take place. Many tendinopathies (which [...]
The Game Changers: Why Top Athletes Are Making a Big Change Produced by Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Cameron, and Jackie Chan, The Game Changers debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018. I was lucky to see the movie when it came to theaters nationwide for a special one-day event on September 16th, 2019. If [...]
Why Stretching Doesn't Relieve Iliotibial Band Syndrome Iliotibial band syndrome is a painful inflammatory condition of the knee joint that often plagues runners, hikers, and cyclists. Stretching is typically recommended to lengthen the iliotibial band and relieve the condition, but as you'll learn in this post, static stretching has little to no lasting effect [...]
What's Causing Your Snapping Hip Syndrome? Up to 10% of us experience snapping hip syndrome at some point in our lives. The condition is most often caused by connective tissue snapping over bone as we flex and extend the hip joint. For some people, snapping hip is painless and simply annoying, but for others [...]
7 Reasons Why Every Athlete Should Do Clinical Somatics If you haven't heard of Clinical Somatics before, you've been missing out. These incredibly effective exercises retrain deeply learned, automatic muscular patterns and undo years of chronic muscle tightness and pain. The benefits of the exercises are so life-changing that every athlete needs to be [...]
Why Stretching Doesn't Work From the ages of twelve to twenty-one, I was a ballet dancer. It was all I did and all I wanted to do. Being extremely disciplined, I stretched for half an hour every night before bed so I could get more flexible. And it worked—I got pretty darn flexible. Even on [...]
Combining Your Clinical Somatics and Yoga Practices One of the questions that students ask me most often is whether or not they should continue their yoga practice while doing Clinical Somatics exercises, and if so, how to go about combining the two practices. I love yoga, and I practice it regularly. Everything I've learned and [...]
How to get optimal strength, stability, and flexibility in your core What does core strength really mean, and why is it so important? The most common misconception about core strength is that it means simply having strong abdominals—like the enviable washboard stomach achieved by developing your rectus abdominis muscle. In truth, optimal core strength means [...]
