You know it’s working when it hurts
By Lauren Johnson
“Like that. That!”
Excitedly, GST Body LA founder and teacher Anna Rahe leaps over the woman lying on the floor, hands clenched around a wooden bar attached to springs that are attached to the wall. Rahe crouches by the woman’s head so she can look directly into her eyes.
“Do you feel how that is different from what you did before?” Rahe, a petit and energetic brunette, leans forward and places her hand on the curve of the sweating woman’s arched back.
“I think I do. And it hurts!” At Rahe’s direction, relieved, the woman relaxes back onto the floor.
“Well of course it hurts!” Rahe springs up and addresses the woman’s classmates, lying in similar positions. “That’s your body changing! And that is what we want!”
In a city obsessed with fitness, one can find many different disciplines, teachings, and practices that claim to change the body. And it is true that exercise such as running, dance, Pilates and yoga can, when done consistently and correctly, increase or decrease the body’s muscle or fat. But what about the injured body, one that is working to recover from a serious or recurring problem that has changed the way it moves and
functions? How do these kinds of activities help that kind of body?
“The injured body is unique when it comes to physical training because it is compensating for the impact of the injury. The body is remarkable in its ability to ‘make things work.’ That is, it will do what it has to do to allow you to walk, move, bend, whatever. But just because you are moving doesn’t mean your body is working as a holistic system,” explains Rahe. Exacerbating the original injury, those very adaptations can cause problems to develop.
Rahe is all too familiar with what it’s like to have an injured body. She started developing her approach while in constant pain from recurring body issues that were magnified by extensive practice in dance, athletics and Pilates. When she began to look with a critical eye at the training she was receiving, she realized she wasn’t the only one in pain, that many fitness enthusiasts with an extensive practices or disciplines seem to experience consistent pain and recurring injuries.
“One of the major problems with most disciplines is that they teach the body to use muscles for stability, not mobility,” Rahe explains. “Muscles have memory; they follow patterns. If you teach a muscle to act like a bone, it tightens and locks into that pattern. That type of muscle tightening alone can lead to injury, because when you ask a muscle to function in opposition to its intelligent design, you’ve put the body in conflict with its organic functions.”
By combining her experience in, and knowledge of different somatic disciplines, as well as by working on her own injured body, Rahe created her own approach, calling it the Grace Somatomorphic Technique, or GST. GST defines five primary body systems proactive in physical movement: the spine, muscles, bones, breath and fascia, and addresses how each of these systems plays its own individual role as they interconnect to allow the body to function. It teaches specific somatic actions to be used during exercise, which are often very different from those taught in other disciplines.
“Because of my lower back surgery, my left leg couldn’t swing forward the way it was supposed to in order to walk. To compensate, I developed a kind of duck walk where I was swiveling my hips forward to move my legs. It wasn’t pretty,” offered a 40-ish woman when asked how the technique had changed her body. Gradually she learned how to stop using the wrong muscle patterns to move her legs. And as a bonus, she adds, “I lost a lot of overdevelopment in my thighs and hips. Plus, my lower back pain decreased because the tightness was relieved.”
The second part of the technique is a movement system that consists of a repertoire of choreographed exercises performed on original, spring-loaded equipment (similar to Pilates equipment). Think aerobics class using a Pilates machine bolted to a wall, and you will begin to get a bit of an idea of what a class is like. The third element, bodywork, consists of what Rahe calls bone carving, a combination of deep tissue massage and rolfing, but with a focus on the fascia, or connective tissue. The three elements together comprise Rahe’s GST system.
We all know the saying, “No pain, no gain,” and it’s certainly true of Rahe’s approach. In a rehab class dedicated to clients with chronic issues, there is much moaning and gasping, as well as the occasional yelp of alarm. The pain of healing is a different kind of pain, however, and definitely part of the process.
“I can feel my back rippling and shaking,” says the woman Rahe was working with earlier, still on the floor but now lifted on her elbows.
“Yes!” Rahe bounces enthusiastically to the center of the room. “Those are muscles you haven’t had access to in a very long time! Those are the muscles you are supposed to use, not the ones you’ve been using for the last ten years.”
Rahe watches closely as a tall, husky man strains to lift himself an inch off the floor using a whole lot more than just his abs.
“Yes!” Rahe leaps over him, excited by his progress. “Like that.”
For more info about this work, go to gstbodyla.com.
Photos: Neil Sharum
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