Pilates Hour #227 Physiology of Movement

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:01][Music] hello everybody and welcome to the Pates hour today we're excited to to be with you and bringing you more knowledge and information remember that everybody can gain knowledge and that you don't need a license to get knowledge so here at the polstar Pilates hour we hope to provide some good knowledge for everybody today all right well listen there's I want to thank everybody for joining me today and we'll leave it at that I'm going to share my my uh presentation with you all and um this is sort of the idea that I want to test out with you today and I'm hoping that you feel that there is a lot of meaningful information coming your way and this ties into this whole concept of pathophysiology and pathokinesiology um in order for us to really have knowledge about movement there's some very important elements that we must understand and I've talked a little bit about Kinesiology a little bit about pathology today we're going to talk a little bit about physiology we're going to pick out one particular area having to do with bone uh physiology which I think is very interesting for us as it pertains to things like osteoporosis and bone density and bone growth and so we're going to go into that topic um and my goal is to make it easy my goal is to make it so it makes sense of why we would talk about how Pilates does or does not impact uh bone growth and bone density so let's go through a couple basic concepts here if we look at uh this first slide here you know how do we understand pathokinesiology this is The Big Picture This Is Us looking at our specialty in Pulstar is working with people who have dysfunctions they have impairments they need modifications to be able to have the full benefit of Pilates and lately it's interesting I've been reading going back through a lot of Joseph Pilot's writings and looking for alignment between what we're doing today and what Joseph pilot saw and did in the past and he mentioned a lot of times in his writings that people that could not do his canology exercises the mat work every day that they would need to have modifications made this is really our specialty is how do we work with individuals that are not able to participate fully in a pilates class but would benefit from Pilates and the evolution of it over time so really really important for us so what I have here is sort of the progression that we're looking at to become pathokinesiology right so basic human performance that's Kinesiology I talked about that the other week we have to understand uh kinesiology we have to then understand physiology physiology is a science of how our body works how the systems work we're going to talk a little bit about that today and then pathophysiology this is where when our equilibrium system and our attempt to maintain some sense of balance in our automatic uh systems of our body how we maintain blood pressure how we maintain temperature how we maintain blood circulation how we filter out toxins of our bodies all of those things are being done some subconsciously we don't wake up in the morning and say oh I need to turn up my filtration system a little bit more I need to pump my heart rate up a little bit more to make sure I'm getting enough blood to these areas these are all automatic systems in our body physiological systems in our body and these physiological systems uh when they go Ary we would call that pathophysiology we're looking at pathology of the systems and we'll talk a little bit about that then in the end when we put this all together and by the way I'm giving you a little bit of insight this course is going to be almost about a year long it's going to be self-paced online with intermittent interactions with me and we're going to go through this process we're going to go from basic human Kinesiology basic human physiology pathology pathokinesiology meaning like how do we get to the point that we're able to work and provide meaningful movement experiences that are able to to affect people positively in their recuperation or their Pathway to function and performance and in so doing we understand that movement impacts pathology and we understand pathology impacts movement so we're going to be able to make modifications with confidence and again some people might say well I don't know if I can you know have this kind of knowledge and it's like well knowledge is available to everybody you don't need a license to have knowledge what knowledge does is it makes it very clear to us of where our interventions make sense with confidence and when and where we need to farm it out to somebody else and I have to go through this all the time in physical therapy right I'm not the endol um I have patients that need consultations with an endocrinologist or they need to speak with somebody that's a renal Specialist or a neurologist or a surgeon based on their manifestations of symptoms that are out of my scope but I wouldn't know they're out of my scope if I don't understand the pathology if I don't understand my scope so that's my little lecture here what what I'm trying to avoid and pre-frame out of this is somebody telling me that I'm talking Physical Therapy talk I'm going to try to make this make a lot of sense because I believe that Pilates teachers because our human uh body is so dilapidated in our world like I think it's 70% obesity in the Western World you know 60% with diabetes we we have all of these diseases right and we're becoming SI like 70% of our population are dealing with um chronic disease and auto um autoimmune disease and so how do we go about this and making it so that if we understand it we can have greater impact on their health and their well-being let's move on to the next one here so basic human movement science um this is where and I use this slide all the time but we look at in our principles of movement book I delet iate these two things that every principle of movement is built upon basic movement Sciences including Anatomy physiology biomechanics motor learning psychological and human behavior So today we're going to be talking about physiology of bone so that we understand better how bone and Bone pathologies and fractures and those kind of things impact movement and vice versa the principle of movement today that we're going to be discussing is control and it's because load becomes one of the very important mechanical uh inputs into our skeletal system to be able to control the building and the breaking down of bone and we'll talk a little bit in depth about that when we look at basic physiology this is sort of the you know where it starts at the very smallest level of chemical right so we're looking at um my pen up here we look at this idea of chemical and we're looking at oh yeah there's this these chemical compounds of carbon and different materials that make up what our cells are made up of right at the at the smallest level they make up the molecules the molecules then make up the cells the cells create tissue tissue organs today our organ that we're going to be talking about is the bones or the skeleton the organ system would be the skeletal system and how does that skeletal system then impact our entire organism how does it interact with every other system in our body right so this is a Continuum it's not just one in and of itself but we look at this idea of going from chemistry to tissue to organ and function and we just keep going around and around and when we understand how these tissues work and how they get sick sometimes and how they heal and how we can influence them with movement we become better practitioners and by the way at any time that you want to ask a question I am not making the assumption that you understand this I'm making the assumption that we're teaching it and if I'm teaching it then I hope that you'll have questions right so please do not be shy to ask a question if you have a question guarantee that you know another 60 people on the webinar are also having that question these are some basic uh body organ systems that we often talk about integumentary is skin skeletals bone muscular you know nervous system is everything from the central nervous system and the periperal nervous system from the uh autonomic nervous system looking at things like sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems as well as the motor symptom uh system endocrine it's going to be hormones we're going to talk a little bit about how hormones impact bones cardiovascular is going to be our heart and our circulation lymphatic is extra cellular fluid that is not in the bloodstream that we talk about lymph nodes we talk about lymph organs uh how that lymph is processed and filtered and how we get rid of um you know old maccrage and white blood cells that have uh been protecting us immune system how our body defends itself respiratory is breath how we exchange oxygen and CO2 and other chemicals our body needs digestion and urinary system how we um consume Pro uh food and energy and how we eliminate waste and then reproductive so these are some of the basic organ systems that we look at and if we refine it just a little bit we can look at and in particular my interest in this course is the physiology that supports the movement systems now the truth be it all of the all of the organ systems have have an impact on each other throughout human movement that doesn't ever change or ever stop so here we're looking at four systems that we start off with in the basic levels of the pathokinesiology course integr as I mentioned is skin and you might think a skin really um important with movement but if you have ever had surgery or you've ever had a scar that restricts a skin scar like on the knee that restricts the amount of flexion you can do in your knee right the integumentary system is a very much part of it and if you think about it from a fascial perspective um this is The Superficial fascial layers of our body that connect to the muscular fascial layers that connect to the Bone fascial layers and the organ fascial layers so again continuous system of movement then we have the skeletal system we'll talk about today the muscular system and the nervous system all of these systems are responsible um as primary elements in our movement system as a human being so today we're going to look at bones and Bone tissue and again if you have questions please make sure you write them in the Q&A slot we'll look at the bone function how do bones support our bodies what is their purpose for us and you might be surprised that it's a little bit more than just support and movement um we'll look at classification of Bones so you know when we talk about about different bones and we start going into the next level of this would be joints and looking at human joints and looking at connective tissues and then we look at the myofascial system on top of the skeleton and the uh connective tissues and look at how they interact with each other and then we add the nervous system and then the skin and we are able to understand a little bit better about how we sense things right sensory is a big part of this not just the motor side we know that in the fascial system itself the myofascial system that the majority of the GGI organs exist inside of this and that GGI organ system is where we have uh the greatest proception of our uprightness right skin has a number of receptors mechano receptors stretch receptors pressure receptors that also give us information of where we are we'll talk a little bit about development of Bones and then probably the most of the time we'll spend is on the homeostasis of Bones because this affects us greatly as we start talking about things like osteoporosis or osto malasia or osteopenia or healing of bone injuries like fractures or surgeries when we look at the function of Bones some of the first things that come to mind is support we look at the bones of legs as pillars we look at the pelvic and spine and rib cage support all the organs uh the bones allow uprightness as bipedal animals and it is quite interesting uh if we were to try to use building blocks for example and try to create a human skeletal structure this bipedal structure two long bone series coming up from the ground a pelvis that has like a little teeter totter effect on the sacrum that goes up into the spine and then our head shoulders arms all are balanced on top of this little teeter totter on on the uh femurs of the legs and if we tried to build that it it'd be very difficult to keep the balance they're finally figuring out how to do that with robot successfully but for years they couldn't get a a bipedal robot to function well the other thing the bones do is they protect us and so we think of vital organs in our body that need to be protected we think of the skull the skull protects our brain the vertebra protect our spinal cord the rib cage protects vital organs and in this sense outside of the skull the skull has very limited movement the brain moves inside of it we can jostle our brain around a little bit with a you know a hard fall um the vertebra are all mobile so it allows us to have movement while Protec protecting uh the spinal cord the central nervous system we think of the rib cage the rib cage is incredibly flexible you know we often get caught up in thinking of the rib cage as being this very rigid structure that holds our heart our lungs and the upper part of our liver and our pancreas and our you know um spleen stomach is up in that area too but in reality it is actually quite mobile we think of the ribs as being the highest percentage of elastin of any bone in the body just like the word sounds elastin is rubbery so we're thinking of these rubbery bones you can push on your own ribs and you can mash them and they will move underneath your fingers they're very flexible they Connect into a flat bone called the sternum the sternum sits in front of our body and that sternum um is connected by this rubbery cartilage costal cartilage that also is very mobile and that flat bone is just floating in air so we can take deep breaths in and that that Stern and manuum will float up we exhale they come back down the ribs can go out to the side come back down they can even go posteriorly and then all of those ribs connect to 12 vertebra and the 12 vertebra also are Mobile in people who have healthy movement in their spine right this is an area that we lose movement that often restricts breath capacity often restricts healthy neurological movement in including the sympathetic nervous system that sits right in front of the ribs and the rib joint to the spine so we start looking at how we are meant to be mobile and protected happens because of our bone system our bone structures our skeleton and theoretically this should be incredibly heavy but the structure of the bone in the tricular bone uh actually make it so that we're quite light and agile moving through space um movement it's the frame fork with which the neuromuscular system executes all its movement and we also have been learning a lot lately from the myofascial system that you know and just from the whole fascial system in general the T biotensegrity that the bones themselves are responsible for some of the springiness and the energy that is inside of our body while we're moving I find this to be fascinating I somebody explained to me that when a femur bone fractures for years before they were doing internal fixations with rods you would have to be for weeks you'd have to be with traction on the femur to be able to maintain the setting of that bone so what that's telling me is that the periosteum around the bone and the elasticity has this compressive force that wants to pull the bone together well that same compressive force is there there before the fracture happened and it could be part of what we consider our springiness and our elasticity is also found inside these bony structures that are um definitely facilitating but also probably um causing some of the movement that we do more spontaneous um another area of bone function is storage a lot of people don't think about it this way but most of our minerals that we eat right we ingest are stored inside of our bones that's where they're stored right so minerals like calcium phosphorus magnesium sulfur copper these minerals are stored inside of our bones now why are they stored inside of our bones well the reality is all of our other systems need these things let's just take calcium today since calcium is going to be a big part of our discussion uh this afternoon but calcium is respons ible for nerve conduction calcium is responsible for muscle contraction calcium is responsible for Transportation uh on the intracellular wall for many of our cells and so we need to have that calcium phosphorus is part of our energy uh ad Dennis and triphosphate right so we think of our energy ATP phosphates phosphates also come from glucose molecules and when there's excessive phosphate the phosphates get stored for when we need more phosphate right and the same thing is true for magnesium sulfur Etc copper so our body needs these minerals to be able to function in a healthy way and these deposits and withdrawals happen when they are needed in what's called an ionic form so they become almost like liquid in our bloodstream and this is where the body is always regulating this this is how the body works right so homeostasis is maintained by the body's ability to say oh there's too much calcium in the blood we need to store it into the bone and so the bone density goes up a little bit oh there's not enough blood calcium uh in the bloodstream we're going to pull some of the calcium out of the bone and increase it in the bloodstream and that's going to be true with any of the minerals or any of the molecules that are needed for homeostasis again if you got a question I hope this is clear please give me at least a shout out to know that you're listening to me and that I am making sense when we look at classifications of bones um the ones that make a lot of sense to us are the long bones uh we deal with them quite a bit uh things like femurs humoris tibas the digits of our fingers and toes how they provide dexterity and Mobility thank you very much everybody um and how these bones are specifically designed for Locomotion right so we can pretty much think of the long bones being responsible for Locomotion and functional movement we also have short bones that often are things like wrist and tarso bones in the ankle and the feet and these particular bones are designed to help us with Dex dity and ground reaction forces so we're able to pass this ground reaction force through these joints into the long joint so from the hands and the feet that we can transfer this it also gives us more dexterity right so we can we can start doing things with our wrists that are not a pure direction of movement because of the way these sort of like cubes of bones are organized these are what we call our short bones we then talk about flat bones flat bones consist of the skull and also the pelvis so the flat bones are responsible often for protection but in the pelvis they're really responsible for transition of force I always think of the pelvis as it excuse me as a um almost like shock absorption so if you think of a really fine automobile let's say we have this really beautiful Porsche and we want to take that Porsche really fast around a curve maybe that curve is banked a little bit the what happens that energy gets stored inside those suspension plates going around the curve and as you come out of the curve they push it back down and even you out so you don't feel this huge sway on your body um while you're taking that curve versus let's say that we're in a big old 1975 Chevy van as cool as they might be if you take a curb fast in that there's no real good shock absor you're going to have a huge amount of sway right to me the pelvic bones are like the really highend suspension system they are able to absorb incredible amounts of ground re ground forces and then provide the reaction that there actually is like this spring reaction to us when we're loading especially with you know high performance things like running or sprinting or jumping or playing soccer or basketball and so we can we can think of it like a lot of people think oh does the sacral iliac joint move a lot and you know hypothetically um anatomists are all going to say no and Bone practitioners like physical therapist osteopaths and chiropractors are going to say yes there's mov in we're we'll go down that road when we get to joints but the reality is that a lot of that ground force that ground reaction force I believe is absorbed inside those plate bones and stored and released based on the functional activity that we're doing so I hope you like that analogy um I love thinking of it that way but that flat bone also is responsible for that absorption and acceleration we look at irregular bones and I I'm fascinated by the vertebra I think it's probably where I've spent my most intense study is trying to understand the relationship of vertebrae between themselves the spinal cord the dura the nerve root the neuromuscular system around it that supports it um we could look at it in from a bony osteology standpoint that the front of this particular irregular bone is what we call tricular Bone now tabular bone looks a little bit like a honeycomb and it can allow the vertebra to be light not a heavy bone but a light bone and yet very strong and supportive when we think of osteoporosis which I'll come back to in more depth at the end of this discussion we're talking about often demineralization of the tricular bone this is where we see people have typical injuries in this lower thoracic and upper lumbar region where flexion causes excessive force on this tricular bone and in our normal healthy State this tabular bone can handle it with no problem and as a matter of fact it's a fine line of how much we have to put that movement into this bone here in our younger years to make sure it's strong enough to Bear our body weight and allow us to do flexion as we age this is a topic of discussion that we get into all the time is if somebody's osteopenic do we now want to load that bone more so that it gets stronger so this is a very important bone that we'll be talking about trecular bone is the honeycomb and if we're having bone demetalization that's going to probably manifested the most is in that kind of bone we'll also talk about it as in the OAS tissue the tricular spongy bone and the cortical compact like how these um how these bones are meant to be able to absorb and have some uh suppleness and some resilience and some elasticity and hopefully not lose those uh those properties we also could look at a couple other bones like the sesm moid bone the patella is a sesm moid bone the bottom of the big toe there's another seso bone and those bones are meant to act like pulley and to increase our efficiency in our uh movement our thrust our jumping Etc let's keep moving when we go into a little bit more of the physiology of the bone and we think of how do bones develop and I was just joking about half an hour ago I was on a video chat with my daughter and my grandson and uh he is now about 10 months old and very active and jumping and bouncing around and starting to stand on his own and to balance and definitely spends most of his time pulled up observing the world in a standing position and we think of how do the bones grow right so even as infants what's happening is that Highline tissue uh is fibrous and it starts creating these cells that start creating harder more cortical bone and the cortical bone is what we would see on the outside of the bone and at the in plates of these bones as we grow especially through adolescence um we have our epil plates and the epil line in a mature bone in these epipal plates the Highland cartilage that's there allows for us to have structure that we need to be able to run and play sports but it is Supple in the sense that there is still bone growth happening well into our late te and early 20s I remember um when I graduated from high school I was 5'11 when I came back from my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ lday Saints I was 21 and I was 6'2 so over those two and a half years I grew almost three in um so men will often grow and this is a hormonal thing will grow into their early 20s women depending when their period starts when menarchy starts um will often grow even up into their 18 17 years old will continue to grow in height in their long bone growth when we look towards the end of the bone we um and and looking at how the bone is structured we start coming into What's called the bone canal and it's here in the canal we call the yellow bone marrow Canal or the medular cavity this is where massive amounts of blood cell formation takes place this is where uh you know the Hop poesis I always say that word wrong um but the the stem cells for all of the blood occur the majority of them occur inside the bone so that means our red blood cells our white blood cells our platelets um are all formed inside the bone and even when we think of B cells B cells as part of our immune system B is for bone and so they are developed inside the bone t- cells come from the thymus gland therefore t for t- cells B for B cells just to put it clearly um to to sort of bring this into uh real light for me I I learned a lot about this recently my mother um passed away unfortunately in July and she passed away from acute myoid leukemia and what leukemia is is that these stem cells that produce all of our blood cells white blood cells red blood cells platet cells that are responsible for healing and for scars and scabs that allow our body to heal themselves um start becoming defective the cancer doesn't let the blood cell develop fully and for many months she would get these blood transfusions because these uh in the inner intra bone canals uh were producing faulty blood cells so we would see every week we would see her red blood cell count go down we'd see her white blood cell count go down we'd see her plateless go down she'd get a blood transfusion they'd come back up she' function fine for four or five days and then need it again towards the end of her life uh the doctor called up and said the blood transfusions aren't working anymore and the reason being that they weren't work anymore and this is what finally made sense to me about how this disease actually kills um human beings and animals is that he said imagine that you have billions of broken down blood cells almost like imagine a big Highway like 405 Highway in Los Angeles right this huge six Lane highway on each side and imagine that it's filled with millions of broken down cars even if we have cars that work they're not able to get to the cells they need to get to because there are too many broken down cars and that analogy finally made sense of like that's how important this intram medular tissue is this is also where people that have leukemia and Bone blood diseases they will often do a bone marrow transplant that's because in the hollow of the bone we're producing all of these uh blood cells and these blood cells make up our extracellular fluid and are responsible for the transport of everything basically almost everything that gets transported is is either attaching to a red blood cell being moved by the fluid around the red blood cells and so that's that's where life comes from that's how important bones are and I really got a great appreciation of that dealing with the health of my mother and then realizing how that how that works um another bit of bone structure that I want to go into is just looking at Short irregular bones and what we typically see is a compact bone on the outside and then a spongy bone in the middle right and the periostium goes around it now periostium goes around all of our bones and this is very important as it pertains to our biotensegrity world uh this hopefully will make I'll try to make good sense out of this when I meet with Dr Carol Davis it's very common that she talks about uh the idea of bone is crystallized fascia and when we think of the periosteum periostium in physiology and in anatomy is often thought to be a connective tissue wrap that goes around the bone that are tendons and connective tissues attach to if we can think of it as a Continuum then it even makes more sense right so the periostium that surrounds these bones right is where all of the connective tissue from that is not crystallized attaches to and can create force or receive Force from or to the bones hence movement right and to me that was a big eyeopener of thinking of the periostium is so important I remember as a pole vter we would get what's called shin splints you know jumpers I was high jumping and pole vating and anything I could do to jump right jump jump jump land fall jump off cliffs I loved hangtime in the air and every year I at some point in the season I would get what was called a shin splint and a shin splint was defined to me that there was basically the tendons pulling on the periosteum so hard that it actually started to tear the tissue between the periostium and the bone and that it would be filled with inflammation with blood and that it would be like a bruising and that's why it was so tender and then you'd warm up and you'd be okay but then again the next morning you couldn't walk because the pain in between the periostium and the bone was so bad so we'd put these anti-inflammatories and rub it on there to be able to decrease that inflammation now it makes so much sense to me to think of you know if my connective tissues are strong if I have good distribution of movement if I have good distribution of force I probably wouldn't have those shin splints right um it would be something where the force was being distributed and exiting the body in these activities and now be able to look at Elite athletes yeah let's make sure that this this idea of mobility and distribution of movement eliminates or prevents some of these excessive loads on things like the periosteum or on the ligaments or on the other connective tissues and also just understand that in this periostium and outer layer of the bone tissue is where the vascularization is and where the innervation is in as far as nocioceptive so yes there is pain in the bone um often the fracture of the bone the it's the out outside cortical part of the bone I believe that is uh innervated for sensory all right let's see we're doing okay I got the the heavy duty stuff is here let's say I've got a comment from Sarah Edwards um how does movement keep these functions of bone at optimal function function cell Rejuvenation and bone remodeling and that's where we're going right now is the homeostasis of bone so thank you Sarah you're always like one step ahead of me but this is a really important question this is this is what applies to us as movement practitioners we have to understand that our tissues are always remodeling especially the bones right the bone tissue and the skin tissue heal the fastest and Remodel and new cells are generated the osteoblastic and osteoclastic activity so we're going to talk about two main things that maintain homeostasis of the bone um most of you hopefully have had some kind of bone density study uh in your life and especially as you get into your 50s if you're premenopausal perimenopausal menopausal uh the research shows this really important that you get a baseline of where your bone density is and that we are able to look at that over time to see if change in hormones are impacting you in a negative way regarding your bone density and I'm not going to go into the endocrine lecture today other than speaking about two hormones one of them is the parathyroid hormone so you think of your thyroid and the parathyroid is behind it the parathyroid is responsible for managing guess which mineral anybody want to take a guess what mineral the parathyroid manages yes Sarah is right it is calcium so the parathyroid manages calcium in our bloodstream the the ionic aspect of it or the anionic aspect of calcium that is necessary for nerve conduction and necessary for muscle contraction and necessary for uh managing the gates of cellular transport so the parathyroid hormone is going to manage how much osteoclastic activity is happening osteoclastic is going to take the bone mineral away to make it avelable for the physiology of the body osteoblastic are new cells that are going to be made inside the bone based on the demand of the body okay so when we think of parathyroid it could deposit osteoblastic to save that mineral or it can do reabsorption osteoclastic activity so the medications today are always playing with this balance of osteoblastic and osteoclastic activity many times when female hormones are decreased in per menopause and postmenopause the imbalance seems to be that there is not enough osteoblastic activity but the body still continues with its osteoclastic activity that means that there's not enough bone building but there continue with a normal rate of bone demineralization to provide these minerals for the body so when you talk to an endocrinologist that is specializing in bone density or in women's health they often will be looking at certain medications diets and behaviors that are going to increase the osteoblastic activity some of them actually decrease or play with the osteoclastic activity which that's a little more dangerous because the body is demanding that calcium the body is demanding that magnesium that are in the crystallized form of the bone so what we want to do is we want to increase the osteoblastic activity and that takes us down to Mechanical stress this is the area that we have our greatest impact as movement practitioners we can provide load this mechanical load to the vertical skeleton right the vertical bipedal skeleton is one of the greatest things that demands for osteoblastic activity to increase it also can slow down some of the osteoclastic activity because the body is demanding the power of the bones um there's a lot of great research and I didn't bring her book with me today I'll put it in the post-production um I heard her on an Andrew huberman special and she has a book that's specifically for women um uh Perry pre Perry and postmenopause in um pretty intense exercise and I know I've had a number of guests on here as well talking about this because it's such an important factor that we should not be thinking of training women the same way we train men I think applying the research of men physiology to female physiology is a big mistake and I think we're seeing that more and more that we have to be sensitive to what happens in the woman's body uh pre- during and postmenopause that are essential for them to maintain their health and one of them that I keep reading about is to make sure that they're doing um pretty heavy resistance training and vertical load on the bones if it's tolerated and preferably doing it before they get into a Perry or postmenopause status um I'd love to hear from you I know I've got some great experts on the on the uh webinar today that dive deep into this topic but we look at how osteoblastic activity is stimulated by mechanical stress um another way of thinking of this is compressive forces on bone long bone um actually stimulate osteoblastic activity and and that's a negative ionic charge the the axial load of compression stimulates a Nega negative uh a negative ionic message and that negative ionic message then stimulates for bone density increasing so that's going to be osteoblastic activity the bending of bone right so if you think of the one side that's getting the compression the other side getting the uh the the movement side of it if you are running or you got hit by something or you're lifting a lot of heavy weights that that all the opposite side creates a positive electronic charge or ionic charge and so the place that the bone is going to become more dense is on the compression side so now we could think of you know where we go from here I'm going to pose a question I have to be very careful with this question to this audience is when do we really stop doing flexion activity with women or men maybe that have been through chemotherapy therapy or had other kind of bone density issues that were iatrogenic caused from medicine or caused from um health care or inactivity that that the we finally make a decision that we're going to stop flexion on these structures to avoid harm and damage to these structures that could be permanent and this is a question we always have we know what um our practice access for example in physical therapy and in Fitness we know that if they are diagnosed with osteoporosis for sure right if their t- score is high enough like a two plus that we should avoid doing flexion activity so that's why we have all these modifications that we make in our exercises to minimize the load of that anterior vertebral body the tricular bone when the bone density is as much as 2 2.5 right osteopenia before that so 1 to 2.5 um is the question is does it make sense that we load that bone to be able to get the mechanical stress on it the compressive stress that would stimulate more osteoblastic activity now vertical load is one thing right we're going to get that load onto those vertebral plates um and and with that we're going to basically see the bone density increase or at least maintain itself not get worse not have more bone density loss right so what I would love to see is a study that looks at osteopenic Patients or clients that are compared to another random group of osteopenic clients some doing flexion activities with control and some doing only vertical load and to see what happens with the bone density I'm not saying go do this You' have to get permission because the way that The Practice Act States is that if they have this we avoid flexion we can do vertical loading all day long right we all want to do that we want to make sure that we're getting good axial load um but I am curious that if we are able to create before the bone becomes so fragile that it's at risk of breaking that we have a protocol that actually increases a compressive load on the anterior bodies of the vertebrae to increase the osteoblastic activity and increase the strength of the bone uh preventing the osteoporotic changes in those bones would love to hear your feedback on it any thoughts you might have um things to think about there's a couple comments coming in let me just share those real quick uh many women post breast cancer um Sarah is sharing this message are on EST estrogen suppressing hormones so loading bone is more important than ever um again remember that and we'll talk about this when we get to talking about the endocrine system in physiology is that when there are hormonal changes right so typically in menopause the amount of estrogen produced goes way down well it could happen early in life for example one of the things we see in professional dancers is if they're amenic and meaning they're not having a regular period that means they don't have enough estrogen in their blood and that that can result at a very early age of bone density what Sarah saying is that when you are on hormone therapy or therapies from uh certain types of cancer especially breast cancer that is estrogen based and they do suppressing hormone on the estrogen that that will also lead to Bone demineralization right so we now see that quite often even I've had men with cancer that have been on chemo and they caused bone density loss and they looked fine coming out of a certain type of cancer um years later but we also did their bone density measurements and found out that they were actually in the osteoporotic level that we had to take the same precautions we would take with a female client that had osteoporotic um measurements of their bone density so very interesting that we can't make assumptions anymore that it's only menopausal women we know that the estrogen levels go down some of them will stay on estrogen supplements U I'm not going to get into that discussion but just to be able to make maintain the bone density that they have um Katherine Connor said when it causes discomfort or pain um she had dealt with chemotherapy years ago and have very mild osteopenia have not had major issues with basic flexion movement when you think of um having osteoporosis the challenge we find is that there aren't symptoms of pain they could do flexion all day long and they don't feel pain until they actually incur a fracture and I've even seen women have fractures that they had no idea when they ever incurred a fracture right so it's sort of like this silent culprit that can create a lot of problems in postural health and bone health uh so we can't use pain as a mechanism I'll tell you what we can use though think about clients who have an incredible sense of awareness in their body of pressure of compression and tension and this is an area that I also am very interested in um anybody out there in research world that wants to take a good question is is there a difference in somebody who really understands distribution of movement equals distribution of force and has a heightened Consciousness and awareness of compress RVE forces you know are they able to detect when the force is too strong or too light to be able to avoid compressive forces that could be harmful to them I don't have the answer to that but it's a question that I have and not rely on discomfort or pain because that's probably waiting too long so it have to be like how much pressure can you tolerate okay that's enough pressure we don't want to feel more than that think of a basic rollup right if we're doing a rollup you know and we don't have good body awareness and we're only moving from three segments we're probably going to do a Val Salva and push ourselves up through that that's way too much force right but somebody who's on the Trap be table that has our hand on the on the bar with spring assistance and they're partially rolling down and they're using their breath and they have good distribution of movement the likelihood of them putting too much force on a vertebral body probably is minimal now again I'm I'm sharing a disclaimer here my goal is not to tell you to do flexion with people that have osteopenia and osteoporosis um there has to osteoporosis by our guidelines we don't do compression flexion right my point is they still put on their shoes they still wipe their bottoms they still have sex all of those have a certain degree of compression and flexion how we help them understand to listen to their body might make the most sense on top of the load management that we try to increase that axial load to increase their bone density and Roberta baren is just explaining I think there was a question that osteopenia is a early stage of bone density loss right so it's more like a warning sign and what we might see is a lot of women in their early 60s that have been active they might have osteopenia already that's a that's a clear sign that they really need to increase vertical load while their tissues can handle it right don't wait till you're 90 years old or 80 years old having fractures and you can't handle axial load that might be that might be a little too late to start working on that um uh but that's that's what I would look at all right I have another comment here from Jing Wang says um ask how the pelvic bones absorb the ground force in acceleration um if I want to run faster how do my pelvic bones help with achieving that goal great question um Jing what we think of is the elastin in the bone and if you look at I think I even have a handy dandy pelvic floor here I don't oh yeah I do so let me pull out my mini pelv floor and or pelvis pelvic plate my nominate sorry for that noise but here is the nominate so you can see right so you'll notice that in this miniature in ominent that it is Twisted 90 de so there's a plate this way and a plate this way right they're opposite of each other and that spiral there's incredible force in here this part attaches onto the SA this is a pubic symphysis so what happens is when we're loading the body in that ground reaction force that spiral absorbs Force it's like you're twisting a metal band and then when you start to take pressure off of it it releases energy right and all of our bones and all of our tissues do that it's not just the um the pelvis like all of our bones and and our fascial tissues and the arch of the foot and the um you know the fasal anatomy trains all of those things manage them all right well listen we are out of time I do want to share one more thing with everybody and uh thank you again for being with me today I hope the information was helpful um we'll continue to put these in in dispersed of different topics different physiology different Kinesiology biomechanic pathologies that we bring in and Scatter throughout the Pilates hour and uh we hope that it is helpful to you in your practice and in your gaining knowledge we always look forward to you sharing knowledge back with us any questions you have are awesome um I have I have a sad announcement that I'm making today on behalf of one of our graduates recently Tori Savona she was one of our students and recently graduated uh this year year in her Pilates comprehensive training uh from New York the training was up in Hadley Massachusetts with Katrina one of our senior Educators and Tori passed away recently and uh I just would like to do a moment of silence we love our postar family our teachers all around the world uh we're in the tens of thousands of graduates it was part of tor's wish to finish her training before she passed and she did and uh according to everybody I didn't get to personally meet her but everybody that knew her um and we've talked to a number of people that have met her said that her smile was infectious and her laugh and that she was so positive and Surround herself with positive energy and um my my take on it is that she blessed the world uh with her life and will continue to bless us on the other side of the veil I'd like to take just a few few moments of Silence on behalf of tor's family those who survived her sister and husband and uh just send our love to them all right everybody thank you so much for joining me today look forward to seeing you next week we have some wonderful gift guest on the agenda coming up over the next couple of months please share it with your friends Above All Things live aligned and be kind we'll see you next week [Music]