Back In Balance Massage Therapy

Welcome to our first virtual workshop, which you can attend and follow along in the comfort of your home! SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST! Is a breathing and movement biomechanics seminar for physical problem solving, breathing and immunity. This workshop will cover: ... - how physical movement intersects with your breathing, - how to optimize your respiratory health and core strength with specific breathing drills and exercises - stimulate your immune system function with lymphatic drainage techniques (demonstrated in class) - how to conquer the immune compromising effects of stress through basic Qigong meditation techniques. We will be connecting your: - Feet to your - Pelvis to your - Ribcage to your - Shoulders to your - Neck and - Head in all three planes of movement. We especially encourage coaches and movement professionals of all types to attend or tune in, because many of these movements are phenomenal techniques for helping your movement clients of all types increase the quality of their experience - especially if they have a history of injury. HOW DO I ATTEND VIRTUALLY OR BUY A RECORDING???? We will be making a private group, and Facebook livecasting to the group, as well as recording video. The cost to attend in person or virtually is $40. To register: Venmo @DrClutz or PayPal friends and family [email protected] and specify SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST in your payment. For locals who wish to come and participate, there is plenty of room to stay 6’ apart, and enjoy the spacious airflow of the spotlessly clean FFE Athletics, located at 123 Leverington Ave, Philadelphia PA 19127 Facebook limits the number of invites I can send, so do me a favor and share with your friends? If you are feeling super generous and know a few people who might really benefit from this content, perhaps invite a few? Jeff Mumford and I cannot WAIT to share this with you .

Every therapy tool in my toolbox, I actually am pursuing my own healing. I love helping my clients, but really, I’m chasing my own healing. I grew up with low ...back pain and asthma problems, lots of allergies. I wasn’t a strong kid. Massive anxiety. I was a reasonably good pianist, but my arms hurt a lot after playing, many days. I didn’t know at the time that my breathing played a role. My nervous system was on high alert, all the time. Wrist pain, and foot pain later- plantar fasciitis. Pelvic floor disorder as an adult. PCOS, hashimotos. Constant nausea. My life hasn’t been a straight line, there was a lot of trauma and grief and detours in there. As a whole human being, this had effects on my body. Most of my work is derived from things I’ve learned for myself in understanding what was happening in my body. I learned that the nervous system is always responding to data our body is processing from both outside and inside of us. Everything we have happening in our bodies now is a part of that nervous system response. The limbic system and my autonomic nervous system played huge parts in my visceral and autoimmune problems. Physiologically, this played a huge role in how my musculoskeletal system was responding, and how my breathing was affected. To address this needed a whole human approach! I learned about muscular response in my studies with NeuroKinetic therapy, but it was far from the last stop. Not long after getting into it, I realized that muscular response was quite literally the bottom of a long chain of links, going up to much higher priority problems in the viscera, endocrine system, digestive system, and respiratory systems, to name a few... and that these systems were responding to deep psychoemotional issues that I needed to connect the dots with. Anatomy in Motion was amazingly helpful for helping me understand that joints played a huge role in working with other systems of the body, such as fluid management, motor control, and blood flow. Joints act, and muscles react, yo! NOT the other way around the way I was taught in massage therapy school. Stage 2 of my training happened when I started training in Dynamic Neuromuscular Assessment to start mapping out viscero-structural dysfunction. Immaculate Dissection gave me amazing movement integration assessments and tools. Pieces were still missing though! I knew how to assess limbic and autonomic dysfunction in the guts and structure, but I didn’t have answers for how to resolve the underlying limbic and autonomic drivers. Enter Adaptable Polarity Therapies. Jordan Shane Terry takes his students through a comprehensive system of assessing and correcting the axial skeleton, which is the container for our central nervous system. Using extremely gentle and non-invasive techniques, we can allow the nervous system to correct imbalances that carry strong limbic and ANS loads, which creates the much needed room to process emotions that we often carry deep within us. As a therapist, I often have the privilege of co-caring in these cases with a professional psychotherapist, and we have seen tremendous transformation. This type of work is called Somatic Therapy. For myself, I cannot overstate how grateful I’ve been to have these tools for my own self work. It has been life changing. If you would like to learn more about this and some of these tools, I would love to have you join us for our next class here in Philadelphia for Adaptable Polarity Axial Skeleton, which runs March 7th and 8th at the beautiful Kismet space (did you know that kismet means fate, or meant to be? I just learned this the other day! How cool) in Chestnut Hill.

#neuronerdtime Let’s talk about manual muscle testing, sometimes referred to as MMT, or applied kinesiology. What is it? Why do some practitioners use it? Why d...o some practitioners prefer not to use it? How does it work? It’s definitely the red headed step child of the therapeutic world, for a variety of reasons- but when used correctly, can be an extremely valuable tool in the therapy toolbox! First of all, what is muscle testing? There are two types of muscle testing: 1) a direct test of strength to a muscle and 2) an indicator muscle test. 1) Involves asking for resistance to meet pressure against concentric activation of the muscle in question. Want to know if a quad or a psoas or a hamstring is activating strongly, or normally? You can check it against gentle resistance and if it falls weak, we know it’s having a hard time doing its job biomechanically. Honestly though, this is BS to a degree- because the nervous system is what decides whether muscles fire or not! So you aren’t checking whether a muscle is strong or weak, you are checking for how the nervous system is RESPONDING to stimulus in that area. And guess what, that stimulus can produce COMPLETELY different results depending on position and load! Something that’s weak in a lying down position could test strong in a sitting position and weak in a standing position... and strong in a standing position that loads the body in a different way, like a split stance. Also, we’re not actually testing that local muscle- we’re testing all the synergistic muscles and tissue that respond proprioceptively do a given movement at that loading angle. Honestly... this style of testing is very limited in the amount of accurate information it can give for a big picture on what is happening in that joint system. It’s good to know academically for the sake of putting context on local anatomy, but if you know your tissue function well, let’s graduate to better testing. And let’s be more accurate, and acknowledge that we aren’t actually testing muscles. We’re testing nervous system response. The whole name Manual Muscle Testing which practitioners in our industry have used to identify this technique, needs to phase out- it’s inaccurate and unhelpful. Which leads to option 2), Indicator muscle testing. I don’t love the term indicator muscle, because as I detailed above, we aren’t testing a MUSCLE. We are testing for NERVOUS SYSTEM RESPONSE. (Can we just call this NSR testing? Please? Thank you.) How does it work? Why are practitioners that use this tool always asking the client to resist pressure somewhere? This is where things get COOL. Your limbic system and thalamus are always observing operations in your body. When we are all chill and relaxed, our limbic system lets the autonomic nervous system become parasympathetic. This is the chill AF zone... we can nap, eat, digest food, and relax. However, if an event happened that our nervous system perceives a threat (hey, that’s the ankle I twisted last summer... don’t get too close to the outside of that foot! or don’t bend too far over... remember when we threw out our back in ‘93?) then your autonomic nervous system slides over to fight, flight, or freeze!! Code orange at the very least is on and our nerves engage a pre-threat protocol in the body. Indicator testing uses this understanding of autonomic nervous system response to create a map of where structural, physiological, and limbic dysfunction affect movement and pain. When we stimulate parts of the human body, structurally and physiologically, the autonomic nervous system responds immediately either parasympathetically, (rests and relax) or sympathetically (fight or flight). An indicator test will show strength or weakness accordingly. Indicators aren’t binary- there is a spectrum of ANS (autonomic nervous system) response. The response could be a calibrated response to pressure, we call that normal and since it’s showing a proprioceptive exactness, it shows parasympathetic response. The response could be weak, this shows a slightly sympathetic response- the stim we are testing is an area of slight vulnerability for the nervous system. The response could be overstrong- we call this hypertonic- it’s a proprioceptive mismatched response, and shows a stronger feeling of threat from the ANS. Lastly, the response could be dead-hand limp-fish level weak, we call this hypotonic and it indicates the highest level of ANS threat to a stim- a really high priority problem for the nervous system!! Using our understanding of how physiological and structural system work together, we can use indicators to create a map that accurately reflects the intersystem dysfunctions a body might be dealing with. None of our systems operate in isolation- our muscular system doesn’t operate separately from our bones and joints, or from our lymphatic system, cardiovascular system, endocrine system, digestive system, respiratory system... they are all interacting together to adapt to whatever injury or event a person may have had. Isn’t it wonderful? Why do some practitioners prefer not to use it? There are a plethora of legitimate reasons. Top of the list is questionable pedagogue- this technique is taught in classes by a huge variety of practitioners with a really varying grasp on neurophysiology. Their idea of application can be just as wildly varying, across several professions. Next is how people understand the intersection of clinical assessment skills and evidence based research, which also can look quite different from clinic to clinic. A quick word about this intersection, although it completely deserves its own discussion in another post: there is a BALANCE between clinical assessment skills, evidence based understanding of broad applications, and individual context for each client/patient. Anytime one of those three factors is favored over the others, both the client and the practitioner loses out. Lastly, there’s a lot of misinformation that gets passed around as it’s a manual technique - and literally ANY manual technique is going to pan out differently from individual practitioner to individual. Not just manual muscle testing (please can we change to nervous system response testing? That’s what it is....) but joint adjustments, stretches, tissue release techniques... even movement work. Everybody practices just a LITTLE bit differently, because we are not robots. Professionally and personally, I think it’s a super useful technique that helps me make the maps that help me solve puzzles. Puzzle solving is my absolute FAVORITE activity, and while I cannot solve every puzzle, I love all the puzzles I get the privilege of helping solve. I’ve had to learn a LOT about neurophysiology, how all the physiological systems interact with the structural systems like muscles and bones, and nervous system functions, to use this tool more accurately. But when used properly, indicators can be EXTREMELY helpful for vetting out root causes for pain and dysfunction - and FAST. Instead of guessing, we get to test the nervous system directly. More data equals more accurate focus on treatment that works faster. Want to learn more about this? PDTR-Global is coming to Philadelphia for their foundation series in March, April, July, and October. Feel free to join our interest group at P-DTR Atlantic Coast Foundations Interest Forum for lots of demo videos and more information. It would be my absolute pleasure to share this education with you that has helped my practice so much! Registration deadline is February 20th. Would you like an in person demo? Let us know, we would love to arrange it for you. Picture: think of the Autonomic Nervous System as acting on a spectrum!

I’m going to start a series of small posts on nervous system response strategies in the human body, and different ways of looking at therapeutic interventions f...or professionals who work on and with humans who might be seeing them for pain, dysfunction, or optimization of performance. They will start with #neuronerdtime. #neuronerdtime Our brain is monitoring all parts of our body at all times... but most of that monitoring happens in the background during normal function, so we don’t have to pay attention to it (thanks, thalamus!!). There are some pretty cool neurodiverse folks out there who aren’t operating on this setting, but most people walking into the average office are. When an event happens to the body, the nervous system will respond by sliding anywhere along the spectrum between #chillAF and #FFF (fight, flight, or freeze). Believe it or not, this encodes a memory response from your motor cortex- it can be anywhere from let’s totally do this again! to LET’S NEVER DO THIS AGAIN. Have you been struggling to recover from an injury despite doing therapy of some type(s) for a while? Or as a practitioner, wondering why some bodies seem to respond really well to your interventions, but others not so much? You may need to learn how to address the #limbicsystemresponse in addition to the structural problem to thoroughly get to the root of the matter. How do we help the brain reprogram the sympathetic ANS response see the functional movement we want to promote as a non-threat and restore full movement function immediately? There are many roads down that path, but Proprioceptive Deep Tendon Reflex therapy is a REALLY fast, efficient and helpful one. I’ve been experiencing this work for about 3 years now, and that’s why I’m hosting the foundation series in Philadelphia, starting with our first module on March 26-29th. Would you like to learn more? See it in action in person? Let me know in the comments! I’m interested in putting together a demo class so you can see the goods.

"And I began to understand that spirals are almost the master plan of nature in terms of structure and in terms of rhythm." -Dr. Gerald Buckberg The heart of t...he spiral. ;-) Spiral obsessed. Anyone else? Your cellular make up, your vascular supply, your movement, your universe! #spiral #spirals #spiralout #spiralizer #anatomy #dna #heart #cantstopwontstop