Why Lever Mechanics Don’t Explain Human Movement

Welcome to the Joanne Averson Podcast. Thank you, thank you, thank you for all the comments that I received from last week's podcast where I responded to. uh a kind of a letter that had been put through my YouTube channel responding to comments about Fasha. And saying that basically I'd got some of my facts wrong because I didn't realise that the bony system in the human body is in fact linear.

And the responses I got were a big mixture of gratitude and emails saying thank you so much for clarifying so many of the terms. And terminology and bodywork kind of fascinates me. Um I think being a storyteller, I'm very fascinated about words. And I'm currently working on my next book. Not sure what it's going to be called exactly, but really it's about.

archetypes, motion archetypes, movement archetypes, how we move our bodies and how the fascial matrix has these different styles, these archetypal patterns of being. I'm very excited about it. And some of the pieces in it, I've really sought to find a language that is super clear and dynamic and understandable and makes sense to people, but is grounded in some really thorough research, but I don't want to make the book researchy. I want the book to feel very accessible immediately.

And it presents a bit of a conundrum because one of the comments that I received on YouTube about the piece I did defining areas of fashion very specifically was this lovely person said It was so great to say this is what it is and this is what it's not. But it was still word salad. And I did laugh because my first book, when it went to second edition, had a dedication. And

The dedication was to my dad. Now I'm gonna go into producing some episodes for everybody that really define some of the words that are used around describing the human body, not just the fascia, but things that relate to it, because their meaning is so meaningful. And the English language can be very flat. It's capable of being very brilliant, but it's capable also of being very flat. It doesn't have the quality of nuance.

That some languages have. And I want to give you an example of this because my dedication to my dad. who was very special in my life, partly because well, a load of reasons, but partly because he was an engineer. And as an engineer he was absolutely dedicated, archetypally he was an engineer, not just his career, he it was in his soul, was to make things work and ask how do they work?

And as a young man he was a fighter pilot in nineteen forty eight. And oh my goodness me, did he love his aeroplanes?

Now why is that relevant to us in the study of fascia in the human body and understanding it? Well, basically Whatever way you study the human body, it was historically reduced to mechanical language because when anatomy developed It developed during a period of time that was in the Renaissance or I mean, it had started before that, but during the Renaissance Mae'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw

the uh burgeoning power and understanding of science, real scientific thought and reasoning in the West was growing. And for all sorts of reasons, anatomy and movement were studied kind of separately. But under the banner of mechanical function. So the word mechanics has been related to the movement of the human body ever since. And for me there's been something profoundly rewarding.

and valuable in going back to the roots of words and asking why do we use those words? Why do we use that language? And one of the words in studying fascia and movement has always been mechanics. And of course we put the term bio in front of it. I say we'cause we're kind of all responsible for this, but We put the word bio in front of it and it's like, Oh great, it's biomechanics but when you drill it down

to it being based on the fact that when you bend your elbow, that's a lever, and when you bend your wrist, that's a lever. And there are different classes of levers. It's an interesting conundrum. You're gonna ask what's this got to do with my dad, but I'll tell you in a sec. I went to my father and I said What is the definition of a lever?

And his answer to me, he he was fabulous. He loved being asked questions. He was an absolute storyteller, makes me look like kindergarten. And he went off and got the definition and came back. And he said to me, the definition of a lever. It's a two-bar open chain. It's a two bar open chain with a pin joint so it moves in one plane. That's the information you need. And I said, well that doesn't make any sense to me.

And he said, What do you mean? Like, you know, I can't. Who am I to question an encyclopedia and all his training of God knows how many years, decades? And he said, Well, that's the definition. And I said, But it doesn't make any sense of the human body. And he said, Well, what what would you call a lever in the human body? And I said, Well, every joint in the human body. He said, Well, why are they called joints?

And I said, Well, that's a very good question, because the word joint is actually short for pin joint. And an open two bar chain, or a two bar open chain, as the definition was that he gave me, means a flat piece of something that's got another flat piece of something joined with a pin So they can move open and closed as two open bars, meaning they're open at the other end. So that definition actually means.

that these two bars are pin jointed together so they can move and kind of pivot around that central pin joint, but they're open at both ends. And I just said, Where's the open other end? My father looked at me like I was bonkers. And he said, What do you mean? And I said, Well we describe every angle in the human body. as a pin joint, or a joint, a lever. It's got a you know, there's classifications of them'cause they

They aren't levers, and all the descriptions of whether they are or not involve very complicated ways of describing pin joints. There aren't any pin joints. And he looked at me and he said, Well, there's nothing that's got an open two bar chain in it. There's no Like if you think about the elbow, you you could argue that the end of the fingers, there's nothing after that, but the other end, the shoulder, is continuous with the torso, hopefully. You get my dilemma.

Now, it's no small task taking on the language of biomechanics. Because there's a lot of people very devoted to it and they're very devoted to Borelli, who came up with the idea of levers, as far as I can work out. That might not be accurate. But the Borelli Award for Biomechanics is still given to people coming up with theories like upright inverted pendulums and how the spine works, which make absolutely zero zero sense.

of how an integrated architecture grows embryologically into the thing that becomes the spine in the body. It doesn't make any sense'cause it all happens in the round. The body's round. Every limb is a tube. The torso is a tube. The heart is a tube. Honestly, spiraled together.

And there's videos on that which I'm gonna incorporate at a later date and share with you beautiful work that John Sharkey did for me. He's a clinical anatomist, if you don't know. Look him up on my podcast. He's brilliant. And he personally knew Terence Wasp, a very brilliant surgeon who worked out that the heart is in fact a spiral tube, spiral tube. It's a complex way of seeing it, but John knows how to do the specific dissection that reveals it.

So you are literally a tubular network made of tubular networks and that changes everything to do. with the word lever. There are no levers in nonlinear biologic forms.

It's the wrong formula for a living human body. It's all we've got, because that's what we've spent the last 400 years working on. But when you think about it, there was a lot of hundreds of years thought that the earth was at the centre of our galaxy. And a gentleman called Copernicus had a theory that the sun was at the centre of our galaxy. You might ask, who cares?

Well, the truth of the matter is that in the seventeen hundreds, eighteen hundreds, and that's the period that we're talking about here that anatomy developed. What basically happened was the microscope and the telescope were developing at the same time. Obviously, zooming in and zooming out, the ability to see what you zoomed into in the body, and the ability to see what you zoomed out to in the galaxy and the universe out there of the stars was fascinating.

So people were building instruments that enabled you to see these extremes. And Galileo Galilei, who was a very brilliant mind, decided to study the galaxy and consider the possibility that Copernicus was right. So the complex mathematics that explained the relationship of the planets, the celestial bodies, to each other, If the earth was considered to be the central celestial body, was super complicated, didn't make much sense. and were argued over in academia.

And when Galileo suggested, dared to suggest, that mathematically, all of those scholarly theories became irrelevant, when it was accepted that Copernicus was right. And the sun is at the center of our galaxy because then the same mathematical formula gave you all the planets because.

the whole thing was based on three hundred and sixty degrees of roundness and relationship as volume of space, as it were. And if the sun was at the centre there was only One kind of calculation that was needed because the central focus that everything else orbited around was the sun, not the earth.

It got complicated because people didn't work out what the center point was. Now Galileo was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life because it was considered heresy at the time, but I believe he had he knew the Pope or something, so he was placed under house arrest rather than being put on trial for setting. heresy, which is what it was considered to be in that time. And it took some time for it to be accepted that the sun was the center of the orbits of all the other planets.

Seems it's taking a very long time to discover that the heart is the central theme of the growing embryo. Everyone thinks it's the brain, and of course the heart feeds the brain so that it grows. We're heart centred. It's quite extraordinary when you study it. But anyway, the point of this story is that the discovery that the sun was at the center of our galaxy, making us a heliocentric galaxy rather than a geocentric galaxy, was just too much to bear at the time.

Now, the idea that the human body has no levers in it, because we're nonlinear biologic forms, actually means it has no lines either. We're nonlinear by definition. We're round. So when we talk about the front body or the back body or the side body. Or the upper half or the lower half, what are we talking about? It's a round tube and it has a toroidal energy field. Where's the straight?

Where's the symmetry when we divide it in half? In any of the traditional planes, transverse, coronal, sagittal, the front and the back are completely unlike each other. The left and the right side don't match. Don't know about you, but my liver's on my right not my left. My heart is tilted.

And of course when we cut the body in half across the middle the transverse plane, the top half is nothing like the lower half. And the point of sharing all of this with you Back to my dad, who gave me the engineering definition of a lever, and between the two of us we couldn't work out for love nor money. why a lever is associated with human motion, when everything in the human body is predicated on spirals, down to the very fibre of the fascia, the movement of the arms, the legs,

everything. The fabric of the fabric is triple helical, which means it's three spiral tubes spiraled together and then there's three of them spiraled together to form a vassal

kind of thread throughout the body and all the architecture of the body is made of that, it kind of calls for a new language in my world. Because the bodies that I work with and the bodies that I move with and the bodies that I treat and teach and am treated and taught by are all animated. They're all living biologic forms that are nonlinear. And they're animated by their anima animus. They are animated by their, call it a spirit or their energy or their beingness.

And That's far more complex in its animation and its forming and it ability to transform and perform than anything I've found in any biomechanical book anywhere. It's very easy to obfuscate knowledge with long words. The definition of obfuscate is to obscure. It means to obscure something. And sometimes I meet people who want not to explain something to me so that I understand it. They want to obfuscate it so that I don't. Then I have to go to them to learn it. And...

Sometimes we can use words like word salad, I guess. To obfuscate things and sometimes we can use words to clarify things. So I'm gonna finish this little baby rant with what I wrote to my dad, the dedication in my book. To Daddy Billy William, your last words to me on this side of the veil carried me through this second edition. Thank you for teaching me so very fundamentally to love learning and to learn lovingly and with laughter every day. You could not bear segregation of any sort.

And to that end my guiding light has been a dedication to wholeness of body, mind and being, which in living, breathing, life on earth are not segregated either. They only appear so in our inherited anatomy book. The mystical principle that the one and the all is the same is emerging in these twenty twenties, and with it the new ways of understanding our living bodies. I dedicate this effort to explaining that, scientifically and in practice, with love, light, and the sound of laughter.

I love you for teaching me at the age of six this poem. Scintillate, scintillate, global vivific, Fain would I fathom thy nature specific, Loftily poised in the ether capacious, Strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous. And for reminding me it is this nursery rhyme. It just depends how you say it, right, Pops? Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are, up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.

Anyway, thank you for listening and thank you for your responses. I deeply appreciate them. Bigger space out.