The Layers of the Back - Spine Extension
AKA - The muscles that create a backbend
Happy Friday! For kicks I figured I’d share a fun little take on Moment’s Notice by Steve Lehman. It’s been on repeat for the last few weeks for me.
Last Time on the Blogsss
I’ve been sharing various anatomical drawings with BODACIOUS COLORS lately. The purpose behind these drawings is to build your sense of how you are structured so that your Inner Sherlock can have a better sense of what you are feeling and how you can theoretically move. These drawings are being done in line with FM Alexander’s directions:
Allow the neck to be free so that
The weight of the head balances forward and up relative to the top of the spine so that
The spine may come to its greatest length and the torso its greatest volume so that
The knees are forward and away from the hips so that
etc..
I don’t include all of the anatomical directions above for brevity. You can always check out my older post for a more complete read.
The drawings I’m sharing for the torso divide the back functionally into 3 chunks:
Breathing
The spine
The other bits and bobs
Last week, I shared a view of the spinal musculature that highlighted the voice:
This week, I’m showing you the view of the spinal musculature from the back!
The muscles highlighted above are active when you go into a backbend (spinal extension). Notice that they start at your skull and travel all the way down to the hip. They start and end with a narrow width and grow quite wide as the muscles grow around the ribs.
If you look closely at the drawings, you will see that the purple muscles have little pink and white lines within them. These lines depict the length of the muscle fibres. In my post Bone X Muscle X Bone, I talked about how muscle fibres expand in 2 directions at once. You can see in the drawing above that the muscles along the back of the spine lengthen in a generally vertical manner.
These little lines matter. If you attempt to think about these muscles widening out, you will fail. If you attempt to imagine too much width in your ribs and you accidentally get that widening imagination into these muscles, you will lock up in the back. This is something you are welcome (and encouraged) to try on your own in your next lie down!
One thing that I have not depicted - yet - is the depth of these muscles. The muscles around the lumbar spine are actually quite thick. One of the things that can happen when we over arch the back and cram tension into the hips is that these lower back muscles get extremely short, tight, and thin. We’ll go over ways to lengthen this area in the future, but for now you should have a little wonder about this whole length and ask yourself if you can slowly feel the quality of the entire length. I suspect this would take roughly 5 minutes of quiet. Just remember to start the technique at the beginning before you try this out:
STOP
Allow yourself to sense you fatigue
Do not freeze any fibre of yourself
Allow expansion
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