Muscle Balance & Posture ~

Ideally, muscles not required to perform a movement should not be involved. But are there any such isolated movement ? Just lifting your arm to the side causes subtle changes throughout the body. Your breathing pattern changes slightly, and even the muscles of the legs need to adjust. Muscles stabilize one part of the body against the movement of another and constantly perform midmovement corrections to maintain balance. All these actions should happen efficiently without excess strain.

Dynamic alignment helps you achieve this goal by balancing the muscles in your neutral position. I have already pointed out the importance of well-balanced first-class levels for alignment. To simply for clarity, muscles acting on a bone can be visualized as a tent or drape attached over a central pole. If the muscles
are tight, the bone is held rigidly in place. If the muscles are flaccid, the bone sways and lack control. If the muscles are imbalanced (tight on one side of the joint and flaccid on the other), the bone loses alignment. Ideally, the muscles should be neither too tight nor too flaccid.

Can alignment be corrected by strengthening some muscles and weakening others ? To create balance,
you could lengthen a habitually shortened muscle and strengthen a weak one. A good knowledge of muscle function is necessary for improving balance with such exercises, and even then success will be limited to creating a temporary and rough balance.

Unless you recognize and adjust your basic habits, body image, and movement patterns, you are going to reinforce your old imbalances indefinitely. You don't want your training to improve what you are trying to change, Our Yi Xue method 4-step process  will help you to create steps in the right direction.

Discovering Muscle Imbalances

There are several ways to begin noticing muscle imbalances in your body. One is simply to palpate an area on one side of the body and compare it in muscle thickness and density to the same area on the other side.

The neck is a good place to start because you might hold your head slightly to one side. Put your fingers on both sides of your neck and see if you notice any differences between the muscles on the left and right sides. Compare you findings with your preferred motions of the head : Does it seem more normal to tilt the head slightly to the right or to the left ? Does it seem more normal to turn  the head to the right  or to the left to look behind you ?

Usually, if you prefer to look to the right, that is also your better turning side in dance, influencing muscle chains all the way down to the feet.

Noticing Differences in Perceived Muscle Effort

Another way to detect muscle imbalances is to stand up from a chair and sit down again. Put your right leg in front and your left in back and stand up and sit down again. Repeat with your left in front and your right leg in back. Do this very slowly and notice the differences between the sides.

Catch yourself during the day and watch how you stand up and sit down. Most likely you use similar patterns and reinforce them continuously. Also notice differences in muscle effort by altering the position of your legs. What is it like to stand up and sit down with your legs medially rotated, laterally rotated, and in parallel ?

How Movement Habits Create Muscle Imbalances

In sport, dance and exercise, it is important to be equally strong on both sides of the body. Balance of strength may be more important than overall strength when creating optimal movement technique and lifelong musculoskeletal health. You are usually aware of which is your better supporting leg and which leg is better in extension, and you sometimes try to correct the situation. But if your only action is to strengthen and stretch, and you don't attempt to change your movement habits, you will not be entirely successful. Don't work in your alignment only during training.

I have observed that when students listen to the instruction during the course, their true alignment patterns often emerge, patterns that are surprisingly different from their exercise alignment. True improvement in alignment is not possible by focusing on and artificially maintaining alignment only during a specific situation ~