1-day workshop ‘Understanding the Human Foot and Pelvis’

We are very excited to bring you this *BRAND NEW* and exclusive to St Ives 1-day workshop with James Earls and Owen Lewis of Born to Move, exploring their specialist subjects, the human foot and pelvis.

While each will have its moments of glory, the day is about more than either the foot or the pelvis in isolation. It is a day of bringing anatomy alive to generate a deeper appreciation of both areas and how they interrelate with the rest of the body.

Throughout the morning and the afternoon, as well as journeys into the detail of the foot and the pelvis, James and Owen will keep bringing the conversation back to where each part fits in the wider picture of human movement in the real world, where gravity, momentum and ground force reaction influence every action we take.

You will get hands-on, learn new vocabulary, and practice new assessments, but most importantly you will build a greater picture of how the body really moves.

What you can expect

In the morning: Understanding the Human Foot with James Earls

Bring the book and your feet alive with this half-day immersive dive into the four dimensions of the human foot!

Not only will we explore the relationship and interplay between bones, muscles and joints to give you the ability to assess the foot, and design appropriate interventions based on your findings, we will use the foot as a lens through which to view the rest of the body, bringing you a functional tensegrity understanding of the role that this wonderful structure plays in human movement.

You will learn:

• how the foot moves between supination and pronation to provide a rigid lever and mobile adaptor;
• to assess and improve toe extension and why you might need to do this for hip and low back issues;
• how and why to apply a range of exercises that can significantly improve your clients’ foot, and overall movement, function.

In the afternoon: Understanding the Human Pelvis with Owen Lewis

After a morning rooted in understanding the foot, in the afternoon we turn our attention to the pelvic triad – the pelvis, the hip and the sacroiliac joint (SIJ).

The sacral bone – the seat of the soul, the keystone of human architecture – is central to our understanding of movement, anatomy, and force transfer.

And, as you will have learned during the morning spent on the foot, in the context of the entire body, the pelvic triad allows a wider perspective into the whole system.

Our focus on the pelvis will enhance your clinical reasoning and decision making skills in your hands-on and movement based interactions with your clients.

You will learn:

• practical skills to identify a rotation from a torsion and the implications of this on the whole body;
• to assess the interplay between the pelvis, the hip and the SIJ;
• to predict how making changes to the pelvic triad could bring significant improvements for back, neck and foot issues.

All this in just 1 day!

We really could not have two better, more informed, and more passionate speakers on the subjects of the human foot and pelvis – and particularly on how they relate to each other, and to the rest of the body in motion – than James and Owen.

As with all Born To Move’s workshops, this day is about discovery, interaction and getting hands-on. Arrive with your curiosity turned up to 10, ready to play, to move and explore. You will leave at the end of the day genuinely inspired and ready to embrace movement in your practice with greater clarity and confidence.

About your teachers

James Earls is a writer, lecturer and bodyworker whose relaxed and humorous style of sharing his learning finds audiences across a wide spectrum of manual therapy and movement professionals. James is an anatomy nerd and his extraordinary capacity to draw on his own extensive experience and education and skilfully distil it into a gentle and meaningful ‘so what?’ often leaves his students, rather than baffled by the detail, with the eerie feeling that they knew it all along.

Understanding the anatomy, the mechanics, and the logic of the language of anatomy of the foot, James believes, is a key to appreciating the rest of the body in movement. James spent 2020’s lockdowns writing his 3^rd book, ‘Understanding the Human Foot,’ which builds on his earlier book, ‘Born to Walk.’ Both books manage to drill down into the detail of the remarkable human body and explore the bigger picture using principles of functional and comparative anatomy - explaining and accurately describing the way the foot moves and how it relates to the rest of the moving body.

James combines comparative anatomy, fascial continuities, force continuity and transfer, elastic recoil, and more in his study of the foot, to arrive at a beautiful demonstration of its grace in steering upright human movement.

Owen Lewis is a highly educated and experienced clinician, educator and, most recently, writer in the field of human movement. He is a philosophy nerd, a big lover of art, poetry, anatomy and sport, and a very clever man. The way Owen sees the world through all these lenses at once is fascinating. The way he blends language and examples from each field to draw parallels and metaphors to help explain the subjects he teaches is truly wondrous. His unique teaching style enhances his students’ cognitive uptake by stimulating unexpected, often non-linear, connections in their minds, leading them to embody the learning at a deep level individually meaningful to them.

Owen recently finished writing his first book, bringing his polymath approach to the subject of ‘the core’ as well as the latest research and evidence surrounding it. He has a particular interest in the pelvis – the hub of the body, its very centre – and takes great delight in expounding upon its beauty and significance as the major load-bearing, force transferring structure in the human body.