Walking and the FitzGordon Method
When people come to study yoga with me they are always happy to do what I tell them in terms of alignment and specificity of the body. I began to wonder why people aren’t doing this in other aspects of their lives. We come to yoga to be fit and healthy and hopefully tap into a spiritual quality of living. But why not take yoga off the mat and live this way 24/7/365.
Walking is the best way to bring permanent change to the body—because we all do it, and we do it over and over again. The human body will accept any pattern we put into it whether that pattern is good or bad. This is how chronic injuries develop out of seemingly innocent or even unknown events. The injury becomes chronic because your body adapts a new movement pattern due to unconscious compensations.
Very few of us have consciously chosen the pattern with which we walk. It isn’t hard to change that. The idea of the FitzGordon method is that if you learn to walk well and walk that way for a good while (long enough for the body’s nervous system to fully adapt a new pattern), you will have a new body that will be primed to achieve optimal health.
Almost all chronic injury is based on imbalance in the musculoskeletal system—this is why so many people have recurring injuries. Proper walking means proper alignment, which finds the bones of the entire body in their proper place. Only when that happens can real rehabilitation take place. Physical therapy works for the local injury, but by failing to address the entire body and its movement patterns it may not prevent the injury from happening again.
