FitzGordon Method Core Walking Program

Walking has been proven to have a wide range of physical benefits, including lowering blood pressure, weight loss, stress management, and reducing the risk of stroke and heart disease. The FitzGordon Method amplifies the therapeutic effects of walking through conscious movement and a series of exercises designed to improve posture and increase core strength, resulting in enhanced movement patterns and superior muscular/structural integrity. Over the course of the program, clients will find their bodies in harmony as never before, with more energy, less muscle fatigue, and relief of lower back, shoulder, and other chronic joint pain.
Walking is fundamental. Over the course of a lifetime, we are likely to walk 25,000 miles. Even the most sedentary person walks an average of one mile a day. A process so critical to our daily lives should not be done without awareness, yet we stroll or limp through life not realizing that our walking pattern and posture affects our health and energy.
A carpenter finds a straight line to the earth by dropping a weighted string from a height. It falls straight down, with the flow of gravity. Imagine if your body lined up in that flow-your ears, shoulders, hips and ankles would all follow the plumb line of the body. Instead for most of us our calves fall backward, our thighs sink forward, our lower back overarches, our upper back rounds back and our head juts forward. What the FitzGordon Method does is align us with gravity, making it our ally instead of our nemesis.
Our posture determines our walking pattern. Stop for a moment and think: What is that pattern? Do you know why you move that way? One way we learn how to move is by imitating, at a very young age. The trouble is, we imitate unconsciously. If our mother or father or aunt walked with their feet turned out or if they were in an accident that affected their posture poorly, those are among the patterns that we may acquire. Coming to a deeper understanding of our relationship to these patterns and to an idea of what optimal alignment might be is a key part of creating positive change in the body.
The FitzGordon Method Core Walking Program teaches a natural walking technique that helps align your bones, free your joints and bring welcome relief to overused muscles. When the body moves as it is designed to, all parts work in harmony. Using the FitzGordon Method, we train you to bring your body into the state of balance that is individual, and healing, to you.

The Psoas (pronounced so-az), considered by many to be our "emotional" muscle, is the body's main hip flexor attaching at the back half of the inner thigh, crossing over the front of the pelvis and attaching along the spine at the lower back making it one of only two muscles connecting the legs to the pelvis.

Walking is a full body experience initiated in the trunk and extending out through the extremities. Your psoas muscle, from the deepest core of the body moves the legs rather than what most people might think, the legs moving the body. In a weird way you can say the leg begins up at the top of the psoas as truly fluid movement in walking is felt as a pendulum like release from the base of the rib cage at T12. A body that walks well is building a strong support system with every step.

Talk about power walking. A new knee-mounted device converts the kinetic energy of strolling, sauntering and striding into usable electricity.

In the early 1990s, Swiss engineer Karl Müller realized that both shoes and backache are unknown to the Masai tribesmen - and that there is a causal connection between these two facts. By walking barefoot on the natural, soft, uneven ground of their East African homeland, the Masai activate muscles that atrophy when we walk on hard, even surfaces wearing conventional shoes.

Müller began to develop a footwear technology that would make the natural instability of soft ground such as the East African savannah accessible also to those who have to walk on hard surfaces. In 1996, after years spent on research and development, Masai Barefoot Technology was launched on the market.

MBT's are the FitzGordon Method Core Walking Program in a shoe. But shoes don't teach you how to walk.

Conditioned patterns are hard to break. MBT shoes combined with the FitzGordon Method bring you an understanding of anatomy and proper alignment are key to a happy and healthy future.

This is a combined image from two of my favorite yoga teachers. Genny Kapuler (www.gennykapuler.com) and Jenny Otto (www.bodybalanceyoga.com).

Close your eyes and relax your brain. Allow your eyeballs to soften back into the space of the deep eye sockets. Keeping the eyes closed gently employ your peripheral vision and feel the eyes soften and widen. As you let the eyes open allow the world to come into you rather than you reaching out into the world. Walk through a clamer, softer city.

Become aware of your calves as you walk and try to feel how they are working as you move forward.

If your stride is too long the calf will have to move backwards in order for the leg to begin its journey forward. This overworks the calf and the entire back of the leg including gluteus maximus, the big buttock muscle.

Try shortening your stride and allow the legs to move forward with each step.

Shoes don't teach you how to walk.

And people with bad feet need to wear shoes that support them. But- these are very cool and very comfortable if your feet are right for them.

VivoBarefoot is a, back-to-basics design based on the simple principle that being barefoot is the healthiest way for you and your feet to be. An ultra thin, puncture resistant sole has made it possible to wear shoes while enjoying all the advtantages of walking barefoot.

The arms and legs should be moving the same distance at the same pace in an alternating fashion. Left arm, right leg etc...

When this becomes part of our natural walking pattern there will be a rotation through the spine and the contents of the abdomen will be massaged and stimulated with every step.