Fixing Spinal Rotation - Part 1
Well hello, everyone! Welcome back to Four Lights Wellness. The body is a miracle of movement, and should be capable of moving a lot of ways. No, that doesn’t mean you have to be gumby, or a gymnast. But if there’s a movement pattern that is missing from your body’s movement vocabulary, it leads to the body and joints wearing down faster than they are supposed to. That wear and tear leads to dysfunction, and ultimately chronic pain.
One of the biggest foundational movements is the ability to twist, and unfortunately is one of the easiest to lose in our flexion based society. Because this is such a foundational movement, this will be one of a series of articles on the matter, covering everything from how we develop the pattern in the first place, how we lose it, how to get it back, and finally ending with how to actually condition it so you never lose it again.
How We Learn How To Rotate
Like I mentioned earlier, the body is capable of taking on a LOT of shapes. While some people have access to more than others due to genetics and natural flexibility, when we boil every one of them down, we are left with seven patterns of movement that are required to survive in nature. Those are: pushing, pulling, squatting, lunging, bending and twisting and the derivations of gait.
Someday I’ll break down each of the seven like I am with twisting, but I want to start us off with understanding how we learn these in the first place, because it’s super important to understand how from a neurological development perspective, each pattern is foundational to the next.
When we’re born, we’ve got rudimentary access to our bodies at best. We’re developed so minutely that our heads must be supported or we can die. But, believe it or not, before that baby is even one hour old, it’s already starting to learn how to twist. The very first thing we need to do to survive as a newborn is to learn how to turn our heads to latch onto the nipple. This twisting isn’t conscious yet, but the rooting reflex is the starting nerve impulses through the cranium and neck that begins development of the cervical spine’s ability to twist.
A few hours or days later, the eyes open and we start to look around and try to start making sense of the world around us. Again, the movement to turn the head from side to side at this stage is generated less from the neck muscles than you’d think, and instead happen from the eye muscles signaling for the head and neck to follow.
Next, we’ve got the snake phase of movement. When my daughter was at this age, we’d put her down on her back in the crib, and even two or three minutes later, she may have wiggled her way a whole foot up or down that mat. Remember, that doesn’t sound like much, but at this age, that might be more than half their length! How she did that was to use the head and tailbone as anchors and wiggle the spine in serpentine like patterns to crawl up and down the crib, learning the spinal coordination required to eventually roll over.
One day, the baby is on their back, and they see something shiny out of the corner of their eye. They turn their head to get a better look at it, and then they decide to reach for the shiny object. It’s this combination of movements that lands the infant on their tummy. This is important for them to be able to do, on their own, BEFORE tummy time is introduced. If tummy time is done before the baby fully learns the twist and roll pattern, the stage of rolling is skipped, and the spine and brain think they’re done learning that pattern. I see this too often in my practice, and we must then spend some time re-learning this crucial stage.
How To Learn as an Adult
Chances are, you have no conscious memory of this stage, and even if you were to ask your own parents about it, they would have no real knowledge of this stage of movement development. After all, this stuff isn’t exactly in the big book.
The first thing to do is to assess whether there is an issue in your spine’s ability to roll and twist. This can easily be done in a number of ways, but my favorite is by lying on a 4 inch foam roller vertically. With your head bone at the top, and tailbone on the bottom, you can easily assess the spinal curves by using the thickness of the palm between the roller and both your neck and low back. If the hand doesn’t fit, those curves are flat! If your hand goes straight through, those arches are too big.
The next step is to try and rotate the rib cage and shoulders down to the floor, making sure to not let the spine ‘banana’ out to one side, but rather using muscles actively to twist the spine along that foam roller axis. The head should remain gazing straight up at the ceiling as well, not tipping to one side or the other.
If this first stage is easy, next is working on getting the hips to rotate down to the floor. This takes loads of coordination for the lumbar spine and sacrum to coordinate, and can be a great way to assess mobility in the pelvis and hips.
Lastly, and this is still a challenge for me, attempting to combine the top and bottom movements; shoulder and opposite hip to the floor. Sounds, and feels like a crazy amount of spinal rotation to coordinate, but this actually is the required amount of rotation for walking!
I’ve had adults that could not do even the shoulder down to the ground day one, and within even a few weeks of working on this skill coordinated their spine so much that they can do both the hips and shoulders. The important part to highlight is not the improved mobility, but the major reduction in spinal aches and pains as the system learns how to coordinate the entire spine, pelvis and rib cage together.
If what I’ve described above sounds like something you want to try, but want more details on how to do it, I’ve got a YouTube video on the channel to guide you through the process, and show how it’s done. I promise, though, if you work on this foundational skill, every other movement pattern will improve as well, simply because we MUST learn this BEFORE we learn any of the others as babies.
I hope this information is very helpful to you all. As always, have a happy and healthy rest of your day, and I’ll see you in the next one!
If you liked this, check out my course at Four Lights Wellness, where I cover both physical and mental aspects of wellness: Healing (e)Motions: Trauma Release Exercises for People with Stress offers targeted physiological exercises aimed at reducing stress and mental health dysfunctions that can contribute to physical pain.