Introduction to "I am Will's Body" muscle function series

Many, many years ago, Reader's Digest published an amazing set of articles by J.D Radcliffe. These articles were originally entitled "The body and how it works." This series of articles took a very different look at the body as the author would become the body part, like the heart or liver, and speak in the first person, as the organ. Wonderful. It was such a new way at looking at the body. Instead of memorizing facts about the heart, it was if the heart was talking to the reader in a an autobiographical way. These articles were published later as "I am Joe's body". Here's the first paragraph of the Liver article:

"Joe frets about his teeth, hair, lungs, heart; he is hardly aware of my existence. I am Joe’s liver.* When he thinks of me at all, he has no trouble visualizing me. I look like what I am supposed to look like-liver. The largest organ in his body, I weigh three pounds. Protected by ribs, I pretty well fill the upper right part of Joe’s abdomen"

What a cool way at looking at the body, huh? If you want to read the whole thing go here: http://www.happyrobot.net/words/ornith.asp?r=4430

Two years ago, I when I entered the GIFT program at the prestigious Gray Institute, we had to learn to look at the body in a different way than what the text books taught us. Gary Gray, PT in his wisdom, decided to take a page out of Reader's Digest and "intransformalized" into various muscles of the body. He would become the hamstrings or the abdominals, and speak in the same first person voice that J.D Radcliffe did so many years ago with "I am Joe's body".

I tend to look for "out of the box" ways to do things and I thought this was an absolutely fantastic way of learning about muscles. Sitting down and trying to remember the origin, insertion, innervation and actions of the muscles is BORING to me. I had to do it as I went through my massage school program, but I didn't enjoy it. One of the Principles of Function is that FUNCTION IS FUN!

In "I am Will's Body", I will borrow from my mentor Gary and his "mentor" J.D Radcliffe and become various muscles. We will talk about origins, insertions, innervations and actions but in a 3-D functional and FUN way.

During GIFT, I anticipated the weekly webcasts on the muscles. I wanted to see the cool way that Gary presented each money in his very UNUSUAL way of presenting muscles.

What I think I took from the mental exercise of not only understanding the muscles better, was that I started to actually intransformalize into the muscle to really become acquainted with it. The old quote of "if you want to know me, walk a mile in my shoes" is apprpopriate here. As you walk a mile in the shoes of the soleus, quadriceps, abdominals, etc, I hope you will begin to appreciate them more.

Look for the first entry next week!!!!!!!

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Happy Thursday!
Thanks!

Will