Discovering Your Core Strength in Working from the Back Body through Understanding the Power of Three: Third in a Series Reversing Da Vinci's Homo Quadratus

I was recently interviewed regarding my back body beliefs & core strength

within the Backbone and Wingspan approach to exercise & movement

by Ingrid Skjong for an article on the website Well + Good NYC

 "Is the back the new core?"

In the article she talks

about how this work

"gives you practice at

stabilizing your shoulder blades,

redirecting your breath

into your lower ribs, and

extending your lumbar spine down through the sacrum."

 

Very often in writing, we use three adjectives or three phrases

to describe something in detail.

  The power of three in our way of detailing a process or a circumstance actually comes from what is present in the composition of our bodies. It's most obvious and most core-oriented when you think of the spine and the way it is composed:

 There are:

Three Curves of the Spine:

Lumbar-Thoracic-Cervical

 

When you stabilize the shoulder blades, you free up the cervical spine or neck.

When you breathe into the lower back ribs, you free up the thoracic or mid-spine,

When you extend the lower vertebrae down thorough the sacrum, you free up the lumbar spine.

 

What I have learned in more than a decade of looking at people from the back side, is that empowerment comes first from a change of perception.

Because we see and perceive ourselves and each other from the front side most often, you have to use sensation and imagination to connect to the back body places that support the spine and help you get to the core strength.

 

This is what my fascination for attempting to reverse the perception of the famous Da Vinci drawing has come from:

if you see the body from the front,

the tendency is to perceive a torso with arms and legs sticking out from it.

But if you see the body from the back side,

it is more clear and more possible to perceive a spine with arms coming from either side off the spine like wings and

the legs coming off either side of the spine like the haunches on a horse.

The power of three is more prevalent here:

one central spine with

two arms arising off of it from either side &

one central spine with

two legs extending off it from either side.

 

Just the idea of "core" implies something central - and something that is central would have something on either side of the central thing as well as  something above & below the central thing.

Finding this central spine in you is what first and foremost grants you access to your core -

then the core extends the lower center of you down into the ground &

                           suspends the upper center of you out the top of your head.

Threes within the three's:

I wrote in the previous post which is part two of the three, about how there are three triceps heads which attach to each scapula or shoulder blade.

This begins the action which grants wings which come off of either side of the thoracic spine and serve to suspend it off the lower spine & legs.

 

There is this same power of three in the hamstrings which connect up on to each sit bone:

there are three hamstrings on each leg, and when you connect them up to each sit bone, they serve to support the lower or lumbar spine.

So you have three in that there is one spine

supported by a pair of legs and

                            a pair of arms, 

  and you have three in that there are

three tricep heads and

three hamstrings

which are what connects those pairs of arms and pairs of legs

to that central line of spine.

 

 

 This is why the back is of utmost importance

to supporting the spine, 

much more so than the frontal abs -

which many people just pull in to

try to support the deep-underneath spine.

 

 And if you're interested in toning those hard-to-tone areas of

the undersides of the arms or the upper sides of the legs,

you really must get in touch with the truth of using

the triceps-to-scapula  and the hamstrings-to-sit-bones connections!

 

Thanks so much for reading!    Comments most welcome here!

 

Tim Driscoll, Backbone and Wingspan®

Backbone and Wingspan founder and owner

and author of Body Mind & Spine Align

is located on the Upper East Side at

Mind Your Body Pilates

1370 Lexington Avenue @ 90th Street

and at SPACE Pilates Yoga & Beyond in Bedford Hills

(formerly Studio Contour)

Tim can be reached at

212-647-8878

Call him today for info or find our about

his special intro rates for new clients!

Email: tim@backboneandwingspan.com

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