Healthier Hip Joints Introduction
Here is a transcript of the above video, cleaned up for easier reading.
Welcome to the Healthier Hip Joints Workshop
I'm Daniel Burkholder, and I'll be guiding you through these movement sessions. We'll be working with the Feldenkrais Method — specifically the practice called Awareness Through Movement — to address your hip joints and related anatomy. Before we start moving, here's a brief orientation.
About the Feldenkrais Method
The method was developed by Moshe Feldenkrais. He held a PhD from the Sorbonne, worked in the Curie lab in Paris, and smuggled their research out of the city as the Nazis arrived during World War Two. He was also a serious soccer player and the first black belt in judo in Europe — athletic pursuits that left him with significant knee injuries.
Faced with surgery his doctors weren't confident would succeed, he applied his scientific training to his own body. He studied how we learn movement and what physical efficiency actually means, and he essentially retaught himself how to walk. From that work, he developed Awareness Through Movement: a series of guided movement lessons done in various positions that address nearly every function of the body — the eyes, the tongue, all the major joints, how to get up from the floor, and more.
Two Central Principles
1. Go slowly and go small.
The goal is to reduce input into your nervous system so you can sense yourself in finer detail. There's a principle from nineteenth-century science — the Weber-Fechner law — that says we perceive differences proportionally, not absolutely. If you're holding a hundred pounds and someone adds a quarter pound, you probably won't notice. But if you're holding one pound and someone adds a quarter pound, you will.
The same applies to effort in your body. The less effort you're using, the more you can sense subtle differences. So throughout this practice, we keep asking: what's the least amount of effort needed to do this?
2. Stay out of strain — and out of stretching.
If I slowly turn my head to the side, somewhere before I reach my full range of motion, there's a moment where it takes just a bit more effort — like a small threshold, or a speed bump. That's the edge of my habitual pattern. In Feldenkrais, we stop before that point.
Not because range of motion doesn't matter. But if we can smooth out that early moment of effort, the end of the range often expands on its own. We're working at the beginning of the effort curve, not the end.
One More Thing
Since this is audio, I won't be demonstrating the movements — I'll guide you through them verbally. That's actually intentional. When you watch someone else move, you try to copy them. Copying is different from sensing. I'm not the authority on how these movements should feel in your body. You are.
Do what makes sense from my descriptions, and assume you're doing it right. I'll describe each movement in several ways, so you'll get the gist. If you have questions about positions, the introductory PDF has images that may help.
Alright — let's get started.