Ahhh the sophistication of the simple. Give the PEN TEST a try, and see how well your feet are pronating. No high tech required. Just get a little feely with a pen and a wedge.
One of my biggest take-aways from the Anatomy in Motion course was how to properly assess, experience, and guide others through foot pronation.
Back in my pre-AiM days, in 2015, I didn't really know anything about feet. I was still teaching towel scrunches and generic calf stretches, and telling people to push their knees out while going up the stairs... And I certainly could not have appreciated how foot pronation is a three dimensional movement, let alone a movement that was actually beneficial for the body.
So how do you know that you're pronating well? What should it look like?
Most of us intuitively know that in pronation the arch goes down and the pressure rolls to the inside edge of the foot, but the detail within that movement is incredible and far too nuanced to fit into a quick social media post (which is why teaching foot mechanics takes HOURS and DAYS in the AiM courses).
For simplicity, I wanted to make a video to demonstrate one of the assessments we use in AiM to introduce people to the observation of foot pronation in SAGITTAL PLANE, i.e. looking at the foot from the side and watching the arch go down and up.
Introducing the PEN TEST.
Use the pen as a gauge to see if your foot gets longer when you bend your knee. If it does, there's a good chance you are pronating well. Go you!
In this video I show you how to do the pen test, and then a few examples of how you can use a foot wedge to help you succeed at a good quality pronation.
As you will see, my foot doesn't lengthen and push the pen initially, but I get a lot of benefit from a heel wedge to help it plantar flex. I wonder which wedge position will be most useful for you?
Keep in mind this is just looking at one plane of motion... Not a complete assessment of pronation, but a good place to start.
In the A
An integral part of the AiM process is to bring awareness to where we feel the pressure under our feet.
I really like this clip that captures my attempt at explaining WHY I care so much about documenting peoples' foot pressures, and why that's where we started with our assessment.
Your foot pressure is a representation of where your entire body may be resting in space.
Gary Ward, creator of AiM, had access to a force plate early in his development of the Flow Motion Model of gait, which gave him objective data about people's static alignment on top of their feet, but he was also curious in peoples' subjective sense of where they put weight in their feet because it provided valuable information that also helped his clients gain self awareness and better help themselves.
I don't have high tech equipment, but I'm always interested in helping people make sense of their foot pressures and how to interpret them in accessible, low tech ways.
If the goal is to have your body as centered as possible so it can access it's movement mechanics evenly on the right and left, in each footstep, then a "perfect" body would feel equal pressure on both feet.
As with any subjective assessment, the data from your own foot pressure scan isn't perfect, but when tracked over time it gives us information to help us understand what mechanics might be missing from your body, why things hurt, and what to do about it.
Have you checked in with your foot pressure lately? What does it say about your body?
If you're curious to learn more I'm always happy to chat, or better yet, set up a movement session online or in-person to be taken through an assessment process to help you understand your body from the feet up.
Shoot me a message if you want to know more, or book in a session with me in Melbourne at EsoLab
I was once labeled by a chiropractor as a “complicated” case, meaning that the exercises he gave me to do that usually helped people didn’t work for me, and it left him stumped as to what to do to help me with my chronic back pain.
Have you been there, too? Have you struggled with “mystery” pains of your own that conventional corrective exercises, stretching, and therapies don’t seem to help with, or only provide temporary relief?
As a former dancer, I understood that movement got me into the mess I was in, and I reasoned that therefore movement could get me out of it. Years of dancing through injuries my body had learned new, compensatory ways of moving around my problems. This ended up causing more new problems and pain in the process, on top of my original issues.
Only 22 when I "retired" from dancing, riddled with chronic symptoms, and without any budget for therapy, I embarked on a quest for the truth of how a human body actually is supposed to move.
Fast forward through 15 years of learning, exploration and experimentation, I've stumbled into my own unique style of helping bodies that blends two of the most effective and fascinating tools that have helped my own body become free from pain: Craniosacral therapy and Anatomy in Motion.
Anatomy in Motion (AiM) is a map of how a body should move that helped me to understand WHY things felt so bad in my body- My body was NOT moving according to this map. This is what made my case seem so complicated. But only because the practitioners I was seeing didn’t have this holistic map. They were using the conventional approach of considering body parts separately from the whole, in isolation, not in the full body context of gait. Stretching and strengthening muscles, but not considering the ability for my joints to access all the movements they should be naturally able to.
With a map to follow, I was inspired, and I learned that I could be my own best therapist as I explored how to restore my gait mech
This was a fun moment from the Anatomy in Motion Flow Motion Model course I taught in Toronto in November 2024.
What I love about teaching these courses in person is how we work with what is present in the room: What comes up in assessment becomes what we get to learn. Every course is so different because of the diversity between human bodies!
In this case, after a gait analysis, we were drawn to Leslie's left wrist, which was limited in extension and external rotation.
He was also missing a host of left suspension phase mechanics, which all became more accessible if we simply gave him back the missing left wrist motions.
We started the movement exploration of his left wrist in quadruped, and someone asked, "Can you use the 'foot wedges' for hands, too?". Hell yeah you can. You can use them for whatever creative intentions you desire as long as they support the mechanics you're trying to accomplish.
The wedge, in this case, helped to give Leslie's hand full contact on the ground so he could articulate the bones of his hand and wrist.
We then did a few reps of left suspension and got a pretty cool outcome in his gait before and after video as a result of this simple exploration.
If you'd like to learn more about gait mechanics and how to use Anatomy in Motion assessments and exercises, I will be teaching several courses this year in Toronto and Melbourne.
Check out the link to the 2025 AiM course calendar here: https://findingcentre.co.uk/aim-education-calendar/
Hope your hands, feet, and bodies are off to a good start so far this 2025!
#garywardsanatomyinmotion #flowmotionmodel #gaitanalysis
Went to Sole Mechanics in Melbourne last week and took part in their free foot assessment. Part of the process included getting to wear Arion inserts to see a representation of my base of support movement through each foot while wearing different shoes.
Something interesting I discovered about my right foot was how my center of mass actually travels laterally after making initial heel contact, instead of travelling medially. Can you see it?
In the Flow Motion Model, what we'd like to see is the center of mass travel from posterior lateral heel contact in strike phase (supination) to anterior medial pressure in suspension phase as the foot pronates. Clearly my foot doesn't do this and it's cool to get some empirical representation of it that I can monitor over time.
Been a while since I've had a little gait analysis case study to share, but here we go again! The theme... KNEE MECHANICS! Always a fun topic in AiM land.
The AiM full body assessment method includes gait and posture analysis. We can collect a lot of info about the whole body and the most difficult part sometimes is avoiding overwhelm and finding a logical place to start! I find that a useful heuristic is to get curious about body parts that rest in a discombobulated static state.
Case in point: Jay's right knee (thank you Jay for donating your body for this case study). I've worked with Jay online a few times and he is an avid AiM student himself. His main complaint at the time of this video was his right medial knee.
His knee appears to rest in a static position of extension with femur internal rotation. This is a red flag as the knee should not, in motion, use this combination of mechanics if it wants to be healthy.
This got me wondering about the dynamic movement potential of his right knee in gait, and could this be related to his right medial knee discomfort?
Can his knee flex with femur IR and extend with femur ER?
In this little snippet from the full 25 min gait analysis video I wanted to highlight the static alignment of his knee and the interesting way his knee presented in gait (which was not what I was expecting).
We went on to do an online movement exploration session to investigate whether his right knee mechanics were something we needed to address, and the answer was YES, his static knee alignment was interfering with mechanics of his knee in gait, as well as things higher up the chain.
I hope you find this little case study useful and inspires you to look at knees more closely.
If you want to learn more about closed chain joint mechanics and gait analysis, I think you'll love diving into the Anatomy in Motion course materials.
I'll be teaching a few courses in Toronto and Melbourne this year and we'll get right into knee mechanics (and
Do you walk on your toes?
This week's featured Project GaitWay model is Ethel, who wanted to submit her video stating: "People say I have a funny hoppy walk."
Well, that funny "hoppy-ness" might be what we're seeing here in this video clip:
Ethel walks toe-heel (on one foot anyway), instead of heel-toe. She completely misses heel strike! Very interesting...
Interestingly, Ethel's main complaint is nervy discomfort on her LEFT leg. Hmm... What's going on?
We could make a theory up about how the quality of how she's entering her right leg is not set up to be trustworthy- Shock absorption mechanics not functioning as well as they could.
And we could speculate that she might "overuse" her left leg, to state it very generically, because it is the one which may have better supportive mechanics.
Some questions I would ask, and want to assess:
- How long have you been a toe walker? And are you aware of that?
- Any injury history on your left leg?
- Is your right foot able to pronate well? Is your right leg able to receive your weight with the correct mechanics to absorb the shock?
We would have to look into her injury history and do some movement investigations to learn more about where to begin working.
Anyone here have insights about being a, or working with, toe walkers?? Would love to hear what that was like, and how you worked with it. Please share :)
As always, gait analysis leaves me with more questions than answers. A story that may be impossible to fully understand. But lots to explore.
Check out the full gait analysis on my Youtube channel for Ethel as part of Project GaitWay: https://youtu.be/dK523ln1PnM
She will soon post her full injury history in the comments... I can't wait to read what she lists down so I can cross reference it with her gait findings and appease my curious mind.
PS I am still looking for more people to participate. Want me to look at your gait video? Shoot me a message and I can tell you more about Project GaitWay.
#Anatom
Turns out, in all my years dancing, I've never been taught how to properly point my feet... Which means, I also never had the prerequisites to actually go on pointe safely. How about you?
But I'm learning now with Esther Juon of Juon Pointe
Here she is guiding me through some basics: How to point my foot without my toes going crazy and srunching so i can learn to properly use the intrinsic foot muscles.
I went on pointe when I was 13 or 14, and as I am now learning, I did NOT have the standards of foot/ankle mobility, control, and strength. Where were you, Esther, when I was 13???
Esther is a dance educator in NZ who has a mission to empower young dancers to make better informed, healthier choices about how to use their bodies.
She has observed over many many years how most dance teachers actually don't teach dancers HOW to properly use their feet or get properly fitted in pointe shoes, which can lead to a lot of problems with their bodies down the line.
Esther believes that if your feet are functioning well and your shoes are fitted correctly, pointe work SHOULD NOT BE PAINFUL. I wish someone told me that...
Her story is also amazingly inspiring in that she was told she would never walk again after a back injury when she was 18.
If you are a dancer or dance educator or parent of a dancer who is preparing to go on pointe, or already IS on pointe, I can't recommend Esther's mentoring highly enough. I'm really excited to see how I progress through her exercises.
#pointeshoes #footstrength #dancerfeet
#pointeshoefitting #pointyfeet #balletfeet
Knee pain sucks.
And like any other body part, it's pain resolution is a process of restoring access to it's complete set of options for joint motion, in correct sequencing with other body parts, in a way that feels safe.
AND... You don't need to have an advanced understanding of joint biomechanics to do it :)
Your knee is a relatively simple, 2D joint (made complicated by biomechanists who've attempted to define what it does disparate of their own embodied understanding of it...)
A healthy knee must be able to do these things:
1) Knee bends + femur rotates in + foot pronates
2) Knee straightens + femur rotates out + foot supinates
If you don't feel these happening, it would not be surprising if your knees are unhappy with you ;)
And, if you followed the video, you'll have the basic understanding that:
A) A pronated foot will prevent a knee from fully extending
B) A foot that CANNOT pronate will not allow a knee to bend
My intention is to clarify and make simple the complexities of learning biomechanics, so that anyone can benefit from healthier movement. This can only be done by actually experiencing your anatomy.
In the words of Gary Ward, of Anatomy in Motion: Expose yourself to the truth of human movement, then let that experience create the learning.
When we try to understand movement ONLY with our intellect, our body doesn't learn.
But if the body learns first, no words or intellectualization is necessary for real knowing. Words can be added later to faciliate communication (which is useful, considering all the confusion!)
Remember, learning is not the same thing as knowing :)
This clip is an excerpt from a 60 min Movement Deep Dive I did last week on knee mechanics for my Liberated Body students. If you liked this little tidbit, you may enjoy the complete 4 day workshop. More info about that here: monikavolkmar.com/liberated-body-workshop
The most basic/advanced concept for setting your body free
Just some thoughts on what I feel to be the most fundamental and yet most advanced concept to work with for all DIY movement detectives learning to change the way they move
4 Things You Should Know About Your Sacroiliac Joint
In this quick video you'll learn 4 things I think you should know about the SI joint to help you make better choices for exercises for it:
1. What the heck is the SI joint anyway?
2. How much movement does the SIJ actually have?
3. What primary purpose does SIJ motion serve in gait (walking)?
4. What two simple terms can we use to name SIJ movement that even a 10 year old can understand?
This is the intro clip from my full 90 minute Troubleshooting the SI Joint (part 1) Movement Deep Dive session. You can see the full clip as a member of my onine movement learning platform. Learn more about becoming part of the movement fam here: www.monikavolkmar.com/movement-education. I do a live MDD session every week to support my amazing students on their DIY movement detective journeys :)
Stay tuned for clips from part 2 and 3 in the next few weeks. Subscribe to my Youtube channel to get notified when I upload new videos (every week, if I'm on my A game).
Did you learn something new from watching this video? Was it simple enough, but not too simple? Did you see my video from yesterday with the dynamic SIJ assessments??
Let me know what you think in the comments :) Like and share this video with your movement pals (or pals who could use a bit more movement education).
Anatomy in Motion instructor and bodyworker. Forever a student of movement. Located in Melbourne, Australia.
