The 6 Pillars of Functional Movement

Functional Movement is built Pillar is built on 6 Pillars.

1. Safety and Fear Avoidance

This is a very important factor in your recovery.  If you don’t know exactly what is wrong, you will tend to overprotect painful parts of your body.  For instance, without even intentionally realizing it, if your knee hurts, you will put a lot more weight on your opposite side and change your gait to avoid weight bearing on the injured side.  This perpetuates faulty movement and prevents balance of your movement system as a whole. 

2.   Respiration Pattern

Breathing with diaphragm control is an important component of posture and spinal stability. Research has shown dysfunctional breathing can contribute to chronic pain, muscle imbalance and can alter movement control.

3.   Joint Mobility (Spinal and Extremity)

Altered joint alignment, is associated with pain and tenderness, asymmetrical tone and tissue tension and range of motion abnormality.  These misalignments disrupt nerve signals traveling both to and from the brain, as well as our ability to optimally sense our position in space.

4.   Tissue Extensibility

Muscles should be able to be stretched just beyond their normal resting length. Nervous tension, scar tissue and trigger points may restrict this ability. As I mentioned earlier, faulty breathing patterns can also contribute to muscle imbalance, thus tissue extensibility.

5.   Core Stability

This includes proper timing and coordination of deep stabilizing trunk muscles.  This training includes integrating diaphragmatic breathing to achieve optimal intra-abdominal pressure for torso stability which serves as an anchor of support for extremity mobility.

6.   Movement Pattern Control

Whether it's due to a learned compensation pattern after an injury, faulty breathing, joint immobility, a lack of tissue extensibility or a developmental irregularity movement pattern issues are very common and certainly contribute to chronic pain.

This approach to your care puts into practice our interpretation of the most advanced, evidence-based clinical practices.  That will always be our commitment to you.