Guts
For the intents of this post, guts will refer to your internal organs. On the fringes of movement-based medicine there are those that study visceral movement, gut movement. Manipulation of this aspect of anatomy has been studied for quite a while, however, it has fallen into the “witchcraft” folder of medical interventions. Interestingly, when organs fail, they have stopped moving. They are no longer producing new cells, or they are no longer pumping blood effectively, or maybe they aren’t expanding enough to take in oxygen sufficiently. We can’t see them in daily life, making their presence and effects marginalized until they don’t show up for work.
Our guts move like a bowl of water due to their high percentage of water content. Imagine turning from the stove toward the sink with a pot of freshly boiled pasta. As you turn to dump the water into a strainer, the water kind of lags behind in the process. It sloshes up against one side of the pot. This may be how your guts move with every step you take. Every movement you make, your abdominal contents lag slightly behind due to their high concentration of water. You can leverage this effect by allowing them to slosh around until they are in just the right place and then push off your guts to move forward. This may be why baseball hitters often wiggle around in the box before a pitch comes. They are attempting to pressurize their internals, so their swing brings some power.
Imagine “the blob” the huge, inflated toy that people use in lakes to launch themselves in the air. As one person awaits ejection, another person jumps and lands on the opposite end of the blob, compressing it and expanding the other side where the passenger resides. That energy transfer propels the rider in the air for a glorious experience. That mechanism of propulsion may be happening every time we make a move. Our musculature and connective tissues compress one aspect of our body, expanding another and propelling us forward.
Your guts are a powerful provider of movement. They are ignored by most practitioners outside of internal disease specialists, but they may have a massive impact on our movement capabilities. Consider their role the next time you hit the gym, and you may never think about motion the same way.
Austin Ulrich, Physical Therapist
