Why Paniculate?

Why Pandiculate and how does it reduce wear and tear on our body?

First of all, what the heck is pandiculate?

Pandiculate is a term used in somatic movement re-education that refers to the conscious voluntary contraction and lengthening of a muscle or muscle groups.  

Before we can understand what a pandiculation does, I need to explain a bit about how our nervous system and our muscles work together. 

We use our muscles all day every day, however we often are not conscious of how we are moving our bodies.  When we were babies our neuromuscular system learned how to move our bodies, and over time we gained motor control of our muscles which developed into a pattern of movement.  Our neuromuscular system, our sensory and motor cortex area of the brain was working very hard to create and co-ordinate our movements.   Once the sensory and motor cortex had repeated these patterns over and over again, they became habiuated and the control of these movements was shifted down to the sub-cortex and spinal cord reflexes because the higher learning centres in the brain had a lot more stuff to learn how to do.  Think of how you learned to print – at first you had to think about it, how to hold the pencil, how to form each letter, but soon it all became automatic.  This is how the brain learns – slowly and methodically.

Lets fast forward 15 to 30 to 60 years or so, we have been going along living our lives maybe not paying much attention to how all parts of our nervous system are doing as it has been humming along in the background the whole time responding to the environment we live in.  Telling our heart to beat faster or slower, telling our digestive organs what to do and telling our muscles what to do all with little conscious awareness from our higher cortex, our lives have become habituated and we don’t have to think much about how to move about our day.  But there is a lot more going on below the surface.

So how does our nervous system respond to the environment around us?  We have 5 senses that are constantly sending messages to our brain;  touch, hearing, taste, smell and sight, these senses are how we communicate with the world around us.  Our sensory input comes in through these senses to the spinal cord and brain, they then send signals to our body to deal with this input.  How our nervous system deals with this information is by perceiving the information as a threat or not – one of the main roles of our nervous system is survival.  All input is filtered through our autonomic nervous system which triggers either of two responses – fight or flight, or rest and digest – the stress response or the relaxation response.  In fight or flight we are on high alert and ready to run or pounce on the enemy – our brain cannot differentiate the trigger from a stressful deadline or being chased by a wild animal.  In the relaxation response we are all good, sitting in our easy chair enjoying the view, our brain tells all our systems that the threat is gone and our heightened state of fight or flight settles down.  How does this have anything to do with how we move our body?  Read on….

Thomas Hanna the founder of somatic movement recognized or at least popularized the theory that our neuromuscular system responds to stress via three common reflexes.  

The Green Light or Landau Reflex – think of standing at attention, ready to take action.

The Red Light or Startle Reflex – think of how we curl in around our heart when we are scared. 

The Trauma Reflex or Cringing Reflex a protective muscular response – think of turning away from a fastball thrown at you.  

Each of these reflexes creates a pattern of movement in the body that are neither good nor bad, they are reflexes that protect us or keep us going.  They happen as a result of true or perceived stress in our nervous system and happen without our conscious awareness.  How things go awry is when our nervous system is repeatedly triggered and the adaptive response is repeatedly triggered, our neuromuscular system is learning a new habit, the muscles stay slightly or strongly contracted and keep the body in the position of the reflex which holds the body in less than optimal alignment.  We carry this movement pattern into everything we do all day everyday.  Repetitive movement, Injury and recovery from injuries can also lead to chronic holding patterns, for example when we have a broken ankle and have had to walk with crutches, we changed our movement pattern and even though the ankle has healed and we can use it again, some of the movement pattern developed during our healing process can remain.  

Our body was designed to function in a particular way, in optimal alignment, and when it doesn’t it adapts, fortunately or we wouldn’t be moving much at all, but these whole body adaptations are also what can cause damage to our joints.  One of the funny things though is because we can continue on with our life we aren’t always aware of these habitual patterns and they just become a part of us, of how we move through life and we lose conscious control over some areas of our body.  Then when a problem arises in our knee, it maybe is not the initial problem but a result of a larger movement pattern, the knee is merely where the body is telling you something isn’t right.  We tend to focus on where the pain is, the knee, to resolve it’s problem but because these adaptations are whole body patterns, we must work on not only the knee but with the whole body – mind, neuromuscular system and the reflex patterns to realign the body into more optimal alignment.   It’s like getting at the root cause instead of just patching up the symptom.  

And finally this is where pandiculation comes in, pandiculation is a somatic movement technique that re-educates the body by working with conscious awareness that stimulates an area of the brain (the sensory cortex) to release the chronic contractions of the holding pattern.  It is through pandiculation that we regain conscious motor control of the muscles, release chronic muscular contraction and change the alignment of our body.  Thereby changing the way we bare weight through the knee by also addressing the root cause.  

Somatic movement or pandiculation is gentle movement that requires active participation from the client to create lasting change in the nervous system, as opposed to someone else acting on your body to change the muscle tone.  Generally somatic movement is designed to be done on the floor, however because of our adaptations throughout our lives not everyone is comfortable on the floor.  Somatic movement can be applied regardless of what position we are in, which makes somatic movement accessible to just about everyone.  

When I work with my clients I am helping them to understand and re-educate their whole body movement patterns, it is difficult to describe a session because every session is individualized because no two bodies present exactly the same way, there can be similarities but because we are individuals so are our symptoms.  What a session might look like is a thorough case history, a discussion around symptoms and goals, a postural and movement assessment, movement explorations including pandiculation and therapeutic exercises to isolate and activate particular muscle groups, we develop a treatment plan and a short home program to keep progressing.  Sessions with me do require active participation and a commitment to a home practice.   Since the work that I do is all within the scope of practice of Massage Therapy, you can claim my services under your Massage Therapy Benefits. 

Somatic movement re-education helps you decrease pain and move in healthier patterns in all your activities and is a compliment to the work that you may be doing with other health care professionals to progress you further.  I see clients privately and teach group classes focused on reducing chronic tension and building better movement patterns through somayoga therapy.  

Here’s a bit about me and how I became interested in learning about somatics and functional  movement. 

I became interested in yoga therapy and somatic movement as a result of an old injury causing me to alter my movement for many years.  Through the study and practices of somayoga therapy I was able to unwind the chronic holding patterns in my body that were contributing to my limited mobility and pain.  My massage therapy practice has evolved into offering movement based therapy to give my clients tools to re-educate their bodies, to self regulate and find reduced or pain free movement, enhancing their daily lives.  

Give a man a fish – and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish –  and you feed him for a lifetime.  

To find out more about my classes and services please visit my website www.healingtouchyogatherapy.com or drop me an email at theheaingtouch@tbaytel.net

I’m also on Facebook, The Healing Touch Yoga Therapy