happy knees – part 1
Hello! Long time, no blog posting, eh? 
This session my Nia classes are going to be all about creating healthy, happy, pleasure-full knees! Each class will focus on something (a body part, a way of moving, etc.) that (in some way) relates to knee health and keeping knees safe and happy (or reclaiming knee happiness)! Our bodies are amazing. And with our awareness and conscious intent (and sometimes help from a knee specialist) we can do things to help our bodies feel better (in Nia, we call this self-healing). In this way, movement has the ability to become good medicine, leading to less and less pain and more and more pleasure. This session is all about our amazing knee joints! I hope you will join me for a little Nia (knee–ahhhhhhh)!
So far, as we dance our dance, we’ve been focusing on paying attention to:
1) “Listening to the Sensations of our Knees.” What is your knee communicating to you? Is it in pain? If so, experiment a little bit. Is there anything you can change about your movement to decrease the pain and increase the sensation of pleasure?
2) “Choosing the Directions of our Toes.” What direction are your toes pointing? Are they pointing the direction you are wanting to go? Is the direction they are facing allowing your knee joint to hinge easily? Often we will want our feet parallel as we walk and sink into our stances. However, we also want to create pliable and adaptable knees. So every once in a while, we can also explore and play with turning our toes inward and outward to feed the joints, muscles, and connective tissues of our legs a little variety!
3) “Activating Whole Foot Support” – What part of your foot is supporting your body weight right now? Is your weight shifted more towards the inside of your foot? The outside? Across both? Where our weight shifts will greatly affect the entire ‘kinetic chain’ of muscles, ligaments, tendons, and fascia that run up the body. Most often, we will want to let our weight be supported by the “whole foot” (meaning the weight isn’t more towards the inside or outside, but somewhere comfortably in the middle). To find this, and keep the muscles of your whole foot (including the tissues that create your arches) fit and healthy, it may help to visualize “3 points” on the bottom of your feet (see image left). I like to visualize them as 3 prongs of an electrical plug. Then, by plugging in our “3 points” to imaginary sockets on the floor, we can keep our movement grounded and condition the arches of our feet which will affect everything above them (including our knees!).
4) “Exploring Three Planes of Movement” – We want strong, mobile, and flexible knee joints. We therefore want to be sure to include 3 planes of movement as we dance. To do this, we seek pleasure and explore dancing through and sliding among the High, Middle, and Low planes. This encourages us to move along the vertical line (to and away from the floor). This conditions our leg muscles and joints for strength and mobility, and also is a great way to increase our cardiovascular fitness conditioning as it is a way to increase the effort needed to move without any jogging or jumping. As they say “if you don’t use it, you lose it!” The good news, is that even if we have lost it, we can still get it back. We just want to make sure that we do so while seeking pleasure in the body. Over time (as long as we choose to stay with pleasure) our legs will get stronger and stronger.
5) “Sensing the Power of Grounded Heels” – When we walk forward we want to activate the “heel lead” technique to absorb the impact of the step and engage the muscles along the back of the legs. When we sink and rise in our stances (for example, a deep A-Stance) we want to push down through our heels to rise up (imagine pushing the floor away). This will help to engage the large, strong muscles along the back of the legs and hips, and thereby decrease the effort required by the knees and the quadriceps (muscles along the front of the legs).
Stay tuned for more tips for creating happy dancing knees in Nia (knee-aaaaaahhhhh) class.
