For all you scoliosis warriors out there who want to understand how to help their spines through movement.

Let’s talk about bone motion, namely, Relative Bone Motion.

Spinal movement is named from how the upper vertebrae moves on the one above. For example, if I rotate my head and thorax to the left the movement of the vertebrae is to the left. If we could look into the lumbar spine we would see the L4 move a little more to the left then the L5. This motion is called relative rotation of the L4 to left, as it moved left a little more than the L5.

The motion came from the top of my spine down, or top down.

Next we have bottom up movement.

If I step forward with my left leg the pelvis will also rotate to the right. This will cause a chain reaction up the spine, with my sacrum moving to the right and next up my L5 then my L 4 and so on up the spine. The movement of the L5 vertebrae to the right creates the same relative motion of my L4 moving relatively to the left as the top down movement described above.

This concept is very important to understand when looking to correct the rotation between two vertebrae in scoliosis.

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