Weight Placement

Have you ever felt aches / pains / or moved in a certain way and felt strain or stress in the body and not known the cause? Although there can be many causes for such physical ailments, it is common that many derive from a lack of body knowledge and physical awareness about our posture and weight placement. This blog will break down how to help you learn more about correct weight placement to:

1)    To prevent injury, stress and strain

2)    To increase movement efficiency  

How To Stand:

This may of course sound rather basic however, the way we bare our weight when we stand is very important as this is the foundation of the way our body is being used. If we imagine parts of the body are like toy building blocks we want to ensure that the building blocks are correctly stacked to avoid the structure (us) tumbling down.

However, more commonly than not we don’t actually tumble down but we also don’t have the correct weight placement. Instead, when the building blocks are not correctly stacked and weight correctly distributed it can put stress/strain on part of the structure and that area may begin to compensate to avoid this tumble. Instead of complete collapse the body compensates and may begin to suffer from long term pain and injury which worsens over time. However, taking time to understand how to correct our weight placement can in the long term help our bodies to re-establish balance in the way they are structured. Lets jump feet first into this body discovery and work our way up to the top…

Feet First - Try This:

Imagine: Imagine you trace the shape of your foot onto a piece of paper. Within the traced shape draw a triangle with the point directed towards the heel. You can see there are 2 corners where the ball of the foot is and one corner where the heel is. If you place 3 small paper weights on the points of your triangle you can see that there is 2/3s of the weight placed in the front part of the foot evenly (between the big toe and little toe) and one part through the heel. Now, see if you can distribute your body weight in the same places as where you placed the paper weights

This is how we should bare weight through our feet with 2/3rds of weight equally across of the front and 1/3rd in the back

Ankles, Knees and Hips - Try This:

Imagine: Imagine that your feet are always hip width apart and on two parallel train tracks. The knees are pointing forward along the tracks and the hips are like the lights shining ahead directing the train forward. We want to maintain the balanced weight distribution already explored. However, you will be able to check if this is happening by imagining your train tracks are on sand, are they level or are the inside tracks falling in or are the outside tracks collapsing outwards? This means that we need equal weight on each foot so the weight on the inside and outside of the foot is equal.

‍

Upper Body - Try This:  

Imagine: If we go back to the weight placement of the feet you should find your chest is over the balls of your feet, but if we want to check you can imagine that there is a little string coming out of your chest and another coming out of centre of your forehead and both are being lightly pulled forwards.