Personal passion
Health and exercise have always been part of Cara’s thinking since she grew up as the smart, but sick and uncoordinated one of the family. Health became more important in her 30’s. Her corporate lifestyle didn’t do much to support health, and Cara increasingly followed emergent research about the relationship between exercise and health.
Cara got the professional reboot opportunity in 2001 (otherwise known as downsized) she decided it was the time to try something she was passionate about which was strength training for older women. There were huge health benefits, but women at that time were afraid of working out with weights.
Along the way as Bridging® evolved, Cara had her share of personal Ah-Hah moments. Things that she assumed were just her own physical limitations disappeared.
Professional expertise
Cara became certified as a personal trainer and Medical Exercise Specialist. She worked with older adults, and her personal interest was in exercise to help with osteoporosis. Research showed that fall prevention has the greatest benefit, so Cara began to focus on balance assessment and the use of exercise to improve balance.
Cara’s systems engineering expertise gave her a different framework for analyzing movement and exercise. From these insights an entirely new perspective on movement, development, and well-being emerged. Most amazingly was the evolution to the technique enabling changes never thought possible.
The Evolution of Bridging
Children, balance and new results!… The work related to balance training led Cara to consult with pediatric professionals to learn how children develop balance. These discussions and research led to requests from these professionals for Cara to work with their child patients. Primarily exercise based, her work with children on balance was also yielding great results for focus and behavior in school.
More education too…As time went by Cara studied more techniques and frameworks to better serve children challenged with coordination and motor skill delays. Most notable were Gary Gray’s 3D functional matrix work, and Greg Roskopf’s Muscle Activation Technique- JumpStart series.
The catalyst for a new solution came when the Muscle Activation Jumpstart technique didn’t work on her son, nor any of the children she saw. Cara kept trying different variations on the technique and finding that function was changing in consistent, yet unexpected ways. In addition to improvements in movement parents were reporting very consistent positive cognitive changes.
Something different was happening…From her engineering perspective, Cara found that when the body’s stability improved, the brain function seemed to improve also. She looked high and low to find someone else working with stability to validate and build on her discoveries.
More learning… She learned of Prof. Pawel Kowar from Prague who taught Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS) and attended his workshop. DNS wasn’t the same–much more complicated, more repetitive, and more restricted in application than what Cara was doing.
Adding in child development… However, the other part of the course was demonstrating child reflexes and locomotion development stages. He also evaluated chronological versus developmental age milestones. Cara re-sequenced the movements she worked with to follow the child development progression and results sky-rocketed!
And then fetal development… As soon as developmental movement was considered to be a key factor, it became clear that some of the movement relationships consistently observed must occur before birth. In 2014, Cara was exposed to the work of Dr Hans Prechtl and Dr Christa Einspeiler from Austria. They had pioneered the study of fetal movement and described a set of basic observable movement characteristics present at birth.
Creating simplicity from all the complexity…Working with these fetal movements revealed a hierarchy of phases. Each movement phase coincided with developing a body’s structural complexity, allowing different physics relationships to function. It became clear that these prenatal foundational movements were necessary at all ages for a body to function properly. Even more amazing was that the Bridging technique supported and repaired these relationships–quickly, permanently, and for any age!
Continued insights… Each week brings new client experiences and learning opportunities. Coupled with emergent neuroscience research to provide insight to observations with clients, the application of Bridging® is constantly being refined.
Helping so many! … Cara and the Bridging specialists she has trained have helped thousands of people, bringing them relief from pain, better mobility, a tool to calm anxiety, allowing them to improve their health and wellbeing by being agelessly active.