The Mezieres' Method
Introduction
Françoise Mézières (1909-1991), a physiotherapist and teacher of anatomy was teaching and practising classical physiotherapy until the year 1947 when, while treating a patient crippled by pain and distortions, she made an empirical discovery that was to completely change her understanding of body mechanics...
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Shape & Beauty
Mezieres used to say that we make wheels round because square ones don't work. This is a concise way to illustrate the intimate relationship that exists between function and shape. The perfect fulfilment of function goes hand in hand with perfect shape which we call beauty. ‘Beauty’ is 'fitness expressed'....
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Are you in good shape?
The therapeutic goal of the Mézièrist is to remodel or ‘sculpt’ the body towards the ideal morphology; F. Mézières called it the ‘paragon’.See how far you measure up to this ideal shape as follows.
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The myth of hyper-elasticity
Apart from individuals with hereditary disorders such as Down’s, Ehlers-Danlos and Marfan’s syndromes, nobody is too supple. People who seem to exhibit a greater than average range of joint mobility (hypermobility) suffer in fact from muscle shortening that masquerades as flexibility...
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Muscle Tone
Muscular Chains
The fundamental starting point of the physical therapy conceived by Francoise Mezieres is the existence and action of what she termed a ‘Muscular Chain’ (MC)...
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The myth of the weak back
Many people labour under the misapprehension that they must strengthen their backs in order to get better. The strong myth of the weak back is so pervasive that there is even one form of physical therapy whose motto is: "a strong back knows no pain"...
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Six fundamental laws
"The muscles belonging to a MC, whatever their number, behave like a single muscle." In effect then, the shortening of one muscle in a MC results in the shortening of the whole chain...
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