4 Pillars Deep Dive
Pillar #1: Connection to Self, Part I
The Pillars:
Connection to Self
Energy Balance
Connection the World
Building Strong Movements
These pillars were developed with careful consideration of the most essential traits that make strong, resilient people. By design, we can always grow/shift in any of these components of strength — and once we step onto this path, the growth trajectory is limitless.
For most of us, we come to this work with a Health need…whether it’s to build strength in our movements, target chronic pain/stress, rehabilitate an area or lose body fat. After working in the Strength Space for over 25 years, it’s become abundantly clear, to me anyway, that in order to build it, you have to create the right type of environment within to support the work we do in the studio.
Winter is a great time to pause and integrate these training principles a bit deeper, and bring renewed focus to our practice in 2025.
These first 2 weeks will be bring focus to Pillar 1: Connection to Self.
The Jedi version is the simplest way I can articulate Pillar 1: Yoda tells Luke to use The Force.
What is The Force?
The Force is your Attention. How much you care to give attention + focus to yourself will correlate with how self-aware you can become. Your Self-Awareness is limitless. So then, the more you increase your self-awareness, the more you attune to your body/mind’s capacity.
(PS—I’d go so far as to argue that each one of us, should we develop our awareness enough, could, in fact, move the X-Wing out of the Degobah swamp with our mind like Luke did in Empire Strikes Back, but that is for another time!)
Unfortunately, our world is filled with distractions. They, too, are limitless and we’ve grown accustomed to trading our self-awareness for the awareness of what’s happening all around us. The Phone, perhaps, is the biggest Distractor in our current time, and with it, many of us have surrendered our Attention. And I’d say Attention is actually the currency of Health + Strength Capacity…
Proprioception + Interoception
There are 2 key ways you can invest your attention via Strength Training:
Proprioception and interoception are two sensory systems that help us understand our bodies and the world around us.
This week, we’ll focus on the former.
The word "proprioception" comes from the Latin words proprius, meaning "one's own," and capio or capere, meaning "to take" or "to grasp". Proprioception is the sense of body position and movement. It's the result of sensory information from receptors in the muscles, tendons, and joints, which the brain uses to determine the position of the body and limbs. Proprioception happens at the neural level and can sometimes be a heady topic to describe. But, all of us can understand this graphic I’ve used to explain it to children in the past:
This happens differently from one person to the next and has everything to do with your Nervous System and how you perceive via your senses. The more attention we bring to how our body moves in-space and senses effort, force or heaviness, the better chance we have to make the right neural connections to develop strong movement patterns.
In optimal situations, we use proprioception to get really present. Our mind + body are focused together to create solid movement articulations. Our ego isn’t interfering, our mind isn’t trailing off and our energy isn’t distracted or in a deficit (tired, hungry, under the influence for instance). This makes training a fantastic way to sharpen our senses + get really attuned to our body/mind.
We see proprioception interrupted (or can deteriorate) in various situations. To name a few common ones:
age (wear + tear, over time, on tissues and neural networks)
injury (acute trauma to an area or system)
non-use (this can be applied to cognitive functioning or specific regions of the body)
Nervous System Dysregulation (chronic stress of an affected area or neural network)
Chronic Inflammation (heavy gut inflammation, auto-immune or metabolic disease)
In a lot of ways, proprioception is the body’s unique method of communicating movement in the environment around us, while interoception is the communication method of the movement within us. The two work in-tandem, but we often focus on proprioception, since much of the work we do with our attention is outside of ourselves. While this makes perfect sense, as we live and work in The World, I’d argue it isn’t advisable to spend our attention outside of ourselves to the degree with which we do. Especially since our distractibility has been amplified with the current technologies and habits of our culture/society.
Further, many of our common afflictions’ symptoms (mentioned above and including aging), can be reduced with consistent proprioceptive training, alongside interoception. When we begin to think of these 2 sensory functions as communication systems, we deepen our Connection to Self and better-train a resilient, strong body/mind. Focusing our attention to the ways in which our body/mind works in the environment and under our skin is one of the bigger health hacks I currently know.
How is this specifically practiced in our Training?
All movement programs consider proprioception. They have to, since proprioception is automatically (non-consciously) used in any movement pattern. Our program, by design, seeks to make us conscious of how well we “propriocept”. It’s very intentional in all aspects, but let’s frame a few big ones.
Barefoot Training
The sole of the foot has a high density of mechanoreceptors. They are responsible for managing contact with the ground to communicate vital sensory information to the CNS about: standing, balance, force absorption + production. When we cover them + bind them with footwear we dull the communication network.
Breathwork to Begin
Paying attention to the movement of our Breath has deep affects on how we perceive everything — including movement — in our environment. We don’t breathe to wind down, we breathe to begin. It is the first movement we engage with every time we train. Stay tuned for a longer deep-dive into just breath mechanics/neuroscience in 2025, but for today’s purposes, it’s worth mentioning that breath as a movement is the way in-which our training considers breathing and becoming aware of how breath moves in our body, each time we train, is a way to focus our attention, sharpen our awareness + unite the body/mind into presence for our session.
Cues, Cues, Cues
I am simply a guide in your Strength Journey. I might see things about your body/mind that you don’t see, since my awareness is calibrated differently via training, education + experience. Though, you are the master of your body/mind and it’s my job to attune you to your highest, strongest Self, via the goals you’re hoping to accomplish together.
So, I’ve developed cues to get you connected to yourself in the most essential ways. This is guided by propriocetion/interoception pathways. The words of: “ground” or “foot focus” are related to the barefoot knowledge I shared above. Other cues like “manage your stack” or “foot to core” or “side-body/lats” are trained to get you closer to observing your core’s movement in space.
Environment
When we stop to consider the materials in our training space, you will notice a lot of texture. There are visual elements that sharpen our focus —metal, wood, black + silver. Our tactile elements stimulate different mechanoreceptors (for proprioception). We have two mats (one smooth and one rough), our step options have various cushion surfaces and the Pilates box, specifically, has a bumpy surface and is slightly sticky on the skin. Our free weights’ handles (and barbell) are made with a variety of thicknesses + knurl (raised bumps) on their surface. These stimulate hand/arm kinetic chains. Our banded movements (along with the Reformer straps) allow for a variety of proprioceptive connections. The Reformer itself challenges our perception of where our body is in space, with its moving “floor” and depending on which plane of motion we’re in.
Self-Study is The Work
Sometimes I wish I was Yoda, though I’d say we all have the capacity to be that fully-aware, Jedi Master of our own universe. No matter the tradition, all the wise leaders tell us to become present to our reality… and that deepening our purpose is the meaning of this life.
While I don’t think Strength Training is the Way of the Jedi Master necessarily, I do think finding a practice that consistently unites our body/mind in a world poised to steal your attention, is a worthy pursuit.
And I firmly believe that Strength Training with the essential foci (our PIllars in this case), can be the kind of discipline that elevates our lives into Growth Spaces we never knew existed. The only prerequisite is the passion for Self-Study. This kind of learning never ends. How exciting is that — to get to LIVE + LEARN, forever, about our body’s special design?
Stay tuned for next time, when we get to unite our awareness of Proprioception with Interoception. I’ll share some exciting information and exceptional tools to use outside of our formal training space.
In Strength + Gratitude,
Kate
