Your Posture, Your Life- a talk by Terence Chua
Talk by Chua Shengwei Terence at ‘Be the Change’ Voice Talk, 29 June 2014 organized by Vocalogy*. Transcribed by Grace Ng Ee Wern Good afternoon everyone, my name is Terence Chua and I’m a movement specialist. Unlike personal trainers who work on fitness and aesthetic body building, my work tends more towards general movement patterns. I trained with Ido Portal. He’s a movement specialist in the world of fitness. I refer to the book ‘Anatomy Trains’ by Thomas Myers in my work. In the ‘Anatomy Trains’ concept of the body, if we have pain in our shoulder, it doesn’t mean that the problem area is the shoulder or the muscles around the shoulder. The problem area can be somewhere further away from the shoulder. In the ‘Anatomy Trains’ concept of anatomy, the whole body itself doesn’t consist of just muscles. It’s just one single muscle that is being sectioned out into different segments so it’s all linked up. There are many different lines or meridians in the body. The bottom of the foot actually links up to the head and the top of the eyebrow. There is the superficial back line, superficial front line, deep front line, spiral line, lateral line and arm line. In just the arm line itself, you have the superficial front arm line, the superficial back arm line, the deep front arm line, the deep back arm line and spiral line. To clarify, these meridian lines are not the same as those referred to in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Of all these lines, I’m just going to pick one line that’s relevant to opening up the voice. That one line is the deep front line. It starts from the bottom of the foot, coming from the inside of the leg, up to the pubic symphysis and going up into the psoas. From there it goes into the thoraco-lumbar junction, into the diaphragm, by the front of the spine and also from the ribcage going up to the neck. It ends at the tongue. If I pull your tongue, I will get a reaction from the bottom of your foot because these parts of the body are linked together by the deep front line. To arrive at his conclusions about the body, Thomas Myers’ dissected cadavers himself. Instead of cutting the muscles the usual way, he turned the scalpel and sliced off from the tendon.It linked up to another part of muscle. He followed that and found that they all linked up in one continuous sheath all the way to the tongue. ‘Anatomy Trains’ contains photos of the cadavers and dissection. In ‘Anatomy Trains’, you can actually see a photos of a cadaveric dissection of a sheet of muscle from the bottom of the foot going all the way up to the tongue. How do all these meridians or lines help us in understanding posture, for example hunched posture (kyphosis) or sway back posture (lordosis); or hips that go into anterior tilt (buttocks sticking out) or posterior tilt (tailbone between legs)? In the case of an anterior pelvic tilt, the psoas and the hip flexors may be tight, pulling the hips down. There are many other reasons why the hips go into anterior pelvic tilt. I will just be dealing with the psoas region in this talk. The psoas is a hip flexor. It pulls the femur bone up. The psoas is also attached to spine at vertebrae T12 all the way to L5. A tight psoas gives you an anterior pelvic tilt which causes resultant compensatory tensions in the body as the body tries to balance itself. Amongst these compensatory tensions is tension in your diaphragm. If that tension is not being released, your diaphragm cannot function normally. It cannot expand or contract optimally when it is full of tension. In other words, the way that you stand affects the way that you breathe. In my practice, I release the psoas and the hip flexors to affect the diaphragm. The diaphragm as you know is hard to reach. That being said, I can reach in for the diaphragm but I don’t do it because most of the time, it’s too uncomfortable. I’ll work with the psoas instead. That affects the diaphragm which in turn improves the breath. If you move up further, working with the arm line can open the chest to create a posture that is more upright instead of more hunched. The arm line and the functional line plays a part in terms of opening up the chest. Both of these lines have functions that are crossed because everything is linked up together. Thomas Myers, the author of ‘Anatomy Trains’ was a student of Ida Rolf. His method comes from Rolfing. He’s also a manual therapist. Rolfing is a form of massage. He uses manual therapy to ease out the tension from the body itself. You can use your own strategy to open up the lines. For me, I use my hands to administer trigger point therapy to open up the body. I also use movement mobilizers, simple techniques like pushing the hips forward and lifting up the hands. The subtle movement of the hips is enough to create the movement that the hips need to open up and free up the tension. I use mobilizer movements a lot instead of stretching and holding a pose for several seconds. I think there’s still value in stretching but I prefer mobilizers because mobilizers work a little bit more in terms of fascia. Fascia is the connective tissue between muscles. It’s the wrapping of muscles rather like wrapping paper around a Christmas present. Towards the end, you have your tendons or your ligaments depending on what’s connected and where it is connected. That is also called the fascia. Fascia contains water and collagen. I use mobilizers as a form of movement to target fascia because fascia works best if your whole movement is rhythmic, in regular timing and is subtle and slow. This
