Zombies

What would this season be without Zombies scrounging around for those sweet sweet brains

Zombies… Scary, slow-moving, likes to eat brains and underrepresented in blogs about massage for some reason. From the point of view of a bodyworker,  someone trying to make biomechanical movements more fluid, zombies provide an excellent bad example in how not to move.

When we think of the iconic zombie walk what comes to mind? Probably a slow repetitive walk where most of the body stays rigid. The body parts that do move, move in an accentuated way to compensate for all the stuck gangrenous tissue a healthy zombie has. Maybe the right foot is lifted off the ground by the torso bending to the left. The left foot propelled forward only by the weight of the right side falling. Why is this stagger associated with how the undead walks? I think while we may not like to admit it, this lethargic stumble is a bit too relatable to us. Think about a long week. Think of the last long day of this burdensome week. Think about the last grueling hour of that long day when the clock seems to mock us. Now let's think about how we walk home after that week. Our shoulders slouched down, our spine curling toward the ground. Our feet lifting off the ground just enough for our bodies to fall forward. 

Now before we correct ourselves out of shame, let us explore our zombie pose. It will be different for everyone. It will show us where we have been injured, where we are overworked, where we are weak. Notice whether our feet have an equal distribution of weight on them. Whether our hips are centered over our hips. Are our shoulder slouch over and are our arms internally rotated. Does our neck crane forward? Now let's move a bit and explore our zombie walk. What muscles are stuck, What muscles strain to move more than their share of the weight. 

As we all know a zombies diet is ketogenic, they eat fatty brains. A brain is the centralized metropolis of nerve cells housed in the skull, but we have nerve cells throughout our body. There are neural ganglia in the heart, we have a complicated system of neurons in the Gastrointestinal tract ( our enteric nervous system ), and every muscle fibers in our body can only be activated when a nerve sparks it awake. Cinematic zombies eat mostly delicious brains from the neck up.  Our inner zombie, the one that comes alive after we exhaust ourselves, will chew away at our efferent (motor) neuron. It will limit our movement options to a pattern that will cause repetitive strain over time. 

But If we learn anything from zombie movies aside from no matter how tempting it is don’t go in the basement, and yes the chemical company across town dumped leaky buckets of toxic waste in the reservoir, it's that we all need to remain calm. Yes, we all have an inner zombie. We can freak out and will our bodies to be aligned for a moment, but how long can we keep this pose. We can instead show a little love to our inner zombie. We can explore where we are compromised, where our life has impacted us. We can see how our inner zombie grew out of our movement choices. We can begin to negotiate with our inner zombie. What do we need to stretch, what is in pain, are there parts of our bodies that are stuck in trauma. Our inner zombie knows all of this and only wants to share this knowledge with us.  

        Anthony Bruni