Evil Strength
  • About
  • Contact
  • Disclaimer
  • Store
  • Schedule
    • GPP
    • Course Offerings

The Doctors' Mashup:  Dr. Mark Cheng & Dr. Perry Nickelston Day 2

9/18/2017

0 Comments

 
Day 2

Day two had a decidedly more emotional tone to the morning than yesterday’s joking bubbliness.  Perhaps we were feeling the bodily energetic effects from having massaged many neurolymphatic reflex points yesterday?  Perhaps it was a touching retelling of her own professional and postpartum journey; Suzanne Ko took the stage this morning to enumerate the many beneficial strategies she used to relearn breathing that put her on a successful and healthy trajectory.  Ko shared Julie Wiebe's Piston breathing using a balloon to illustrate Pascal’s Principle [hydraulic/pressure] within the pelvic-abdominal region of the body.  Brianna Battles was in attendence and further helped us understand how every population that uses postpartum strategies can improve their well-being and performance.  This key concept helped me rethink the value of taking a postpartum pelvic floor workshop soon.

Often considered a taboo area and sorely neglected in the general trainer/fitness industry, the pelvic floor remained the interest for the better part of the morning.  Dr. Nickleston added his clinical observations about how the tissues around the hip tend to behave when the pelvic floor is overly tensed.  The energy of the room brightened up as we retested our squat to our amazement.  Indeed, this pelvic floor does need more exploration.  Strong and active does not necessarily mean coordinated.  Most of the attention was on the timing of this goldilocks area in relation to our breathing, not too tight, not disengaged, but just the right amount at the right time netted us easier and easier retests.

Dr. Cheng led us through ankle movements sieza (a formal japanese sitting posture) and hack squat like drills.  Each retest felt easier and had higher fidelity sensation.  The day was not filled with countless examples but ideas that spoke to principles for us to later apply in our own way.  The main principles undergirding the morning session seemed to say:  try improving the communication within the body with by using easy movement through key joint areas and remove interference with that neruological communication.  None of these drills involved high threshold strategies or greater force input, alluding to the importance of softer modalities like tai chi and Moshé Feldenkrais’ work.  They were surprisingly simple, easy to perform moves that made measurable differences in our test squat performance.  Some attendees familiar with Eric Cobb’s Z-Health nodded in agreement.  I believe the key ingredient here was attention paid to the task at hand.  Our careful noticing, not our harder work was giving us the benefit of feeling more at ease in our movement-body.

Dr. Nickleston restated his preference for working succinctly with the body choosing only the fewest key points to affect at a time.  For areas of pain he showed us to work with a foot joint and a neck joint.  These two taken together is a form of pain and trauma resetting that sometimes goes by IRT [injury recall technique].  The use of energy testing and point manipulation during the demonstration reminded me of the way Donna Eden teaches energy medicine.  She demonstrates that energy can change rapidly and show through the body immediately.  This however was framed in the day’s reminder that lifestyle is ultimately how we help construct, maintain, or destroy these pathways to expressing health and happiness.  
The zooming in and out needed for this style of presentation reminded one to stabilize the skill that is required to maintain the “50-foot view” of the client while working with changes of perception that are just below the surface of habitual awareness, whispering yet evident to the careful observer.

By the afternoon we had deconstructed quadruped and integrated pelvic floor exercises into the posture.  This offered more mapping to that part of the body-mind and magnified inconsistencies we may have had discovered earlier in the day.  Dr. Nickleston offered an extrememly easy way to vary rocking by simply changing a hand or a knee position.  We ended the afternoon by setting up half-kneeling.  Doc Cheng’s disavowed himself of the multitude of half-kneeling exercise variations available on the internet and instead emphasized simply setting the posture up properly.  The lesson here, demonstrate mastery via ease.  Be able to breathe, and move eyes and head with no strain or stuggle.  An important reminder here when he asked us to relax after only a handful of seconds in half-kneeling:  the metabolic load of learning a new position can be fatiguing.  Take our lead from the babies:  explore to discover (rather than achieve), then rest.

0 Comments

The Doctors’ Mashup:  Dr. Mark Cheng and Dr. Perry Nickleston, Day 1 of 2

9/16/2017

0 Comments

 
The Doctors’ Mashup:  Dr. Mark Cheng and Dr. Perry Nickleston

Day 1
9.16.17

Arriving at Spindle Fitness in Chicago, participants were greeted by hostess Suzanne Ko and made their way to the waivers, coffee, and doughnuts.  Hugs and handshakes from Dr. Perry Nickelston and Dr. Mark Cheng made for a friendly reunion.  After a warm welcome by Dr. Mark Cheng, we dove into a whole day of seamless back-and-forth between two doctors, sharing anecdotes and wisdom interspersed with hilariously bawdy jokes.  The main objective was clear:  “We are going to have fun today and learn some deeply important things along the way.”  The discussion, which could have easily been dense presentation on topics like sensory input, motor control, and compensations, was made digestible by simple postural tests and hands on experimentation.

Doc Cheng led off by asking us to make some distinctions about the word “fitness.”  Would we be talking about cosmetics or quality of life?  Should we consider training different than testing?  Is health different than sport?  Cheng offered that training is setting up a learning environment for improvement of some quality, while testing gives one feedback. That critical distinction of an external environment influencing our internal environment led us into the freestyle “jam” between the doctors.  The dual presentation was an organic framework injected with the doctors’ insights, dovetailed together effortlessly and coherently.  

Cheng offered tidbits about the clinician/trainer’s professional role in the client’s life, asking us to consider how we educate the client and get their “buy-in.”  Perhaps personal, many of Cheng’s insights were threaded with a theme of responsibility and ownership: “own the movement,”  “make the difficult look easy,” and develop control of your person through extremes like tension and relaxation.  He often implied a hierarchy exists from foundational work through high order [complexity] movements as a rationale for slowing a client down.  While demonstrating the beauty of moving more slowly, he cited efficiency as being at the heart of a regression:  fundamental movement provides a point of access to help make learning efficient. Nickleston offered gems about pain’s insidious distortions on our perception and tended to emphasize the body’s non-linear and mysterious connections through nerves, lymph, and important points on the body worth exploring or “hacking.”  Nickleston also reminded us that our emotions ought to be considered as part of both our humanity and a variable in our learning environment.  “People don’t want to feel judgment or humiliation,”  he said as he instructed us to look for subtle markers of the body responding as if threatened.

We explored a foundational movement, breathing, by feeling nuances in abdominal engagement in a balloon-blowing exercise led by Ko.  Sometimes abdominal tone was evident visually; other times palpating our partners’ bellies offered a chance to feel how different areas of the abdomen engaged in a non-simultaneous fashion.  Nickleston asked us to feel for these timing differences among our partners and asked if timing might play a role in perception of pain or strength?  This was just one question that preceded the chorus-like rejoinder, “Context!”  All of this information we experienced was couched in different scenarios and positions.  How well we breath while lying on our back could be informed by changing the context: breathing in sphinx position.  How good we feel in sphinx position might change after chopping our neck muscles and rubbing our intercostals.  The play between the doctors provided many ways to think about and feel the developmental positions that were strongly central to both doctors’ approaches.

Cheng briefly touched on Ed Thomas’ Three Common and Uncommon Postures and three foot positions as possible movement lenses through which to look at the body.  He briefly introduced his 5 postures he presents in his DVD Prehab-Rehab 101, and took us to through the first two, ground-lying and sphinx [belly down supported on forearms].   We took careful note of our vision, breath, and spinal articulation in these two positions when Nickleston picked up the conversation by delving into an unsung hero of the body, the lymph/nodes.  He used palpation and mobility tools to pointedly implore us to consider how the body’s fluids and waste can produce massive alterations to our well-being and movement quality.  

After a second round of sharing take-aways from the afternoon, our posterior chains “juiced,” and vitalness accessed with simple postural exploration, we conclude day one.

0 Comments

    Gwen

    Incubating practice and teaching ideas in written form here.

    Archives

    May 2018
    September 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    January 2016
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.