Not What. How. Why Your Cues Change Everything.
- Elliot Arifin
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
Most people are asking the wrong question about their shoulders.
The question is not what exercise to do or which muscle to strengthen. The question is how you are doing it and why your body is responding the way it is.
A colleague recently commented on one of my posts that the chains originate from the spine. That she always starts at the spine and ribcage and works all the way into the hands. That if the pec major, pec minor, and lats are tight, you cannot position the arms properly on the ground or distribute weight equally. She is right. That perspective comes from the world of structural therapy, from pioneers like Ida Rolf and the tradition of Structural Integration. That lineage gave us a profound understanding of how the body organises itself around gravity, how fascial lines connect structure across the whole body, and why stability in the deep muscles matters before we load the superficial ones. I spent years working within that framework. I still respect it deeply.
My understanding of movement has evolved though. The shift is no longer about what we are doing. It is about how and why we are doing it.
Here is what I mean.
Take downward facing dog. An overhead press. A dead hang. The movement looks the same whoever is doing it. What is actually happening in the body depends entirely on the cues running it.
The hand has a tripod. Three points of contact. Press through the base of the index finger and you get one chain of engagement through the forearm, elbow, and into the shoulder. Shift that pressure to the outer edge and you get something completely different. Same posture. Different body. Different result.
The foot works the same way. Put someone in Warrior 2. Ask them to slightly shift their front foot out of standard alignment and press down through different points of the tripod. Front foot versus back foot. Inner edge versus outer edge. The structures that engage or lengthen change completely depending on where the cue lands.
The structural muscles need to do their job. They exist to maintain structure so the body can breathe and move well. Staying only in that framework though, without also addressing how and why we are using those structures, keeps people in rehab purgatory. The symptom gets managed. The source keeps firing.
My work now lives in the cues. Not the anatomy lesson. Not the biomechanical law. The specific instruction that changes everything about how a movement lands in a body.
That is what I am teaching in my classes and sessions. That is what Ricky and I are taking into Hand to Spine on April 18th and 19th. In person in Jakarta or online. Recording included.
If you want to feel the difference between knowing the anatomy and actually changing how your body moves, this is where we are going.
Comments