|
|
Here’s a way literally to find a new life footing.
Bone strengthening and alignment give you a springy
step and ‘walking on air’ feeling. BFL is
billed as a program to help avoid or reverse osteoporosis,
which is now epidemic in the US, but its benefits go
further. We all move, but how many of us in this sedentary
society do so dynamically, with real joy of movement?
 In
a BFL class, you’ll learn safe ways to fall, jump,
lift light weights, run, sit, and especially walk. The
role model for efficient weight-bearing posture is African
women who carry heavy loads on their heads. They maintain
alignment, balance, and grace, with only five percent
of the bone fractures of Western women. The BFL version
of this walk aligns your skeleton so that you can feel
movement traveling from one end to the other, vertebra
by vertebra, like dominos in a line.
The idea is to direct a vibrational force through the
accurately aligned skeleton, which you accomplish by
creating pressure of hands or feet against walls or
floor, then checking what it feels like as the movement
ripples through you. Healthy bone building only happens
when we’re weight-bearing. This is why BFL has
proved useful to NASA in Texas, helping astronauts reverse
dramatic bone loss due to the experience of zero gravity.
Until recently, bone loss was widely misunderstood
as the province of the old, not the young and fit, and
assumed to be irreversible. The good news is that bones
can be regenerated. This has been demonstrated both
by astronauts’ recovery and in a 2004 study by
BFL originator Ruthy
Alon. After 60 hours of a BFL course, 50 percent
of the research sample showed bone growth.
Ruthy was one of Moshe Feldenkrais’ thirteen
original students in Israel and the first US pioneer
of his Method. In 1996 she carried those principles
into this program.
|
|
|
