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  • Philosophy
  • why you hurt
  • easy healthy habits
  • This is me
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Suite 201
Osoyoos, BC
V0H 1V0



you are designed
​to feel good

if your brain drew your body

6/5/2021

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it would look like this...
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As far as your brain is concerned, your hands are bigger than your entire torso and legs.
​No wonder a paper cut can drive you crazy, but you’ll ignore that aching back for 20 years.
There are a number of reasons our knees, hips, spines and shoulders break down before their time, but this is a big one: we just don’t have enough awareness of them built in. We have to train it in. Your brain pays attention to whatever you decide to pay attention to, and if that’s your body, your brain will map more of that information in. Becoming more aware of how you move builds your brain and protects your body: a win win any way you look at it. Changing up your movement patterns is a great way to build the body map in your brain, but concentrating on your breath does it too. Spend 5 or 6 minutes breathing deeply and slowly today, and explore the whole inside of your torso with your mind while you do. Feel the rib cage move. Get under your shoulder blades. Trace the spine. Circle around the inside of your pelvis. Just notice yourself. Map yourself. And have fun! Your brain doesn’t know what it’s missing.

If you want to know more about this, download this file from my teacher training program...

cu_anatomy_body_mapping.pdf
File Size: 2318 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

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why you hurt, and how to fix it

6/4/2021

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Here's an explainer video I made to give you a short, easy way to understand why you hurt.
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how to walk

6/3/2021

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When’s the last time you practiced walking?
Probably not since you were less than 2 years old, right? Most of us stop practicing a thing we think we’ve mastered. We just do it the way we do it, and never think about it again.
But what if you are doing it wrong?
What if your walk is walking you toward pain?
You might be surprised how little it takes, and how likely it is that you are creating your own future of bad knees, bad hips, bad back, bad shoulders, bad neck.
Gravity doesn’t just hold you onto the earth; it pulls you toward it. If you aren’t fighting against that, you are actively allowing your bones to crush together. When your doctor says “bone on bone compression” - you did that.
You’ve got to walk tall, and lift the front of your rib cage a little. Open the chest. Pull the back of your head into line with the back of your body.
And put your toes forward. We sit and sleep and stand with our toes pointing away from us, and many many many people walk that way too. So you overuse the outer hip and leg muscles, and underuse the amazing power and potential of your inner hip and leg muscles. And eventually, it all falls apart.
I swiped the last picture from a video ad for walking to lose weight. Two strong looking folks just strolling along. But watching their feet all the way to their hips shows me they are walking their way towards pain.
Ask someone to shoot a video of you walking. If one or both of your feet swings away from front and center, consider fixing that.
Practice walking again.
Toes in front.
Heart proud.
Head on top, not in front.
​Don’t worry, your brain will always get home at the same time as the rest of you; it doesn’t have to be rushing out in front.
Walk with your hips, not your head.
It’s simple things that make a big difference.
Just practice.
It’s #theyogayouneed
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how to walk, part 2

6/2/2021

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In another post, I wrote about practicing how to walk correctly, because if you’re like most people, you don’t. Nonetheless, the muscles in your hips and legs are pretty skillful at moving you along. They let you roll over your feet, bouncing across the planet, day after day, year after year. But later in life, when you’ve got bone on bone compression, arthritis, or you fall and break a hip, you find out that mobility without stability isn’t good enough. We need both - especially in those hard working hips.
I practice stillness in the walking line as a way to maintain stable strength and balance in my hips, and it’s a practical, easy tool for anyone.
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You’ve got to work at keeping the back foot facing forward - that’s the hard part. Lifting your arms isn’t required, but it makes your legs work harder automatically. You’ll wobble and shake at first, but stability builds quickly - your body wants to do it right. When you get good at it, close your eyes. A minute or two per day on each side is a good practice; longer if you like.
If you want to live with your own happy hips for the long game, you’ve got to practice having happy hips now.
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body science

6/1/2021

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​In the modern world, trusting science is up for debate. Maybe because it is not uncommon for the pain management doctor to use the science of drugs until the science of surgery is required, and neither actually works to take your pain away.
Science knows only 5% of spine surgeries work, so yeah, who’d want to take that bet if they believed there was another way?
Exercise is a science too, but a lot of exercise methods choose an idiotic ‘no pain no gain’ philosophy of self abuse, that might give you rock hard abs, but still doesn’t eliminate your back pain.

Gravity is the science that keeps you from floating off planet; they teach you that in grade school. It’s also the science that crushes your bones if you don’t resist it, and maybe they didn’t teach you that.
​Homeostasis is the science of your amazing body’s constant effort to be healthy, and you might not have learned that either, because so much of it is happening deep inside without you needing to think about it.
Life without back pain (or hip, knee, neck, and shoulder pain) requires you to think about it. You must think to seek muscular skeletal homeostasis, by resisting gravity and moving without unnecessary force.
That, my dears, is the whole point of The Yoga You Need, and yes, it’s a science.
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    Life Hurts

    But your body is designed to heal, feel good, and function without pain for 100 years. We blame the body when it breaks down, but mostly it is the world we've created, and the way we live in it. Your body does the best it can, until it can't anymore.
    But there are a whole lot of easy things you can do to change your pain story, and understanding how things work, and why you hurt, helps the most.

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