"Herald's teaching and his e-book's information has had a huge positive impact on my understanding of the usage and relationship of the feet throughout the whole self. I use it every day, be that in walking, dancing or doing Yoga. I now no longer suffer from pain in my hips, amazing!" This testimonial was posted by a woman I worked with one-on-one and who bought my e-book afterwards. I worked with her in ways which are illustrated in still photos and in two videos within the e-book. I worked with deepening her femur bones into the sockets in an upright seated position as well as with her lying-down with a stability ball under her heels. These were not-so-much exercises as activities - which involved teaching her how to place her palms on her thighs and how to use contact and directional force, as well as gravity, to create the healing relationship of the ball-shaped head of the thigh bone deepening into the domed hip socket - all the while focusing her mind on the spherical shapes of her heels to initiate the connection. You'll learn in this posting from images, anatomical relationship descriptions and watching a video how this woman could glean an understanding of her heels which greatly affected a healing in her hips. Continue reading

We're all forwardly driven and frontally obsessed with ourselves, and because of faulty postural phrases like "stand up straight," the muscles of the front body are overtaxed and tight. In the e-book High Heel Healing: Using the Feet & Legs Efficiently for Improving Posture and Enhancing Exercise & Sports is a concise craft, honing in on the heels, to help people release muscle tension, joint pain, and tight tendons in hips, backs, and even necks. Expanding the heels back and wide, with subtle force, is the most crucial space-creating action anyone can do. This small but sustainable action initiates access to support because it releases over-tightened tendons in the front of the foot, granting people the postural-potential of easing the entire overworked frontal body to then engage the entire back body system of muscles residing on either side of the spine. The heel expands the sole to support the spine. Continue reading

Although the new e-book: High Heel Healing: Using Feet and Legs Efficiently for Improving Posture and Enhancing Exercise and Sports includes hundreds of images - from photos to composites and overlay illustrations, some of which are interactive, there are also twelve two-minute videos showing the foot function and foot alignment principles of the e-book - demonstrating the principles in action and motion. The videos include exercises, activities or stretches with a stability ball, a roller under the knees, a latex strap over the heel of the foot & with the soles of the feet over a Pilates reformer footbar - some moves are performed seated, some stretches are demonstrated lying-down and some of the postural principles are expounded upon and fully-delineated while the body is in upright walking - even in high heels. Continue reading

Even though you may feel muscle straining or connective tissue tightening in many different parts of the leg or hip - perhaps tight quads or tight hip flexors or tight I.T.B. - iliotibial band - tight hamstrings are probably the most common occurrence especially with runners - when you learn to deepen the thigh bone into the hip socket - this femur-to-hip relationship will help improve whatever stretches you perform - plus, the better-function of the legs and hip joints will strengthen your gait and even enhance your stamina and improve your endurance. The High Heel Healing: Using the Feet & Legs Efficiently for Improving Posture and Enhancing Exercise & Sports E-book leads you step-by-step - on every page the text is aligned with corresponding images - to assist you in understanding how to deepen the ball-shaped thigh bone into the domed hip socket. You learn activities lying down with a roller under the knees or a stability ball under the heels to help utilize the rounded-shape of the heels into a surface to sense relationship of heel-to-hamstrings-to-hips. Then you take the connections you forge while lying-down and use them in upright posture and active sports. Continue reading

People tend to perceive their bodies primarily on the vertical plane - especially when we are in an upright posture - standing, walking, running - even cycling. The vertical line is top-to-bottom or up-and-down, and our bodies - with our long leg lines and a spine - reside very much in this up-and-down line or plane. However, the feet are neither primarily vertical nor horizontal - the feet are primarily on the front-to-back plane. So perhaps you might realize how it could be that the soles of the feet - being the parts of the body closest to the floor - would be what largely determines stability in the body. No matter how much you pull the abs in to try to stabilize between the front and back of your self, you'll not find an ease in posture or agility in active sports unless your feet are useful-of this front-to-back - or depth - or what we'll now start to call - the sagittal plane. Continue reading

Feet are one of the most misunderstood and misaligned parts of the body. It's quite a challenge to direct fitness or Pilates class participants in how to use the feet more efficiently when people may be more concerned with elongating the legs or deepening the abdominals. The heels - being the backside of the feet - have relationship to many other points in the back body system: the heels have a triangular relationship to the tail bone which helps stabilize the sacrum and elongate lumbar vertebrae.The heels have a relationship to the sacroiliac joints - which are actually the top of the ilium bones and grant someone a sense of feeling the leg lines above the butt. The sacroiliac joints are also the lower attachment of the latissimus dorsi - through its connective tissue - how the heels are used helps low back support. Continue reading

The ballet exercise tendu is even more important to foot function for posture support than is the much-more well-known plié. I learned tendu in terms of resisting with the heel as the foot and leg extend. It's as if someone keeps drawing the heel back as the bottom of the foot slides forward along the floor from full-sole contact - to ball - to the pointed toes. You learn to "lever" the heel back when performing any type of exercise or movement that involves the feet and legs. The "lever"-age of the heel back - even if the foot and the leg and rest of the body are moving forward - is crucial to maintaining an alignment for connection to the back body muscles which support the spine. Continue reading

Despite that sitting is often perceived and practiced as a non-exertive posture, if you're working at a desk or computer, you need support. Actually, there's more need for stability in sitting than there is in standing or walking.This is because you must sustain a sitting posture for a long period. However, stability is often misconstrued as holding the body in place - people squeeze or grip in attempts to stabilize the body in exercise positions or yoga poses. Both men and women will find advice, activities, stretches and movements to learn better support and stability for the body in any type of shoe or in barefoot exercise such as Pilates and yoga. The improved support you find can then be taken into sports or running & cycling - and of course walking, climbing stairs & sitting at a computer. Continue reading

High Heel Healing: Using the Feet & Legs Efficiently for Improving Posture and Enhancing Exercise & Sports, an enhanced and interactive e-book by Herald from Backbone and Wingspan isn't "sole"-ly for women - or even just for women who wear high heels. There are many stretches for tight calves and bulky hamstrings and for releasing the ITB or IlioTibialBand which men will get great benefit from. As well, there is much information on plantar fasciitis: and using the hamstrings strength efficiently for such pedestrian activities as climbing stairs, and of course, creating an elongated spinal line for improved posture, which comes from well-aligning the heels with the paired points along the back body. Continue reading

The subtitle for this comprehensive e-book is: Using the Feet & Legs Efficiently for Improving Posture and Enhancing Exercise & Sports. The foot function and spinal support information works for anyone - male or female - in any sort of shoe - or even in bare feet practices like Pilates and yoga classes. Learning how the heels relate to the backs of the hips, the glutes and the muscles which make up the lower back area on either side of the lumbar vertebrae makes all the difference in how well you'll be able to deal with painful sciatica and other lower back issues. If you learn how to align the heels so that the pelvic halves slightly expand on either side of the sacrum, you gain better lumbar spine length and support and better access the deepest abdominal layer - the transverse abdominis. Continue reading

If you experience foot pain, low back discomfort or aching hip joints from wearing high heel footwear, a new High Heel Healing e-book is being published in October 2014 with eight chapters of detailed information on better foot function for improved posture and pain relief for joints of the ankles, knees, hips and & all parts of the back. The heels of the feet are the lower parts of what's known in certain physical fitness circles, yoga disciplines and movement studies as the back body. The heels align with the great supportive strength of the hamstrings muscles as well as having more skeletally-structural-supportive relation to the important points of the pelvic structure including sits bones and the backs of the hips which align on either side of the central spine. Understanding the back body and how the strength of the back muscles serve to support the spine has been focus of the work of Tim Driscoll from Backbone and Wingspan for over eighteen years. Now within this new e-book - and with Driscoll's new name as an author - Herald - he details and pictorially illustrates as well as illuminates through eight instructive videos how to use the feet, particularly the heels - to better support the body in high heels - or really any type of footwear. Continue reading

Whether you practice pliés in a ballet class or squats or leg presses at the gym or if you perform chair pose in yoga, if you learn to lead from the heel when you bend or when you extend the legs, then the ankle joint will become spacious so the shin and the calf flow downward and then the legs won't be pushing back into a straight-hard-locked position, but rather will elongate into a true extension and your legs will be lengthened above and below the knee. This elongated extension of the leg is very different than straightening. Continue reading

Wearing high heel foot wear can be detrimental to health and wellness, whether it be through basic foot pain or from potential injurious effects to feet that have long-term or even surgical consequences. Every few months, there is an article printed or posted online which describes how not only from fashion magazines, but The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and even Forbes have readers from all "walks of life" who suffer from foot pain and seek relief! Continue reading

For women who experience foot pain, back pain or hip pain from wearing high heels, it's a pretty obvious prescription to put your feet up in order to deal with the afflictions of tired, sore, and aching feet or exhausted, tight, and straining legs. But if you use a ball to cradle your calves and hug your hamstrings rather than the typical putting your legs up the wall, besides the obvious relief from taking a load off your feet, the stability ball support and rubbery resilience will assist in releasing tight calf muscles as well as hamstrings because when the heels have a giving surface to sink into the calves will be able to unravel through a spacious ankle joint and the hamstrings, which tend to get tight down towards the knee, can instead flow down with gravity towards the stable sit bones. This is because the heels are located along the same backside body as the calves and hamstrings, so when the heels release and deepen into the ball, so can all the rest of the back body muscles. Continue reading

When you take a look at the bottom of your foot, or do some sole searching, you can clearly detect three parts: the ball, the arch, and the heel, and then you can further see how each of these parts relates to each other as well as how each part relates to the ankle above. Continue reading

In this segment is a New York City podiatrist who performed a high heel intervention on one of her patients juxtaposed with Tim Driscoll of Backbone and Wingspan working with a client from Mind Your Body Fitness on the Upper East Side performing with her aspects of the High Heel Recovery he has developed over the past two years. In comparing intervention to recovery what Tim sometimes says is that High Heel Recovery is not about abstinence! Continue reading

The high heel recovery principles help fashion-conscious women survive screaming heels not only day-to-day, but also in avoiding serious long-term health risks. Walk in high heels with pain free feet and support for posture ! Engage and tone muscles of the back of the leg up to the hip! Soles and heels grant hamstrings strength and release tight calves. Continue reading

In gaining core strength or core stability, you must understand how to use the back body muscles on either side of the spine: when you stabilize the shoulder blades, you free up the cervical spine or neck; when you breathe into the lower back ribs, you free up the thoracic or mid-spine, when you extend the lower vertebrae down thorough the sacrum and out the tail, you free up the lumbar spine. Continue reading

Walk in high heels with ease and grace and without foot pain, knee pain, or low back pain! Discovering support for your body in high heels for better posture and pain-free feet involves engaging the support up the back of the leg using hamstrings strength and releasing the tight muscles of the calves so that then the back body alignment of heel-to-hamstrings connects to the back of the hip and supports the spine. Continue reading

With the unique system of Backbone and Wingspan you learn to: engage the muscles underneath the shoulder blades to release neck and shoulder tension, realizing that a supported spine moves more freely. You articulate each vertebrae individually, and also use the rotation of the ribcage to elongate the spine into a spiral. Use the back muscles of triceps and trapezius and lats to separate the ribcage from the pelvis and side-bend the spine with the support of the entire abdominal system and engage the expansive width of the back which is the wingspan to free the spine which is the backbone. Continue reading

When you learn to use the triceps muscles, the lower trapezius muscle, and the lat muscles, through creating stability in the shoulder girdle by connecting the arms into the scapula or shoulder blades, you learn to work the arms from the power of the back body to support the spine for better arching movements and to release neck tension and shoulder stiffness.. Continue reading

Da Vinci renders Vetrivian Man from the front so this well-known drawing doesn't show the spine, but if you imagine the same proportions from the standpoint of function in perceiving the body from the backside, you get better in touch with the muscles of the back body that grant spinal support for pain-relief, posture, ease and grace in movement, core strength, and power in any physical activity. Continue reading