Anatomical Variants and What It Can Mean

Everyone is different and everyone is the same.  There.  Now you know in case you didn't.  We all have femurs and hips and spines that should move.  We also all have subtle differences in the way we are built.  Some have a wider pelvis, some have very narrow hips.  This is something that anyone can plainly see.  The idea that everyone should do the exact same thing is obviously not correct.  The squat guru's can't even decide whats the best way to squat.  

The emergence of self care to help how you move, in my opinion, is one of the best things to happen in the last few years.  Does it get carried overboard?  Again, in my opinion, I think it gets carried way overboard.  Putting a kettlebell handle into my guts to get on a psoas, or lacrosse ball deep into my arm pit to hit subscapularis, or trying to push down the first rib through my anterior neck triangle, with the caveat, if you start to black out, ease off, is not the smartest.  

But, using a lacrosse ball and bands to improve my squat, and shoulder extension, all awesome things.  No one is saying squat exactly to this depth, or everyone should back bridge.   The message hopefully taken home is lets improve your squat depth by improving your hips.  Lets improve you shoulder flexion.   Let's improve how YOU move.  

A few days ago a blog post was making the rounds about how you can't fix things with lacrosse balls and bands ect, `because we are so individual anatomically.  Then proceeded to show two hips from different people.  I'm guessing the pictures were of the least like photos the collector could find to show two extremes.  We all aren't that different.  When making a point.  Show the extremes.  It was well done. 

So my message to you is, yes we are different and yes we are the same.  Let's continue to work on each individually moving better.  We may not look the same at the end, but that's OK if we have improved from where we started.