MovementREV Philosophy and Methodology
In this episode of the Unreal Results podcast, Anna discusses her mission, philosophies, methods, and unique system of sports healthcare. She shares the fundamental beliefs and principles that guide the MovementREV method and create her lens of view of the human body, movement, injury, and dis-ease.
Sharing these foundations, you will see how Anna assimilates her 20 years of practice in athletic training and performance and years of professional development into a unique approach combining osteopathic manual medicine with allopathic sports medicine.
Considering the viscera as a source of musculoskeletal pain and dysfunction is a great way to ensure a more true whole-body approach to care, however, it can be a bit overwhelming on where to start, which is exactly why I created the Visceral Referral Cheat Sheet. This FREE download will help you to learn the most common visceral referral patterns affecting the musculoskeletal system. Download it at www.unrealresultspod.com
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Today, I wanted to talk about MovementREV philosophies and methodologies. I basically want to give you an overview of my philosophies and methodology because this will help you to understand this lens of view of how I see the body, how I incorporate the visceral organs and the nervous system into this truly whole-body organism approach to rehabilitation and performance.
So, um, one thing I always do whenever I'm teaching. I share one of my favorite quotes from Jean-Pierre Barral. And I want to do that with you today because, um, I think it just gives some perspective to, to what we do as, um, sports, healthcare professionals and in what we're sort of faced with and working with. And when we, when you're working with, um, something so unique and so intelligent, as the human body.
So he says “the door has opened a crack and we can only imagine the vast expanse waiting behind it. Our knowledge about the human body is so small compared with the unbounded intricacy and richness it possesses. It is important to start the journey of discovery, even though we cannot see where it will lead. Let us be grateful for all that our occupation offers. Even if it is not always easy.”
And I just love this quote. I know, especially, especially the beginning of it, right? Like “the door has opened a crack and we can only imagine that vast expanse waiting behind it.” My hope through this podcast and through my teaching on Instagram and my teaching on YouTube and even my teaching through my paid curriculums. Right. The LTAP course and the um, mentorship and any teaching I do at symposiums and conferences; that, that really is it to open your eyes to this vast expanse of information that is already out there. That you might just not have been aware of, right? That you might've not even understood that there was things like this to consider.
As well as to bring us back to realize just how intelligent and highly self-evolved the human body is because I think sometimes we lose perspective of just how engrained in our cellular memory, our cellular operating system.
How our bodies are, are wired to develop on their own with not a whole lot of input from us. Not a whole lot of cognitive thought of developing from one cell, a joined cell, a zygote. That becomes an embryo, which becomes a fetus, which becomes a baby. And that baby goes from being helpless to learning how to move, eat, talk, think, run, jump, do all the things. Virtually on its own. Right? There is nobody that teaches the baby how to, just how to walk. Right? Nobody teaches the baby how you even roll over or sit up? The baby does this because the whole organism, every cell in its body is designed as this, like amazing supercomputer. It's like the best way to sort of think about it. To take the sensory inputs. And create an output with it. Use that information. That is scanned by it of the environment. Both external environment and internal environment. And do something with it. Respond to it whether that response is movement. Growth, whatever it is.
I really do feel that we've lost sight of that. We've lost sight of how amazing the human body is. And so I want everyone to by learning how to appreciate the viscera and the nervous system. And how it influences the musculoskeletal system and how we can leverage it to get better results for our clients.
I want you to, to allow that to provide this feeling of awe about the human body. And just to appreciate that our knowledge about it, like he says is so small. So, so, so, so utterly minimal minuscule. “Compared with the unbounded intricacy enriches that possesses.”
That's it. To go through your day, seeing client by client, patient by patient, and to be sort of in this utter state of awe is like, one of the best gifts that I have received from my teachers. And from my work in, I feel like it is the best gift that I can give you. Who is learning from me. So with that said, I want to just do a little like formal.
What is MovementREV, because like I said, I am taking. An osteopathic type of belief system and marrying it with a more allopathic Western medicine, sports performance thing, and bringing the two together and creating my own unique thing. Just like you will create your own unique thing. And I, I challenge you to spend some time and sit and consider what your current philosophies are and what your current methodologies are. And are they your own? Are they someone else's? Are they a blend of many peoples, which then would make it your own unique thing? I want us all to have our own unique thing because we are all our own unique people. And that is what makes you so special as a physical therapist, as an athletic trainer, as a sports healthcare provider, is that you are unique and no one else in the world will evaluate and treat someone exactly like you do, which means no one else in the world. We'll get the same results for your client as you do.
So I will share with you. What my current philosophies and methodologies are, which is the MovementREV, philosophies, and methodologies. And I'll also share. Uh, what my mission statement and my goals are. So the MovementREV mission statement is to teach as many athletes and sports healthcare professionals as possible how to trust their bodies, optimize recovery and improve performance. This is literally what drives me every day. I love teaching people how to trust their bodies and how to appreciate how amazing their own body is and how capable their own body is and leveraging that to optimize recovery and improve performance.
I love working with athletes. I love sport. I love being part of that all. I love seeing people use their bodies to do things like that and so that's, that's my whole mission. And I know that the best way to reach more athletes is to reach more professionals that work with athletes. So I am. Uh, reaching out to you to ultimately reach more of them.
Not for myself, but because I just love athletics. I love athletics. I love sport. I love what athletes in sport provides to everyone else who either participates in or watches them. And the lesson learned.
So I'm a big semantics person. So let's first talk about what the heck is the difference between a philosophy and a method. Or methodology. Or a principal. And even a system. So philosophy is
your basic beliefs or basic set of beliefs, concepts, and attitudes. Of an individual or an individual organization. A principal is a fundamental law or assumption. A method is a systematic procedure technique. Or mode of inquiry. Uh, employed to a particular discipline, a way of doing something, a practice a system that you follow.
A methodology is a body of methods, a body of the systems followed that create rules. A hypothesis, a working hypothesis that or a postulate that you're working off of. Employed by a discipline, which is a particular procedure or set of procedures.
And a system is a set of things working together. The set of principles or a set of procedures according to which something is done. So. What are MovementREV philosophies. These are my, and my business MovementREV’s, basic beliefs, my attitudes and some concepts that are important to understand.
So these are my guiding belief system. This is my bias. This is the bias of how I see how the body is and how it moves and how it heals and how it performs. Number one, the body can heal itself. This is a shared belief from osteopathic medicine. The body, like I described at the beginning, it is a self-tuning, self-healing organism.
The primary job of the musculoskeletal system is to protect the organs. You may have already heard me say this, but that is fundamentally, always has been, and always will be the primary job of the musculoskeletal system. Protect the vital organs. This is why they're really important. Organs are inside hard-frame skeleton structures.
Right? Our brain and our heart and lungs. They are in very protected containers—another belief. Um, is that movement dysfunction is a loss of biotensigrity or a pattern of protection. So movement dysfunctions are present when the body is protecting something more important. I.e. the organs.
Or protecting itself from getting hurt. Protecting itself because it feels threatened and not safe. Or is just a lacking dynamic alignment. Because we are not participating in our biotensigrity. Biotensegrity or fascial tensegrity of how the structure uses coupled and combined movements. To improve movement, efficiency, and economy.
I also believe very strongly that the practitioner, the sports healthcare provider, no matter what type of provider you are, you must be doing the work in your own body. It is impossible to take care of someone else and to really allow your body's wisdom to speak through your hands and speak through your brain if you are not doing the work in your own body. If you are too distracted by your own pain, by your own ego, by your own worries, by your own fears. If you are distracted because you are not dealing with your own shit.
It's really impossible to be there for someone else in their healing journey. Okay.
Another belief. Ahh, one of my favorite quotes, um, from Jill Miller, “the body thinks in feels”. Meaning feeling is better, more powerful, more sensitive, more true than thinking. The better we can be at improving our sensory information the better output we will have. And our body is a sense driven. We are a sensory organ. We are driven by our sensory experience. Just like I described as the baby developing what drove his development, the sensory experience, experience, understanding and interpreting the sensory information from the external environment, as well as the internal environment.
So tapping into being comfortable with learning how to optimize, leaning into what you are feeling and improving your feeling is the way to go.
Some other concepts. Um, that are part of the MovementREV philosophy is that the neurovascular structures must be free to act and do their part. That is a play on a famous quote from AT Still, the founder of osteopathic medicine. Andrew Taylor Still. Um, he said that the, um, “Nerves must be free to act and do their part”. And that is true. And that, um, the “artery is Supreme.”
That is what he means by that. Right? The neurovascular structures. And you could even say the neuro lymphatic vascular structures must be free to glide and slide and move within the containers of the body. Because they are an extension of visceral organs. The nerves are an extension of the brain. The vessels, the vascular structures are an extension of the heart and the lungs.
And the lymph is an extension of the vascular structures as well as the spleen and the liver. Okay.
Another concept that is really important is that the body is the smartest one in the room, not the practitioner.
The body of the person you are working on. As well as your own body. Which is why it's so important to get letting go of that ego, getting out of that, thinking mind and leaning into the feeling.
Another belief is that lasting change happens only in a parasympathetic state. It is very difficult to optimize healing, improve performance on someone who is in a state of fight or flight or freeze. If their nervous system does not feel safe then it doesn't matter if you do the best treatment in the world, if you do the best strength training in the world.
Their nervous system will always keep them in a protective mode. In protective modes, we are not granted our full mobility. We are not granted our full efficient movement patterns. And we are not actively doing the biochemical and hormonal things needed to facilitate rest, and digestion. And restoration and healing of tissues.
Okay.
The practitioner is merely a tinker or a guide. We are not fixing people. We are not healing people. We are not fixing people. We are not as important as society makes us believe we are, which is part of, the hard part of letting go of our ego; is for years and years and years, we have been told that the medical professional, the healthcare professional is the smartest person, is the expert and is the person to do the healing and do the fixing. And we are not.
That is the body's job. We are simply there to assist the body in that. In that goal.
The last belief is that the loss of the ability of compensate is the issue, not the compensation itself.
The body is made to compensate. That is actually what makes us so amazing as human organisms, like shit can happen to us. We deal with it and we continue to move on. This is why athletes, if you've ever worked with an athlete, when they come to see you? They're such great compensators, because their capacity to withstand a lot of shit happening to them before they break down is greater than typically the normal persons. Right?
Whether you consider it a, um, Um,
I call it a cup of compensation or like a threat bucket. Um, that's called, uh, in some pain science, texts. Uh, whatever you want to call it. That is usually it's the straw that broke the camel's back, right? It was not, people did not have a problem until “all of a sudden”, right. My back didn't hurt until I sneezed. And then now I've herniated three discs. Was it the sneeze? No, it was all the other stuff. This needs was just the icing on the cake. All right.
So now let's talk about principals. So MovementREV principles, which are fundamental laws and assumptions. So these are the guiding principles, the guiding laws and assumptions. That I use while I'm practicing, where I'm seeing the body in this bias.
I pull from osteopathic principles. This is the body wisdom. The body is the smartest one in the room and it has. This, um, self-tuning intelligence within it already, the body is self-healing and is constantly seeking a state of homeostasis. Though understanding homeostasis is not a flat line in the middle. It is an ability to come in and out of threat.
To come in and out of rest. Right.
Uh, another, osteopathic principle, that is a MovementREV principle is that the organs are supreme. The organs are the most important thing to the body. The body hugs the lesion. So when we have an injury to the tissue, when we have, um, something that is not functioning and an organ that's not functioning or, or a joint that's not functioning. The body goes into protective mode around that and tends to hug the lesion.
Even in, from a wound standpoint, right? All the healing cells and stuff come to the area and what does it start to do to the wound? It contracts it all in on itself. Right. That is the body hugging the lesion. Lack of movement creates disease on a micro level. And on a macro level, we know this as we are in the movement industry. We know that when you're not moving, you're not very healthy.
Right sedentary. Is this a problem?
It's physics, right. But also not just from a movement from a musculoskeletal standpoint, even the organs in the cells. The micro structures. We need micro movement in order to. Keep healthy as well. So movement on every level. When movement is lacking, that is when things start to fail. Some anatomy principles that I, I use. Um, I'm big fascia nerd. So, I see everything from this fascial bio tensegrity standpoint.
I lean into embryology quite a bit. Um, and then physics, right? We're basically a whole series of pressure fluid dynamic systems. And then of course, biomechanics, biomechanics is the anatomy principle, the science principle that I think most people are more familiar with. And of course physiology.
The movement principles are already sort of talked about these a little bit, but the nervous system is queen. Um, one is it is an organ. So we already know. Like it's the organ. The artery is Supreme, right? The AT Still. Um, it's like the visceral organs are Supreme. The nervous system is a visceral organ.
However, then our autonomic nervous system, it's also queen because again, we're going back to the body is constantly seeking to survive. That is primary concern is survival. So understanding the body, being aware of if we're safe or if we're threatened. That that is what is determining our output.
Almost every single time. Right. And then we're looking at movement from an efficiency standpoint is knowing that we are sensory beings that we need to improve our input. If we, if we want to improve our output, our output being movement. So it's wild to me, even though we know that relationship that we are more sensory beings than not, why this whole industry is built on changing people's output without really considering the inputs. Right? So sort of flipping that around and understanding the output is an output. And so manipulating the environment, manipulating the movement experience to have the desired outcome on movement is how I approach things as opposed to cueing the output and trying to change the output.
So another favorite quote by Alain Ghein, um, is you, “you learn techniques to understand principles. When you understand principles, you will create techniques.” I love this. This is what it's all about. Everything I'm teaching I'm always trying to teach people to understand these principles that I just went over because when you understand these, everything else sort of makes sense, and it doesn't matter what tool or technique you use.
All right.
So the MovementREV method, which is a system procedure technique, or motive inquiry, employed to a particular discipline. How do we go about putting these principles? These philosophies into practice. We listened to the body, right? Because we are understanding about fundamental body wisdom through an assessment of using the locator test. So the LTAP, the locator test assessment protocol, as well as, um, measuring or assessing autonomic nervous system reactivity.
We meet the body where it's at to create safety and facilitate rest, regeneration, and recovery. I teach movement within the fascial tensegrity system, utilizing all the sensory organs, breath, and bones in dynamic alignment. To facilitate that movement efficiency. And I approach movement dysfunction and pathology from a visceral and neural-based biased.
Meaning, if someone's movement dysfunction is present. Whether it is poor hip extension or lacking upward rotation of the shoulder. Instead of looking at that purely biomechanically about what muscles are firing or not firing or needs strengthening, or need stretching, what. You know, the, sort of the old way of thinking I'm looking at what organs relate to that area. What nerves relate to that area? What nerves could be entrapped that is limiting the hip going into extension or the hip going into flexion? So, this is what I mean from looking at this from a visceral and neural-based bias. How is the viscera and how are the nerves relating to this movement dysfunction, relating to this pathology or injury?
Always going like one layer back.
So the system that I use is a system of assessment, which is a locator test assessment protocol, the LTAP, and an ANS assessment. And then movement map assessment. So I still look at movement because movement is still my primary thing I care about, right? I want everyone to feel good in their body, moving their body and performing well.
And then from a more, a performance standpoint, like I said, it's big on movement with tensegrity creating a movement experience in a developmental sequence of tapping into that already level of cellular intent intelligence that is within our body as a human organism. And then also leaning into teaching people about their body and teaching people how to take care of themselves. So self-care, cultivating awareness and self-reliance and compliance. And facilitating people being smarter about paying attention to how they feel, trusting it, and then implementing an intervention.
So the goals is to use all of that. Use those systems, use those methods with the guiding principles and philosophies to decrease injury potential, improve performance, have people feel good in their body, expose the self-healing and self-tuning capabilities that are innate within our intelligent organism.
Um, have people be an active participant in their health Uh, by helping them improve their body ownership and body agency. And ultimately my goal is for my athlete or my client to not need me anymore. I don't want anyone having to rely on me in order to feel well in their body and perform. I want them to be able to take care of the majority of stuff on their own. And then just bring me in to be a tinker, to just make little adjustments here and there much like you would maintenance on your car. You don't need to see the car maintenance person four times a week, or even every week for that matter, maybe every few thousand miles. So for an athlete, maybe that's every few weeks. For a non-athlete just person that wants to feel good in their body. That might be once every couple of months. Or even less. Especially when you start learning how to trust your body, how it feels and how to take care of yourself, you don't always need to be working with a sports healthcare clinician.
So hopefully that gives you sort of a good overview on where I'm coming from and how I've sort of pulled everything together. And obviously every episode that I talk about you'll, you'll hopefully see these philosophies, see these principles, see these systems put into place. In a tangible, practical way.
Thank you for joining me. Can't wait till next time. Have a great day.