Muscle Chains

This is it! Chuck’s miracle cure for most of your technique aliments. You’ll move better, your body will enjoy it, and you’ll look awesome. But for it to work, you must learn some theory…

The model you have for your body and how it works effects understanding of how things work and how to fix things. The better the model, the easier it is to fix things. And for doing dance well and having some really fantastic natural-animalistic-juicy-yummy movement you need to have a better model.

Without directly talking about the muscle chains, most of good body movement technique is based on it. You can see it in the technique of weight-lifting, ballet, modern, jazz, ballroom, latin, yoga, and gyrotonics.

Simple Model

You were probably taught this in high-school. Muscles are connected to bones, muscles pull across a joint to move the bones. Not a bad simple model. If you understand that stressing a muscle (exercise, lifting weights, etc) will cause injury and then rebuilding will change it (make it bigger, or stronger, or more shaped, or faster, or more coordinated) then you can apply that practically. Understanding that different types of exercise/stress will cause different types of rebuilding allows you to be very specific about your development.

So, with the simple model and a bit of knowledge you can go a long way. But to develop further you need a more complex model of how things work.

Basic muscle chains

Muscles don’t actually exist on their own, one by one, just connecting and pulling one bone to another. Muscles always exist in a chain of connective tissue – kind of like a string of sausages before they’ve been cut apart. At the points where the sausage links come together to a point is where the muscle ties down to a bone. Or even more appropriately wraps around the bone at that point.

There are six really basic muscle chains to know about at first.

1. The front chain. The front chain starts on the top of the foot at the toes, goes across the top of the foot, up the front of the legs, up the front of the abdomen up to the top of the sternum and then from the sternum to the ears through the sternocleidomastoid and then wraps up at the crown of the head.

2. The back chain. The back chain starts at the bottom of the foot at the toes, goes across the bottom of the foot and then up the back of the legs, up the back along the spine through the erector spinae and then wraps over the top of the head to end at the eyebrows.

3. The lateral chains (left and right). These chains start on the side of the foot, run up the side of the legs, along the side of the torso through the inner and outer obliques and up the sides of the neck.

4. The spiral chains. These chains start at the back of the skull, wrap around the torso like a giant sash and then wrap around the leg of the side of the skull they started on, wrap around the middle of the bottom of the foot like a stirrup and then return to their origin at the skull along the back of the body.

5. The back arm chain. The back arm chain starts at the spine, goes through the latisimus dorsi to the shoulder, through the triceps to the elbow and then along wrist flexors out to the hand.

6. The front arm chain. The front arm chain starts at the sternum, goes through the pectorals to the shoulders, through the biceps to the elbows and through wrist flexors out to the hand.

So what? How do I apply that? How does that get me natural movement?

One, you need to know the old saying – practice makes perfect – or the other common version – perfect practice makes perfect – or whatever version you subscribe to. To give a little more detail – every time you do a physical action you build a pathway from your mind to your muscle – sort of like walking a path in a field. Every time you do that action you body builds a better wire to signal it, like the path in the field gets worn each time it is walked. It becomes the default path or action that you do. (Don’t waste your time thinking about technique when you perform, build your path in your practice well before and show your character and life and expression when you perform!)

Now let’s start to look at some aspects of applying the chain.

Misbalanced use of a single chain

Ideally for nice natural movement you will activate all the muscles along the chain roughly equally. If one muscle is over activated it will pull on the rest of the chain and reduce effectiveness elsewhere in the chain.

A good example is the arm chains where people tend to way over use the muscles in the forearm or the muscles in the elbow to shoulder region. This can lead to a really horrible jerky forceful uncomfortable feeling of connection (for both latin and standard). Often the correction teachers give for this is to pull the shoulder blade down (activating the latissimus dorsi) or just simply activating the lat muscle. (Sometimes a correction to activate the pectoral muscles more.) A good start! Correcting the highest nail, it will inch the student along closer to the overall good feeling. If the student doesn’t fall into the trap of focusing on details but on how does that one correction help fit into the best overall feeling then we’ll probably end up in the right place.

How about the problem of students not pointing their feet as their leg swings forward in latin? Note the top of the foot and forward hip flexor are part of the same muscle chain. What if we could get that student to use the psoas (not part of the front chain) to swing the leg forward and relax the front part of the quadricept? Oh! suddenly the top of the ankle is relaxed and a beautiful point is easy.

Misbalanced use of a chain against its opposite chain

The front chain can work in opposition against the back chain. The lateral chains can work against the other lateral chain on the opposite side. The front arm chain works against the back arm chain.

Nice posture is a fantastic example of the back and front chain in opposition. Imagine for a minute the feeling of being forward on your feet, heels touching the floor but just that touching. (As one Blackpool lecturer put it, “your heels touch the floor as if you’re kissing your mother-in-law”). In this position the bottom of the feet activate – the start of the back chain. If you were back-weighted (like so many people are these days) with weight in the heel you cut off the activation through the bottom of the feet. The entire back chain is slack at one point and can no longer work in an efficient manner.

If we are in a forward weighted position, with the bottom of our feet active, now the back chain starts to pull and be able to be active together. The back of the calves activate and we can start to get a feel of straightening our knees without locking them (locking the knees is sign of activating the front chain and not the back). And we can start to find a better position of the hip. One where the front muscles and back muscles can work at the same time, balancing the body and allowing nice freedom of movement through the hip socket. (Have tight hips? learn to stand nicer! :) ) Once the hips are in a nice spot we can continue to work this front back balance all the way up through the body. The back releases it’s tension, the rib-cage – it becomes easier to breathe, the head settles back into a nice position that allows for easy turning.

It’s like a miracle drug! Just finding the proper balance between front and back chains. Imagine nicer more natural bounce in Jive, freer action through the torso for rumba and samba, better jumping ability, easier freer movement to the upper body. If you’re doing ballet, better plie’s, better releve’s, better transitions between all of them.

 

Further Reading…

The Anatomy Trains