Anatomy In Motion

Anatomy in Motion is a movement based treatment modality, where a detailed evaluation of the quality of movement a patient has, is paramount for discovering where an injury has originated from.

Discovery is the most appropriate word to describe the treatment process for the therapist and for the patient as it is a journey of how they have moved their whole life, with the current injury they are experiencing and what is missing to help the patient move better with more efficiency.

Assessment is a key component for interviewing the body, looking at the body as a whole integrated system to find out what every joint is doing in all three planes of action and what movement patterns are missing.

We are looking at your whole body and the movement patterns you have, rather than just the local injury that you are experiencing, but all the other traumas, injuries and adaptions your body has had to adjust to over your whole life. It is important to remember that you walk in the door with all these past adaptions as well as the latest injury, pain or limited movement also and those old injuries can be contributing to this one right now.

A lot of patients we see at Acu Dublin have had many treatments on the injury they are suffering from with local treatment and have experienced this injury resurfacing time and time again. This is due to everything else not being given a chance to resolve and this is the beauty of Anatomy in Motion, it gives the body an opportunity to unwind the other adaptions/injuries that came before as well as the most recent one.

Anatomy in Motion places a particular emphasis on observing the feet and their 33 joint motions in relation to each other. By assessing the action of all these bones in three dimensions of movement, using walking gait as a mechanism gives us a massive amount of information we can apply to the whole body.

Feet are your only contact to the ground and as such everything must stack upon the feet and thus all the bones are mirrored in the body from the feet and what way they are moving and how those bones in the feet move in relation to each other. It is no coincidence that there are 33 joints in each foot and 33 joints in the Spine, and through each step, the spine mirrors the foot and vice versa.

With this way of thinking we can discover that your lower back injury or shoulder injury is related to an ankle injury from 5 years before and once we start getting movement back into the ankle and foot bones and unwind the ankle adaptions, the rest of the spine frees up movement and the issue lessens considerably.

This is done by observing the patients current movement or limitations in movement, assessing what movement is missing then making an intervention. This intervention can take the form of placing wedges in positions under the feet to increase Proprioception in the foot to match what is missing in the body. By doing this the body starts to recognise the invitation to move in the pattern that was missing and self corrects.

We then test and measure whether this intervention has allowed the body to accept the invitation to move differently, if it has we move onto the next pattern if not we change what we did the last time. This is the process of discovery is a collaborative effort with the patient and the therapist working together to understand where the lack of movement was and add it in thereby solving the issues being presented.

This system is being used for premiership footballers in England by its creator Gary Ward for high performance but it literally can be used for everyone. Everyone walks have had injuries, falls, has accidents, traumas etc. It is normal to have these things in life and wonderfully our bodies try to keep us going by adapting to them for survival. As a result, we are potentially all prone to injury or pain going forwards in life therefore we all need to have this wonderful ability to learn how to unwind these adaption/injuries for less pain in our lives going forwards.

If you would like to have a session and experience Anatomy in Motion for yourself schedule an appointment and book in for your first step into better movement.