Yoga Anatomy.net: Fundamentalsmedia.yogaanatomy.net/fundamentals/unit-06-transcript...Page|2%...
Transcript of Yoga Anatomy.net: Fundamentalsmedia.yogaanatomy.net/fundamentals/unit-06-transcript...Page|2%...
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Yoga Anatomy.net: Fundamentals
Unit 6: Muscles & Connective Tissue Leslie: This is Unit 6 which is about muscles. What are they made of? How do they work? What is connective tissue? What are muscle actions? What are the different kinds of contractions a
muscle can do? And what does it mean to stretch anyway? We’ll be covering all of this and more, so enjoy.
Lesson 1: Form & Function
Amy: Muscles. Okay, so I love bones. I love muscles too. They are so much fun. Leslie: That’s from the book.
Amy: That’s from the book. We are not gonna do this muscle connects here to here and does this action. This muscle connects here to here and does this action. We may talk about some
specific muscles but that's all stuff you can go look up. What I feel is a gap in most of our teaching about muscles is the fundamental principles about how they work. And some of them are things when I finally learned them, after memorizing tons of muscles, I went, “Oh, really.”
So, one of them is that muscles cross joints to move bones. With very few exceptions. There are very few exceptions. But in general, a muscle crosses a joint to move a bone. And what is a joint, from last week?
Student: Where two bones articulate.
Amy: Where two bones articulate. Student: And have a relationship.
Amy: And have a relationship. Irene’s been studying or soaking it in. So a joint is a place where two bones are in relationship. Where they articulate. Where movement happens. So, muscles
cross joints to move bones. To create movement. Muscles are not weight bearing. Duh!
And they do that. They attach to the bone through tendons. With some exceptions the connective tissue of a muscular system is tendons and fascia. Where the connective tissue of the skeletal system we talked about last week was ligaments. Ligaments connect bone to bone.
Tendons connect muscle to bone. Yes.
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Student: So a ligament that attaches bone to bone isn't the same structure as the bone itself. Is it the same type of cell?
Amy: So let me back up, yeah. Let me back up and do just a mini, mini connective tissue kind of...
Leslie: Inventory.
Amy: ...inventory. So connective tissue can be described in a couple of different ways. But generally it's described as having four components. It has ground substance. And that's the fluid, gel, stuff, and it can also be called the extracellular matrix. So that's the fluid but it's not always
runny fluid. It can be more or less viscous which describes the quality of thickness. The ground substance is the fluid. It's not cellular.
Student: That's joint, yeah? Amy: No, no. We're talking about connective tissue here. Ground substance. Collagen fibers,
which are protein molecules. Collagen fibers are not—they’re cellular byproducts. They are a product of cells, they are not cells. They are things that cells make. The third thing is something called reticulin. Reticulin which is immature collagen. And the fourth thing is elastin—now these
are not in any particular order so you could have prioritized them some other way—which are elastic molecules. Then, depending on the kind of connective tissue there will be varying
amounts of cellular, different kinds of cells also. And these we don't know. They might be more or less. Things like blood cells, fibroblasts, osteocytes, all kinds of different cells can be in there. So before we get to the cell part anything that is connective tissue will have some of these in it.
But the proportions vary widely, widely. So, reticulin—I'm going to back up. Collagen and elastin are one of the things, to really simplify
it, they kind of set the tone of the connective tissue. And the collagen is flexible but not elastic. And this is an important distinction. An elastin is flexible and elastic. So the quality of elasticity is not the same thing as the quality of flexibility. Yeah. This is a perfect example. The belt is flexible
but not elastic. This is flexible and elastic, meaning that when I stretch it, it rebounds. That rebounding quality, that returning to its resting length is elasticity, and it is not the same as flexibility.
So the more elastin there is in the connective tissue the more elastic it will be. The less elastin the more collagen, the more flexible—not the more flexible but it will be flexible but not elastic.
So within our body ligaments and tendons are not—they're flexible but they're not very elastic. But there’s some ligaments in our body that have more elastin in them than others. So some ligaments are more elastic and some of us are just physiologically, constitutionally, some people
have looser ligaments which is not necessarily less elasticity but some people have more elastin in general in their body, and be able to stretch and rebound more easily. So they’re different
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proportions of these materials in any given connective tissue. So the sheet of fascia that wraps around a muscle will have a little different set of these than a tendon, than the periosteum
which is the skin of the bone, which is a little different than the skin which is also a combination of these. Which is a little different than compact bone, which is a little different than the pericardium which is the sheet that encloses the heart. So all of those are kinds of fascia or
connective tissue. They all have different proportions of these and then they also have different amounts of, or different kinds of cells in them. So the fibroblasts are the things that actually secrete collagen. So something like a ligament will have fibroblasts in it. Lots of collagen, not
very much in elastin and then ground substance is the fluid that holds it all together. And ground substance will be pretty densely filled with collagen. So it's not very fluid.
Cartilage is a kind of connective tissue that has this ground substance but a firmer matrix of the collagen fibers in it. But the ground substance is more jelled in a way. So it's not the same as ligament. It's the same stuff but really different proportions. When we get to the bones, the
osteocytes, the osteoblasts and actually in the bones then there's also the crystalline structures that are secreted. The calcium and phosphate, cell salts that are in the bone that make the bone rigid. Because those wraparound collagen fibers so those make bone, but bone is basically made
up of these. So blood is sometimes considered a connective tissue. It's a lot of ground substance. It's very fluid. But there are collagen fibers and elastin fibers floating around in there because this is what creates clotting. Part of what creates clotting is the collagen fibers starts to
get sticky when they need to. So blood cells are carried by the connective tissue of blood [Timestamp: 10:00]. And then reticulin—reticulin, when there’s an injury or when there’s just
renewal, reticulin is a kind of immature. And I think information about this is shifting. Because there's all this research now on inflammation and what’s happening in chronic injury. But reticulin is kind of a—it doesn't grow up into collagen but it's a [...] it’s not—so it shouldn't be
immature, primitive. It's actually a precursor, a precursor to collagen. It's a substance that the fibroblasts can secrete really quickly and it gets laid down and the kind of holds the matrix, and then the collagen fibers fill in and make a much stronger matrix. So reticulin is kind of the first, a
quick and dirty scaffolding that gets laid down. Leslie: It goes in the pothole before the road repair crew comes to smooth it all out.
Student: So are the reticulin and collagen secreted by fibroblasts [...] or separately.
Amy: Separately. Reticulin doesn't grow up into collagen. Student: Do the same fibroblasts secrete both?
Amy: I think so. I think so, but I don't know about that.
Leslie: Something you can look up?
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Amy: Yeah. So one of the issues then because we talked about chronic injuries is that if the injury is in something like the tendon or the fascia is that if we injure something, that heat and
the swelling are part of the healing process and they're what stabilizes the injured place until the reticulin can get laid down and then filled in with collagen. If however we continue to injure the place we keep laying down reticulin, and this is one of the things that happens in repeated
micro trauma kind of injury. That we never really get a solid healing because we keep reinjuring it and triggering this reticulin instead of collagen being laid down.
Leslie: So the idea that if you have a chronic inflammatory situation and you need to keep working it, and working, and working it to make it heal properly is somewhat of a flawed concept on a physiological level.
Student: How about the idea of doing strength training, repetitions, sort of fatigue...
Leslie: Well that's different. That's what's happening in the muscle fibers and there’s a lot of ideas about that too. We might get a chance to talk about that.
Amy: One of the challenges is that these things get said about muscles in general and it's really important to distinguish if it's an injury in the connective tissue or if it's an injury in the muscle fiber because they heal really differently. And these sweeping statements get made, and often
we're not talking with precision about what the issue is. The other thing that I want to say in here is that swelling and the heats is part of the healing process when there's an initial injury,
and the swelling is something that is fluid, as excess ground substance in a way, is fluid that is stabilizing where the injury is been. It creates a kind of pressure that stabilizes it and it inhibits movement. When there's an injury caused by over movement.
Student: So is it kind of like not taking Tylenol when you have a fever. You do not apply ice to a swollen area?
Leslie: That's a different issue. It's a good question.
Amy: So it is about applying ice to a swollen area if it's a brand-‐new injury and you put ice on it so the swelling goes away so you can keep moving, you’re inhibiting the healing process, and you're stopping the heat and the swelling and sometimes it's necessary because you have to get
on with your day. And this is a challenge between knowing if it's a new issue or a chronic one. If it's a chronic inflammation kind of thing we do need to break the cycle somehow. But a brand-‐new injury, icing? Is not anymore the greatest idea because it stops the healing process and it
mobilizes a joint that needs to be stabilized. Taking the swelling away mobilizes something that... the swellings there. If the swelling is there to stabilize something that’s recently injured, taking the swelling away doesn't help the healing process.
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Leslie: I heard a presentation once on a sports medicine event. This was years ago where the effect of... the immediate effect of putting ice right on an acute industry injury as soon after the
injury occurs as possible, according to research I heard was less about managing swelling and more about reducing metabolism in the surrounding tissue. Because if you tear a muscle for example, you’ve torn the matrix of the blood supply to that specific area. The area immediately
surrounding it is going to be deprived of oxygen and it’s gonna become ischemic and it tends to make the injury spread beyond just the immediate area that's been torn. The idea is that you want to reduce the metabolic need for oxygen in the surrounding tissue to contain the damage.
Now this was several years ago and the thinking has evolved since then as well. So there's a lot of different theories about ice and heat and all of that.
So your question about anti-‐inflammatories. It also depends how you use those. If you take two that's more of an analgesic effect, you're dealing with the pain. But if you’re taking them in therapeutic doses in an anti-‐inflammatory way, that's a whole other effect it's going to have on
your system, and it's the same pill. It depends how much you take. What we're talking about, what the connective tissue is, it’s the scaffolding of the body of every layer and level of the body. If you sucked out all of the cells from a human being’s body and all that was left was the
connective tissue you would still recognize who that poor person was. You would see the scaffolding of that person in the non-‐cellular material that was left behind. So in a way our life processes and everything we’re able to do and all the functions of our body simply have to do
with what cells have decided to fill in which areas of the scaffolding. So you can think of us as a series of tubes if you like and the tubes are connective tissue. But what fills in the tubes will be
certain kind of cellular substance that makes that tube either a muscle or a nerve or a bone or a blood vessel or whatever it is, but the scaffolding is what we're talking about here.
Amy: Which goes back to, I think the question came up last week, but to reiterate this we have new cells. We have all new bone cells, or all new whatever cells every seven years. The cells die and reproduce and cells die and blah, blah, blah but we don't have new connective tissue. I
mean connective tissue is being regenerated at the same time but it's not at the same speed as cells. So cells might have a short lifespan and be—but they’re doing that reproducing within the matrix of the scaffolding.
Leslie: By necessity the scaffolding turns over more slowly than the cellular material within it because it's the sthira part of the system. It’s sort of what we’re talking about here. If you want
to look at it in those terms. So your scaffolding needs to be more sthira than the stuff that's embedded within it. Which is not to say it can't heal or change over time. Even things like cartilage and stuff we’re generally told doesn’t heal. It does but just really much more slowly
than we like. Much more slowly than a muscle or a bone or an injury to the cellular matrix will heal. Bones heal better than connective tissue they have their vascular, they have a blood supply. You break a bone, it heals. You mess up the cartilage in your knee, it's going to take a
long time. The question is how long do you want to wait.
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Student: This is maybe basic and I'm sorry if you kind of defined this last week but you keep using the term matrix and I have an idea of what I assume that you what you mean by it but if
you can explain it. Amy: So we spent a little time last week talking about how not everything in the body is a cell.
That there are cells and then there's what cells produce. So things like when we hold a bone, like we had some real bones last week. That what we think of as bone, that’s not cells. That's what's left when the cells are gone. That's what's created by the cells. So when we talk about the
matrix, it's the thing the cells had built around them but it is not made up of cells. Leslie: What is the matrix?
Amy: You are the matrix.
Leslie: It's everywhere. Amy: It’s everywhere. Okay, so.
Student: [...] the connective tissue, it would maybe be a better idea to rest that connective tissue for a while, [Timestamp: 20:00] maybe even some [...] going to a slow healing process
before introducing [...] movement again?
Amy: Yeah. I'm going to say ideally if all the stars are in alignment and your systems are in balance that you don't need to take anti-‐inflammatories. Because the inflammation process is also part of the healing process. The heat is part of healing. So anti-‐inflammatories... so, heat
and swelling are part of the healing process. Leslie: You're talking about acute here.
Amy: Yeah. I'm going to talk about chronic in a minute. But heat and swelling are part of what the body does to heal. The heat is part of breaking down the damaged tissue so that new tissue
can get laid down. It's one of the things that's a byproduct of that breaking down. So in an acute injury, immediately after an injury happens. Trying to stop the heat and trying to
stop the swelling is not helpful. Now then there’s also this question like can you stop the swelling. Can you let the swelling happen but keep the other tissues around it healthy. It gets really challenging. The swelling stabilizes. The heat’s part of the process. But what can happen is
that we can get into a chronic situation where then we get stuck in this inflammation pattern where we keep reinflamming it, and that's where anti-‐inflammatories can be helpful but we still need to unravel the underlying issue that's causing the inflammation to keep reoccurring. Some
of that is a physiology thing. Some of it is a biochemistry thing that has to do with nutrition and chemistry and molecules, hormones, and some of it has to do with repeated movement
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patterns. The part that we are framing the experience around is movement patterns at least. And that—I'm going to suggest that if it's not something like a tissue, a physiological disease in
the tissue, or an imbalance in the chemistry. If I can stop doing the repeated movement pattern that keeps micro injuring the tissue that the inflammation will go away. And so I don't think any time we should have to take anti-‐inflammatories to facilitate healing. I might do it so the my
knee doesn't hurt enough so that and I can go teach what I need to teach because I can't afford to take three weeks off to let it heal. I have to go function in the world, and blah, blah, blah. Like there are cases where that's necessary to do and there are cases where anti-‐inflammatories are
really helpful for balancing out the chemistry or for breaking a cycle and then letting healing happen. There's certainly situations for using it. But if the issue is an acute injury or just a repeated movement pattern that keeps reinjuring something, anti-‐inflammatories are going to
take care of the symptom but not the underlying cause. Leslie: And I would add as I just mentioned just before there's a difference in how you use them.
If you're trying as Amy said to break an inflammatory cycle the body is locked into, they’re very useful, but you have to use them as anti-‐inflammatories not analgesics. The inflammatory cycle is simple to understand when things are inflamed they swell up and that's intended to limit
movement. The swelling and inflammation. But if you keep moving it and you keep doing this even on a microscopic level you may not have a big swollen knee but it could be happening on a smaller level. The increased swelling in the area creates more friction and more heat. And if you
keep irritating that thing you're going to get more swelling which creates more friction, which creates more swelling which creates more friction and there’s an inflammatory cycle. That’s
what you need to break, and the inflammatories can be useful for that if you use them in therapeutic doses. Meaning you’re taking maybe 600 milligrams of ibuprofen three times a day, which is different than oh I got this nagging, aching pain, you throw a couple in your mouth in
the morning and just go about your business and then you forget about it. And then when it hurts again you take a couple more. That's very different. And too often we just get into that level of just managing it enough so that we can get back to doing the things that are creating the
problem in the first place. If it's in the context of understanding the issue and as Amy said understanding the movement patterns that have led to this in the first place, It can be very useful but used in therapeutic doses. And this is just something from experience I can say it
works if it's done properly. If you get to that point where you locked into an inflammatory cycle. Student: [...] and you have to change your movement pattern.
Leslie: Well that you have to take care of. You have to understand the cause of the thing in the first place.
Student: [...] you want to explain to the doctor that you really want to learn is what is causing the problem. [...] but really I just want to know, or they send you to massage. So I go take a
massage. The massage is nice. It heals for a little bit just the symptom, but what about when you stop taking inflammatories. [...] how to learn how my body’s moving and these problems and
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even asking this issue, even if I take anti-‐inflammatories I believe, and I don’t take anti-‐inflammatories because I do think that’s going to [...] I want to learn how to heal. Inflammatory
drugs is by the changing the way you are moving [...] and just how to break that cycle without masking the symptoms. [...]
Amy: And then we go back to the question of do you know what you doing? Because that's how we get inside of our patterns is to figure out what you're doing. And are you doing what you think you’re doing.
Leslie: It also points to the great contribution that people like us can make to people who are not getting this sort of thing from their medical practitioners. Not that we're replacing doctors
or diagnosing or anything like that, we can just bring more attention, more consciousness to the way we move in simple, simple ways. Feel your bones, feel the weight being channeled through your bones, understand how your muscles are working a little bit. This is what people get from
even the basic yoga classes. The person teaching the class doesn't have to be a yoga therapist. They don't even have to have purchased our book, although they should. It's just about relating to your body and your movement in a different way. Something differently. You’re doing
something different than what you have been doing. That is sometimes the missing component. Because after all you go to a doctor with a pain here and they do a whole exam and all that and they declare that you have lateral epicondylitis. Well you knew that when you walked in the
door, he just described your symptom in Latin. It doesn't tell you why you have pain there. But a yoga teacher adjusting your elbows and shoulders in a down dog, a light bulb can turn on. You
can understand what you been doing that's giving you the pain. Or, you can make it worse. You can use the pattern more and more and it will get worse so bringing consciousness to what you're doing in the context of something like yoga class can be very, very useful and very
helpful. And again it can also make it worse. Amy: Which can also make it worse. In that moment I would also say that there's a lot of things,
that if what makes a yoga class a yoga classes is bringing greater awareness. There are a lot of things that function as yoga. A dance class can do that, a Pilates class can do that. I mean we can take a really expansive view of what yoga is if it is about the practice of bringing consciousness.
Because, there are some asana classes that don't do that. Okay, muscles cross one or more joints to move bones via attachments through tendons. We
got through our first point. Leslie: Just cruising right along through the handouts here.
Amy: Muscles travel in the layered and spiralic three-‐dimensional pathways so that there's three-‐dimensional movement in every joint. Pretty straightforward but not really.
Leslie: It straightforward to say there's no straight lines in the body.
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Amy: There are no straight lines in the body. There are no muscles that travel in straight lines
without at least a little spiral. A little bit of three-‐dimensionality. Which means that any time—and we might do it—there is no such thing as a joint that only moves in one or two dimensions. So the elbow joint which is often described as a hinge joint that moves like this. There is rotation
in this joint is well. With every time I fold all the surfaces of the joints are curved and the muscles are pulling in a spiral so I can balance the joint action, but it’s never going to be perfectly flat. [Timestamp: 30:00]
Leslie: And, if you attempt to make it flat you're working against the way your body's put together which will create an imbalance in the long run. If you treat your body as if it had
straight lines and as if the movements of the joint traveled in two dimensions as opposed to three.
Amy: The other thing that is key in this statement is that muscles are layered. The fibers travel in layers from the deep to superficial and embedded in this concept is also this idea that muscles are named in a totally arbitrary way. It's totally arbitrary. So we might have a really big muscle
that just has one name that have some really short deep fibers and some really long superficial fibers and in another part of the body there might be a big muscle group and the short deep fibers have a separate name than the long superficial fibers. There's no guarantee that there’s
consistency about every muscle that’s shorter than so-‐and-‐so gets its own name. So the names become irrelevant. What is important to know is that at any point where we have muscles we
have layers of muscles. Okay. One of the reasons I don't like the names is that the names are really arbitrary. Someone said
this looks like, I can see this, so let's call it this. And someone a couple of years later, with a different kind of visual sorted out a different set of muscles and some of them got separate names and some of them got names of a group in a different book still have different names.
Leslie: And as we'll see, the way in which a muscle is named and/or labeled in terms of which end of it is which can produce a whole series of misconceptions about what that muscle does
and how it does it. Amy: Muscles expend energy to pull, to overcome resistance. Two points here. Muscles pull.
Muscles do not push. If you get anything and if we get to the end of today and tomorrow and you don't understand this still keep asking. Because for me this was a big light bulb so I think it should be a big deal for everybody. But muscles pull. That is when they are active they are
pulling. Each individual muscle. So for me to do a pushing action, like if I’m going to push Leslie away—like I can create this action of pushing. But it's because this muscle is pulling shorter. I'm not pushing with this muscle. To do some action of extension of my elbow we have to figure out
which muscle is pulling to do that. If I’m rolled over and I come up, I might say I'm pushing with my legs but that's not a description of muscle action. I'm not pushing from the front. I might be
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doing tons of things to organize what's going on the front but in the way that muscles, the physiology of muscles work. The way they fire up. I can do all kinds of stuff here but something
in the back is pulling to get me up. Student: Is it contracting?
Amy: It's contracting yes. It is contracting. But what the action is called is a contraction. But what they do is they pull. The other key thing here to understand is that they pull to overcome
resistance and if there is not very much resistance the muscles don't have to be very active . Leslie: You can make them active in the absence of resistance but that's a whole other issue.
Amy: So, this is how we figure out what kind of contraction the muscles are doing. But the most basic form of resistance we all negotiate is gravity. So how much something weighs is
determined by gravity. The lighter something is, the less resistance we need when we go to pick it up, and the less the muscle needs to fire up. So picking up a ball there's not much resistance to overcome. Where picking up Claire, there would be more resistance to overcome. And I
would need to activate more. Leslie: When she says how much something weighs, it's how much it actually weighs. Not how
much we perceive that it weighs. Because our perceptions can be a little bit off. If you've ever gone to pick something up that you thought was really heavy and it was empty and light,
remember what your body felt like? Amy: Well, that's our expectation, not our actual perception.
Leslie: I just want to point out when you say how much something weighs, you're talking about the actual mass of the thing in gravity not our expectation of it.
Amy: I just saw you do this movement Eileen. So we're going to get there.
Student: It’s still gravity. Student: There's no I'm moving it through space.
Amy: You're moving it through space, right but the other thing is then to do this movement of lowering my leg down with control is not about the back of my leg. Because that's not where the
resistance is. Gravity is already pulling my leg down so where we say it’s pulling, but it's not necessarily about which muscle is getting shorter. It's about the degree of pulling. So in this case it's about this muscle pulling less than the pull of gravity. So this is still pulling but it's not pulling
as much as my lower leg weighs so this muscle’s going to get longer but it's still active because it's what's controlling.
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Student: [...]
Amy: There is but I'm not going to say what that is.
Leslie: Hang on. Amy: I just want to make this point about pulling and resistance. And that this lengthening, even
though the muscle is lengthening it's still trying to pull. It's not pushing. It's trying to pull but the weight of the leg is modulating that pull in such a degree that the leg is lowering. Because I'm saying don't pull more than the weight of the leg. So that I can lower the leg down with control.
Leslie: Which is why she used the word pulling as opposed to shortening.
Amy: Yeah, what’s shortening is not what we're talking about. Leslie: So, we're going to try to get very specific as we can with the words we use to describe
muscular actions, because it's very easy to pick the wrong word and create confusion. You might think that pulling and shortening are interchangeable but in this context they're not.
Student: Did you say it’s contracting them.
Amy: Right now we're talking about pulling. But we're going to—I'm also trying to be really methodical about introducing words we understand the concept before we get more complicated about the words. So we will get there.
Student: Yes so if you did something this way these muscles are pulling.
Amy: Which part of it. From here to here? Which muscles are overcoming the resistance? Student: All of the top ones.
Amy: The top ones.
Student: [...] Amy: Yeah, but not back here.
Student: Really?
Amy: No, these are doing the pulling.
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Student: These are lengthening and these are contracting [...].
Amy: It's not about lengthening. It's about what is activating to overcome resistance. And the pull, it’s good practice, the pulling and it’s shortening but the pulling is overcoming the weight of the arm. Now, once I get to hear to 90 degrees, the weight of my lower arm from here to here
it's in the back. This is really, really important to understand if you going to talk about muscles. It's about where the resistance is. And what it needs to pull in relationship to that resistance.
Leslie: It's important. Let's make that point again. Amy: So every does everybody understand that from here to here this is what's active, what's
actively shortening but once my arm goes past perpendicular the pulling is happening on the back.
Leslie: Not to actively make the elbow do that but to resist the weight of the forearm being pulled down to the center of the Earth by gravity. That's why this kicks in once it's passed 90.
Amy: And it's not very much I don't have to activate it very much because my forearm doesn't weigh very much. But it's something. And the more my forearm weighed if I was holding something, I would have to exert more energy here.
Leslie: Can you feel that with your arm? Can you feel the transition between what gets your
forearm to here—let it kind of hang out there for a minute [Timestamp: 40:00] at 90. And then just imagine your forearm falling toward the top of your shoulder but then controlling the fall. Can you feel the shift of action from the front to the back of your arm?
Amy: And then similarly when you come back out...
Leslie: When you come out of it, it's the opposite. Student: I have a question. Can pulling sometimes seem like [...]
Amy: Yes. So you can pull and get shorter or you can pull and get longer.
Leslie: And you can pull and not get anywhere. Amy: It's about where the resistance is. And that's where this gets really tricky and that’s why I
don't think we should be talking about muscles if we don't understand this. Student: But it's about shortening that muscle function is.
Amy: No, it's not about shortening.
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Leslie: Pulling.
Amy: Because from here to here the muscle that's controlling is getting longer.
Leslie: Imagine that you're in a tug-‐of-‐war. You have one end of the rope and there’s other people at the other end and you're keeping that rope taut. If they’re stronger than you the rope’s gonna go this way, but you're still pulling. If you’re stronger than them the ropes going to
come this way but you're still pulling. If you're equally strong no one is going to go anywhere but you're still pulling. So we're not talking about which way the rope is going just yet. We're just talking about the fact that what you're doing as a muscle is pulling. Does that make sense?
Student: [...]
Leslie: It all has to do with what the resistance is at the other end of the rope. Which direction the rope’s going to be moving. But you're pulling the whole time.
Amy: Okay, muscles expand energy to pull, to overcome resistance. And the next point is they relate to each other through fascia. We talked about that. The next piece here is just to review that joint actions happen in the skeletal system and we’re going to introduce this term focal
joint which I said once last week but we're talking about we need to know what joint we’re talking about. We're going to call that the focal joint. So if I do something like this, like fold into
Utkatasana, we need to know what we're talking about. You can't just say that's the blah, blah, front of the leg because what it's doing at the hip will be different than what’s happening at the knee will be different than what’s happening at the ankle. So the question’s going to come up,
what’s the focal joint. And what is the joint action? What is the joint action at the focal joint. So as we talked about last week that action, those actions. Joint actions, are flexion, extension, circumduction, rotation, abduction, adduction, all those joint actions that were listed last week.
That's not muscle language. You can say that it is not strictly accurate to say I'm going to flex my bicep muscle. You can't flex your bicep muscle. Technically there's no such thing. You can say I'm going to use my bicep muscle to create flexion at the elbow. Does the distinction makes sense?
Student: Can you say again, sorry.
Amy: You cannot say with accuracy, “I'm going to flex my bicep muscle.” What the most accurate thing to say is that I’m going to use my bicep muscle to create flexion at the elbow joint.” Because flexion is language about a joint. It doesn't describe what a muscle does.
Because in certain situations the bicep also controls extension at the elbow joint. So muscles that are named as flexors, it's a fallacious name. It is an inaccurate name, because it only describes the muscle doing one thing. And the muscles don't do only one thing. So something
that's described as a hip flexor is a hip flexor in a certain situation in this relationship to gravity.
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The hip flexors a group, or the external rotators as a group. Those the names are maddening to me. They make me crazy.
Leslie: Because you're naming a muscle based on a joint action. And joint actions like everything else are contextual depending on what the starting position is, what’s your relationship to
gravity and a lot of other factors. So naming a group of muscles using the language of joint action leads to a lot of confusion.
Amy: And we are all guilty of doing it, myself included. But I will say again because I'm guilty of this; hip flexors are only hip flexors in certain situations. The hip flexors in another relationship to gravity will be extensors.
Student: [...]
Amy: I know. I know. And you’re in the right place. Leslie: That's good, that means you're paying attention. If you were confused, you were paying
attention. Amy: Yeah, so let's see if we can sort that out. So, you can tell I get really excited about this.
Love this. So now muscle contractions, Joint actions, flexion extension, dah, dah, dah, dah. What a muscle does is it contracts. And specifically what it does when it gets contracting is its trying to
pull. Now the question is there are three or four different kinds of contractions. We're going to talk about three of them. They're three kinds of contractions and what kind of contraction happens is determined by what? By if there's a change in length in the muscle. If the distance
between the attachment points changes in length and what that changes. So contraction would seem to imply contracting and getting shorter. And it doesn't in this case. Contraction does not mean getting shorter in muscle language. Like whoever picked the name contraction they did us
all a disservice but that is the word for it. So you could say muscle actions but the language all over the world is still contractions, so in a muscle contraction, in a concentric contraction—I made a Christmas tree kind of thing—the muscle fiber between them with its connective tissue
and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And when that muscle fires, when it gets active it's going to move the two ends of the muscle closer together. It's either going to move end, or the other end, or both ends. And the distance between the two ends of the muscle will get shorter.
Student: So the green lines are the end of the muscle.
Amy: They're the end of the muscle. Student: And the red is the just [...]
Amy: And the red is the muscle in between.
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Student: What's the squiggly that’s firing.
Amy: The squiggly is the firing up. So in a concentric contraction a muscle that is this long will get this long. Either because, and this is an important distinction as well. Either because this end
moves or because this end moves. Or because both ends move. Or because one end moves a lot and the other end moves a little. But the distance between them get shorter.
Student: [...] Amy: Not necessarily both ends move. One end can be fixed. The other end can be moving.
Either end can be fixed. Either end can be moving or both ends can move. It's all a concentric contraction because somehow they move towards the center and get shorter. So this case the muscle pull overcomes whatever resistance exists on the two things the muscles attach to. In an
eccentric contraction the two ends of the muscle something pulls them further apart. And the muscle itself gets longer. So the muscle starts out like this. The muscle that’s firing is active but the resistance, whatever it’s working to overcome is stronger than the pull that the muscle is
exerting. So the muscle gets longer. The two ends of a muscle move apart from each other. Either one end moves or the other end moves or both ends move. But the distance between the attachment points gets longer in an eccentric contraction.
Leslie: We can demonstrate that, it’s very easy. [Timestamp: 50:00] I'm stronger than Amy. As
she grabs the other end of the strap and pulls against it we’re both using our bicep muscles, right? So what kind of contraction is my bicep doing and what was hers doing. I'm concentric and she's eccentric. Now if she pulls back...
Amy: Because it's not only a question of absolute strength, but he can let me and he's doing an eccentric contraction. He's actively modulating this. Right. So he's not letting go but it's not
overcoming my resistance. He's in this negotiation and letting me pull longer. Leslie: Right, did you see the...
Amy: And, when I get my whole body weight behind it to adjust his bicep he can't overcome the resistance and his arm length...
Leslie: It’s even... ah, there it goes.
Amy: I was going for the third one. The link between the attachment points is not changing now. Because he's not overcoming the resistance, but I'm not pulling stronger than he can sustain at least for a moment in time and that is isometric. “Iso” means same length. In an isometric
contraction we have two attachment points. We have the muscle between them. The muscle
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fires but the length doesn't change. The distance between the attachment points does not change.
Leslie: In other words the strength of the contraction is equal to the resistance.
Amy: The strength of the contraction. The amount of energy exerted is the same as the resistance, is equal to the resistance to be overcome.
Leslie: I’d like to point out that it took both Amy and her whole body to... Amy: Yeah, should we compare our [...] asanas?
Leslie: No. We're not going to compare.
Amy: We already established... Leslie: We can compare them once, but I would not walk for the rest of my life.
Amy: There are ways in which I’m sthira and you’re sukha and there are ways in which you are sthira and I’m sukha.
Leslie: Exactly.
Amy: There's temperament, and there’s physiology.
Leslie: And in rare cases, they come together to produce something beautiful. Amy: Homeostasis.
Leslie: Right.
Amy: So, in this question of this movement that Eileen did, that pull of gravity. What kind of contractions happening over the knee to get from here to here?
Student: Eccentric. Amy: Eccentric over the knee. And then what happens when I do this?
Student: It's concentric.
Amy: It's concentric underneath. Yeah, in the hamstring area. But we’re just going to say on your knee. You notice that I'm like avoiding naming the muscles as much as possible. Because
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we don't really need to know the names. We don't really need to know the names to figure any of this out. I would like to free you from the tyranny of naming muscles. Because you can be
really functional about working with muscles without knowing the names of them. Isn't that great?
Student: That's great. Amy: It's really great. Thanks.
Student: Also when you’re teaching you just throw out all these names and people won’t know what I was talking about.
Amy: Or they think they know and we're all talking about the same thing anyhow. And then there’s also these popular names, like for many years this muscle was really popular. For awhile
it was the transversus. For a long time and in some circles the psoas is really big, everybody loves the psoas. Quadratus lumborum is a big one, anterior serratus. I was in a Pilates studio that went from talking about their erector spinae to all of a sudden it was all about the multifidi.
Like who knows the difference? I mean, I do. But how many people can really tell the difference between using their erector spinae and their multifidi. I mean first you have to know what the difference is and they're like this on top of each other.
Student: [...]
Leslie: You see a lot of times people get inaccurately specific which is what Amy's talking about. But then the other end of it is to be inaccurately vague. Like we're going to do something with
our groins. What the hell is a groin? It's not a structure, it's a region that you naming. Amy: So, when I lift my arm up overhead. When I go from here to here. Just one arm. What's
happening? And what I want to hear is like top or bottom, concentric or eccentric. I don't want you to name the muscles, you are forbidden.
Leslie: Just think top, bottom. Amy: Top is concentric.
Student: [...]
Amy: No, it was a little trick. It was a little trick. So I didn't do that the second time. I left that out cause... yeah. So if I go from here to here without changing. So while here—thank you—it was a right angle at the joints. It's not the right angleness, it’s the relationship to gravity. So in this
relationship to gravity all the way here it's concentric on the top. But...
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Leslie: Same movement, different positions.
Amy: ... if I do this movement. What is it? Student: [...]
Amy: It's not about the closeness to the floor it's about whether I'm perpendicular or not. It's where gravity is pulling me so the weight of the pull of the muscles is overcoming gravity. So
from here. We're still talking about—here if I drop my arm it would fall here. Here if I drop my arm it would fall here. So where do I need muscle activity. So from here to here it's concentric on the top, I'm calling this a top. And from here to here it’s eccentric on the bottom. In this
relationship to gravity, and that becomes key. Eccentric on the bottom from here to here. Leslie: So in other words to phrase it a different way if her arm is here. Which muscles is she
going to let go of to let a drop here? Student: [...]
Leslie: Right. But if her arm is here, which muscles is she going to let go to let her fall that way? Here... that's just identifying which side of the joint the muscles, which muscles on which side of
the joint are activated. And then you can just add well, yes it has to be a concentrated contraction of these muscles on this side of the joint to get it to here. And as she controls the
fall of the weight of the arm in this direction it's going to be eccentric action on this side of the joint. That make sense?
Amy: Generally, though I think are some exceptions, moving away from the pull of gravity, overcoming the pull of gravity is going to often be concentric. And modulating a release into the pull of gravity is going to eccentric.
Student: Can you show?
Amy: Yeah, so in this case I'm overcoming the pull of gravity. I pull my arm away from the pull of gravity. And what I'm going to need to do is to become concentric on the side. In this case, and it's brought up by Leslie making a point about that I could release. So just releasing, that's not a
contraction. But releasing, let's say lengthening. When someone says lengthen we don't know. Like that's not a term that means... it doesn't tell you what speed. Lengthen slowly s probably an eccentric contraction. So this modulating my going into gravity by not dropping will generally be
an eccentric contraction. Leslie: Isn't that what Amy asked you to do this morning in the Sun salutation? When you're put
throwing that leg back into the lunge you can use the muscles that lifted up against gravity and
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fling it and let it fall into place which is very different [Timestamp: 60:00] from modulating its fall with a whole other set of contractions so that it just gets place down instead of thrown down.
Amy: My point exactly.
Student: But it's not necessarily different from muscles. Because [...] it would really help me figure it out.
Leslie: Let me get over so we can hear you on mike. Student: [...] now when I'm gone down are still using this that and there’s not as much
resistance. Leslie: Well, the same set of muscles can lift it up concentrically and then ease it back down
eccentrically. It doesn't necessarily switch sides of the joint depending on what movement you’re doing.
Student: [...] And it helped me think about the eccentric to think about to resist, like you're thing [...] what I'm doing in modulating, going down is basically trying to bring back up, but...
Leslie: By letting gravity win.
Student: Yes. Amy: Yeah. If she let gravity win, but not splatter you then its eccentric. But if you win over
gravity it’s concentric. Leslie: Letting gravity win isn't the same as being defeated by gravity.
Amy: Exactly. It's having grace in defeat or whatever. So it's about changing your relationship to gravity and in such a way that. Which is a really important thing to understand because when
we do a pose and we change our relationship to gravity, and we do an asana and sometimes we talk about this like I can do this in relationship to gravity. The joint action stays the same. The muscles we use change. So what I do to stand and do something like this is a whole different set
of muscles—not a different set of muscles, different muscle actions to do this. And different muscle actions in this and different muscle actions to do this. But this is another little bit of language that has to do with actually what we talked about in the joints. So we talked about
proximal and distal as terms to describe end of the bone, or parts of the body part. We can also have proximal distal movement. I’m just gonna write the words again, but you have them I think. So in proximal movement, and we still have to know what the focal joint is. The part
closer to the center of the body moves. So the proximal body part moves. And in this movement the distal body part moves.
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Student: So the proximal would be the closest to your body?
Leslie: The proximal would be the closest to the center of your body.
Amy: Yes the proximal is closer to your center. Distal’s closer to the periphery. So the difference between doing something like this. If our focal point is the elbow and we still have to know what the focal joint is. This movement is a distal movement at the elbow. And so is this, and so is this,
and so is this. Distal movement at the elbow joint. Because what’s moving is this part. Student: I see.
Amy: At the elbow joint this is proximal movement. Hip joint, two parts on either side of it, leg and pelvis say. Is the leg proximal or distal?
Student: Leg is distal.
Amy: Is the leg pelvis proximal or distal. Student: [...]
Amy: To the hip joint, proximal to the leg. Right. So if I at the hip joint move the proximal bone,
it’s going to be something like this. At the hip joint if I move the distal bone it’s going to be something like this.
Student: [...] Amy: Yeah, it’s not about the direction of movement so that's the challenge.
Leslie: But understanding this, the underlying reality of this is important before you start talking about what muscle is doing it. Or what the muscle is doing in order to create it. Because it can
be the same muscle that's involved in both proximal and distal. The question is which end of it is still and which end of it is moving. But without this underlying recognition of proximal distal it would be hard to figure out what the muscles up to.
Student: It’s relative to something [...]
Amy: They’re relative to something, yes. We had this conversation last week, but it's a great moment to pull it out again, but these terms are relative. They're in relationship to something that don't have absolute meaning so we have to know what they're relating to.
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Leslie: Sort of like if you have a map of some territory you know and you never intended to actually be in the territory and just had the map you can definitely say where everything in that
map is in relation to everything else in that map. And you can have the coordinate system, a grid. And you can name every feature on the map based on where it is in relationship to that great. But once you’re in the territory you want to know where everything is in relationship to
you. Is it closer to you or is it further away from you. Is it above you or behind you, is it left or right. So the terminology that makes sense for you when you're in the territory has to do with where you are. Is it further away from me or closer to me. I’m in the territory. The problem with
anatomy is that we’re so us accustomed to looking at the flat maps and labeling things, and saying, this is here, and this is here, that’s fine but that's a flat two-‐dimensional image with arbitrary names of things. You know, what Amy’s talking about, is where are you in the territory.
Know where you are in and in relation to that you can say if something is further away or closer. So it's another way of saying the focal joint but in the broader sense it's know where you are in the territory which is three-‐dimensional. Once you know where you are then you can say, oh
that's further away, that's closer, this is above, this is below. Does that make sense?
Lesson 2: Muscles & Movement Patterns Leslie: So take a break before you start the next lesson and while you decompressing I’d like you to think about this question. What is the difference in proximal and distal movements in terms
of resistance. In other words take a moment to think about this. Is there more resistance in a distal movement or in a proximal movement?
Amy: Okay.
Leslie: Welcome back. Amy: Welcome back. Afternoons.
Leslie: Proximal distal.
Amy: Proximal distal. What is the difference? What is the question I asked? What is the difference in resistance?
Student: Movement in terms of resistance. Leslie: What end is the food go in and what ends doesn't come out of.
Student: [laughter]
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Leslie: Actually that's a good question which is proximal and which is distal.
Student: To what? Leslie: Exactly. Thank you.
Amy: Okay, so proximal distal what's the difference in resistance.
Student: Well, there is a difference. Amy: There is a difference. Can you say anything more?
Student: I would say perhaps less resistance closer to the focal point.
Amy: Less resistance closer to the focal point. In a proximal movement or in a distal movement? This is the question really. Is there less resistance when you do a distal movement or when you do a proximal movement.
Student 1: Less resistance Proximal...
Student 2 ... Proxmial...
Student 3: Much less... proximal... Student 4: Proximal... Less resistance...
Amy: Really? Do it. Do a proximal a distal movement at the wrist joint and see where...
Leslie: At the wrist joint. Amy: At the wrist joint. Do a proximal. Do it at the wrist joint. Fine. Do it at the hips. In the wrist
joint is there less resistance when you do a distal movements or when you do a proximal movement
Student: I have trouble separating it seems [...] Amy: Yeah, yeah, say it, say it, say it Candice, say it like you believe it.
Leslie: Yeah. Keep going with that, keep going.
Student: Say it like you mean it.
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Amy: Say it like you mean it.
Leslie: And say it on mike. Candice: When you make a proximal movement there’s more weight involved so there’s more
resistance to [...] Amy: Yes. I so rarely say that but yes. That is the beginning of the point I'm getting at. Why is
there more weight? Not always because I could be picking something up in a distal movement. But why is there more weight when you do a proximal movement than when you do a distal movement?
Leslie: Stay with that. Stay with that.
Student: Everything you're working with is proximal so [...]. Leslie: No, but you're moving it through space which is good.
Student: You’re closer to gravity.
Amy: No, you're not closer to gravity, not necessarily. It's something about what's moving through space.
Student: [...]
Amy: [...] that. You just said it. You just said it. Leslie: You're right on the edge of it.
Amy: When you do a distal movement you do not move your whole body. And often a proximal movement moves a whole body also.
Student: So there’s more resistance.
Amy: There’s more weight which means there’s more resistance. Student: Even though you're often moving into gravity.
Amy: Even though you're often moving into gravity.
Student: But with a big weight.
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Amy: But with the big weight. So there's more to engage with.
Student: So the wrist, I'm still confused about the—if the wrist is the focal point this would be a distal or a proximal.
Amy: Okay so if the wrist is the focal point is the forearm of the hand proximal? Student: Hand.
Amy: Proximal.
Student: Wrist is the focal point. Amy: Is the hand or the forearm proximal?
Student: Forearm.
Amy: So if you move the forearm then that's proximal movement. Student: But then if you move this way that's distal.
Amy: Right.
Student: Thank you.
Amy: One of the places that this is really obvious is it plays out in the foot. Because in walking, this part of walking, we need muscles on the top of our foot to lift our foot up so we don’t toe drag. And in this part of walking we have to move our whole body. We have like say 50 muscles
on the sole of the foot and five on the top of the foot and I want to say something now about how the ends of muscle points are often named origin and insertion, and why we don't use that language. I don't use that language. You don't use that language.
Leslie: Only to blow it up.
Amy: The origin is, in America, is the point that is closer to the center. Leslie: Is it opposite South of the equator?
Amy: No, no, no, it's different in Europe. The origin is described as the point, the attachment point that is closer to the center, and the insertion is the attachment point that is further from
the center. So you can just as well say the proximal attachment and the distal attachment. The underlying assumption here is that the distal or the insertion is a point that is moving and that's
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why that language—it's old, old, language. Very traditional language that people use a lot and people group memorize it. And that's how you learn muscles in a lot of places you learn the
origin, you learn the insertion and that there are two fallacies in that. One is that the insertion is on the distal part because where it inserts is the part that moves, which assumes that all of our movements are distal movements.
Student: That we’re like puppets?
Amy: That we’re like puppets. Leslie: It's very old reductionistic.
Amy: And it's based on looking at a cadaver and going, “Oh, this points closer and this points further and what we do is we move our limbs.” The other mistake is the assumption that our
muscle grows from one point and starts there and it grows and then it attaches somewhere else. And that's not how muscles develop in the embryo. The muscle fibers flow out from the paraxial column. They travel out into the limb bud and they immerse themselves in the
connective tissue that's already there. And they don't start at one point and grow to another. They kind of invest the tissue in this—it's not even starting at one point and going to the other. They come in and they spiral into the tissue. So there's no end point in the development of the
tissue even in the embryo.
Now in Europe I have heard, and it maybe also a distinction between Britain and the continent, that they reverse origin and insertion depending on what kind of movement you're doing.
Leslie: It's a kinesiologically term that's used. Student: And that's why it’s so confused.
Amy: And that's why it's so confused. So they use it as a kinesiologically term and the origin is the fixed point and the insertion is the moving point.
Leslie: That's why they’ll talk about a muscle reversing its origin and insertion depending on what you're doing.
Amy: It makes more sense to me if we change it and make it a kinesiologically rather than anatomical but in that case why not say proximal and distal describing the ends in space. The
distal end is always the distal end of the muscle whether the movement is proximal or distal. The end that it attaches on is always the same. And then we can talk about the kind of movement. But in the United States it’s described by the anatomy
Leslie: But, kinesiologically discussions do still use the terms.
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Amy: You do whatever the Brits do.
Leslie: I don't know if every Australian would go with that idea.
Amy: In this thing they do. Student: [...]
Leslie: They don't translate from English to Australian.
Amy: If for some reason I have resistance in [Timestamp: 10:00] the backs of my legs such that my starting position for Pasha Uttanasana is here. Or he was doing Janu Sirsasana which brought it up. Is the movement of coming into Pasha Uttanasana at the hip joints one of eccentric
movement in the back of the pelvis. Student: [...]
Amy: So to start from here to get here I have to do a concentric in the front of the hip. Which is one point. But when I'm here I'm not starting perpendicular to gravity. The other point is that
even if I even get myself here but I have so much resistance in the back of my leg that the weight—I have more resistance in the back of my leg than the weight of my upper body. If I
have more resistance in the back of my leg than the weight of my upper body but moving into gravity and this resistance in the back of the leg comes from something other than weight. So resistance can also come from someone else pulling. Like Leslie and I pulling on each other. Then
it won't be an eccentric action that controls me coming forward. If I happen to be the kind of person that can fall as this. If you can fall into it you can do eccentric into it. If I had to pull myself into it would no longer be an eccentric action at the back of the hip. It would be
concentric action at the front of the hip and it would continue to feel that way if I kept trying to move into it by pulling from the front.
Student: So whenever you use a strap [...]. Amy: Well, when I used to strap, what I start doing is making the joint not the focal joint
because I'm using my arms. So I start using my arms to overcome this resistance. Then we're not talking about what's happening at the hip joint. We're talking about some action of the arms to overcome the resistance in the back of my legs and it gets to be a much more complex question.
Now one of the places that this resistance also shows up then is in doing this. And so Eileen was feeling all the sensation in the front because the front does need to lengthen but it's not the lengthening of the front that folds the—that does the action of overcoming the weight of the
lower leg to fold in. But particularly once you picked your foot up, once you took a hold of your foot, you didn't feel the work in the back as much as the—until we did the resistance. Right.
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Student: [...]
Amy: Because there might have been resistance from what was going on in the front that didn't have to do with gravity. That had more to do with habitual holding maybe in the front of the leg.
So sometimes resistance does not just come from the weight of the body part which is what we started out saying, our main form or resistance is gravity. Sometimes the resistance does not come from gravity. It comes from some habitual trip contraction in some other body part.
Student: So what you were just saying about Janu Sirsasana, would it then really depend on the individual and the flexibility [...]
Leslie: See, now that's a principal. Right there.
Amy: But it depends on the person. And all of this previous work we did, assuming that the main source of resistance was gravity which would assume that we had a fair range of motion in the joints. But not everybody does.
Leslie: And that whatever starting point you're using for that movement is relatively neutral in terms of the support you're getting through your bones. While in reality depending on each
individual, we're doing some work when were supporting ourselves in gravity and that level of activity in the muscular system is part of what's going to be offering resistance to any movement
from that starting point. Student: That’s why when you’re on a blanket, you sit on and you’re kind of neutralizing the
starting point. Leslie: Sure, turning down the static, the gravitational static that we all have. The postural tone
that we all maintain. Some more or less efficiently than others. Because a lot of times what you experience when you're moving to a new position isn't the musculature that's controlling you as you go there, it’s the resistance that your own body is offering to that range of motion. And so
we can misidentify what's going on. Amy: Because we can’t use necessarily as a guideline our own muscular sensation. One of the
main ways that we get feedback in the muscular system, and I'm going to talk more about how that happens, but in this moment. One of the main ways that we get feedback in our muscles is through resistance. Not everybody encounters resistance at the same moment in time. And so
not everybody has the same sensation. Student: So not only are we dealing with resistance in relation to gravity, but resistance in our
own bodies in relation to our own movement patterns, and also resistance in our muscle and our joints...
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Amy: Which are all reflections of our movement patterns. Um...hmm...
Student: Oh okay. So we can pretty much clump it into movement patterns.
Amy: If you say movement patterns to me that means our habitual muscle activity. The way our connective tissue has learned to behave, our joints, all of that learned stuff sets up a pattern that when we go against it we get more feedback. And when we go with the pattern in a way we
don't get as much feedback because we don't get as much resistance. And this is one of those really concrete concepts in the nervous system that gets extrapolated into—when we're doing what we’re used to doing we don't get much feedback as when we meet some resistance.
Anyhow, like in your life, how much you notice your life until someone says stop. Pay attention and they get in your way or something like that. And for those people who have a lot of flexibility you don't get feedback until you get to the end. You don't get feedback—we talked
about this in the joint. I don’t get feedback from my joints. I don't need any resistance until I get way, way out here. So that's what I'm using as my barometer. The point where I meet resistance, where I have sensation will be really different from the point where Leslie has
sensation. Leslie: Tapas... the principal in practice. The aspect of practice that's covered by the concept
tapas is closely related to what we're talking about. Where the energy is moving freely in our system it doesn't register. So we intentionally have to offer something that's different from
what we're accustomed to in order to generate some feedback so we know what we're doing and where we are and what's going on. And tapas is often translated as austerity. Doing something extreme like standing in a cold river or reciting mantras or standing on one foot, or
fasting. The concept underneath that is to just take your activities out of their habitual patterning and do something else with them, and you’re generating resistance. Cause it literally means to cook. There's a heat that's generated from that friction of working against the walls of
your habitual ways of operating that's implied in that term, tapas. And of course all of these things that we said that will generate someone's movement patterns;
what you have to throw into that also is just what we’re born with. People have different genetic predispositions in their shape, in their form, in their physiology, in their bones. That's definitely part of it. I was not born with as much elastin in my connective tissue as Amy. That is
something to which I must surrender. That is the ishvara pranidhana part of yoga. You know. The discernment to make that realization is the svadhyaya part. If my goal—if I won’t be happy in my yoga career it’s because I can’t get my legs behind my head and do Supta Konasana, or
something like that. Then I'm going to be perpetually frustrated. And it's not my fault that I wasn't born with that much elastin.
Amy: It is also true then [Timestamp: 20:00] that continually, there is a little danger in continually looking for that feedback. That particular feedback that comes from resistance.
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Because we can't keep making things harder and harder for ourselves. And is there some point that which we have gotten enough feedback or that we can start listening to other feedback. So
the muscles in particular we get feedback from resistance but that's not the only part of our body we can be sensitive to which goes back to the bones.
Leslie: Which goes back to the principle of svadhyaya. You can't just apply things across the board and stop questioning them because that's the way you’re doing it. That's why that discernment, that self-‐study is such an important component. Because lo and behold when you
finally surrender to something and stop trying to change it and focus on other things you may come back to that thing later on and realize that it's been transformed without any direct effort on your part. So it requires that—no one is excused from the svadhyaya part of the practice.
That's what you need to keep doing. The same questions will give different answers over time. And then you’ll discover that the two different answers that you thought had nothing to do with each other are answering the same question, or vice versa.
Student: You talked before about our patterns of movement and bringing awareness to them, and talking about—isn’t the idea to be aware of the pattern of movement and notice how they
serve us or don’t serve us to create a new pattern. Amy: Or keep the old pattern. Yeah.
Student: Right, if it does serve us.
Amy: Yeah. The point. My point is mostly that one of the places where we meet resistance is where we go against our pattern. That we can feel it more sometimes when we do something
differently. And then yes, the discernment is around deciding—first of all seeing the pattern and deciding if it's what we want to be doing.
Student: So ultimately do you get to a state of no resistance? Amy: Could be.
Leslie: No unnecessary resistance.
Amy: No unnecessary resistance. Leslie: Efficiency I think is what we're looking for. Remember, all the patterns that we have are
there for a good reason. Originally there was a reason for developing all of them. But the conditions in which the original pattern was useful have changed. Well, if the pattern is no longer useful then it's unlikely that the conditions in which they were formed is no longer valid.
So like the way you balanced your body in gravity when you have very little lumbar curve and your head was one third your body length is one set of patterns. If you don't get past those
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when you have a fully developed lumbar curve and sort of an adult proportioned body then you’ve got a problem.
Amy: So when we look in the physiology of the muscle fiber at what happens when it shortens and lengthens. What's happening is that this is—this whole unit is called a sarcomere and these
filaments—the blue filaments in this case are called actin, and the red ones are myosin. And they have actin and myosin molecules in every cell in our body, but not in every cell and only in muscle cells are they organized in this sequential way. So actin and myosin in all of our bodies
are like transport mechanisms. It lets them have their pulling power really organized and cumulative. So the changing relationship between the myosin filaments and the actin filament is what changes the length of the muscle fiber. It's not because the myosin itself get shorter or the
actin itself get shorter. This is actually I think a very important concept. It's not the absolute length of either of those filaments that creates the change in length. It's about a changing relationship between these two molecules that are inside the muscle cell.
Student: Are they little hair-‐like things, the actin and the myosin.
Amy: These little red things? Student: Yeah.
Amy: They're called the heads of the myosin and what they do is they have this chemical
reaction where they ratchet along the actin. So they’ll do this and they let go, and they do this, and they let go, and they do this. So then would you go to the other—so now we’ve changed colors.
So in this case the red is the actin and the green is the myosin. Now I wish we could edit this and take away relaxation. Well, it should be lengthening. So what happens when the muscle get
shorter. If we go back to [...] the pictures, but in a concentric contraction, what happens is that myosin little heads ratchet along the actin in such a way that they slide together and it's elbow to elbow is the distance and the whole thing get shorter. So when the fibers engage contract
concentrically the two ends which are called Z-‐discs, these things move towards each other, they get shorter. When an eccentric contraction happens they don't know how it works. They don't actually know how it works. The physiologists, the Internet, cellular biologists. They’re still
trying to figure out exactly how is eccentric contraction works. So to get from below to above where they’re saying relaxation, it could be relaxation. It could be
just a let letting go of effort and the fibers slide apart. Or it could be some diminishing amount of effort where they don’t ratchet together quite as—where they don't exert quite as much and they slide apart. And they don't know. They don't know what it is that happens in the eccentric
contraction that makes it possible for it to slide apart. What's important here is that can slide functionally all the way that length to where the tips of them just overlap. So this is as long as it
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can functionally go and this is not as short as it can functionally go. It can go a little shorter, these ends can go a little more towards each other. As long as these are interacting with each
other. So does that make sense so far. So when I say sliding short and sliding long this is what I'm talking about. Not that you need to
be able to feel your actin and your myosin fibers sliding short or sliding long but it's not like a spring it lets gets itself get shorter. That the two fibers, the two sets of fibers are sliding such a way that they are shortening.
Student: It's a longer slide.
Amy: Yeah, you could go that way and there’s more surface area sliding in relationship to each other so you could say that this is more sliding area than this is. So you could sure make a case for it. What I think is really important is it's not like a spring. It's not something that the shorter
it gets the more springy, the more rebound there is or the more tension there is in it, in the sense that the fibers themselves are shortening. In the sense of the molecules themselves shortening. However this happening over—can you go to the drawing from the book? So inside
a muscle, which we talked about last week—thank you— there’s a muscle which we usually talk about, which is really an organ, because it’s that connective tissue, layers of connective tissue, surrounding bundles of muscle fibers which are called fascicles. So fascicles are bundles of
fibers. The muscle fiber which is a muscle cells is made up of bundles of myofibrils. So myofibrils are made up of many, many sarcomeres stacked up in a row. [Timestamp: 30:00]
Student: Stacked up lengthwise?
Amy: Lengthwise. Sarcomeres. Which was that unit of a set of actin and a set of myosin where the two ends can move together.
Leslie: So, the smallest functional unit of a muscle is a sarcomere and those get organized into myofibrils which turns the muscle fibers which turn into fascicles, which turn into muscles.
Student: And each muscle fiber is one cell. Amy: And each muscle fiber is one cell. So the myofibrils, the sarcomeres in the myofibril will
contract and as one sarcomere contracts it tugs on the next one, and the next one, and the next one in line. And if they all contract the whole thing get shorter. If some of them contract it gets shorter but to a lesser degree and as more myofibrils contract more the muscle fiber will
contract and as more muscle fibers contract the whole fascicle will contract. If the fascicles contract, if they all contract, the whole muscle contracts. But it's not all or nothing.
Leslie: All of this can happen without the joint that the muscle crosses being affected. They have to reach a certain threshold before actual movement in the joint will occur and it will be visible.
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I’m not saying it won’t affect the joint necessarily but you'll see visible joint movement unless enough of this stuff fires up that the two ends of the muscles start pulling towards each other.
Amy: Unless the two ends of the muscle overcomes the resistance of whatever their blah, blah.
Leslie: The weight resistance or whatever. Because there can be quite an active contraction and no visible joint as well, that would be isometric. Which she said.
Student: Is it always resistance that’s going to fire off that reaction? Amy: Is it always resistance?
Student: That will create that effect.
Amy: Well, the resistance doesn't create the effect. The resistance tells you how much you need to recruit. That what tells the muscles to fire is the nervous system. So the instruction to fire comes from the nervous system. The calibration of how much effort is needed. Of how many of
these fibers and fascicles and muscles need to be recruited. That calibration is through this feedback loop of sensing the resistance and then recruiting more, and sensing the resistance and recruiting more until you’ve activated just enough to overcome the resistance. Unless
you're compelled to work too hard in which you’ll make it harder.
I think the value in seeing this level of detail is when we keep talking about how nuanced the muscles can be that it's not all or nothing. That you can fire a muscle at 1 percent or 2 percent or 3 1/2 percent, at 10 percent or 12 percent. it doesn't all have to fire full on. Now we might not
feel it until it’s firing and 50% but it can be working really efficiently at 20% and we just wouldn’t feel it.
Leslie: And that'll change over range of motion. For example the weight of my forearm when it's out here gets less, and less, and less as it comes closer vertical. So it may feel like I'm using exactly the same amount of muscular effort to get it from there to here but in effect I need
more to overcome its inertia. It's weight when it's out here, then here, then here, it’s completely variable over that range of motion.
Amy: Because the resistance changes. Leslie: Because the resistance changes based on its position. The further away something is
from the focal joint, the fulcrum if you will, the more it’s going to weigh, and the more you’ll have to exert to get it to move. And as that lever gets closer to vertical so it’s over the fulcrum, the less you’ll need. So it's always changing. We don't necessarily notice that it's a subtle thing
to notice. If I had a dumbbell in my hand it would be much more noticeable. That's why the increased resistance can increase awareness.
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Amy: So in this then is a little bit of information. Again, you don't really have to know about
actin and myosin to understand this, but muscles—and this goes back to what Leslie was saying about the differing experience of bringing the arm in closer a little bit. It's another facet of that, which is that most of our muscles have a comfortable working distance. That they like to rest at
a certain distance. Which is not necessarily passive but they like to hang out at a certain length, and they are comfortable, shortening a certain amount within that and they are comfortable actively lengthening, eccentrically contracting a certain distance relative to that resting length.
So, relative to the resting length we can comfortably concentrically contract, and we can comfortably eccentrically contract. A kind of habituated distance because of how much of these—partly because of what the sarcomeres, how many of them are accustomed to being
recruited. And what happens, whether or not it makes sense to you relative to the sarcomere part. What happens sometimes when we try to shorten more than we're accustomed to the muscle cramps or spasms and everything goes at once and locks into the short spot. And the
kind of simple way to say one of the things that can happen and when the muscle gets longer than its accustomed to working to is that it just lets go and stops being functional, or is damaged and can be torn in some way. But we are capable of learning to use muscles a shorter and
shorter length and we are capable of learning to use our muscles at longer and longer lengths. So it’s a matter of educating our nervous system about coordinating the action in the muscle fibers.
Student: What happens when it lengthens more?
Amy: What happens when it lengthens more than it’s accustomed to, is that it can feel really weak, and it can feel like it's going to give way.
Leslie: What Amy just described in terms of muscle physiology is what we all know and have experienced firsthand from having learned and practiced and taught yoga. Watching ranges of
motion change, functional ranges of motion change, in ourselves and other people. Amy: Which means we can increase our functional strength in a concentric contraction. But a
place where I think we do it a lot in asana is the eccentric contraction. That we learn to feel stronger for greater distance and one of the places that this happens a lot I think that's interesting, again is this example, of coming from here to squaring the pelvis. And that for a lot
of us, this is a very long position across the outside of the hip. And to stay here either in an isometric or to get here might feel like it's going to give way. Or it starts [sound effects]. Yeah, because it's learning to work in a longer position than it's accustomed to. And so we’ll say it’ll be
happier when I'm right here. And this will feel like the end of what I can do. So learning to get here is in the case of those muscles about increasing the working, the functionality in an eccentric contraction over a greater distance. Which is learnable but it's not necessarily a
flexibility question. It's a question about what distance can the muscle be active over, not how long can it be passively stretched.
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Leslie: But, it will have an effect long-‐term overall on your flexibility.
Amy: Whatever flexibility means.
Leslie: Yeah, but you don't think of that as stretching your hips, or even that as a hip opener, whatever the hell that is. You know the important point that I want to make which is implied in what we’re saying about the accustomed ranges of motion in the muscles is that the training we
do in whatever field, whether it's in yoga, or weight training, or running, or athletics, whatever it is [Timestamp: 40:00] the conditioning of a muscle is very specific to the range of motion, the speed and the type of contraction in which you use that muscle. If you do a lot of short quick
concentric strengthening movements for this muscle, to use an obvious example, you're going to make it very good at doing short range of motion, quick concentric action. It doesn't mean that you’ve done anything to improve its function in a slow, long lengthening, eccentric
contraction. So if someone tells you oh, you’re back hurts, you have weak abdominals, you say oh I can fix
that and you end up doing like a thousand crunches every day, you have trained your abdominal wall to do those kind of concentric actions over a certain range of motion at a certain speed. The question that you need to ask is that the kind of strength my abdominal wall needs in order to
support my lower spine. And the answer is actually no, not really. We don't hold up our lower spine like this. It's still the abdominal wall, the question is what are you training it to do? And at
what length, at what speed and at what kind of contraction. Amy: The challenge, that you’re [...] is a particular challenge to see if you’re really doing it. To
know if you’re really level because most of us think we are and we’re not. Because we think, we've gotten to the end of the available movement. So that's a place where our sensation is not really telling us about the actual outer form. But doing the movement is a way to learn to do the
movement. The other challenge in that is to see though also do we start, are we doing it—what do I want to say? If you put your foot against a wall there's a way that you can take away the resistance. You can kind of make your body lighter because you can direct some of the force into
that back leg or do something like putting your leg on this which kind of makes my pelvis lighter. Makes the amount I have to exert here last, but it's also letting me do something in this leg that I might start to do and then move away from the wall and still not able to do this because I've
done it all from straightening this back knee. So the challenge of doing something like that with support is that I can use something else but I need to use it intelligently. Like right now I feel like this is almost a passive stretch here because I'm holding myself up from the energy in my back
leg. So I still would need to kind of gradually go. Do less in the back leg and start being able to cultivate more and more in the front leg.
Leslie: I think the methodological question is can you use some kind of external support, I mean to get it beyond this one asana, can you use some kind of external support props, walls, a
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partner or something that to help you move into a final position and then figure out how to supported it a little bit more once you’re there. Which is one way, it's perfectly valid to get that
feedback and then slowly let go of you, or you slowly come off the prop and you go whoa, what do I need to do in my body to replace that support that is now being taken away. That's one way. And another way is to find the starting position that allows you to go into it so you can feel
the movement from one position into the final position. And it's not that one way is better than the other it's just, we just need to know what we're doing and not only do just one thing necessarily.
Amy: Yeah. Okay. Muscle relationships. Now we're going to talk about these words.
One of the ways that we can describe the way that the whole muscular system works, because no muscle works in isolation. They just don't. Muscles don’t work by themselves. They never do. There is never ever, and I rarely say this, but there's never only one muscle doing something.
Leslie: What about the cremaster.
Amy: Even then you're breathing. Leslie: Well, if you want to bring breathing into it.
Amy: Even then.
Okay so what becomes really important to go from this micro view of what's happening in one sarcomere of one fiber of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to all the way back out to looking at how
muscles are in relationship to each other. Which is once we have that basic understanding of sliding and gliding, what we really have to look at is how they relate to each other. Because that's where we’re going to see the—well we don't really have to look at that but when we look
at that, when we look at the relationships between muscles I think we get more functional information. And again it's a place we can talk about muscles without naming them. We don't have to name them. In most of our—even though the illustration names them.
Leslie: Sorry.
Amy: No, it's okay I did it. Leslie: It's you're drawing.
Amy: One way, and we're going to look at three things. We're going to look at the focal joint in layers and in kinetic change. Three kinds of ways of organizing muscle relationships. Any of
these is a map, and not the whole territory. It's just a way of talking about what's going on.
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Leslie: By the way, lest you're preparing to be completely overwhelmed and confused by language, you already know this stuff in your body. You've experienced all of this. Because you
practice and teach yoga. You've experienced it. You've observed it. You’ve used it. Whether you knew it or not, we’re just going to name the things that you already know on some level and we’ll do our best to connect it to what you already know as we present it. Because I know it's a
lot of information. Seems that way. Amy: Really, you already know it? Not only because you’re doing yoga but because you feed
yourself breakfast in the morning. You go to the bathroom you lie down and you get up. Leslie: Well the point is you paid some attention to this, presumably.
Amy: Some of these are [...] things that aren’t anywhere.
Leslie: We'll see. Amy: Okay, so when we're talking about around one particular joint. When we’re talking about
one joint, and we have been talking about this focal joint. One way of talking about the muscles is that we can look at what's on one side of the joint and what's balancing it on the other side of the same joint. And this is very traditional kind of conventional relationship called the agonist-‐
antagonist relationship. In this the agonist which is the Greek word agon, was an actor in a play who drove the play forward. Who made the thing happen. Who made the action of the play
happen. And the antagonist was the actor who got in the way. Leslie: Conflict.
Amy: That's the bad guy who created the conflict. Not the bad guy but...
So the agonist is the thing that creates the movement. Is the main doer. Whether or not it is concentric or the eccentric. And the antagonist which used to be described more as being the thing that had to let go or get out of the way. The antagonist is the muscle on the opposite side
of the joint that modulates pretty directly the agonist action. The agonist and antagonist roles. Do we think they're absolute, they’re relative. Like everything else. Something can be an agonist in one joint action and an antagonist in another.
In looking at—I’m going to try to draw a picture that I don't usually draw very functionally. We’re going back to talk about bones for a minute. When we talk about balanced joint space,
say we have a generic kind of bone here. This looks an awful lot like an ulna. Leslie: It does.
Student: That's good.
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Amy: It's okay, it's not really any particular joint.
Leslie: It’s a schematic.
Amy: It is. It is. [Timestamp: 50:00] Now if the agonist, say it connects from here, up here. And it's going to be pulling short. It's going to be pulling this way. The antagonist on the backside will generally be getting longer and it used to be said that it was just letting go. The point I want to
make here is about keeping balanced joint space which is that if I get to a certain point here this can start to kind of get pulled out of the joint. If the pull on this side—this is the agonist's pulling. If this pull is so strong it can imbalance this joint space which in theory was pretty evenly
balanced here. You want the space between the bones to stay relatively balanced. But the agonist can start to pull so strongly there's a gap on the side. So one of the things that the antagonist does is modulate that amount of pull and this would be a case where there's no
antagonist. Where the antagonist isn't doing it's lengthening job here. It's modulating job of keeping the joint centered. In this case the round bone centered in the “socketish” bone keeping A, centered in B’s space there. A, is being pulled out of alignment with B because
there's only muscle action on one side of it. Where if this muscle were in here doing it's modulating job, not just letting go but modulating. It should keep the ball of the A more centered in the socket. So the antagonist is not passive and both muscles have to be
communicating with each other to really keep negotiating the nuance of keeping balance joint space in a three-‐dimensional space. This is only looking at two dimensions of movement here.
Kerry. Student: [...]
Amy: Well yeah, one of the things in this framework what I would say is that binding would tend to override the function of the antagonist. So in something like this, do you see how the head of
my humerus is kind of dropping forward? Even a little bit here, going from here. Not the scapula itself moving but I can kind of hyper extend and overexpose the front of my shoulder joint. It's not gravity doing that, it’s this continuous concentric contraction. So what I need to do is not let
the front of the joint just go. This is the antagonist. But it needs to keep modulating so that I get to a certain point where I'll say—not because cause I've hit the end range of the joints, but something about balanced joint space. This is far as I'm going to go is to the next joint, which
would be the scapula sliding in that case. So, this dance between them becomes really important in the joints where we have a lot of mobility. Does that make sense? So yes, when I go to bind the chances of this getting pushed to beyond what the antagonist can negotiate
would be, but in that case the bind is taking over and I'm not really working in my shoulder joint there anyhow. But it would be a similarly imbalanced joint space forced but forced by something else. But what might become really important in that bind then is the eccentric action here of
keeping this space from getting too exposed.
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Leslie: You have to remember the greater the distance from the focal joint of the bind and the force that’s being applied, the greater the force that's going to be exerted on that joint. And at a
certain point the stabilizing muscle, the antagonist, is simply going to be overcome no matter how hard you try. There is things you do in yoga that—I once injured my shoulders swinging on rings. You ever see the traveling rings where you swing from one ring to the next and the next.
And I was okay about halfway out but then I didn't have enough muscular strength to resist the traction that was being exerted not just by the weight of my body but by the centrifugal force of my swinging and it injured the joint. I wasn't strong enough to do that movement.
Amy: So, agonist-‐ antagonist relationship is a way of mapping the muscles that are on opposite sides of a joint. Something does one action where the thing does the opposite action. It can be
really literal, this does flexion and this does extension, or it can be more abstracted. Even that though as a description of joints, of how the muscles work around the joint is a little oversimplified. And the drawback to the agonist-‐ antagonist there's some really great strength
to seeing that relationship between them from side to side, but if we focus only on those as being what organizes the joints, we will still oversimplify. We also have to pay attention then to what are called fixators. Yup, fixators and synergists. So the fixators—and this is where when
Leslie was saying even in a bicep curl there are muscles being used. I saw a client the other day. I'm wondering if he's ever going to see this tape. But who...
Leslie: You don't have to mention his name.
Amy: Yeah, he'll know who he is if he sees it—who was saying I have this neck thing and I think it's from doing a bicep curl and he brought out his weight. He's like, “I do this, so I can do about two like this and then I start doing this thing. Why does my neck hurt?” Do you have a lighter
weight thing. And so we talked about he's working on Tadasana and so what do you have to do to maintain your Tadasana. If you want to focus on a bicep curl you actually have to do a whole bunch of stabilizing in other places so that you're not doing it from where you don't want to be
doing it from. And all of those muscles are called fixator muscles. And depending on the amount of resistance you'll need more and more fixator muscles which are the muscles that are more proximal, that are stabilizing the more proximal body part is the conventional definition. Though
there would be some fixators if we are doing a proximal movement the fixators might be also in the distal body part. So if I'm doing something, some of this kind of stuff what I'm doing to stabilize my foot, my knee, and my inner leg and blah, blah, blah and keep that organized, those
are all kind of fixator muscles along with everything I'm doing to maintain the alignment here. And then to go back this inner leg is the antagonist in this case to what's going on out here so I do something here to modulate joint space. But it's not the agonist. And then even when I lower
down I might be doing something to keep the joint space centered. But the agonist is still the outside the leg. The antagonist would be the inner leg and all the rest might be fixators. Or, the other muscles around the joints between the agonist and the antagonist those direct
relationships all the other muscles around the joint that facilitate or help keep the bones lined
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up [Timestamp: 60:00] or sometimes tug on the muscles so that it changes the line of pull, those are all called synergists.
Leslie: So there's a difference between fixators and synergists?
Amy: Yes, fixators—I mean there are definitions of these out there but as I learned it, the fixators are not right around the joint that's moving. They’re are around the other joints to keep them in line for example. To keep my spine organized while I'm doing something. Where the
synergists are the other muscles around the joint. And synergy is that what comes from several things working together which is different than for anything working by itself. Greater than the sum of its parts sometimes. So the synergists are the muscles besides the traditional agonist and
antagonist that are facilitating the job at the joint. And they don't often get a lot of credit. But I think they should get a lot more credit than they do. Because they go—particularly when there are joint issues is often the synergists that all the rest of the muscles around the joint like the
knee joint that are affecting the line of pull or something that tugs on the quadriceps that has an effect on the cartilage in the knee for example. The synergists have a lot to do with how the joint surfaces slide in relationship to each other, the tracking in the joint, the alignment in the
joint. So there's a way agonists and antagonists, fixator and synergists are really useful. And there's a way that agonists and antagonists kind of gets privileged and overemphasizes the one or two muscles when we really do have to look at the whole constellation of what's going on
around the joint.
Leslie: Well, it implies more of a linear action in the body than actually exists if you recognize that even things that seem to be moving in straight lines are actually spirals, there’s a whole bunch of other muscles near that joint that are managing the spiralic nature of the movement
other than the big movers that appear to be taking it in those two dimensions. A useful thing to recognize here in terms of giving a real-‐life example is the difference let's say in doing a bicep curl with a free weight. This is a free weight it can go anywhere in space. It's just a weight. If I
hold it here—by the way it's different to do it seated as opposed to standing. Here, I need to do a lot more fixating of all the joints in my body really, to isolate this muscle here compared to here. But what if somehow I built a machine where there's a set of pulleys and the framework
and this lever that has actual mechanical joints that will only move over a prescribed range of motion, and it has a handle, and the handle can only go in this plane. And it's attached to a weight somewhere in the machine that I can adjust and that's not free weight anymore. It's still
the bicep but all the synergistic and fixating actions of the body are no longer really required because the path of weight is fixed by the machine. All the fixating is happening in other words outside my body, not inside. That's, a Nautilus machine or something like that. The advantage is
that you couldn't have a modern health club without the Nautilus because free weights are dangerous. There's a pretty steep learning curve and you need help. You need people spotting you and there’s always a chance of dropping them. With Nautilus or some such you can take
someone around and in 10 minutes basically show them how the machines work and they can work out on their own and the worst thing that will happen is if they let go these plates will
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clank on each other but no one gets killed. But, it’s taking something out of the picture which is not surprising. Eventually the fitness industry recognized and had to put it back in.
Student: It's not as immediately dangerous.
Leslie: It's not as immediately dangerous. No, you don't create acute injuries by dropping weights on you or something else, but long-‐term what's missing is this wonderful word that starts getting added back in called core. And I don't know any elite athletes that I've ever
worked with that would go near one of those machines. They all want to use free weights, sometimes pulleys because they recognize that it's a whole body action even if you're trying to isolate one set of muscles and train them that you want the rest of the body to be trained to
cooperate with that action and not taken out of the picture. There's certain sports that have very specific jobs within the sport, like an offensive lineman or something and they'll use machines that reproduce an action that they want to do. But in general the people that
understand the body and train them, they want to use more free weights because of the full body action you get. You don't want to dumb the body down in other words.
Yoga is about increasing the intelligence of the system. You can't describe what's happening in one muscle without talking about its relationship is to everything else that's going on area which is sort of what made writing this book a little maddening. Very rewarding. In the long run.
Amy: Ah-‐ha. Definitely. Absolutely.
Leslie: Yeah, what she said.
Amy: Okay. That's if we look mainly at what's happening around one joint. But, it's not so useful because there's rarely just one joint moving. So if we look at muscles that cross more than one joint. Well, I'm going to say it differently. I’m going to say it the way it’s said on your hand out.
We can also look at not either side of the joint but layers around the joint. And as we look at the layers around the joint we’ll find that we have one-‐joint muscles and then two-‐joint muscles, so two or more joint muscles, we can called them multi-‐joint. So as soon as we start looking at
layers we also start seeing that what happens in one-‐joint via the muscles affects another joint. And as far as I know there are no joints in the body that only have one-‐joint muscles crossing them. Which means that every joint in the body is related to another joint either the next joint
proximal or the next joint distal via direct muscular connection. By some muscle that affects at least both of them. And I might come back tomorrow and correct myself but at least in the majority of joints there is no joint that works alone without a layer of the muscle also affecting
another joint. So we can talk about one-‐joint muscles which are usually deeper. They cross only one-‐joint. Which means they’re really specific. They provide articulation and discrimination in the joint. Every joint has one-‐joint muscles around.
Leslie: Every joint?
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Amy: If not, a muscle that is named then a deep, deep layer...
Leslie: Of that same muscle.
Amy: There might be one muscle that looks like it covers a whole bunch. But they'll be some part of that muscle that only crosses one joint. Every joint in the body has one-‐joint muscle. Every joint in the body has a muscle that crosses only that joint.
Student: Has at least one [...].
Amy: At least one muscle that crosses only that joint. Which means—or at least a layer of muscle that crosses only that joint. It means every muscle has the potential to be discriminated from all the other muscles. Other joints. Sorry, every joint has the ability to be discriminated
from other joints. By that I mean I could only move one-‐joint. I can move at only one-‐joint. Two-‐joint muscles cross two or more joints. They are generally more superficial, longer, broader. Every joint also has a two-‐joint muscles. Those two-‐joint muscles are more about integration.
About the relationship between one-‐joint and another. And in fact most of our joints have a muscle like the elbow joint will have a [Timestamp: 70:00] two-‐joint muscles that also crosses several two-‐joint muscles that also crosses the wrist and several to two-‐joint muscles that also
cross the shoulder. The elbow also has one-‐joint muscles. So I can do something at just the elbow but I can also integrate the elbow with the hand and integrate the elbow with the action
at the shoulder. I don't have to name them to know they're there. Now any given person I work with might not be able to make that discrimination but that's
about our nervous system not about whether the muscles are available or not. Leslie: So the layering of the muscular system that Amy's describing provides for the possibility
of both integration and discrimination. Another way is to say in general terms what Amy is describing about muscle layering, about every joint has single joint muscles and multi-‐joint muscles crossing it is that the way that the body's musculature is layered provides for the
possibility of both discrimination and integration. And we need both. Amy: There's probably a million more ways to organize our understanding of muscles but one of
the other general principle ways to do it is to look at kinetic chains. Which is a term that I learned from the [...] fundamentals, but it’s a really traditional—it's used in physical therapy, maybe occupational therapy. I don’t know where it started. So, you might hear it in other places
but that is the idea that one muscle will via connective tissue will affect the next muscle up or down. And this is different from being a muscle that crosses two joints that has more to do with the fact that if I start something in my fingertips, what happens in those muscles will tell them
connective tissue that will wake up the next muscle, that will wake up the next muscle, that will wake up the next muscle. So things are connected in kinetic chains, but also has to do with
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nervous system in that if I need to do something and what I have available in the muscles of my hand say won't be enough, then the nervous system will recruit something else, and then will
recruit something else, and that will recruit something else until I'm using my back to lift up the sandbag if I can’t just do it in my fingers or my wrists or my elbow, or my—I’ll keep recruiting along this kinetic chain until I'm using a whole cascade of muscles to do something. A whole
sequence of muscles. So they communicate with each other both via tugging on the connective tissue that relates them, that connects them and via the nervous system that actually recruits more and more help as it's needed.
Leslie: So would you say the kinetic chains that any given individual uses to produce certain functions are determined by their structure, by their history, by their habit? All of the above.
Amy: All of the above.
Leslie: So, they're very individual these chains. Amy: They’re very individual and in terms of that sequence of recruitment there is no way to
know. No two people will do it the same. Because it also has to do with percentages. One person might use 25 percent of this muscle and 30 percent of this muscle and 50 percent of this muscle to do some like stepping thing and someone else might be using 45 percent and 15
percent and 50 percent. But the percentage of usage of the muscles is highly individual. Partly learned and partly a product of I have a shorter tibia then Leslie does so we're going to need
different percentages of muscle work. Leslie: Not just shorter because you're shorter, but shorter in relation to the length of her
femur. Proportional differences. Amy: Right. So when we see all of those factors that go into how muscles work do you see how
it might be kind of silly world, to say use your biceps to flex your elbow. Student: You might as well say use your nervous system.
Amy: Hmm?
Leslie: She said, “You might as well use your nervous system.” Amy: Yeah!
Leslie: Which actually would be a better thing to say to say.
Amy: Even better yeah, exactly.
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Leslie: You're not telling them the what, you're just suggesting the how. Use your nervous system, and you'll figure it out.
Amy: Um... Hmm... Even worse...
Leslie: Get it all off your chest Amy. Put it all out there. Really, just everything that bugs you. Amy: Oh, I can't go there.
Leslie: Sure you can.
Amy: No I don’t even know. Leslie: You have 20 minutes, that’s plenty of time. No it's not, actually.
Amy: I give you this “even worse.” I did my shoulder rant last week. Even worse is to say, “Feel the biceps working to blah, blah, blah.” Because I might not feel my biceps. They might be so
used to doing this that I don't feel it and then if I'm setting out to be a good student then I’ll work so hard that I can feel them which may be way harder than I need to work to actually lift that thing up. So if I'm pretty used to. A little more, I'm not used to lifting this. I'm pretty used to
lifting this. I don't even feel it. If you said to me, “Feel my biceps working to do this.” What I would have to do is engage the antagonist to such a degree that I made it harder for myself to
lift this thing up and then I can feel my biceps working. But, I don't need to do that. I'm not learning something then except for how to do what's called a co-‐contraction. I mean it might be functional in some setting but they're working hard enough to feel it is not necessarily more
efficient. It's a waste of energy for me to work that hard to pick up my water bottle that I already know how to do.
Student: It would be the same idea though for example. Stand with the arms to the side and try to create that extra weight and the system needs your arms to start feeling the muscles working around your bones. But you know what I mean? It’s not only having your arms [...] but create
that system in your body in work. Amy: Yeah. I think so. I mean this will get tiring soon enough and if it doesn't, great. But making
it harder by pulling down so you have to pull up. I don't think that as a society we need to cultivate skills at making things harder for ourselves. And I don't think physically we need to cultivate making it harder for ourselves. And I think the underlying assumption that we're all
gonna feel the effort at the same moment is really dangerous. Because it sets us up to think we failed unless it's difficult.
Leslie: Or unless we feel what the teacher says we should be feeling for whatever reason.
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Student: [...]
Leslie: Hugging the muscles to the bones. Student: [...]
Amy: You know, hug the muscles to the bones. I have heard that and I have played with that and it can be really sweet. They can be really like—I mean it's not far from what I'm saying that the
muscles play with the bones that the muscles support the bones moving into alignment. I think the danger is when we get into, “”Hug the muscles to bones.”, In such a way that you’re not working hard enough. Because there's a way I can feel like, “All right. My muscles they're talking
to my bones, there hugging the bones into place it can be really nice.” And then, I get told I'm not working hard enough because I'm not hard.
Leslie: Hugging is not just one thing. You can hug somebody in a very sweet kind of aw... like that. And then there’s like Aunt Bertha who comes over and usually, [sound effects], and it's like you can't wait to get out of that hug. So you know, what does that mean?
Amy: I think we lose track also a something like the quadriceps. Any big muscle, any muscle. But the bigger the muscle the more nuanced it can be also. And if my goal is to have my quadriceps
fully, fully engaged altogether that's one thing. But that to me starts to separate the functioning of one muscle group from some kind of sense of integration through the body. [Timestamp:
80:00] And now it would be a whole different thing to say engage your quadriceps or engage the front of your legs until you feel it spread up into your abdomen. Until you feel it spread to the back of your neck and the palms of your hands. Like that would involve—that would invite some
kind of feel this, recruit this, spread—like things that invite recrimination. That's not what I mean. Communication, kinetic chains. That I think is bringing us more towards the sense of the wholeness. Things that come about like just how hard can you work in this one spot doesn't to
me, at least in my experience of it, doesn't cultivate a sense of the wholeness of myself. Leslie: Cause the other thing is how many individual components of the alignment of a pose can
you keep in your consciousness at any one time. Amy: About 30.
Leslie: Not unless they’re integrated to a whole. In fact every cell of your body can be integrated to a whole in certain context of an experience. But if it feels like you're juggling alignment cues
or keeping all these plates spinning. Because the minute I focus on, I should be keeping my knee cap lifted, damn I'm going to do lose my anal sphincter. Because I was supposed to keep that contracted too, and by the way oh, but then I'm knitting my eyebrows and I always do that. But
then I relax my eyebrows and oh, my shoulders pop up. So wait a minute. I have to relax I have to concentrate simultaneously on relaxing my eyebrows, keeping my shoulders dropped,
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contracting my anal sphincter, and lifting my knee cap, because that's the right way to do this pose that I've learned. You see what I mean? You can access the whole through any part—
through any cell, really. The question is what are you doing with that information. Are you getting hung up in the part or are you integrating it with the whole? Again, differentiation and integration. They need to be in balance you can't just be a bunch of parts that you're trying to
keep relating to each other by jumping your awareness from one to the other, one to the other, and back again. There has to be a whole picture somewhere.
Amy: Okay, lie down. If you're not already. But if you'd like to, you can just take Sivasana if you want to but if you want to bring your arms out to the side and take this movement we've done a few times now. Just a reaching, one set of fingertips across and then on rolling back and
reaching the other set a fingertips across and then rolling back. Just feel as you kind of reach into that twist where do you feel sliding? Where do you feel sliding short? Knees can be bent or straight. Where do you feel sliding long? And then let it go and just settle.
< Interlude of sound >
Amy: Lengthen your exhale and deepen your inhale. Let the movement of your breath travel to your fingers and to your toes, to your head and to your tail. And with an exhale gather limbs in and roll to one side. And find your way up to sitting. Feel the support of your bones and the
movement of your muscles. Bring your hands together at your heart. Bow your head forward and your heart forward in gratitude to all the teachers and students who’ve gone before, and
the greatest teacher of all is that within ourselves. Om shanti. Thank you. Thank you everybody have a great night.
Amy: This concludes Unit 6. In this section we looked at the physiology of the muscles. We looked at the connective tissue, and how they work together to create the muscular system that
creates movement in our bodies. Before you come back for the next section I would invite you to think about the muscle patterns in your body. [Timestamp: 120:00] What patterns are challenging for you? What patterns feel the most enjoyable? And can you change that
experience? Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time.