Forest Massage Therapy

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, we couldn’t find Dori 🐟

Can you see all the little movements? 👀

This is one of my favourite exercises because it challenges much more than just balance.

Standing on an unstable surface encourages your body to make constant small adjustments to help keep you upright. Your feet, ankles, knees, hips and trunk all have to work together.

As a sports massage therapist, I wouldn’t normally give this exercise to someone who had just injured their knee or was in pain. We’d begin with much simpler exercises, perhaps standing on one leg on a stable surface, before progressing to something more challenging if it was appropriate for them.

Exercises like this can help improve coordination, balance and the control of the muscles around the joints. Even the smaller stabilising muscles have to contribute to help maintain your position.

When I’m assessing movement, I also watch how someone performs an exercise—not just whether they can complete it. Does the knee stay well controlled? Does it wobble? Does the ankle compensate? Those observations help guide what we work on next.

The body is brilliant at adapting when we challenge it in the right way.

Have you ever tried a BOSU? 😊 firing balancing

Can you see all the little movements? 👀

This is one of my favourite exercises because it challenges much more than just balance.

Standing on an unstable surface encourages your body to make constant small adjustments to help keep you upright. Your feet, ankles, knees, hips and trunk all have to work together.

As a sports massage therapist, I wouldn’t normally give this exercise to someone who had just injured their knee or was in pain. We’d begin with much simpler exercises, perhaps standing on one leg on a stable surface, before progressing to something more challenging if it was appropriate for them.

Exercises like this can help improve coordination, balance and the control of the muscles around the joints. Even the smaller stabilising muscles have to contribute to help maintain your position.

When I’m assessing movement, I also watch how someone performs an exercise—not just whether they can complete it. Does the knee stay well controlled? Does it wobble? Does the ankle compensate? Those observations help guide what we work on next.

The body is brilliant at adapting when we challenge it in the right way.

Have you ever tried a BOSU? 😊 firing

🦶➡️🦵 Last week I talked about the foot — so where do we go next? The knee.

The knee may look like a fairly simple joint, but it doesn’t work in isolation.

What happens below it at the foot and ankle — and above it at the hip — can influence the way the knee moves and loads.

The knee mainly flexes and extends, but it also allows a small amount of rotation, particularly when it is bent.

This is why, when someone has knee discomfort, I’m interested in more than just the knee itself. I want to think about how the whole lower limb is moving together.

Tomorrow I’m going to demonstrate this with a balance and stability exercise. 👀

Our joints don’t work independently — they work as part of a chain.

🦶 Standing still only tells us part of the story…

Yesterday I showed you how differently my two feet look when I’m standing.

But biomechanics is really about movement.

Here I am simply walking naturally. My left and right sides don’t move in exactly the same way, which is one of the reasons I find gait and foot biomechanics so fascinating.

Movement at the foot doesn’t happen in isolation. What happens there can be accompanied by movement through the lower leg, knee, hip and pelvis — what we often refer to as the kinetic chain.

That doesn’t mean every asymmetry is a problem or that it automatically causes pain. Our bodies are remarkably good at adapting.

But it does explain why, when assessing somebody, looking at how they move can sometimes tell us more than simply looking at the area that hurts.

👣 The body is a chain — and the feet are a very interesting place to start. gait of the foot chain riders players