Check this out.
This device— clothing that can tell what tissues are active during a given movement—raises a super interesting point about what we’re measuring, and how much that measurement matters.
That awareness, i.e. are my right glutes firing more than my left in a back squat?, can be a beautiful thing. Though here’s my experience, especially with folks who lift weights (both at my clinic, and when I taught crossfit classes): if we get too tunnel visioned around creating left/right, and front/back, balance, we’re almost always:
a) missing some key somatic information, i.e. blocking out the smaller stuff to get to the bigger gains of symmetry, which wouldn’t be a problem were the small stuff not the key expression of our core (tiny little stabilizers that hugely, if not mostly, influence our structural health) and physiology (the functional health of nerve, fluids and organs that sit right next to, and are quite influenced by, those little stabilizers)
b) losing sight that compression doesn’t tend to happen linearly. And while that compression certainly CAN be undone, i.e. decompressed, linearly, this is less common. That means your left hip that’s too low (or is your right too high? hmmm …) likely took a non-linear, 3D sort of sliding path to be in its current home, especially if it happened over time (as opposed to a traumatic accident).
The downside, then, of seeing where something is (“too much weight on my left foot”) and trying to remedy that with the opposite (“so put more weight on my right foot”) leaves out the nuances of the journey … Which is to say, how we find our way out of the beautiful messes we’ve gotten ourselves into.
Just a thought.
Cheers to the people who made this. I do think these kind of inventions are at least inspiring conversations that will do much more good than harm.
dynamicalignmentbodywork.com 