Consciousness and Movement

Terms such as “energy flow,” “resonance,” and “blockage” are descriptive tools rather than measurable quantities. Horizontal movement is mechanically simpler, vertical movement more coordinatively demanding — yet neither is inherently “ideal” or “deficient.” Evolution has no target architecture, only adaptation.

Concepts are first used functionally and only later refined. Every correction is a sharpening. The path of understanding consists of approximations, detours, repetitions. One climbs the same mountain several times.

Development emerges as an increasing ability to differentiate between experience and explanation, metaphor and mechanics, force as an external influence and energy as potential, conscious control and unconscious regulation. What improves is the capacity to keep concepts flexible. Errors are markers of progress.

Progress reveals itself in shifts of focus. Movement and perception are processes: elastic, feedback-driven, never complete.

The following text was written half a year ago. It provides an intermediate stage of conceptual formation. Today it appears less “wrong” than mixed — it blended things that are united in experience but separable in analysis. The documentable development lies precisely in this distinction.

I used to think in large images. Horizontality seemed to me a mechanical ideal form, verticality a compromise. In training practice both were effective. Meanwhile, I know more. A central point concerns the distinction between force and energy. For a long time I spoke of energy intake and energy amplification where the issue was physical force input and internal energy mobilization. The bodily sensation — “something comes from outside” — remains. The explanation has improved. Energy is not transferred. What comes from outside is force. The body responds with its own energy.

The Evaluation of Horizontality

It once appeared to me as an evolutionary ideal. Horizontality is mechanically simpler because loads are distributed and lever arms shortened. Verticality is coordinatively more demanding, but not a malfunction. It is a different optimization with its own advantages — free hands, vision, endurance running. The earlier opposition provided a useful teaching image, yet it contained evolutionarily unfounded value judgments. “Ideal versus compromise” becomes “different mechanical profiles.”

My use of terms such as “resonance,” “flow,” or “blockage” has also shifted. I once understood them as physical quantities. Today they appear as phenomenological markers — descriptions of sensation. They remain useful, but lose their claim to objectivity.

Another point of development lies in understanding the nervous system. What once seemed a mechanical problem of structure — horizontal efficiency, vertical limitation — is now understood more strongly as neuronal organization. Balance, muscle tone, and joint play do not arise from leverage alone. They are the result of protective programs, reflexes, and learned regulation. The “invisible brake” is an unconscious control pattern.

On the Original Text

The distribution of loads and the organization of movement can be described along a compelling axis: from maximal surface coupling in the horizontal to highly complex balancing performance in the vertical. In the horizontal, load distribution is evolutionarily efficient. Multiple contact points provide stability, shorter lever arms reduce stress, and the kinetic chain flows almost by itself.

Global Contact

At the beginning stands the principle of global contact. A worm uses its entire body like a continuous sole. Any point can receive pressure, transmit it, and transform it into propulsion. The kinetic chain is not a sequence of levers but a flowing wave. This principle appears even more refined in the snake. Its movements continuously exploit ground-reaction forces. Instead of concentrating compression on individual joints, it distributes loads along the entire body. The organism becomes a resonant body that steadily receives and passes on energy — or, more precisely, force impulses answered by internal energy.

Bipedalism drastically reduces the support surface to two points. Suddenly balance is no longer incidental but constant. High compressive forces load the joints, and the interplay of trunk musculature, fascia, and neural control becomes essential. That humans can not only walk but also run, jump, and dance is an evolutionary feat. Decisive factors are finely tuned reflexive control and the capacity to store and release elastic energy efficiently in tendons and fascia.

Child’s Play and Feat of Art — The Kinetic Chain Between Horizontality and Verticality

The musculoskeletal system follows a long evolutionary line from simple forms of global surface coupling to highly specialized bipedalism. Horizontal movement patterns are biomechanically simpler and more economical, while vertical posture demands a coordinative master performance.

Archaic Laterality

In fish, the pectoral and pelvic fins lie laterally along the trunk. The first tetrapods adopted this pattern. Limbs extended outward like outriggers. Movement emerged from lateral trunk waves transmitted into the ground. Over the course of evolution, the limbs moved beneath the body, enabling more efficient running because the legs could bear body weight directly. Yet archaic laterality remains inscribed in our anatomy.

Even in upright posture we still experience this orientation. During walking, the trunk rotates diagonally. Feet and calves do not work purely vertically but also in subtle spirals — pronation, supination, rolling. The spinal wave retains a lateral component. This explains why diagonal linkages transfer force economically. It underlies the spiral organization of fascia and appears in everyday movement, from gait rotation to torsional athletic performance.

Muscles and joints function with evolutionary ease in horizontal orientations. In verticality, natural constraints arise, yet with tendon elasticity and coordinated muscle activation the body can approximate horizontal efficiency. Thus the kinetic chain becomes, in both orientations, an instrument of efficient absorption, transmission, amplification, and short-term force storage in ligaments, tendons, muscles, fascia, and joints.

Muscles, Bones, Tendons, Joints — Static Elements and Elastic Energy

The human locomotor system evolved primarily under horizontal conditions. In that orientation, joints operate neutrally, muscles generate impulses efficiently, and the kinetic chain remains freely mobile. Ground contact, muscle action, and fascial tension interact like an integrated amplification system that potentiates small inputs into fluid, powerful motion.

Vertical orientation is an adaptation rather than a full redesign. Body weight compresses joints, muscles must stabilize statically at the expense of transmission efficiency, and the elastic potential of tendons and fascia can be partially inhibited — yet it can also be improved through targeted activation and coordination. Tendons function as elastic amplifiers of muscle force. With precise muscle–tendon timing, ground-contact impulses can be elastically absorbed, stored, and transmitted in spiral pathways. The body thus translates horizontally evolved efficiency into vertical function through dynamic integration rather than structural perfection.

Consciousness and Movement

Conscious activation of the kinetic chain means perceiving the body not as segments but as a whole. Force is guided from the feet through the legs and trunk into the arms.

The use of tendon and fascial elasticity involves diagonal, spiral, and vertical force conduction. Eccentric movement, plyometric training, and dynamic stretching can improve recoil capacity and the subjective sense of flow.

Joints benefit from operating near neutral angles rather than end-range fixation.

The foot complex — toes, ball, heel, and calves — forms the primary absorption system. Actively sensing ground contact, engaging the arch, plantar fascia, and calves, and training absorption, storage, and redirection of forces enhances coordination.

Awareness and integration mean perceiving the body as an interconnected system in which stability, mobility, strength, and coordination arise from cooperation among structures rather than isolation.

Horizontal Evolution as Point of Departure

Muscles, joints, and tendons developed under predominantly horizontal load conditions. In that orientation, structures could operate with maximal distribution of forces, elastic participation of connective tissues, and fluid kinetic chains.

Vertical Orientation as Adaptation

Upright posture brings advantages alongside mechanical constraints. Joints must stabilize more, muscles work less dynamically, and elastic structures do not always unfold freely. Compared to horizontal configurations, verticality is not a deviation from an “ideal” but a trade-off — a redistribution of capacities toward other functions.

Optimal Inclination

Tendons and fascia allow a portion of horizontal efficiency to be expressed in vertical posture. At moderate forward inclinations, gravitational forces distribute more diagonally through the kinetic chain rather than purely compressively through joints. Elastic tissues can preload and release more effectively when muscles yield dynamically instead of locking statically.

Joint angles and force transmission follow length–tension relationships: hips and knees often produce high force in mid-range flexion rather than full extension. Elastic recoil in structures such as the Achilles tendon, plantar fascia, and thoracolumbar fascia is most effective when muscles are pre-tensioned dynamically. In strictly upright stillness, gravity acts primarily as compression; in inclined motion it becomes a vector distributed through spirals and diagonals. Sprint starts, deadlifts, or kettlebell swings often demonstrate high efficiency at moderate trunk inclinations — not because a single angle is universally ideal, but because elastic structures, open joint angles, and directional force transmission can align advantageously there.

Movement, in this view, is not the pursuit of a perfect form but the cultivation of adaptable coordination — a dialogue between mechanics, perception, and regulation that remains perpetually unfinished.