Your Three Magical Joints

You have three joints the are supreme to all others – in my humble opinion.

Can you guess the three?

Let me start with some hints. 

HINT ONE
The three in question – between them – govern just about every other joint. By govern, I mean these three are distally influential over many other joints.

Can you guess any of them?

HINT TWO
I carry on and on about one of them – even saying that the way it operates does not appear in any anatomical texts. How can that be?

Can you guess where it is?

HINT THREE
If you truly understood the two that are under the influence of the one, you could figure out a lot of things that are causing you trouble as you use your arms and legs.

Can you guess the other two?

***

I won’t prolong your agony anymore.

Atlanto-occipital joint (head/spinal joint)
Sterno-clavicular joint (arm joint)
acetabulofemoral joint (hip joint)

Atlanto-occipital joint 
The joint of your head upon your spine influences how joints of your arms and legs effectively join the main skeleton. The profound influence of head upon spine is Alexander’s first discovery. Readers of Chancer need no reminder.

Sterno-clavicular joint
Oh, I don’t know where to start. Anatomical texts are hopeless at describing this joint. Have you ever heard of protracting and retracting? I thought so. But it gets worse. Instead of focusing on the joint, many texts focus on the free-floating scapular bone at the back. This leads some teachers to declare that your arm is jointed to the back of you! If nothing else remember this – this joint is in front of your body, which puts the operation of your arms in the front of your body too.

Acetabulofemoral joint 
This is not actually the final joint of your leg – that honour goes to the sacroiliac joint. But this joint is debatably not a joint at all – it moves in childbirth, but not for much else. That academics say “never”; the clinicians say “sometimes”.

Therefore, your hip joint is effectively the place of the most significant influence on your leg. It moves in all three planes, something that does not happen anywhere else down the leg. And this has significant consequences for all kinds of skill-based activities.

If you have one lesson – and you want to do some mapping to benefit your students or your Self – then start with the location, action, ranges and influence of these joints.

You can reference each of them in the three modules of BodyThinking Online – the course I created over many years, first from my trainees in Japan, and later for teachers of all kinds who need better information about how we coordinate.

You can read more about the course on the link below; together with the offer of BodyChance Symposium “How to Teach Online (by example)” which I am bundling in with the package. There’s more than that too – a cool reference library of teaching tips and body mapping information that you can benefit from for years to come…

Read more about it and book on this page:

BodyThinking Online + “How to Teach Online (by example)”

https://bodychance.mykajabi.com/store/oTZvjLye