The iceberg metaphor for the performance-stiffness-injury continuum is particularly elegant - it captures something that's often missed in both clinical and athletic contexts: that pain is rarely the first signal of dysfunction, merely the loudest.
What's fascinating about your "on-axis" hip case study is the bilateral asymmetry pattern - one hip anteriorly displaced, the other posteriorly. This suggests compensatory adaptation rather than simple bilateral deficit. The body's attempt to maintain center of mass balance created opposing inefficiencies.
The 15-25 seconds per mile improvement post-treatment is remarkable, but what's more interesting is the mechanism: you didn't add strength or aerobic capacity, you simply removed mechanical friction from the system. This speaks to how much performance potential gets locked away in positional inefficiency.
Curious about the temporal stability of these corrections - in your experience, does the on-axis positioning tend to regress without concurrent stability work, or do athletes naturally maintain the improved pattern once they've experienced the efficiency gains?
Hip flexor fall back is my favorite thing ever! Has helped me so much
The iceberg metaphor for the performance-stiffness-injury continuum is particularly elegant - it captures something that's often missed in both clinical and athletic contexts: that pain is rarely the first signal of dysfunction, merely the loudest.
What's fascinating about your "on-axis" hip case study is the bilateral asymmetry pattern - one hip anteriorly displaced, the other posteriorly. This suggests compensatory adaptation rather than simple bilateral deficit. The body's attempt to maintain center of mass balance created opposing inefficiencies.
The 15-25 seconds per mile improvement post-treatment is remarkable, but what's more interesting is the mechanism: you didn't add strength or aerobic capacity, you simply removed mechanical friction from the system. This speaks to how much performance potential gets locked away in positional inefficiency.
Curious about the temporal stability of these corrections - in your experience, does the on-axis positioning tend to regress without concurrent stability work, or do athletes naturally maintain the improved pattern once they've experienced the efficiency gains?
I see that bilateral asymmetry a lot, but uncertain why. In his case: it could be from a lot of track running (always left turns).
But many have this without a blatant loading imbalance.
I suspect the driver is pelvic (and that, thoracic and above).
As such, maintenance depends on:
• correcting the driver (head, neck, ribs) and,
• hip and pelvic stability to learn to “move” (/function) on axis.
thanks for the comment!