on brick walls and stubborn hips.

A student in Mobility Meets Asana asked a question this week that was too good to leave buried in a comment thread. It went something like this: what about skeletal limitations? What if someone has been consistent in their hip openers for years and their bone structure simply doesn't allow for certain shapes? Would you even bring that up with a new client? Or is the whole thing a myth?

Great question. Big conversation! Let's talk about it.

first, it's actually not a myth.

Bones are not all shaped the same. The angle of your hip socket, the orientation of your femur, the way your particular skeleton came together through childhood and adolescence, all of it varies from person to person. And here's the part people forget: your structure was itself shaped by what you did, when you did it, and how often you did it while you were growing. Your adult hips carry a record of your childhood soccer seasons, your years of sitting cross legged, your dance classes, your everything.

So there is always an element of baseline structure. And there is always an element of adaptation. It's the nature versus nurture conversation, playing out in your hip joint. The SAID principle applies here as it applies everywhere: what you ask your body to do is what it will adapt to. But adaptation happens on top of a structure you didn't choose.

so how do you tell the difference?

This is where it gets interesting, and where the conversation with an actual human matters more than any test. Because yes, you can watch someone move. But their words will tell you just as much.

Ask a student "how does this feel?" and listen closely to the answer.

If they say they feel stuck, like they're running into a wall, like they never feel anything at all, and that sensation lives on the closing side of the joint (the side that's folding shut), that might be structure talking. Twenty years of practice, nothing has ever changed, no stretch, no sensation, just a wall. That's information.

If they say it feels tight, like it's going to snap, like they're being tugged in too many directions, they're pointing to the open side of the joint. And that kind of language points toward tissue. Tissue is something we can change, at least to some degree, with time and consistent, appropriate loading. Which means we have a path to follow.

Neither answer is a diagnosis. But the verbiage matters. It tells you which direction to explore, and it keeps you from promising someone a shape their skeleton may never make, or writing off a limitation as "just your bones" when it's actually tissue that hasn't been asked to adapt yet.

would I bring it up with a new client?

It depends on the context and the relationship. This is a tough conversation to have in the middle of a group class, and frankly, mid class isn't where it belongs. It works far better one on one: sitting next to someone during an adjustment, in a private session, in a teacher training, or in those quiet stretches of class when everyone is settled into a long hold and you can actually talk to one person for a minute.

Because the goal isn't to tell someone what their body can't do. The goal is to get curious together about what their sensations are telling you both, and to choose a smarter path from there. Sometimes that path is "let's keep loading this and see what changes." Sometimes it's "let's stop chasing this shape and find the version that serves your body." Both are wins.

where to go deeper

We touch on this inside Mobility Meets Asana, especially in the mechanics lectures. The conversation piece, how you actually see these things in a body and talk about them with a student, gets much more airtime in the body reading course. And the structural foundation underneath all of it, the joint mechanics, hip orientation, anteversion, how the skeleton develops, lives in the anatomy course. It's not a formal prerequisite for Mobility Meets Asana, but it's the assumed floor underneath it, unless you've trained somewhere with a heavy anatomy focus.

the takeaway

Skeletal limitation is not a myth. But the way it gets used, as an "everybody, always" or a "you'll never, so don't bother," is overblown. My general take, on this and most things: there is no such thing as "no, never." There is always an "it depends."

Your bones are real (duh.) AND so is your capacity to adapt. So the more interesting work usually makes alot more sense when we hold both truths at the same time.

(as always, it depends :)