Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/77400
VISUAL ASSESSMENT OF POSTURAL PATTERNS What can you do for your work by looking—really looking—at your client? A lot. Ida Rolf said, "Seeing is touch at a distance," and you can use your vision as a way of pre-feeling into any old dings in your clients' frames, any hitches in their functional "git along," and even subtleties of their psychological approaches to life. This information can guide your strategies, shorten your guesswork, and make your sessions twice as effective via the integration of your unwinding. We are going to unfold this BodyReading approach as a series in this and subsequent issues, including a set of practical webinars for developing these skills. Now, you already have a lifetime's experience of making these visual assessments—you can recognize a friend from a couple of blocks away, long before you see his or her face, just by the movement pattern, can't you? Sure you can, so it's just a matter of putting your native visual- kinesthetic skills to work for you. But we need to put a strong logical foundation under those intuitive skills, so let's get serious for a bit. Many forms of structurally oriented manipulation, including the method of Structural Integration put forward by Dr. Ida Rolf or our version, Kinesis Myofascial Integration or KMI (www. anatomytrains.com/kmi), use an analysis of standing posture or gait as a guide in forming a treatment strategy. Chiropractors, physiotherapists, soft- tissue practitioners, and movement educators such as Alexander, yoga, and Pilates teachers have used various grids, plumb lines, and charts to help assess the symmetry and alignment of the client (Image 1, page 77).1 Our approach favors the inter- relationships within the person's body, rather than his or her relation to anyone else or a platonic ideal like a line or a grid. For this reason, the photographs we use are devoid of such outside reference, except, of course, the line of gravity as represented in the orientation of the picture. GLOBAL POSTURAL ASSESSMENT An easy upright alignment within the strong and shadowless gravitational field of the earth is inescapably a benefit to health. The advisability, however, of compelling left/right symmetry or even a straight posture on a client is far more dubious. Alignment and balance are dynamic and adaptive, not static and fixed. The goal in making such an analysis is to understand the pattern, or story if you will, inherent in each person's musculoskeletal arrangement—insofar as such a task is possible using any analytical method. Using what we show you here merely to identify postural faults will severely limit your thinking, the client's empowerment, and the longevity of the results. Once the pattern of relationships is grasped, use any treatment method available to resolve or unwind the entire pattern. The idea is to assist the client in the process of "growing out of the pattern," not to impose symmetry or a particular ideal. As people resolve these patterns, they more closely approach a natural balance, which amounts—with allowance for different muscle fiber types and fascial densities—to an evenness of tone throughout the entire myofascial system. Accompanying this even tone comes anecdotal evidence of increased length, ease, generosity of movement, and adaptability in both somatic and psychosomatic terms. earn CE hours at your convenience: abmp's online education center, www.abmp.com 75