Tom Gellie walks you through a self-assessment to check your alignment and movement. You'll test weight distribution in your feet, then mobility in your pelvis, rib cage, and head across multiple planes. Note any pain, limited range, or asymmetry to track changes or bring to a professional.
Hi, this is Tom from Functional Body. I work with people to help them better their alignment, their performance, and help them live a pain-free life if possible. And a lot of this is done through movement and just becoming aware of your body again, inhabiting it, so you can kind of pick up on things that may start feeling strange early enough so they don't develop into sort of more unbreakable or harder to break patterns. So this video is designed as a check-in and assessment type video, I guess, as first, but can also really help in actually treating or helping bring back some movement to some things that might be missing. So I myself personally do these check-ins daily, particularly after I've done something really active like one of my favorite sports, or if it's, if I've been through a stressful time, whether at work or private life, whatever it is. So I always check in with my body and see how it's feeling. So I encourage you to do the same. So the first thing I want you to do is bring your feet hip width apart underneath you, and just check in and see if you feel like you have even weight on both feet. And not just left and right, but front to back. So if your feet were sort of split in half right across this point here, you'd end up with 4 quadrants. And so just check in and see, today, do you feel that one quadrant is perhaps carrying a bit more weight than usual, or doesn't carry much weight. So, just be aware of that and perhaps write it down. So, once you've checked in with your feet, you're going to try and keep them even in terms of pressure and weight on the ground through this whole check-in exercise. So, the first movement we're going to do is, ah, with the pelvis to see what ranges we have in all different planes. And the first one is just Tipping your pelvis forward, and then tipping it back. So if it was like a fruit bowl, you're spilling all the fruit out the front, and then all out the back. Should premise this by, if any of these movements cause you pain and discomfort, back off how much you move, or just don't do them at the moment and note that you can't do them. Because it's not, we're not here to try and push through pain barriers and force a movement. It's just checking to see where you are today. So forward and back. Okay. So just note if any of those do cause pain or discomfort, or if any of them feels difficult to do. From side on, just to give you a view of that, there's spilling the fruit out the front. There's it out the back. Out the front. Out the back. Keeping even weight. We're then going to check in and see how our pelvis is up and down. So keeping even weight, you're just going to bend one knee. So I'm going to do my right knee, which should drop the right side of my pelvis and hike the left side. Back up. Again, trying to keep even weight and not shifting out over to the side just yet. You're purely seeing how much you've got in terms of movement and ease of movement, rotating right around the midpoint of your pelvis this way. Then you're going to start checking in with side-to-side movement. How easy is it for you to shift your pelvis from side to side? Do you feel tightness or discomfort? Do you get further range on one side? We're now going to check in with rotation. So keeping the upper body still, we're going to rotate our pelvis to the left and to the right. See if there's any big discrepancy in how far you can move each way. And there's our pelvis in all 3 dimensions. Gonna go up to the rib cage now, and just like the pelvis, we're gonna drop the rib cage down into this slumped type position, and then elevate the rib cage up into this tall, proud position. So dropping, lifting. Again, trying to isolate just this at the moment. Rather than moving other structures to make this movement happen. From side on again, dropping, elevating. And this is not dropping, going in front of your feet and then behind your feet. Try and keep everything stacked on top to give you a true reading of what's going on. Side to side movement of the rib cage. Do you notice you have to pull up a shoulder to get your movement over? Do you notice you have to shift out to get your rib cage to drop? Or can you actually stay more evenly weighted on your feet and drop left and right? Lastly, rotation each way. So if this is quite difficult to do, do it in front of a mirror. Hold your hips still, or just get that upper body to move without the head moving or the pelvis moving. Okay, so rotation back and forth, side to side, has been done. The rib cage We'll lastly finish with the head. So, dropping the head, elevating the head. This is even more effectively done if you keep your eyes on the horizon the whole time. Just from side on again, dropping the chin down, elevating the chin up. Dropping it down. Does that cause discomfort or pain, or are you limited in range of movement? Side to side. Left and right. Again, do you have to make some kind of adaptation when you go sideways, like a rotation to help you get that movement to the side, or can you purely keep it in this side to side range? Lastly, can you rotate both left and right? Feeling even? So go through each of those movements of pelvis, ribcage, and head, and write down what you feel is missing. And then keep an eye on that. So if you're coming in to see me, that'd be great information for me to know. And even more importantly, great information for you to know because you can start figuring out that perhaps this pain in the hip could be coming from some lack of range of movement in the rib cage and the neck, or vice versa. So really good to start mapping out what things your body can and can't do. Finally, if you feel like it, you can check in with your arms. So see how much range of movement you have rotating your palms to the back of the room, and then rotating down, an internal rotation of the arms. So how easy is it to go both ways? Does it cause pain and discomfort? You can even do it down by the side of your body. And is there a large difference between the left and the right arm? Okay, so again, I encourage you to check in with this movement on a daily basis. It's great to see where your body's at, see what it can and can't do. Knowing the things it can't do, you can either come and see a professional like myself or someone else that might be able to help you unlock or discover why you can't make those movements. Okay, anyway, if you are feel like coming in to book and see me, please visit my website, www.functionalbody.com.au, and I hope you have a great day. Thanks.
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