Strength-related reasons clients seek my help:
- Build muscle tone
- Feel stronger/healthier
- Improve athletic performance
- Increase comfort in daily activities
- Maintain physical function during long-term illness
- Rebuild strength after injury
- Support weight management program
Learn more about strength
Feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally strong is a guiding factor in overall quality of life. Strength helps us more comfortably enjoy our favorite activities. It also protects our joints from injury, aids our ability to balance, and even can help us sleep better.
Our body is engineered for movement. Over 650 skeletal muscles do everything from pumping blood to helping us lift things. Here are 18 of the body’s basic movements:
- Sitting (flexion)
- Standing (extension)
- Stepping to the side (abduction)
- Squatting (adduction)
- Getting into a car (external rotation)
- Putting on pants (internal rotation)
- Puckering up for a kiss (protrusion)
- Relaxing your lips after the kiss (retrusion)
- Shrugging your shoulders (elevation)
- Opening your bottom jaw (depression)
- Turning your head sideways (lateral rotation)
- Turning your head forward (medial rotation)
- Turning palm downward (pronation)
- Turning palm upward (supination)
- Swimming (circumduction)
Our daily movements can overwork some muscles and call in other muscles to get the job done. When that happens, the overworked muscles tighten up in protection, as if they’re afraid they’re going to be worked even more.
Strong and functional are able to both tighten and lengthen. Moving our bodies toward more strength starts with releasing the tight muscles. Once they have their full movement range, strength can — and does — rebuild.
Somatic yoga therapy is an effective, holistic way to regain free and confident movement, expand your breath, and restore your posture.
How this therapy works
Muscle movement comes from the brain via a steady two-way communication stream within the nervous system. Sometimes, repetitive movement patterns of daily life overwork specific muscle groups to the extent that they can no longer access the communication stream. This is called “sensory-motor amnesia,” or SMA.
Somatic yoga therapy helps us locate areas of SMA and reteach the neural pathways on how to access the communication stream. The therapy is a partnership between therapist and client. As the client learns to sense and feel their body from the inside out, the therapist guides the client through very small, slow movements to lessen or eliminate SMA. Neural muscular reeducation takes place, the communication stream is reestablished, and functional movement improves.
Read to get started?
If you are currently under a doctor’s care, receiving physical therapy, or visiting a chiropractor, please schedule a free 30-minute phone consultation to discuss when would be the best time for you to begin your somatic yoga therapy.
Otherwise, schedule your first appointment, either in person in my Saint Paul studio or as a virtual visit.
I look forward to working with you!