I was introduced into myfascial work and the writings of Robert Schleip during my Pilates teacher training, and I have found that it gives me focus and perspective on my own efforts to age gracefully.

I have been involved in a long-term effort to reconfigure my gait after years of sitting and walking badly left me with a right foot that didn’t work and lots of other problems. Now, in the light my my readings in Schleip’s “Fascia in Sport and Movement”, I can see that what I am doing is reconfiguring the tensegrity network that supports my right ankle in particular and walking in general.

It has been a long an sometimes painful process. I have been asking my body to move in ways that it hasn’t done for a long time, but my ligaments, muscles, and tendons had become used to doing it one way and do a lot of complaining about my treatment of them. Heck, sometimes if I listened to everything my foot was telling me I wouldn’t be doing any walking at all!