Six years ago, as I was driving down the street, I witnessed a very elderly man fall onto the sidewalk. I pulled over to help. Fortunately, he was okay. He told me that any time he would walk on a surface with any downward slope he would find that his momentum would pick up speed and that he would eventually fall forward onto his knees. He stated that his legs & feet did not have the ability to stop him when he was walking down even the slightest slope.

As I pondered this situation over the next three days I realized that the solution to this man's problem was really very simple. He had lost the ability to push-off with the ball of his foot, (our bodies breaking action when we are going down hill), and if he were to strengthen his calf muscle in a push off pattern he could easily regain the ability to regulate his speed and be able to stop himself when walking on a mild downward slope.

As I came to understand this man's problem, I began to think about how the foot and ankle's relationship to the ground was the starting place for our body's ability to balance when moving, as well as our being upright as a biological species. I began to understand that this important fundamental pattern breaks down in a variety of ways, depending on individual history, and causes a weakening, or mild sloppiness, in our extremely refined balance mechanism. Not at a level to cause us to fall, but significant enough to stress, over the years, the body's structural organization of balance.

This additional stress to the working relationship between our Central Nervous System and our Musculo-Skeletal System, makes us weaker and less coordinated, but on levels too subtle for us to notice with our normal daily awareness. As this pattern weakens due to injury, long-term sitting and aging, the ability of the human body to lift up with gravity and organize movement actually becomes less effective.

By activating and re-setting the Central Nervous Systems' genetic ability to organize movement in gravity we facilitate a higher level of teamwork in the organization of movement, which then can perform in a more coordinated and stronger fashion.