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The Soma RoomBlogWellbeing and HealthGuest Post – Effortless Walking

Guest Post – Effortless Walking

Today we have a guest post written by Soma Room therapist Samuel Tinguely. A passionate sports massage therapist, martial artist and dancer, Samuel is particularly interested in finding ways to help his clients move in ways that are easy, efficient and pain free. In this post, Samuel offers a simple visualisation exercise to help you walk with more power, but less effort.

Walking is something we do everyday, and that makes it a great tool to work on our body and movement. I use imagery a lot when I walk, and this post is about a simple image to improve your efficiency and body mechanics. To learn more about what imagery is and how it works, you can read the introduction to this post on my blog.

The image we will work on today concerns the movements that happens inside the pelvis when we walk. It is an extremely simple image, but it will power your walk and make it effortless, by helping you recruit deep, powerful muscles and use the structure of your skeleton optimally.
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This image is fairly straightforward: think of your pelvic area as a brick-shaped sponge, and as you take a step with your right leg, think of this sponge twisting so that the bottom of the right side goes forward, and do the same on the left.
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This image is very simple, but it can prove challenging to many in our society, because we are lead to think of the pelvis as one single “thing”, whereas it is a complex construct involving multiple bones that articulate in many ways. There are amazing videos presenting the movement of the individual bones of the pelvis on Youtube, among which two are particularly informative:
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  • One presents the movements of the ilium, the big bone that is easily palpated just below the waist, just under the buttocks (sit-bones) and above the genitals (pubis).
  • The other presents the movements of the sacrum, which is the lower end of the spine, roughly between the back dimples (if present) and the coccyx (tail-bone).

The explanatory text is in French, but the movements are explicit enough to be informative even without the explanations. The only thing worth noting is that the red text that appears sometimes on the left of the screen says that the movements presented at that moment are exaggerated.

And with that, I hope your walking becomes more effortless with every step, allowing you to devote your precious energy to whatever you’re going to do at the end of your next walking journey!

If this you’re interested in this kind of exercises, head over to my website for more similar posts!

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