14 Years of Unwinding Torsion in My Body

When I returned to Tai Chi practice in 2012, having had three enforced years out with knee problems and having been on quite a journey to find practitioners who could help me with the underlying biomechanical drivers behind those issues, I was starting to realise that I carried significant torsion in my body. However I was still a long way from truly understanding what that meant, how deep it ran, or how long it would take to rectify.

Fourteen years later, I'm still on that same unwinding journey. The shoulder correction I recently received from Wang Haijun, described in my last practice diary piece alongside the mid-back Peng issue it resolved, also did something separate: it uncovered a further layer of the torsion pattern I've been working with all this time, one I hadn't known was there.

1. The First Layer: Hips

When I first started standing seriously in my Tai Chi practice, the first thing I noticed was how far from neutral the musculature around my hips was. There was a massive amount of habitual holding that would pull my hips away from neutral over and over again. Each time I became aware of it, I would consciously let go of the muscular tension, and within a few tens of seconds, it would return. The dominant pattern was my right hip riding up and forward, taking the inguinal crease with it, so that the crease straightened and song kua was lost. Much of my early standing practice was simply learning to let that holding go, over and over again, and to keep my awareness on holding a symmetrical lower-body frame instead: equal weight on both feet, a symmetrical shape through the legs I looked down, refined progressively over those early years.

2. The Second Layer: Shoulders

Three or four years later, I became aware for the first time of the chronic tension held through my shoulders, something I hadn't had any awareness of before. As I began the process of remodelling the fascia in and around the shoulder, and the shoulders started to shift position, it became clear both were suboptimally placed, though not identically. The left was slightly elevated, without much forward displacement. The right was worse on both counts: elevated, and also protracted, the scapula riding up and out and forward, away from its nest against the ribcage.

This has been one of the central threads of my practice for the last ten years or so: following this thread of tension, gradually opening the Myofascial Lock, and letting my shoulders, the right one in particular, drop further into their nests towards neutral positioning. Over that time both shoulders repositioned substantially, the right dropping by at least five centimetres. As it did, the stretch reached into a deeper layer of Biomechanical Debt, travelling from the chest and upper back down through the diaphragm and into the fascia of the belly, and more recently the psoas.

It's also why I stopped standing practice entirely for an extended period during those years. There was too much fascial remodelling still needed to bring the shoulders into a better position, and Zhan Zhuang wasn't sending a strong enough remodelling signal to drive that. It wasn't the best use of my training time while that work still needed doing.

3. The Correction, and a New Discovery

The recent correction from Wang Haijun continued the shoulder progression outlined above, dropping the right shoulder further into its nest. But it also revealed something I hadn't yet understood about the global torsion pattern of my body. During standing practice not long after, I noticed that if I corrected my shoulder without deliberately changing anything in my hips the lower half of my posture was disrupted: more weight landing on my left foot, and my left hip sitting slightly forward, no longer square over the feet.

Chronic holding in the body rarely stays local. The body tends to handle asymmetry globally: a fault in one region is offset by a compensating rotation elsewhere, so the net effect across the frame maintains balance even while individual segments sit out of neutral position. What I had mapped, over the years, was a set of three linked compensations: the right hip riding up, the left shoulder riding up, and the right shoulder protracting, each offsetting another somewhere in the chain. I'd taken that set to be the whole picture. What the shoulder correction uncovered was a fourth link I hadn't previously felt: the left hip, compensating for the right shoulder, shifting forward to offset the shoulder's forward protraction.

That compensation was imperceptible for a simple reason: physically, it's how my body had been organised for as long as I can remember, a poorly calibrated 'neutral' set decades ago. For the first twenty-odd years of my life I had no sense that any of this torsion existed at all. Understanding it has been a gradual process of Hierarchical Interoceptive Unmasking, beginning fifteen years ago and deepening steadily as interoceptive sensitivity has improved and my tissue has reorganised: first the three-link chain described above, mapped over those years, and now, only with this correction, a fourth and more subtle link inside it. One more unresolved piece inside a pattern I'm still in the process of uncovering: right shoulder forward, left hip forward, two faults pulling in opposite directions and cancelling each other out through the spine.

Correcting the shoulder broke that cancellation. With the shoulder back in its true position and the hip left exactly where it had always been, the hip's forward compensation was no longer being offset by anything, and it became perceptible on its own: the left hip perceptibly riding forward and dragging more weight onto the left foot, and asymmetry in the frame of the legs when looking down.

I then corrected the hip to match, pulling it back until the weight settled evenly again. What resulted was genuinely square, weighted 50/50, and the leg frame now symmetrical, but it also felt odd and unfamiliar, not quite right, even though nothing about it was actually asymmetric.

Looking back across this, there are three distinct states worth separating out:

• The first is the old habitual state: two faults offsetting each other, registering as neutral because it's the position my body has held and attempted to balance around for decades, not because anything about it was actually optimal.

  
  

• The second is what appeared the moment the shoulder was corrected and the hip wasn't: a real, measurable asymmetry, weight visibly off 50/50, confirmable by the structure itself and not just a feeling. It felt strange, and it was strange, for the same reason: something was genuinely off.

  
  

• The third is what appeared once the hip was corrected too: neutral by every check available, and it also felt like torsion at first, but for a different reason entirely, unfamiliarity rather than fault. That strangeness didn't last. Within a few sessions of standing, this third state began to feel natural, settled, correct, which is itself the clearest evidence that it's where the body actually wants to be.

  
  

The first state felt right and wasn't. The third state felt wrong briefly and was, in fact, right.

I started my journey in Tai Chi with real, significant torsion through my posture, and not everyone will have this much Biomechanical Debt to unwind. Not everyone carries torsion at this scale, but most people carry some, and the broader point holds regardless of degree: what feels neutral isn't a reliable guide to what is neutral, and that's worth knowing even if the discovery process looks nothing like this one.

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