What is Anatomy In Motion (AiM)?
AiM is a method of assessing and improving movement in the body to reduce pain and improve performance. It analyses movement at every joint to identify the missing links that often lead to chronic pain or injury. Old injuries, bad posture and poor movement habits can lead to layers of compensation, meaning that the site of your pain is rarely the cause of your pain.
The AiM method was developed by Gary Ward, author of “What the Foot” and creator of the “Flow Motion Model” - a blueprint of how every joint in the body should move through each phase of the gait (walking) cycle. The further your body is away from the blueprint, the more likely you are to be in pain. You can see Gary in action and get an idea of what an AiM session entails in this clip taken from the BBC series “Dr In The House” (2016).
By treating the cause rather than treating the pain, AiM provides you with the tools you need to fix your own body through movement, rather than being dependent on therapists to repeatedly treat the same problem that flares up time and again.
Is it all about feet?
Feet play a central role - they are our foundations and strongly influence how the rest of the body functions. But AiM is a whole-body approach: your big toe might be linked to your neck pain, and your forward head posture could be driving your knee pain. Nothing in the body happens in isolation and in AiM we are investigating how the whole body is responding to any limitations in the system.
What makes AiM so different is its guiding principle: “Joints Act: Muscles React.” In other words, muscles simply respond to the position of your skeleton in space. By restoring joint motion, muscles naturally follow, bringing the body back into balance.
Why so much focus on the gait cycle?
"Don't run before you can walk!"
The gait cycle describes the movements that take place during a single footstep. In AiM we break that down into seven phases, but it’s the five phases when your foot is in contact with the ground that we can best influence.
In each phase, your body has to organise itself to move as efficiently as possible. By the end of just one footstep, every joint in your body should have accessed a relatively even range of motion across all three planes (dimensions). Every bone, joint, muscle, tendon, ligament, and the fascia connecting them all has a role to play. Any limitation anywhere affects the entire system. A single footstep takes just 0.6-0.8 seconds, entirely outside of conscious control - try to control it, and you’ll fail! What we need instead is better unconscious movement, which we achieve b showing your body a more efficient way to move.
By identifying areas of restriction (and areas moving excessively), we can begin by restoring those ranges in isolation. But the real transformation happens when these smaller corrections are reintegrated into whole-body movement patterns hardwired into our DNA. From an evolutionary standpoint, you could say the very reason we have the joint ranges and muscle actions we do is so we can walk and run - everything else is a bonus.
No one ever taught you how to walk, just as no one teaches a fish to swim or a bird to fly. We’re born with this movement software pre-installed. Over the years, bad habits and injuries may have disrupted your ability to move efficiently and pain-free but there is a solution. Through AiM, you can Rewire your body and unlock its full potential.