I also recognize that I’m not the baby anymore, and the benevolent responsibility as a human citizen to share with younger people and share with others. That has been a really delicious part of aging—realizing that people look up to me. Parenting has taught me a lot of that, but also being a business owner and a teacher of teachers has taught me that. You don’t age in isolation. You age in community, and you age in relationship to all these other age groups.
Can you tell us a little about the evolution of your yoga practice and how it brought you to Tune Up Fitness?
I started practicing yoga when I was around 11 or 12. My mom had brought home the Jane Fonda Workout video and the Raquel Welch yoga tape. We lived off-the-grid in a solar home outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, so we didn’t have a television. These videos lit me up, and I became obsessed with them. What happened over the next 8 or 9 years of my life was a spiral of disordered eating, orthorexia, and using yoga as a way to regulate my nervous system. There was a certain point in college where I knew that my bulimia was absolutely not going away, and I needed help.
My roommate, who was pre-med, was taking the same pilates class as me. She would always be sore in her abs, and I was never sore. I had a feeling that the reason I was never sore was because I couldn’t feel my abs, and I was just bypassing them because I was bulimic. I had this disconnection from myself. So I confessed to my yoga teacher that I was bulimic, and that I felt numb in my abs. She showed me a prop that they use in the Iyengar space that looks like a hamburger bun stuffed with sand. She said, “put it on your belly and lay down and breathe into it.” It was absolute agony. But I finally felt. The pain that emerged connected the dots for me about what I was doing to myself with the bulimia. I started to wake up every morning and roll up a hand towel (which was a lot gentler than this bean bag) and I would lay on the towel and move it around my abdomen. What ended up happening was I was able to move beyond the bulimia. I attribute a lot of that in part to creating this connection from my guts, my heart, and my mind. The self-massage work has been instrumental for being able to locate myself and being able to locate my emotions. In the context of practice, I am practicing as safely as possible. But also while in myself and not bypassing myself or continuing to objectify myself the way I used to.
That’s an incredible story and very inspiring. I appreciate you sharing that. Can you explain to the reader what self-myofascial release is?
Self-myofascial release is using a tool to attempt to improve gliding motions between tissues, to improve overall mobility, eliminate pain, address muscle imbalances and improve one’s proprioception (the ability to know where you are in space). I use self-myofascial release to help people improve their embody map, which is that body’s sense of itself. This concretizing of your soma, your anatomy, so that you can be a better participant with what you intend with your movements. The self-myofascial release that I teach is called Roll Model Method®. I use soft, pliable rubber balls of different sizes to help people locate tissues, improve mobility, and transform pain. This is the work that I teach to clinicians, to sports and athletics communities, to the general population, people that don’t like yoga, people that love yoga. All sorts of people can benefit from self-myofascial release.
Because the science behind anatomy and movement changes so rapidly, how do you adjust your training and teaching to align with the new information? What are your thoughts on the people who challenge the effectiveness of rolling?
When people challenge the effectiveness, it’s really easy to counter because we have evidence. In the fascia research community, we’ve moved on from a lot of terms. For example, a lot of people get caught up in this term, “adhesions.” That’s really not frequently used anymore. We’ll hear people talk about agglomerations or lack of gliding or true visceral adhesions, but people don’t really talk about adhesions in a musculoskeletal way very often anymore. That is a term that I used to use because that’s what was used a decade ago. My book, The Roll Model, was written when that term was popular, but in the new book, Body By Breath, I have been able to update those terms and try to continue to evolve. Science is as much an art as it is a science, so we have to keep updating our terms and explain what we mean.
What is your recommendation for women over 40 who want to maintain longevity in their fitness routine and everyday life?
I am a manual movement medicine person! I believe (and the research shows) that load bearing exercise is so important for the aging body, especially with women over 40. The loss of estrogen is deleterious for every system of the body. However, you are working with the symptoms that come along with the disappearance of estrogen in your system, there is no good reason to not do load bearing exercise to continuously stress your muscles so that they stay healthy. We lose our fast twitch muscle fibers at a very fast rate as we age. We also lose our ability to generate power, which weakens the muscles and weakens the bones, so our connective tissues stiffen, and we are more likely to have ruptures and tears. It’s important to do load bearing exercise that is likely beyond yoga. Yoga is important for whole body motion as well as stability. It’s incredible as a mind-body exercise to enhance focus and induce the relaxation response.
The aging body also needs self-myofascial release. Self-massage can get into nooks and crannies of the body that, unbeknownst to you, aren’t being moved by your exercise. Therapy balls can create motion where motion is not occurring well and can also help you update your mind’s ability to connect to your tissues so you can get a more robust contraction. There’s really great evidence about rolling being able to improve a muscle’s ability to create torque or force generation as well as improving your body’s proprioception. Slips and falls are the highest leading cause of hip fractures, and hip fractures are the leading cause of death in aging bodies.
We want ankles that move well, and we want to have good reactive hips and strong bones in those hips, so if we do fall, we are less likely to fracture.
Is there anything else you like to share with the readers?
My newer book, Body by Breath is all about that journey through the gut to embodiment. What I realized when I started to teach these methods to other people is that I got lucky because I healed my eating disorder. But these were applications that ended up helping people with neck pain, with asthma, with chronic shoulder pain, and with low back pain. There were so many varieties of people that were helped by doing these types of gut, massage, rib cage massage applications, and now, I see it’s really quite an endless side-effect free application. The traction just blows me away. This simple thing. This sad little bulimic girl laying down in her dorm room trying to wrestle with what she was struggling with, but there is this universal application that is way beyond what I thought.
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