“It doesn’t matter whether you’re an 80-year-old smoker, a 23-year-old Olympian, or a regular, fit guy-odds are the way you’re breathing right now is flooding your body with stress hormones, compromising your joints and mobility, bottlenecking your energy and undermining your performance in the gym and everyday life. Fourteen times a minute, you become a little weaker and a bit duller.

Hruska is on a mission to change that. Step one is understanding how your body is organized.”

Ron Hruska was recently interviewed by Men’s Health along with Bill Hartman and Neil Rampe discussing Postural Restoration, after Trevor Thieme, Senior Editor for Men's Health attended a Postural Respiration course last year. Topics discussed include: optimal breathing and the typical respiration patterns, asymmetry, PRI in pro baseball, and common compensations that can cause neck, back and joint pain.  

The 90/90 hip lift with balloon was shown as a way to get your diaphragm in a position to work correctly, helping you to breathe appropriately and avoid chronic stress which can increase your risk of dementia by 67%, stroke by 59% and diabetes by 45%.

“You can think of neutrality of being functionally symmetrical- the ability to shift your center of gravity from one side to the other, to breathe efficiently with both lungs, and to maintain position of your true core. “Being neutral helps everything,” says All-Star first baseman Paul Goldschmidt. “When I lift, I’m stronger. When I run, I’m faster. It allows me to fully express my power and speed.”

If you haven't already, go out and grab the April 2015 Men’s Health issue and flip to page 144 to read the article, which they refer to as the "#1 Greatest Health Tip Ever!"

The article that originally appeared in the April issue of Men's Health is now online, you can read it here!

Dr. Todd Stull is our next speaker spotlight for our upcoming Interdisciplinary Integration Symposium. Dr. Stull, founder of Inside Performance Mindroom, holds a Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree from the University of Nebraska Medical Center and is a board certified psychiatrist in Addiction Medicine as well as General and Addiction Psychiatry. He is a former high school and college football quarterback (Hastings College) and has spent a number of years working with college athletes while serving as Consulting Sport Pyschiatrist at the University of Nebraska Lincoln and Creighton Athletic Departments.

As a performance performance psychiatrist, Dr. Stull has worked with athletes, corporate executives and physicians to identify and address psychological, interpersonal and wellness needs through mental skills training. To optimize health, improve performance and managae psychiatric symptoms while operating whithin an interdisciplinary team, Dr. Stull often treats mental health and substance related problems. Here is what Dr. Stull has to say regarding his upcoming presentations at the Interdisciplinary Integration Symposium on April 16017th:

"Top performers are driven by a clear vision based on their passion, desires and strengths. Vision leads to peak performance only when aligned with supporting thoughts, emotions and behaviors. By developing mental routines, brain training skills and feedback processes, athletes and teams can successfully match their mental game to their vision. Many barriers stand in the way of peak performance – lack of confidence or emotional maturity, communication differences, relationship difficulties, mental health and substance issues, parental interference and stress. The mind-body connection is the foundation for the upcoming presentation at PRI on April 16-17, 2015.  By integrating neurobiological and psychological skills and science-based  tools, you will learn to access the power of your mind to enhance performance."

Wow!  What an amazing weekend in Indianopolis. The enthusiasm and passion for PRI by course attendees was amazing.   We had over 10 physical therapy students in attendance in addition to the physical therapists, strength coaches, and athletic trainers in the room. Integration of the pelvic inlet/outlet in the frontal plane with stance and swing phases of gait were emphasized with synchronization of TWO diaphragms. Powerful weekend. The IFAST group was fabulous and I can’t thank them enough for hosting yet another PRI course!

Asymmetry of arm-swing not related to handedness:

Authors: Kuhtz-Buschbeck, Brockmann, Gilster, Koch, Stolze,

Gait and Posture 27 (2008) 447-454

During my recent certification process to become a PRC, I found an article whose findings are supported by PRI science.  I felt like I had stumbled upon a pot of gold!  I want to share the wealth with PRI nation!

This 2008 article identified a predominant trend of patterned posterior arm swing occurring more on the left than the right in subjects walking at various walking speeds.  They found this event to not be related to handedness. The author’s provide insight into why this pattern of movement was observed including underlying mechanisms of side differences in muscle tone and/or strength and also neural motor programming.  PRI’s apriori understanding of normal human asymmetry, the development of adaptive muscular recruitment patterns around a left AIC, right BC and a left type1 scapular pattern can explain why the authors observed this pattern. 

 Around the time of finding this evidence, I had two clients who demonstrated L AIC/RBC patterns. Because of these patterns of movements they had developed asymmetries of a left and right triceps and posterior deltoid muscle groups.  Their pictures are below:

The left arm swing findings are understood when you consider that left arm swing occurs during left trunk rotation of the right stance phase of gait and that the human body is always oriented to be in this right stance phase pattern.  PRI courses and previous blogs provide excellent and thorough explanations for why our body has a right stance dominant pattern, so I will not describe them in depth.  Anatomical asymmetries that orient our spine to the right create imbalance in the AICs with the left AIC becoming more influential and orienting the pelvis and lumbar spine to the right.  As a compensation to a right oriented spine the thorax rotates back to the left creating an imbalance in the BCs with the right BC becoming more dominant.  This pattern of counter-rotation, between the pelvis and ribcage, will be the dominant pattern occurring during walking, so even though a person will move into a left stance of gait they may not achieve full and opposite counter-rotation.   Thus the left arm will always have a tendency to move more frequently and activate more into extension or posterior flexion as the authors described it vs. into flexion or anterior flexion.  The degree to which a person is limited in moving out of their LAIC/RBC and into a RAIC/LBC will vary and the results of this study show this.  Clinically, I have observed this and have found that the individual needs for a PRI program will vary from one person to the next person.

In closing, I think one of the take home messages from this article is that the underlying pattern of a LAIC and RBC can be observed in a real world situation, walking.  The power of PRI is that it understands why the person maybe walking in an unbalanced manor, it provides an evaluation to determine the extent to which a person’s systems are influencing the patterned movement and it provides a management program that helps people become sensory-motor aware and find the floor to maintain balanced walking.