I am having one of those mornings where I think, “Oh, what if?” and suddenly, answers appear! I am super excited to find out that imagery I have used for decades to explain how I position my body for tango, actually connects to how the body is structured! Woohoo!
I usually explain to students that I imagine my abdominals go up the front edge of my spine, instead of in front of my gut, to lift my core in and support it. The Deep Front Line (DFL) of fascia continues from your feet, up the front of your spine, to your jaw, and provides a strong connection through your body that is essential to your tango technique.
A picture is worth a thousand words
It is easier to see the DFL than to describe it, as it has several different branches in some parts of its journey up the body. The first minute of this video shows Tom Myers giving a super-fast description and provides several illustrations from his book Anatomy Trains (more about this book below). You need the DFL to have good posture. It:
balances your skull.
stabilizes your chest and helps with correct breathing.
supports and contains your body from the hips through the abdomen.
supports your lower back and connects through your hips to your feet.
stabilizes your legs.
The DFL is all about support and slow twitch muscle fibers: it’s endurance, not sprinting. If this layer of the body is not working well, outer layers take over the work, which makes your movement take more effort and thus looks clunkier and less elegant.
DFL Cliff Notes for tango dancers
Foot
The DFL starts under the foot. It spreads out like fingers and hugs the bones of the metatarsals and the arch. High arches and fallen arches both denote issues with the DFL. Each time you push off to walk forwards, this supports your arch and inner ankle to stay in line and work efficiently. For those of us who roll out to our little toes, we can balance better by really focusing on this line through the inner ankle and up the back of the leg to stabilize and balance.
Up the leg
Despite being called the Deep Front Line, the DFL runs from the inner ankle up the BACK of the calf, under the back lines of fascia. It includes the back of the knee capsule. The DFL attaches onto the femur on the medial edge (towards your middle). Your adductors, the muscles that move your leg towards the middle, are part of this line. Think of a fanlike group of attachments from your inner thigh up to your sit bones and pelvic floor. If you grab a yoga block, put it between your upper thighs, squeeze it and do chair pose, you will feel all these muscles wake up. The fascia connects the whole line of muscles and bones together to make this possible.
Through the pelvis and pelvic floor
If you take my yoga classes, you know how important the pelvic floor is to tango already. If you think of a sling of muscles that attach to the inside of your lower spine, down around your pelvic floor, and up to your belly button, that gives you an idea of how much the DFL hugs your core under and around your guts to support your body. To balance the upper body on your pelvis and legs correctly, think about gently adjusting this front-back alignment of your hips and pelvic floor to find just the right position for your body.
You cannot remove core work from tango: it does not get easier. However, all the other work can be pared down so that you see elegance and ease throughout your posture, held up by your pelvic floor and deep core.
Connecting pelvis to spine
Psoas, psoas, psoas
The psoas muscle has ten neuromotor units on each side of the spine. It does A LOT of different things. The human transition from walking on all fours to bipedalism affected how this muscle works and the path of the muscle is pretty weird. However, what you need to know about the psoas and its cousins, psoas minor and iliacus, is this: these are BIG muscles that help stabilize and move, connecting your legs through your pelvis to your spine. They are deep inside the body and hard to find if you feel for them, but my chiropractor and my medical massage therapist can find them on me and I can tell those lines of muscle and fascia need release in order to stay aligned. Ow….
Tail/back
The DFL also has elements that we would think of as BACK, not front of the body. You can follow the fascia from the lumbar spine DOWN the inside of the sacrum, down the tailbone, across the pelvic floor, and then up to the belly button. As I said above, this helps with images of how to align your hips or hip tip front to back for optimal tango alignment.
Diaphragm connections
“Through the pelvis, the deep front line lies in intimate relation with the hip joint and relates the wave of breathing to the rhythm of walking.”
I always joke that “You can swear, but you have to breathe!” when working on walking in tango. It turns out that the DFL directly connects your diaphragm to your deep core to your hips/pelvic floor and all the way down to the sole of your foot (and up to your skull). No wonder you can’t walk well if you are not breathing!
Three routes from diaphragm to skull
The DFL splits at the diaphragm (take a look again at the video linked above). One line (posterior) continues up the front of your vertebrae and connect just in front atlas bone, right under your skull. The center DFL line wraps around your heart, between your lungs, and ends up connected at the base of your skull, in front of your neck vertebrae. The front line of the DFL comes up the inside of your sternum, along the front of your throat, and connects at the base of your jaw/chin. What does this mean for your tango? Again, find the right balance front to back in your ribcage. You have three fascial routes to help you adjust.
Head stabilization
Now that we have built from the floor to the skull, let’s adjust starting from the top for a quick fix to begin your body awareness and improve your tango technique. Most of us have been taught to “stand up straight” in ways that do not serve good posture. Whether you overdo the stress i.e., military upright (too flexed) or slumped (too extended), most people need to adjust their neck muscles to find a good, neutral, balanced place.
Hold your skull between your hands and tip it until your neck feels long and relaxed in the back. Most people have the front of their neck long and the back too short. You may feel as if you are looking down visually, but you are probably closer to good alignment than before. Relax your tongue and jaw as well. Take a deep breath.
Keep this feeling at the top of the DFL and see if you can align yourself better at jaw/throat, diaphragm, pelvic floor and soles of the feet—all the parallel surfaces of the body. Can you find a way to stack them up that works better for you?
Tango, fascia, and body awareness
I have been developing a set of yoga classes to help people find their fascial lines, become more aware of how they move, and then apply it to tango. When the classes are completed, I will offer them again as a series focused more on tango. Stay tuned for announcements!
Anatomy Trains
I can’t say enough about the Anatomy Trains book and the Zoom lectures and dissections I have attended that are organized by Tom Myers. For most people, the deep study of fascia is too geeky, but if you are interested at all, I recommend the book. It comes with several hours of videos, and they serve as Cliff Notes for the book if you are not a reader. Again, it’s a deep dive, designed more for massage people, structural integration practitioners and movement specialists, but if that is your jam, you might want to put this on your wish list.