Do you struggle with your walking? Have you become someone who waddles? Do you find it an effort to be on your feet? Are you unsteady in your balance? Maybe you have had a hip or knee replacement and you find yourself struggling, like so many others, to re-learn how to walk with your new joint? Is your posture poor?

If so, I share your pain. An injury to my foot in my 30s, even after an operation ‘to fix me’, left me with all these difficulties.

It took me a long time to discover what the answer was despite all the exercises I was given and the hours and money I spent in the gym. The trouble was that none of these exercises actually taught me how to move well. They were focused on strengthening this muscle or stretching that muscle. None of it helped to change the peculiar gait that I had developed because so many of the people that I worked with did not know what good movement involves, or if they did, they didn’t know how to help me achieve it.

Let me tell you the secret: good movement is when you move through weight transference in a way that gravity is your friend rather than your enemy. When you move in a way that your skeleton supports you then movement becomes seemingly effortless. It’s not what you are doing but how you are doing something that is important.

When you were a toddler learning to come to stand and to walk you had to think about how you were doing this because your head was so heavy in relationship to the rest of your body. You learnt to transit from lying on your back, to coming to sitting, standing, and walking in a way that was in harmony with gravity. You learnt that if your hips weren’t in alignment with your feet, or that your pelvis wasn’t synchronised with the movement of your head then you were going to take a tumble.

As adults though, as crazy as this may sound, we forget how to do this and as a result get into all sorts of trouble. A walk becomes a fall when it should be a sense of going up and when we don’t get this right, we rapidly begin to wear out our joints. Even the new ones!

If you are someone who has struggled with these issues, then this course is going to help you. It’s based upon my years of teaching the Feldenkrais Method® and my own personal journey to a better way of doing.

Helping people to improve their walking, balance and posture is a major focus of my work. So many of my students in Rutland have asked for help with these issues as they prepare for joint replacement surgery or post-operative rehabilitation because all too often the traditional physiotherapy exercise programs that they have followed have failed to change their gait. And every parent of a special needs children that I work with, understandably, wants their child to walk.

Its why I developed the Fit Sit courses and wrote my book: ‘The Fit Sit Revolution’. So many of the older adults that I work with have the same issues that the children have with weight transference, but they attribute their problem to old age when really it has, in my experience, little to do with age but how they are moving. We all have the capacity to learn whatever our age. This is the fundamental take home message of all the research into neuroplasticity

Once you can teach a person how to do something differently, more easily, then the rate of change can be remarkable. The lessons in this course work because they give your brain information. They set up differences and once your brain has a ‘difference’ it has information that it can act on. For example, you might suddenly gain the insight that your pelvis is moving on to your right heel in standing but isn’t really transferring weight onto your left heel. Once you know that then you can begin to do something about it but if you are not aware of it then you are doomed to replay the old habit over and over again without ever realising that this is perhaps why your right hip is now painful.

The course contains 9 lessons that will teach you how to change your walking, balance and standing. They are done either sitting in a chair or standing next to a chair so that it can offer you, if you need it, extra support while you are working on improving your balance.

You will progress from learning how to side-bend effectively in a chair to learn how to shift weight from one leg to another in a way that you are supported by your bones rather than trying to hold yourself up all the time through a lot of muscular effort. The course also includes a bonus mat-based lesson which is done partly on the floor if you can lie down easily and partly in standing

• Amongst the benefits you will gain are:
• Improved posture
• Improved balance
• Improved gait
• Improved breathing
• Improved confidence in your ability to do all the above
• Improved coordination

... This could not have come to my attention at a more appropriate time, for I am suffering greatly from bilateral pain across the tops of my feet starting from the outer aspect of the feet. On occasion it is difficult to walk and the skin on the upper surface becomes incredibly sensitive. This in turn is altering my gait and creating lower back pain. I feel the movements you demonstrate in your video will offer me some relief long term, therefore and I have vowed to do them on a daily basis. Thank you for sharing -Claire Suter

Getting older does not have to mean that you can’t improve the way that you move. We are all entitled to move as well as we can whatever our age and we are all capable of change with a little bit of investment of time and attention.

Falls, fractured hips, replacement surgeries cost a huge amount of money and can be devasting to the lives of so many people and their loved ones.

Join me on this course, which will be a lot of fun on the way and treat yourself to the gift of better movement.

Stewart