Movement, mobility, flexibility, strength… these are all familiar words, but how do you know if you’ve got em’? And why should you care? The second question is easy- the way I see it, movement is medicine. And I mean that literally- I have some examples:

• When your muscles move, they pull on your bones, and that signals your body to deposit more calcium there, making them stronger
• When you walk and move about, it acts like gentle massage in your belly, encouraging not only digestion and elimination but also circulation, lymphatics, and immune regulation
• Walking is one of the best ways to trigger your vagus nerve and enter the parasympathetic state, the OPPOSITE of “fight or flight”. In this state smooth muscles like blood vessels and your intestines and your eyes relax and dilate
• And deep breathing is a practice that not only helps reduce stress, but builds the strength of core muscles like the diaphragm, the pelvic floor, and the lungs themselves

Now, as to whether you’ve got good movement- I have a pretty simple formula to determine where you fall on the mobility spectrum, because make no mistake, it IS a spectrum! The formula is this:
Flexibility - Strength = Mobility

Let’s dig into this. Don’t think of it like math class! This is a formula that’s about YOU, and how you work. So try to apply these pieces of the formula to yourself. Ready? Ok:

First, mobility.

Mobility is movement. This is what’s after the equals sign. This is what we’re trying to get to. Mobility is what lets you move confidently through your world. And it’s made up of a number of different factors, that pretty much are facets of either strength or flexibility. 

So, flexibility. 

Mobility (movement) requires flexibility of your muscles and tendons and ligaments. We don't always think of the connective tissue, the ligaments and tendons, when it comes to flexibility but they’re very much involved and important. 

When you’re not actively doing anything with a muscle, it’s called being “at rest”. When you contract the muscle, it shortens and moves a joint. This is called flexing. Then, when you’re done moving the muscle, it has to lengthen or extend to straighten the joint back out, which is actually done by an opposing muscle flexing the other direction- think biceps and triceps. One bends your elbow, the other straightens it. You can also open lots of joints past their resting length, which we call stretching. 

Ligaments and tendons need to be flexible as well. These are pieces of connective tissue, the white stuff on anatomy pictures, that connects muscles to bones, and bones to bones. It’s white because, unlike red muscles, it doesn’t get much blood flow. A healthy diet and good hydration are important to keep connective tissue lubricated and flexible, and flexible muscles allow for their proper movement too. 

All this ability of muscles and ligaments and tendons to lengthen is your flexibility. Sometimes, even lengthening TO their resting state can be a challenge if the muscles have been in a constant state of contraction. The muscles get stuck in a tight state because they’re not moving and exercising and being strong. Plus, the state of your muscles IS the state of your tendons, and the ligaments can get dry and brittle and stiff if there’s poor circulation happening in the joint because it’s not moving much. For example, do you have trouble walking barefoot? It could be because your calves and your feet have been contracted to help you balance against a shoe heel for your whole life, so you didn’t fall flat on your face!

On the flip side, damage or injury can cause inflammation in connective tissue, and the swelling that comes with that can further inhibit flexibility. Not to mention, the lack of blood flow to connective tissue means it won’t heal quickly so these problems can linger.

So improving your flexibility is a critical piece of mobility. The other piece of the formula is strength.

Strength is the power you have to either move or hold a joint still against resistance. Again, think of the biceps and triceps, and imagine you’re a baker. Your biceps come into play when you, say, stir a batter with a big spoon. You use your triceps to push the elbows straight when you’re kneading bread. And when you pull a tray out of the oven, you tend to hold the elbows in a bent position and use your back and legs to stand up and then put it on the counter. 

I think most of us understand being strong. Here’s the kicker, though: strength and flexibility work against each other. This is why our formula is “Flexibility - Strength = Mobility The stronger you are, the less range of motion you will have around your joints. For one thing, this is because of the sheer mass of the muscle impeding the movement- the bulky muscle gets in the way of the movement. Also, the strength of the muscles pulls on the joints in both directions, so they can’t open or close as far. It’s like a swinging door- if the hinge is set too tight, they won’t swing as far or as easily.

This means it’s entirely possible to be overly tight and lose mobility because you are too muscular. However, that’s not usually what happens! Very few people train and work their bodies to this point. What’s much more likely in our world is to lose strength from NOT moving as much as we should or could be. Then, what little muscle you have left hangs onto the joint as tight as possible for dear life, trying not to let the joint become unstable and fall apart.

So lack of strength will lead to lack of mobility because of the tightness it causes around joints, and also because that tightness leads into decreased flexibility as well. It’s a vicious circle that gets balanced out when we incorporate THREE pieces into our daily movements, whether they’re traditional “exercise” or the normal life movements we already do frequently. And those 3 pieces, dearest listeners, are another topic for another episode. Tune in again to my Holistic Lifestyling show, and learn how to balance your strength and flexibility- next time.

Listen Here

​There seems to be a spectrum of hypermobility. At one end are people who are particularly flexible in one direction- something always stretches markedly better than the rest of them. This is the kind of thing that is often noticed in a yoga or pilates class, and it’s something that I’ve seen a lot over the years teaching reformer pilates.

At the other end of the spectrum is a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, or EDS. This is a fairly serious condition where your connective tissue, which is what holds you together, is weakened. This can cause all sorts of problems, and EDS is not the main focus of today’s episode, although what I’m going to talk about can help. 
 
For me, my hypermobility meant that I was actually very weak, muscularly. I’ll never forget, in my first reformer pilates instructor training over 15 years ago, our master trainer was excellent at encouraging us to adjust the resistance on our reformers during training because it was so exhausting over several days! 

So I was doing an upper body exercise on the absolute lightest spring our machines have, and she called the rest of the class over and asked me to continue. First she pointed out the little bitty spring that I was using, and then the obvious muscle strain happening around my shoulder joints (I was wearing a tank top so you could see everything). It was a lesson to not simply assume springloads for people, to actually observe them and make changes based on their form and effort. Because even though I was there to be an instructor, so I presumably should have been able to do everything at what’s considered a ‘normal springload’, my shoulders couldn’t handle it. So making that assumption for me would have been dangerous for my shoulders.

For me, the whole experience showed me that while, for example, my shoulders could come out of their sockets on demand, I could also use the muscles around my joints to help hold them together if I had some more muscles around my joints! ​

Hypermobility is seen from the outside as being extra flexible, but really it’s not about the muscles- it’s about the connective tissue (CT) being extra stretchy and/or weak. This is a problem because CT doesn’t heal well. When you look at an anatomy picture you’ll see the muscles in red, and you’ll also see white stuff which is the connective tissue. The best image for this is a picture of the back muscles, there’s a triangle of CT over the low back. It’s there to support your low back.

The CT is white both on pictures and in person because it doesn’t get much blood flow. Therefore, it’s slow to heal and easy to re-damage. One of the types of CT are tendons, ligaments are another CT type, so when you do things like sprain an ankle you’re more likely to re-injure that ankle because it’s really hard to fully heal that.

The other thing about hypermobility is that while you’re stretchy and loosey-goosey at your joints, SOMETHING has to hold you together! A lot of times, that something is the CT line that runs from the front of your pelvis up the front of your body to your neck and throat. 

This line can get really tense. A lot of hypermobile people have really strong pelvic floors, because that contraction of th epelvic floor muscles has always been part of keeping themselves vertical. It’s not necessarily supposed to be, but that’s how we’ve compensated. There's also sometimes intense tension in the jaw and front of the neck, which can be actual TMJ, or can share some of its symptoms.

Personally, I have a depression, like a channel or an upside down ridge, between the 2 halves of my sternum, the breastbone, and now I think that was caused by this CT tension up the midline of my body while still having extra flexibility- that extra mobility- around my ribcage as a child. ​

OK, but here’s why this matters. You might not have known you were hypermobile, or you thought you were but outside of party tricks like when I can dislocate my shoulders on demand you didn’t care much about it. 

But it does matter, because over time your movement patterns are affecting things like your joints, and how your bones get built, and even things like how your digestion and immune systems can function, because they are’ really made of a lot of CT. 

So there’s 2 main things you can do for yourself if you are hypermobile- you can strengthen around your joints, and you can align your movement patterns so the demands of moving through your day are evenly and safely distributed along those joints.

When I say “strengthen around your joints” I mean something specific. Most of the time, when people say “strength training” they’re talking about the big muscle groups- biceps, quads and hamstrings, calves- those sorts of muscles that stick out from your skin and are aesthetically desirable and don’t have much to do with actually stabilizing your joints- they’re more ‘power’ muscles. They’re important, but they’re not the stabilizing muscles that I’m talking about.

Your smaller muscles are the ones that are more responsible for your actual joint stability, and being small there’s 2 things that help them the most:

1. Moving slowly, because the faster you go the more the power muscles are going to take over and,
2. Moving often, because since they’re smaller, they tend to ebb away very easily

These are both good, because that makes it very easy to make strengthening your joints part of your normal day! This takes consistency though.

The second thing you can do takes awareness as well as consistency. Learning properly aligned movement patterns, ways to sit and stand and walk and hold yourself- takes some practice, but really what you’re doing is resetting your habits. These aligned patterns actually feel very comfortable and stable, so it’s not hard to learn them and to practice them and for them to become your new habits. 

But that is a different way to move than the usual “exercise” we’ve all experienced.

All this to say that if you recognize hypermobility in yourself, there’s 2 ways I can help you. For one thing, you can keep following me. You’ll learn little bits, from these podcasts and from my freebies like the challenges that I run, and also from the First Steps mini courses I offer, and you can slowly incorporate into your life. Or you can directly work with me. I do take 1:1 clients, and right now as this episode is published the doors are open for my Foot to Forehead Fix, a small group version of my private coaching. Check out PaulasHerbals.com to learn more and to get started!

​Listen to the Episode Here

Recently I was asked, "Are there particular herbs or remedies that you’d suggest for clients with pelvic floor dysfunction?"

Well, yes and no. This is a classic answer, I know!

One of the things I’m on a mission to teach is that plants weren’t invented for our illnesses, so having that expectation of “what’s a good herb for…” doesn't really translate into actual improvements in our health. 

Because as a general rule plants don’t really care what our problems are! Right?! They're out there, living their lives, making chemical compounds to attract pollinators and defend against pests and foragers, and generally not too concerned with the bipeds sharing their planet. They're not trying to help us, regardless of how much we want to use them to our ends.

Having said that, there are some herbs that can help us in some more specific ways. It turns out that lots and lots of plants do interact with us chemically in ways that are beneficial to our health! Just not always, or in expected ways, or precise amounts, so take your time trying out plants as medicine. 

There are also some other plants that can help with PFD symptoms-

If you're experiencing irritation, like maybe cystitis, soothing things can help, like:

• Oats
• old fashioned Barley water
• Cinnamon
• or even Corn silk, leftover after shucking fresh corn

Astringent aka toning things might help too, like:

• Raspberry leaf
• Rose petals
• Hibiscus

Choosing between them is often a matter of self-knowledge and trusting intuition. Does it feel dry, like it needs soothing? Or feel boggy, like there's too much fluid and it needs toning? 

These herbs are great as teas, especially since these kinds of internal PFD conditions are often helped with more fluid diluting urine. ​

Curious about the soothing suggestion? Yes, you can add Oats to tea! You can also just eat them, well cooked and thick. Also, here's a SUPER tasty and really easy experiment: 
​

1. Put a couple Cinnamon sticks into 2 jars
2. Fill one with hot water, loosely cover, and leave on the counter overnight 
3. Next day, fill the second with hot water, loosely cover and wrap in a kitchen towel, and leave for about an hour
   1. While you wait, what do you think they'll taste like? What do you expect to feel, smell, taste?
4. Now, taste both the cold, overnight tea and the warm, freshly made tea
   1. What did you actually experience?
   2. Objectively- how did they taste, what did you feel, how do they compare?
   3. Subjectively- did you enjoy it? What emotions came up with the tastings?

Remember, though, plants weren't invented for us and so it doesn't work to just "use" them for our benefit.

For example, before just walking into a health food store and announcing to the confused staff, "An herbalist on the internet says I need Solomon's Seal for my prolapse!," or buying a case of Raspberry leaf tea and starting a quart-a-day discipline, I might suggest a gentler course of action.

Avail yourself of the internet and do a local search for herbalists. Reach out to them and say you're interested in learning more about [enter plant here] and do they grow/sell it, or know anyone who does? Try to talk to an herbal practitioner face to face (or zoom to zoom, as the case may be) (yes I do consultations). Learn what the plant looks like, and try to recognize it if you walk in parks or gardens. 

Order some dried plant from a bigger supplier like Herbiary or Mountain Rose if you can't find it locally. Chew on a few pieces for a while. Make it into tea (roots need to steep overnight or simmer at least an hour). Drink some tea, then add the rest to a bath.

Pay attention to how it feels, comparing it to plants you're used to feeling like Coffee, Peppermint, Chamomile, Onions, Strawberries... you get the picture. You're learning if you and this plant get along, and this isn't anything like watching out for side effects from medications, is it? 

No one person- friend, therapist, chef, author, actor, boss, etc- is perfect for everyone. No one herb is either. So give it a little time, get to know it, before you decided if it "works for you."

Have you ever spent time trying to get to know a plant? 



​

Have you ever really stopped to think about just how complex and mind-boggling you are?

Well, I've been thinking about it. And I've been thinking about how many descriptions and metaphors I've used in the last 15 years or so to try and describe our selves to my clients.

​It's time to make a series out of those descriptions.

Everyone is different, yes, but we're all very similar too. And our bodies tend to move (or not) in familiar (at least to me) ways. 

The more you can understand about these functional, "physiology" ideas, the more you'll understand the deep, intertwined connections you have- why your breathing is connected to your digestion and your knee pain and your hearing and vision, for example.

This leads you down the rosy path of "the foot bone is connected to so much more than the ankle bone" as one of my teachers Claire Mockridge says. Why do you care? Living with ease and grace means avoiding strain and overwhelm, and since we tend to be so much more familiar with the latter, the former takes deliberate awareness. 

Hence, this series happening about monthly, where I'll start introducing you to your own self! Deliberately, cheekily, colorfully, and clearly.

Coming up first: 

• Your ribs are supposed to move like fireplace bellows. Do yours?
• Your feet aren't just the rubber bottom of a pogo stick, bouncing you around!
• Do you have space between your bones?
• Your spine is like a stack of tea cups...

Do you have any body movement questions you want answered? I'm serving the cheek here, nothing dirty or NSFW.

The foundation of the training you'll get from me is from the Your Pelvic Matters program, a pelvic floor rehab system that works with alignment, strengthening, and stretching to improve pelvic floor dysfunction (PFD).

Spoiler alert- MOST of us have SOME kind of PFD, at least sometimes.

In my full body approach, I work with people who deal with: 

• Stress incontinence
• Abdominal separation 
• Early stage prolapse
• Hiatal hernia or reflux
• Hip and low back pain from poor posture or muscle weakness

Oh, this sounds like you? And you want to fix it? OK! Here's a list. In a nutshell, you need to:

• Sit better (if you must sit, or vary the way you sit eg floor sitting)
• Stand better (I teach you how to do this in every class setting on my timetable, so no excuses)
• Walk and move more (but you need to learn how to stand better for you to be able to move and walk better, so you can sort of see how these things are indeed connected)
• Strengthen your glutes (a huge role in relieving pelvic pain, sciatica and sneeze wee is building yourself a strong butt, which incidentally is linked to walking better - you see - I can find a tenuous link to everything!)
• Release your hamstrings (particularly if sneeze wee is something you suffer with - it tells me your pelvic floor is possibly too tight)
• Teach your core to switch on reflexively (which means you don't "draw it in" all the time, or at all - you let it anticipate and adapt to the load you're asking it to bear), and finally
• Learn to breathe better (because you can't get a reflexive core, if you're not breathing into your ribs, and breathing better can also help pelvic floor/core synergy too)

 
And, there you have it! 
 
That's quite an extensive list as you can see, but if you've ever asked me a question along the lines of:
 
"What exercises are good for....?"
 
I rarely if ever answer it by listing my "go to" exercises, because I look at the body as a whole unit, and just sending you away with 4 movements to do in isolation isn't going to relieve your symptoms.
 
You've got to take some responsibility for your pain and actions going forwards too, you see.
 
If you're concerned that any symptom you're suffering with is not going away, it's probably time to get in touch with me, don't you think?

I teach 1:1 clients all the time, and next month the next round of my semi-private program the Foot to Forehead Fix opens again.

It's a frequently asked question: 

But aren’t you an herbalist? Or are you a movement teacher?

My philosophy is simple- if it helps you be well, it’s fair game to include in my whole body approach to wellness. Boom.

Lymph is a super simple example (this is all the body fluid that’s not actively in your blood right now. It’s in and in between cells, and in lymph vessels and nodes, washing away waste products like old cells and dead bacteria. But the lymph system doesn’t have a pump like the heart in the circulatory system, it relies on the body moving for it to move.)

Lymph can be supported materially by:

• Drinking enough water
• Herbs that can support or stimulate movement
• Reducing inflammation and stress

It can also be supported manually by:

• Dry brushing
• Hot and cold shower rinsing
• Massage
• Correcting posture to straighten out the channels
• Aerobic, bouncing, or functional exercise to add movement

My practice integrates the manual and the material- I’ll teach you to move, stand, and sit right AND how to support your body from the inside. It’s a whole body approach that’s really, actually holistic- inside and out, physical and herbal, consistent and persistent. 

Check out my services here and get to work with me to feel better yourself

Can you lift your big toe- without using your hands? Why should you care?

This is important because tension in your feet is a good indicator of also having tension in your pelvic floor, neither of which is good for us.

In my experience, almost all of the aches and pains we deal with are somehow connected to the hips and pelvis. A healthy pelvic region requires a balance of strength and mobility, and VERY often the clients I see don’t have either of these. 

Simply put, your pelvic floor is the very foundation of how you move- and how you feel when you move. Not having good strength and mobility makes for a messy chain reaction up and down the body, and this is why I’m always working with clients on the feet from day 1, regardless of what else we’re also working on.

P.S.- You’ll probably also see some other improvements up and down the chain too. Everything’s connected, after all.

P.P.S.- Want some extra help? I can do that! Sign up for a private session with me.

Are you ready to Walk This Way? 

Oh... what way, you ask?

Well, a better way, in fact!

Why am I doing this? Well, I've been hearing from a lot of people that they've been out walking since their gyms and such shut down, but it's not working out so well all the time.

Basically what we've done is taken to the sidewalks and park trails the same way we would take off for the printer or the doorbell- hunched, tight, asymmetric, and unaware.

Have you also taken to the sidewalks and parks since Coronavirus, using your couch-to-bathroom gait? Are you finding yourself sore, achy, tight, stiff, and uneven? 

Learn to walk better with me!

Walk This Way is a 5 day video challenge, with daily emails to your practices, an online community sharing the #walkthiswaychallenge all over the socials, and the best part: daily worksheets done in my exclusive Graceful Stick Figures style!

Ok, I'm not an artist. But you'll "get the picture". (See what I did there??)

Each day of the challenge will feature a short, 5-8 minute video with yours truly teaching you a small, easily accessible movement or stretch. We'll wake up your hamstrings, mobilize your feet and hips, realign your neck, and more- all with simple lessons + herbal supports (since you might feel tired and sore- the good kind!)

Are you ready to walk like a pro? Click here to sign up:

bit.ly/walkthiswaychallenge

Calling All Walkers!
(Hey that’s funny because my friend’s last name is Walker and that’s not what I meant but Hi!!)

By Walkers, I’m really referring to allllll the people who have discovered or doubled down on walking outside as their movement of choice during our Covid shutdowns. 

Hi everyone! Thanks for inviting me here today. How’s the walking going?

At this stage of the meeting we’d share highlights of our favorite routes- seeing trees flower and leaf out all spring, making friends with squirrels and cardinals and in one case a neighborhood llama, discovering magical hidden forest paths and evil poison ivy. (I know it’s not the poison ivy’s fault, it’s just trying to not get eaten, but it does SUCH a good job…shudder)

And now we get to the heart of this discussion. How’s the actual walking going? How are your feet, your ankles, your shins, your hamstrings, your hips? How about the low back, shoulders, and neck? Any soreness, tension, unevenness, inflammation, or pain?

Mmm, yes, I thought there might be. And yes, I have some ideas for you. But my first one, the baseline suggestion if you will, isn’t going to be as sexy as you might like. Here it is:

Now, I know you already are paying attention. To your podcasts, to your step count, to your mileage tracker, to your max heart rate percentage number thingy.

​​I’m asking you to pay attention to something even more important- you.

• How do your feet feel on your path? Can they even feel? 
• Are you walking by tipping forward, or by pushing from your back leg? Can you tell?
• Do your hips lift your legs, or swing them around to get them in front?
• How deep do your ankles bend on an incline? 
• Can your feel your spine muscles on the opposite side of a step helping keep you up?
• Do you lead with your chin, your chest, your pelvis, or your foot?

I know- we’re so used to the outside stimulation of our earbuds and our trackers and even our walking partners, and what I’m describing here is essentially a walking meditation.

Getting quiet and paying attention to the internal outputs, instead of the external inputs. This is challenging. But try it. Pick a section of your regular route to pause your phone. Spend a few minutes in quiet between songs or episodes. Investigate one new sensation or observation each time you go out. 

Or. And. Here’s a bigger shift you can try- wear thinner shoes, and see how that feels. Get your individual foot structures moving more. Explore texture, changing surfaces, temperatures, angles and slopes, starting with the pads of your toes.