Your Knees
Stand up. Take a look at your feet. Notice what direction they are pointing. Now bend your knees and notice what direction they are pointing. Now with your knee bent, point it inward relative to the foot. Notice what you feel. Now point it outward and notice what sensations come up.
In general we want our feet and our knees to point in the same direction.
If I grabbed your foot while you were lying on your back and started to twist it along the axis of the leg, eventually something exciting would happen. Your knees would explode. Yaaahhh. The reason is that our hips are many times stronger than the ankle and shin. And the Ankle and the shin are much stronger than the knees (in this example). So your knees are the weak link along that axis.
So when I am dancing and I start pivoting, I am putting the same torque on the knee as in the above example and the only way to avoid knee-splosion is by cultivating the habit of always keeping the foot pointing in the same direction as the knees.
Example. If I’m doing back ochos and I stop in mid-step. My feet, knees and hips should be roughly in line. If not, I’m not pivoting enough for the step. This tends to cause a fall-like step that is less controlled but more importantly, it puts tremendous strain on the medial lines of the knee.
“But in tango, we are ‘turning out’ our feet for many movements!” True. But if my hip is able to rotate with the lower leg, then I can reduce or eliminate the torque on knee. In other words, I move my femur or upper leg (which comes from the hip joint) with the lower leg. Take your hands palm up. Then turn them palm down. That mobility is also present, to a lesser degree, in the bones of lower leg, and indeed it is that flexibility that allows us to explode our knees when we weight them in these positions.
I do lots of yoga and know that eventually, almost any movement can be stable in the human form, but unless we are engaged in practices that open and maintain that mobility of joints and tissues, simple things like not pivoting enough for the step can make our little knee-sees go ‘pop’.
An example of foot, knee and pelvis moving together by the lovely Jennifer Bratt:
Abrazos,
A
