New: MONTHLY MOBILITY CHALLENGE: Each month I am going to designate a mobility movement pattern as the month’s challenge. If you’re new to the movement, the challenge will be to learn and begin using the movement pattern to enhance your joint and muscle health, motor control, activity levels, and overall wellness. If you’re already incorporating this mobility exercise into your routine, we’ll find ways to enhance the mobility exercise to get even more value from the exercise.
May Mobility Challenge: Segmental Cat-Cow
Segmental Cat-Cow is the Cat-Cow you may or may not know from the world of Yoga, but with an added emphasis on motor control of each lumbar and thoracic spinal segment. So, rather than just globally rounding and arching the spine, the segmental Cat-Cow asks you to move one joint at a time until the rounded spine and arched spine end points are reached.
(Tip: If you don’t know what a pelvic tilt movement pattern is, then we need to work on this together, because the pelvic tilt movement is what gets the lumbar spine moving, and lumbar spine movement is often left out of the typical global cat-cow pattern)
We’ll be working on this movement pattern all month (and forever). Of course, the reason you visit me this month will be the priority (pain relief, other areas of the body), but I’ll be making sure to highlight this mobility pattern. Why did I start this new monthly mobility pattern challenge with the Cat-Cow? Because the spine is so incredibly important to your movement, and the most often injured, stiff, arthritic area of the body.
Use the following two videos from my YouTube Channel as a primer for getting started.
Below is an old video (from my previous office) of my segmental cat-cow:
And, another old video breaks down the segmental cat-cow into the lumbar portion and thoracic portion, before putting them together into the full segmental cat-cow: