By John Sutherland — Creator of Adaptive Bodywork Structural Integration. Twenty-plus years as a therapist, still learning what the body has to teach.
The Body You Have Is the Body You’ve Practised
I spent decades as a competitive cyclist — first on the road, then on the velodrome, where I won multiple Canadian championship titles as a masters sprint cyclist. I was good at it. I was also, without realizing it, becoming a narrower version of what a human body can do.
A bicycle locks you into flexion. Hips bent, torso folded forward, thousands of hours spent never once reaching full hip extension. I got extremely proficient at generating power from that position — proficient enough to win. But proficiency isn’t the same as range. I had made myself into a widget on an assembly line: legs spinning like a sewing machine under a mechanical apparatus, highly optimized for one narrow output, at the cost of the fuller expression the body is actually built for.
When I moved from the velodrome to sprinting on foot — no bike, no bars, just spikes and a track — that history didn’t disappear. The hip extension I’d spent a career avoiding was suddenly the thing my new sport demanded most. My body had gotten extremely good at something else, and hip extension simply wasn’t part of that skill set.
We often talk about the body as though it were an object: something we possess, something that can become tight, damaged, weak, stiff, old, or injured. The body is better understood as a process — continuously responding to what we ask of it, reorganizing around the demands we place on it, learning from repetition.
That distinction changes how we think about movement, pain, posture, recovery, and ageing. The body you have today isn’t just the product of genetics, time, injury, or wear. It’s also the product of what you’ve repeatedly practised — often without realizing you were practising anything at all. Mine had practised flexion for thirty years. It was very good at it.
The Body Is Always Learning
Practice doesn’t only happen in a gym, on a mat, or on a track. It happens all day. The way you sit, stand, carry your weight, and protect an old injury are all repeated experience the body learns from.
You don’t need a crash or an injury to build a pattern this deep — a bicycle seat did it to me over three decades of otherwise healthy training. Injure an ankle and the same thing happens faster: you shorten your stride, maybe shift more weight to the opposite side. In the short term, that’s an intelligent adaptation — a solution that lets you keep functioning while protecting something that feels vulnerable.
Here’s the part that matters: the body doesn’t distinguish between a strategy that’s useful for two weeks and one that gets kept for twenty years. Repeat it often enough and it becomes familiar. Familiar becomes easy to reproduce, and easy to reproduce becomes automatic.
The body doesn’t necessarily return to what’s best. It returns to what’s most familiar.
Familiarity Becomes the Default
An injury can heal while the strategy built around it stays. The ankle stops hurting; the altered gait persists. The shoulder heals; the guarding remains. The back spasm passed years ago; the bracing pattern built around it is still being rehearsed today.
Over time we stop experiencing these patterns as behaviours and start experiencing them as characteristics. “My right hip is just tight.” “My left shoulder has always been higher.” “I have a bad back.” That’s sometimes a real structural limit — and sometimes a deeply rehearsed adaptation wearing the appearance of one.
That difference matters. Something that’s simply “how I am” feels permanent. A pattern that became familiar through repetition is more changeable than it looks — that’s the other side of adaptation.
Repetition Builds Skill — Even When the Skill Is Compensation
The body gets efficient at what it repeats. We accept this easily when we’re talking about athletic or artistic skill: a sprinter drills acceleration until it stops requiring conscious effort. Repetition lowers the cost of performance. The system organizes itself around the task.
Compensation works the same way. You get efficient at walking around an old injury the same way you get efficient at a jump shot — through repetition, without the body weighing whether the pattern is actually a good idea.
Adaptation isn’t the enemy here. The pattern you later want to change was often the smartest solution available at the time — what changed is the reality it was solving for, not the body’s judgment.
Why Change So Often Fails to Last
This explains why people feel dramatically different after a session and then drift back toward the old pattern. A shoulder feels freer. A stride feels longer. Breathing takes less effort. For a while, the system has access to a different possibility.
But the old pattern has history. It’s been rehearsed tens of thousands of times. The new pattern has been experienced for an hour.
So the body moves back toward what it knows. That doesn’t mean the session failed, or that you did something wrong — familiarity simply has momentum. Adaptive systems settle into well-established patterns unless a new alternative gets repeated enough to become credible.
Creating a new possibility once isn’t the hard part. Making it familiar is.
Making the New Familiar
Lasting change means expanding the range of available strategies and giving them enough repetition to become usable, not forcing the body into some supposedly perfect position.
A hip that hasn’t extended well in years — mine, for instance, after thirty years of cycling — needs opportunities to actually experience extension, over and over, until it stops feeling foreign. A shoulder that’s been overworking needs the ribs, spine, or pelvis to start participating differently.
This is how I think about Structural Integration: changing enough of the relationships within the body that another option becomes possible. Sometimes the most important result of a session is that the body experienced a way of organizing itself that was previously unavailable, not that something got “fixed.”
Once that happens, the question is whether the new option gets reinforced enough to compete with the old one.
The Body Is a Process, Not a Finished Product
This is the part I find most encouraging.
An adaptive process is never entirely finished. It’s continuously updated by your habits, your injuries, and what you expose yourself to. Walking, sitting at a desk, an old injury, a new movement — each one becomes part of the ongoing conversation between the body and its environment.
The body you have is a current expression of what’s become familiar, not a static result. And familiarity isn’t destiny.
The more useful question is “What has my body become familiar with?” rather than “What’s wrong with my body?” What movement does it return to automatically, and what tension has it learned to treat as normal? What position feels normal simply because it’s been repeated so often?
And then the real question: what would happen if something better became equally familiar?
I didn’t get my range of motion back by wishing my cycling career hadn’t happened. I got it back by stopping — by ceasing to be a competitive cyclist, and then deliberately making full range of motion the priority in my sprint training and my gym work. The old pattern didn’t fade on its own. I replaced it, on purpose, with enough repetition that the new range became the default instead of the exception.
The body you have is the body you’ve practised.
And the body you’re becoming is being practised right now.
The body you’ve been living in doesn’t have to be the body you keep living in.
About John Sutherland
John Sutherland is the creator of Adaptive Bodywork Structural Integration (ABSI) and a registered massage therapist in Montréal. He is also the only certified Anatomy Trains Structural Integration therapist in the city, and has spent years applying that work to his own body as a competitive masters sprinter.
His work is informed by decades of clinical experience, advanced structural integration training, and a lifetime devoted to understanding human movement—from elite international sport to the treatment of people seeking relief from pain, improved performance, and greater freedom of movement.
Adaptive Bodywork was built upon a simple conviction: the body is not a machine to be corrected, but an adaptive living system to be understood. Every treatment reflects that philosophy, helping individuals discover more efficient, resilient, and comfortable ways of organizing themselves rather than imposing change from the outside.
Whether working with chronic pain, athletic performance, or the ordinary challenges of everyday life, John’s goal remains the same: to help people better understand their own remarkable capacity to adapt.
The body you’ve been living in doesn’t have to be the body you keep living in.
