Crazy Stuff

7.6.21

Hold your hands up in front of your schnozz, fingers touching and hands flat. Now tilt your hands so a marble on your right wrist would roll off your left wrist.

(Shades of Jeff Goldblum teaching lovely Laura Dern about chaos theory. Which, now that I think about it, might be apt.)

Okay. Go back to having your hands flat. Now shift your hands as if they were flat on a turntable, so the right wrist goes toward the far wall and the left wrist comes back to you.  There—got it?

Reset.

NOW. Hands pushed to the right. (Or left. I don’t care.)

There. You’ve just demonstrated the three planes that your hips can be in when they’re wrong. There’s a lot of variation there—so if someone were to say, for example, you were hiked over to the right, you might justifiably wonder what the hell they’re talking about.

Are you over to the right because your hip is higher on one side? Because it’s rotated forward? Because the whole megillah has shifted out of the true alignment? BUT WAIT—WE’RE NOT DONE YET!!

Hold your hands in that same position. Now flip your right hand forward so the palm is facing toward the wall.

Or let your fingertips separate so the left hand is still the same but the fingers of the right hand are now pointing into that corner.

Do you see the damned challenge?? There’s a joint back there in the pelvis (two, actually; one on either side of the spine), and your hips are NOT one solid bone cradle. You can flare out. Or up. Or, I suppose, back.

HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY NOW?? BUT WAIT—THERE’S MORE!

My hips are the Ginsu knives of opportunity. Because now keep your hands wherever they’ve ended up but shift your shoulders in whatever direction you care to. Because YOUR TORSO MIGHT BE TWISTED OR ROTATED AND YOU WOULDN’T KNOW IT. It feels normal to you. You poor thing.

This is me, going through my hip exercises with the amazing Barbara. I’ve been doing the exercises faithfully since Jorge adjusted my hips last week, but my hip flexor has been annoyed by the exercises, and Barbara wanted to know why.

Well, “why” turned out to be because my hips were out and up and over and back and flared and sitting under a torso with a definite rotation. I mean, by the end of our session together, I felt like I’d been put in one of those astronaut training gyroscopes where they fling you around in three different axes until you’re either laughing helplessly or spraying vomit across the room.

Fortunately, the Barbara method caused laughter. Confused laughter—but laughter.

With her help, and Jorge’s, and Chip’s (all the experts at Body Dynamics in Falls Church, VA), I am going to master that gyroscope, by damn! If only there weren’t SO many variables!