Katy Bowman - Alignment Matters: The First Five Years of Katy Says

ALIGNMENT MATTERS

THE FIRST FIVE YEARS OF KATY SAYS

KATY BOWMAN, M.S.

ALIGNMENT MATTERS

THE FIRST FIVE YEARS OF KATY SAYS

KATY BOWMAN, M.S.

Copyright Katy Bowman 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2013

ISBN 978-0-9896539-0-9

Propriometrics Press
2419 E. Harbor Blvd. #130
Ventura, CA 93001

wwww.propriometricspress.com

Cover and Interior Design: Zsofi Koller, www.tangerinesky.com
Author photo: Nancy DeLucrezia

The information in this book should not be used for diagnosis or treatment, or as a substitute for professional medical care. Please consult with your health care provider prior to attempting any treatment on yourself or another individual.

Publishers Cataloging-In-Publication Data
(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

Bowman, Katy.

Alignment matters : the first five years of Katy Says / Katy Bowman.

p. : ill. ; cm.

Includes index.

ISBN: 978-0-9896539-0-9

1. Posture. 2. Human mechanics. 3. Human locomotion. 4. Physical fitness. 5. Chronic pain--Treatment. 6. Essays. I. Title.

RA781.5.B69 2013

613.7/8

To the Alpha RES Warriors:

Nancy Burns
Brian Campbell
Ann Gallimore
Breena Maggio
Patricia Pasternak
Diane Rennell
Karen Sullivan
Roxanne VanPelt

They took a chance on a course and affected the course of many.

Alignment Matters is a collection of blog posts from 2007 to 2011. It is not just the good ones. Weve put the bad posts in as well. Weve organized them to make the content easy to search when you have a question.

My blog has no rhyme or reason when it comes to organization. I post on whatever inspires me. Some days it is the pelvis, and some days I write about the hair follicles inside the nose. And, because there are years of posts, to read through it strictly chronologically is a challenge. Through the miracle of super-duper editing, you can now sit and read through years of posts organized into chapters by topic (and chronologically within chapters). And, if youre looking for something in particular, you can search the chapter names or the super-awesome index. By using these tools, you can easily find the topics that interest you.

In 2007 I started a blog. I didnt know what a blog was, but like many things I dont understand completely, I began enthusiastically. I posted twice, and then nothing, until 2008. At that point in my career as a biomechanist, I was on my third Restorative Exercise facility and was teaching fifty new individuals a week. Our alignment specialist certification program (Restorative Exercise Specialist) had been going on for two years. There were a lot of people who had been exposed to a very simple but profound idea: Alignment Matters.

Posture and alignment have been components of various treatments, like physiotherapy, for a long time, but significant issues persist. The biggest is that there is no standard set of measures for evaluating body position. Well, there is, actually, but the language is so unspecific that even those trained in the science of anatomical position have become very casual in their assessment and as a result have lost the precision that the bodys geometry truly requires.

There came a point in my academic career when, after designing and testing a (very successful) program for reducing risk factors for pelvic floor disorder, my professors sat me down. Would you like to do research full-time? Because people are going to start calling you to come to their university once your information is out.

Now, you have to realize that I have a veryinsanely, actuallyhigh level of respect for science. Science, logic, and mathematical proof are beacons for me. But because I had participated in the academic scene for a few years, I was aware that most researchand I really mean most of itis never dispensed for actual use. You may see a pop-culture magazine pull some of it out to misreport on, but thats it. There is no standard practice of health professionals going to research journals to figure out how to better be a practitioner. There is no requirement that you stay up-to-date on research. To participate in academia in that way for the prestige of being published was not what I wanted then, and its not what I want today.

So I declined the traditional academic route and decided to take science directly to the people who need it. And because I found a huge lack of science education in the general population (even in health professionals), I decided to create a program that would teach biomechanics and how to apply it, today, to anyone who wanted to learn.

Teaching people directly was a success. It turns out that there are millions of people who want to be better, but dont know how. And their ability to know the difference between something that makes sense and something that just doesnt feel right is keen.

Once youre exposed to a very specific, mathematical approach to the functions of the body, everything begins to make sensethe pain. The injury. The cramping. The birthing outcome.

My methods of objectively quantifying body position are so simple that anyone can learn them. Which, in this age of health care, is extremely important. People should know how to evaluate and repair themselvesand, better yet, know how to use their bodies in a way that prevents the affluent ailments. It is through my career pathmy time at university, my interest in all things scientific, the many people who had questions, and my passion for offering simple-yet-specific lessonsthat this blog was born.

I was never, and still am not, a reader of much online. I dabble here and there, of course, usually when searching for answers to questions like: Why is there blood in my stool? (Answered, always, about six minutes into the search: Because you ate beets last night.) So I can understand how so many people stumble onto my blog. If youre looking into the body, the information is theresomewhere.

The KatySays blog was not started as an income generator and still isnt a few years later. I dont do advertising. Ill refer you to the right exercise DVD or program that Ive already createdbut this is because the information you seek is much more complex than my blog-time can handle. The blog is still my favorite hobby. The posts have absolutely no form whatsoever. Some are two hundred words and some are three thousand. Every once in a while I will post heavily referenced scientific papers of mine and sometimes there are videos of me teaching a hip movement in a dinosaur costume. Each is a genuine representation of me, and how I am in regular life.