Changing your body is like undertaking a science project and looking at it that way would be well worth the effort. The body is a machine and we take for granted that machines need maintenance and care. Unfortunately, many people take better care of their cars than their bodies.
That was my story for the longest time, though I wasn’t unhealthy. I have always eaten well and moved enough. But I needed to injure myself repeatedly before I realized I never thought too much about how the body was supposed to move.
From the time I was able to go outside I ran around without ever thinking about how. I did yoga the same way for almost three years before my knees told me they didn’t like what I was doing.
In yoga loose joints are super cool if you have a lot of muscle to support them but I didn’t know that at the time. It took three knee surgeries to finally wake me up and put a plan together for getting and staying out of pain.
The body is designed to work in a specific way. There are ideal patterns. The bones are supposed to hold you up; the muscles move you and the nerves tell the muscles to move the bones. The muscles need to have a certain balanced tone to support the movement of the bones, which are designed to move in specific ways. You can figure out how to best serve your body and change its patterns if you want though it is often easier said than done.
We are pretty attached to our habits. But changing them is usually a good move.
In an ideal world, when walking, the feet are meant to fall close to parallel landing with a two-inch lane (give or take) between them, the legs want to equidistant beneath the pelvis, the shorter the stride the better. The leg bones move forward directly underneath the hips with the kneecap tracking in line with the ankle, and the shins aligned towards parallel. The pelvis is meant to tilt and rotate in direct opposition to the shoulder girdle centered on a perfectly vertical spine under a head that that sits, level, directly above the pelvis.
It’s all relative of course, but diagnosing your body and instituting a plan for changing it is a science project worth undertaking.