EDUCATIONAL MOVEMENT SYSTEMS
Somatic movement therapy, posture assessments,
and home-study materials for better bodies and active living.
Meet Mary Ann Foster B.A., L.M.T
Mary Ann named her business Educational Movement Systems, LLC, because she specializes in teaching people practical, easy-to-understand movement exercises for improving posture and movement and preventing injuries.
She offers individualized movement sessions, in-person or over zoom to help people figure out solutions to stubborn body problems assocaated with repetitive-use injuries. Mary Ann also offers many educational resources derived from the two textbooks she wrote, Therapeutic Kinesiology and Somatic Patterning.
With over 500 skeletal muscles and 250 joints in the human body, anatomy and kinesiology are intricate. Mary Ann breaks it down into easy-to-grasp units of muscle groups and joint actions. Her unique approach to changing body patterns is very effective in resolving movement problems from recent or old injuries or pain episodes.
In her classes, private sessions, and educational materials, Mary Ann is passionate about explaining the kinesiology concepts underlying every exercise she teaches because once you understand how your body moves, you will be able to apply the principles to keeping your body aligned and balanced as you go about activities of daily living.
Mary Ann's approach is ideal for anyone who wants to take a deeper delve into the wisdom of the body. It's great for yoga and dance enthusiasts, and it's especially geared to seniors like Mary Ann, who want to stay active longer.
Announcement!
NEW You Tube Channel
"If our interested in learning about your muscles and bones while tuning-up your muscles and joints, please visit my You Tube channel.
I offer a plethora of self-help videos with exercises great for improving posture, performance, and ease of movement. They are also great healing old injuries that interfere with activities you love to do.
My exercises are great seniors, dance and yoga enthusiasts, massage therapists, or anyone interested in practical applications of kinesiology--the science of movement--for keeping active longer and feeling better at it".
Since 1995, Mary Ann has been refining her "Pain-Free Posture" program to better teach clients, students, or anyone interested in improve their body how to activate all the postural muscles along the trunk for core stabilization. Since 2010, she has developed a "Kines Warm-up" that tunes-up the whole body by taking all the major joints and muscles through a full range of movement in all three planes; it loosens stiff joints, stretches tight muscles, and makes a great warm-up for any activity.
An avid researcher and writer, Mary Ann wrote several columns for The Massage and Bodywork Magazine, including “Somatic Anatomy,” “ Talk about Touch,” and “The Science of Movement” She is the author of two textbooks. She self-published and illustrated Somatic Patterning: How to Improve Posture and Movement and Ease Pain, which is available here. Her second award-winning textbook, Therapeutic Kinesiology: Musculoskeletal Systems, Palpation, and Body Mechanics was published by Pearson in 2012.
Also a human movement anatomy geek and home crafting creator, Mary Ann's office is littered with many skeletal parts and anatomical models. To understand how all the muscles fit together and overlap and provide her students learning aides, Mary Ann invented and built over 200 soft 3-D Muscle Models that can attach and layer on the bones like life-sized puzzle pieces.
Mary Ann creates many of her own illustrations to provide students with graphics of her concepts and and anatomically correct images.
This image is her own version of the Rolfing block logo, which shows core alignment in a vertical stacking of the major body masses.
Mary Ann graduated from the Rolf Institute in 1986 with over 1000s classroom hours training as an integrative movement teacher. She offers her own unique version of the structural integration concepts and recipe in "Pain-Free Posture" program.