Kit Laughlin’s life has been active but not always flexible.

In the 1970s Kit trained for Olympic and power weight-lifting before losing consid­er­able weight to become a middle distance runner in the 1980s. At this time, it was his inflex­i­bil­ity that caused amuse­ment amongst his fellow trainers at the H.K. Ward Gym (Sydney Univer­sity) and earned him the nickname of ‘Rubber Man’. It was a nick-name he wore without pride at the time.
Below is Kit’s story, from inflex­i­bil­ity and pain, through discov­ery, study, exper­i­ment and research, to Posture & Flex­i­bil­ity, told in his own words.
Before I went to Japan
During the early 1980s I was a tele­vi­sion director and a strug­gling athlete. I trained for the 800– and 1500-metre races, the so-called middle distance events. Direct­ing the Australian Broad­cast­ing Commission’s nightly current affairs program ‘Nation­wide’ was stress­ful enough on its own; together with all the running training—we ran 160 kilo­me­tres (100 miles) a week in the winter months—I now think I was asking too much of myself. I used to hold a tremen­dous amount of tension in the middle back muscles. Despite phys­io­ther­apy and chiro­prac­tic treat­ments, the problem never really improved beyond tempo­rary relief.
Life as an athlete
Some sort of insight occurred one day when I bent down to touch my toes after an interval training session at Sydney Univer­sity. At full stretch my fingers came a few inches below my knees, and that was with my back bent like a bow. Someone took a photo­graph of me doing this, and it ended up on the wall at the H.K. Ward gym (where many of the local track and field athletes did their weight training), suitably inscribed ‘Rubber Man.’
Was I symmet­ri­cal?
The next insight occurred when I was using the seated heel-raise machine (from the seated position a padded bar over the knees is lifted by the feet to strengthen soleus, one of the two calf muscles). I placed my feet evenly on the footrest and posi­tioned my heels level with each other. One knee contacted the support bar. The other was a full centime­tre or so lower. Natu­rally, my first thought was that the machine had been bent by one of the serious body­builders using too much weight. I looked at it care­fully, got a tape measure from the atten­dant at the front desk, and after careful checking decided that it was straight. Only then did the possi­bil­ity that I might not be straight occur to me. Careful measure­ment revealed that my right leg from knee to heel was notice­ably shorter than my left. I mention this only to high­light the point that we resist the notion that there might be some­thing less than ideal in our own physical makeup, but consid­er­a­tion of all possibly relevant infor­ma­tion is essen­tial if we wish to overcome our problems.
Accept­ing reality
Once I had accepted the differ­ence (in fact my right leg is shorter by about 2 centime­tres [three-quarters of an inch], evenly divided between the upper and lower leg), I began to think about the effects this struc­tural asym­me­try might have caused. I had trained for both Olympic and power lifting for years before losing quite a deal of weight to become a middle distance runner. I realised that years of weight training had adapted my body to two major stresses-the training itself and the asym­met­ric distri­b­u­tion of those forces as resolved in my partic­u­lar body. So, not only had I become extremely tight in the process, but I had also devel­oped an indi­vid­ual pattern of flex­i­bil­ity. I began limber classes at a Sydney dance studio, and these patterns became very clear indeed. I also quickly realised that the approach adopted in these classes was not effi­cient for teaching adults how to become flexible. The young students were very supple and had become flexible while they were still children. What looked like stretch­ing classes were really prepa­ra­tion or an extended warm-up for their ballet classes later in the day. My expe­ri­ence there made me think about the differ­ences between adults’ and children’s bodies, and how one might improve on the standard approaches to the problem of how to teach adults to become flexible.
Expe­ri­ences in Yoga classes
During the late 1970s I attended yoga classes at various places around Sydney. I found the classes rela­tively inflex­i­ble in their teaching approach: students lined up in neat rows and there was little dialogue. The strict atmos­phere often discour­aged ques­tions at the very time one needed assis­tance. I was disturbed by the tendency for some teachers to accept the pronounce­ments of their own teachers uncrit­i­cally. Guru worship was common­place, and many teachers had adopted the manner­isms and apho­risms of their own teachers. What I subse­quently learned to be the correct form of various poses was being distorted by many students in their attempt to imitate the teacher, through simple inflex­i­bil­ity. Ques­tions like,’Why do we do it this way?’ were left unan­swered, or deflected with replies like ‘Tradi­tion’, or ‘That’s the way the posture is taught by my teacher’, and so on. I met few teachers who had more than a passing acquain­tance with anatomy—the one aspect of western medicine normally unques­tioned by the alter­na­tive healing arts. Of course, these were my partic­u­lar expe­ri­ences at the time; much has changed since these early days, and anatom­i­cal knowl­edge is now empha­sised in contem­po­rary yoga teaching.
Martial arts stretch­ing
During this period I also resumed martial arts training, and so did the kind of stretch­ing usually employed in these arts during the warm-up—vigorous dynamic move­ments, assisted by a partner or an instruc­tor, and all over in 15 minutes before the real training began. No atten­tion was paid to form in the exer­cises, and I injured myself a number of times using this approach. On one occasion, I pulled a groin muscle (one of the adduc­tors) that took nine or ten months to heal and which was subse­quently injured at another training session.
The Japan story begins
I had my thir­ti­eth birthday in Japan. I had had enough of tele­vi­sion, and decided to go to the source for martial arts. I was dismayed to find the same approach to stretch­ing used there, too. I found disbe­lief on the part of teachers who could not accept that someone who had trained for ten years or so was not perfectly flexible. They had no effec­tive sugges­tions on how to become more flexible. They had all done the usual stretch­ing as children (usual in Japan, anyway), started their martial arts training at an early age and conse­quently did not need to know how to make an adult flexible. The severe training I went through (I was a live-in student, called an uchi deshi) made my back muscles even tighter. After nearly a year and a half of this life, I found myself unable to recover from an illness that alter­nated between a cold and influenza for six months. A friend had been studying a form of oriental medicine for a year or so (shiatsu) and, fed up with being kept awake at night when I visited, he suggested that I go to see his teacher.
First shiatsu expe­ri­ence
It was a reve­la­tion. Never have I let anyone hurt me so much. I was holding a tremen­dous amount of tension in the muscles of my body, and all the places he worked on, includ­ing my back, were incred­i­bly tender to touch. The sensei (Japanese for ‘teacher’ or ‘doctor’) told me that although my body was strong it was holding exces­sive tension every­where, which he felt was the result of the stress of the work I used to do plus the effects of the rigorous current training. He would poke my body and say in English,’Too hard, too hard’. I confess I was scep­ti­cal of a treat­ment that consisted merely of main­tain­ing a leaning pressure on various places using the elbows and thumbs mainly, together with a few simple stretches and manip­u­la­tions of the bones of the body. However, I started to feel better that same day, and by the time of the next treat­ment (a week later) the cold had gone. It was at the conclu­sion of the second treat­ment that I was intro­duced to a woman who would change my way of thinking about flex­i­bil­ity. Ms K was a diminu­tive Japanese woman around 35 years old. She was the trans­la­tor for the shiatsu classes presented for foreign­ers at the centre. Sensei mentioned that I was inter­ested in becoming more flexible. Ms K’s way of getting to the floor for this conver­sa­tion involved sliding through the side splits into front splits, then lifting herself into seiza, the normal Japanese way of sitting on one’s feet. It certainly got my atten­tion!
Meri­di­ens and energy movement
Ms K and I were to do consid­er­able work together on flex­i­bil­ity and shiatsu during the ensuing few years, as I became a student. She was the sole surviv­ing shihan (senior teacher) of an exercise method called jikyo jutsu. Roughly trans­lated, this means ‘self-help method’. Like tai chi, it is based on meridian theory, the practice of which is designed to ‘harmonise energy flow’ around the body and promote internal health, in much the same way as shiatsu. This improve­ment in internal health is said to be respon­si­ble for the increase in flex­i­bil­ity that follows. In other words, the acqui­si­tion of flex­i­bil­ity was deemed to be a side effect of health. Quite differ­ent to our western approach, I thought. The exer­cises them­selves were an inter­est­ing mixture of dynamic stretch­ing move­ments and pressure point therapy. In time I was awarded a shodan (a ‘first degree’ black belt). Sho is the Chinese reading of the char­ac­ter for ‘begin­ning’, and unlike other parts of the world where a black belt is often regarded as a pinnacle of achieve­ment, in Japan it signi­fies a starting point.
Learning shiatsu
Part of the learning process of shiatsu involves receiv­ing treat­ment from one’s teacher. I received treat­ment for a year or more on a fort­nightly basis, did the jikyo jutsu, and taught and attended yoga classes in Tokyo. By the time I had been in Japan for three years or so, my back felt consid­er­ably better and my flex­i­bil­ity was notice­ably improved, partic­u­larly when I cast my mind back to the ‘Rubber Man’ era. All was progress­ing, I felt. An incident one day on my way to teaching a stretch­ing class at the well-known Clark-Hatch gym in Tokyo soon dispelled my compla­cency. While walking across the car park (thinking about some­thing else), I inad­ver­tently stepped off a low curb—no more than 8 centime­tres (3 inches) high—and felt a stabbing pain in my lower back. The sensa­tion was so strong it took my breath away. I contin­ued walking to the gym, and although my back did not feel ‘right’, I taught the class. When I returned home that evening, I stripped off and looked at myself in the full-length mirror in the bathroom. Unbe­liev­ably, my hips seemed displaced so much to one side that the normal inden­ta­tion of the waist had completely disap­peared on one side, compen­sated for by double the amount on the other. I had trouble accept­ing the evidence of my eyes; I could not believe what I was seeing.
Why care is needed when walking!
The follow­ing days suggested that this distor­tion was going to be with me for some time. I had treat­ment vari­ously from my shiatsu teacher, a local chiro­prac­tor, and in desper­a­tion yet another shiatsu teacher. None altered the displace­ment by any extent that I could see or feel. Worse still were their claims that they had not seen any equiv­a­lent problem in all their years of practice. I was so worried by this that I traveled four hours north of Tokyo to a famous chiro­prac­tor, but he could not help either. Very slowly, with careful stretch­ing over a period of seven or eight weeks, my shape returned to normal. I now think that the incident resulted from an imbal­ance of too much flex­i­bil­ity and not enough strength, my body being predis­posed to certain types of injury due to my leg-length differ­ence.
Possible expla­na­tions
I spent consid­er­able time thinking about the physical struc­tures involved. One chiro­prac­tor suggested that the distor­tion resulted from one hip bone (the ilium) moving with respect to the sacrum (driven upwards by the unex­pected force of stepping off the curb onto my shorter leg while completely relaxed). This joint, partic­u­larly in men, is normally stable. The liga­ments binding the sacroil­iac joints on both sides of the pelvis are extremely strong, and the internal surfaces of the joint are irreg­u­lar and fit each other. It is possible that all the hip abduc­tion work (legs-apart stretch­ing) I had been doing had upset the stabil­ity of the pubic symph­ysis (the joint where the pubic bones come together at the front of the pelvis), thereby permit­ting the much more stable sacroil­iac joint to move. However, because the shape of the distor­tion appeared simply to be an extremely exag­ger­ated version of the normal lateral curve in my lumbar spine induced by my leg-length differ­ence; I thought this unlikely. Another chiro­prac­tor thought that my pelvis had ‘rotated’ with respect to the lumbar spine, and that was the cause of the problem. When my teacher suggested that enough shiatsu treat­ment would even up the length of my legs, I felt that I needed to consider the problem in depth.
Thinking about expla­na­tions more gener­ally
The appar­ently conflict­ing expla­na­tions I had been offered for the problem led me to think about possible rela­tion­ships between infor­ma­tion produced in differ­ent frame­works, and about stan­dards of evidence. It seemed to me then (as it does today) that there are various kinds of facts about the world, and there are differ­ent expec­ta­tions of reli­a­bil­ity in relation to these facts. ‘Infor­ma­tion’ or ‘facts’ depend crucially on the assump­tions under­ly­ing the differ­ent frame­works giving rise to them, and these facts come bound together with indices of reli­a­bil­ity. In this sense there are no certain facts (we might say, though, that some facts are very reliable and others less so), but compar­i­son of explana­tory range, assump­tions, reli­a­bil­ity indices and suitable constraints permits eval­u­a­tion of differ­ent kinds of facts. For example, with respect to my back problem, it was not that one perspec­tive was wrong and another right but that each perspec­tive provided one window on the problem—a window that revealed a partic­u­lar view.

Causes and their effects in the body
These musings led me to think that, in respect to a health problem, we might conve­niently divide the body into psycho­log­i­cal and physical aspects for partic­u­lar reasons, as western medicine ordi­nar­ily does. For example, the physical body might be consid­ered in terms of a spectrum: from its least alter­able to most alter­able substances, as one way of deciding how to tackle a problem. One advan­tage of working with the physical aspects of a body (in contrast to the psycho­log­i­cal) is that some of the cause and effect rela­tion­ships are better known, and are often measur­able. For instance, we know that the nerves of the body react most quickly to stress, followed shortly after by the muscles, then liga­ments and tendons, and the slowest to change are the hardest substances in the body—the bones and teeth. How these substances manifest their reac­tions to partic­u­lar stres­sors is well known. Knowing this about the body’s organ­i­sa­tion, in respect to a problem like neck or back pain, we may affect the brain and nerves using relax­ation tech­niques, we may affect patterns of muscular tension (the results of stress) by using the stretch­ing exer­cises, and we can strengthen the body in various ways against expected future stress.
Direct­ing focus to outcome
This simpli­fied approach may seem like a struc­tural and engi­neer­ing analysis, but the oriental medical ‘umbrella’ permits useful asso­ci­a­tion of aspects of the problem whose precise causal rela­tion­ship is not clear. The oriental perspec­tive allows greater freedom than the western medical approach, because it is a medicine of corre­la­tion rather than cause-it is a system of corre­spon­dence (Porkert, 1974). The essence of my approach is that, in respect of multi­causal problems, analysis and treat­ment is better directed towards a desired outcome rather than trying to solve the problems of causal­ity. This approach can avoid the pitfalls of symp­to­matic treatment.

Shoshin Centre
In 1988 I opened the Shoshin Centre, special­is­ing in shiatsu. One of the four main forms of oriental medicine in the modern world, shiatsu applies periods of still, manual pressure on the acupunc­ture points for treat­ment follow­ing the yin-yang and the five elements (or trans­for­ma­tions) theories. Shiatsu was devel­oped in Japan around the turn of the twen­ti­eth century by joining aspects of the Palmer chiro­prac­tic method with tradi­tional Chinese massage, called anma in its Japanese form. Although I opened my centre with the inten­tion of prac­tic­ing preven­tive medicine, the majority of patients were seeking a cure for a partic­u­lar problem affect­ing them at the time. Although I stressed the medium– and long-term effec­tive­ness of lifestyle modi­fi­ca­tion and the appli­ca­tion of specific exer­cises for their problems, most patients preferred to return at three or six-month inter­vals for treat­ment. By the end of the first year, it was clear that most patients wanted help with neck and back pain more than any other problems, and this pattern has contin­ued to this day.