Three Questions with Meghann Koppele Duffy

Episode 36 - Redefining Stability in Movement and Life

• Meghann • Episode 36

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What if I told you that stability isn’t something you “hold” but something you feel?

In this episode of Three Questions, I take you inside my own evolving definition of stability — in life, in relationships, and in movement. From snapping in traffic to gripping through Pilates exercises, I share how I learned to notice the difference between reacting and responding, and why that same lesson applies directly to how our joints and nervous system handle load.

In This Episode You'll Hear:

• Why gripping, reacting, and overcontrolling often masquerade as “stability”

• How reflexive stability actually works and why your most mobile joints matter most

• Why your favorite cue may have worked for you and still isn’t gospel

If you’re a movement professional, a Pilates teacher in training, or someone who wants to feel more grounded in your body and your life, this episode will help you rethink what stability really is and why it’s so misunderstood.

Links & Resources For This Episode:
Find a Neuro Studio Teacher Near You
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Connect with me on Threads

Meghann Koppele Duffy: Welcome to Three Questions where critical thinking is king, and my opinions and research are only here to support your learning and deeper understanding. Hey, I'm your host, Meghann, and I'm so honored you clicked on Three Questions today so we can talk about stability or maybe lack thereof. So rather than a big, long introduction, I kind of wanna get right into it.

So question one. What does stability mean to you?

Think about it. What does the term stability mean to you? And it doesn't have to be in the framework of movement, maybe in life. Like what is a stable person? Well, I think if I'm being honest, my like gut is to be like, oh, a stable person is a person who's kind of always there. And can adapt to any situation.

But now as I'm getting older and in my forties and have had more life experience, I think a stable person isn't somebody who's always steady and seems like they have it all together. To me, it's the person that can respond appropriately, not always perfectly. But can be vulnerable in a way that's like not weird, vulnerable in a way that's honest, someone you can count on, someone that shows up, someone that responds and doesn't react.

And that's something I've been really exploring personally over the past. I think I first started really talking about this a few years ago on social media. And it was like, I would like pop off in the car, like if somebody cut me off, like kind of lose my shit in a way that was like, all right, you're doing too much.

Um, and I was realizing it was happening more and more with kind of students or just anything in life. I noticed I was doing it more to my mother, which kind of sucks because like. Like I would never, I would snap at her and then I'd have to like call back and apologize. But it all boiled down to I was like overwhelmed.

I was tired. I had a lot going on. And rather than dealing with all those little parts, I would react really fast. And it kind of reacted with anger like. I, I remember when we first got, Willie. Mariska reminded me of this the other day when we were thinking about getting another, uh, beagle puppy is, I would be fine, but if Willie had like an accident in the house, like peed, I would totally lose my shit in a way that was not okay.

Now, it didn't hurt anybody else. It was just hurting me. 'cause usually it was just me home having to clean up the pay. But I had to kind of self-reflect and realize like although people might describe me as being stable or maybe they didn't, is I was always there. I did show up for people. I could handle a lot, but I wasn't responding very well.

I was reacting. So if this kind of resonates with you, um, something I'll, I ask myself now is am I responding or am I reacting? And just for clarity, 'cause I do think language matters. But I hate, like, putting value on words is, for me, responding is in a way that's not emotional. It's thoughtful. It's kind of taking a step back and being like, oh, how do I really feel about this situation?

Or reacting is like shooting from the hip, going hard in the paint and just giving it to people straight. I'm putting air quotes, no, because it's, it's all emotion to me. So maybe that doesn't resonate with you and you're like. No, I never react like that. You're a crazy person. Well, fine. So what does stability mean to you?

What do you look for in a stable friend, A stable partner, a stable business partner, all those things. And now I want to get into kind of what's more meaningful to me and, and most of my audience, because it's mostly movement professionals. Um, what does stability mean to you in movement? And, and maybe a better question is, what does stability feel like in your body?

So I'll be honest, something that really annoys me on social media is when people will be giving an exercise and they're like, this is an exercise for shoulder stability or hip stability when they're mobilizing or moving the hip. Now we could argue that. Uh, in order to better stabilize and react, we've gotta have both sensory input and motor control of said joints.

So yeah, your hip is not gonna stabilize well if you can't move it. So they do interact, but I just feel like that's super confusing to our clients and to other movement practitioners. So I have over the past, like, I don't know, it's been a while since we've had the advanced course for at the neuro studio.

It was before Brian and I got married. Oh my God, why can't I never remember our anniversary? I'm not a bad wife. I remember we met in 2011 on July 4th, so I always think that is our anniversary. There's a painting on the wall. 2017, I believe is the year we got married. Okay. Anyway, not important. So I think it was like 2015 or 2016 we started teaching the advanced course.

Really helping people identify and assess for reflex of stability. Now, some of you might have heard me talk about reflex of stability. Now, why I separate the two is because I'm trying to separate the work we do at the neuro studio from what everybody else is doing. That is not, in my opinion, accurate.

Okay? That's an opinion right there. Um, I haven't studied everybody's else's work in detail, so I'm not gonna cherry pick and pick people out. What I am just saying is to me, stability should occur when a force or demand is placed upon it. So if I'm trying to overhead press with my right arm, well my hip joints and hopefully my opposite shoulder joint can stabilize, so I can mobilize this right arm.

Now if my hip joints and shoulder joint, the glenohumeral, let's talk about the ball and the socket specifically. And if you're not a movement professional, our shoulder is made up of kind of four joints. I'm talking about the most mobile joint in the body. Your glenohumeral, that's your upper arm bone where it fits into that little ball and socket thing.

So yeah, you can still pressure arm over your head without stabilizing at those other three, what I call quadrants. Okay. But where that can lead us to brain mapping issues or to. Compensatory patterns that can lead to injury like our body's supposed to compensate, so like everybody needs to chill. But for me, if we cannot stabilize at our four most mobile joints in the body in this instant, we're talking about three because one is moving.

That is a big cognitive and protective load the brain has to accommodate for. Okay, so people ask me why when you're doing your four quadrant stability model, which is a model I created for assessments. Why those four joints? And I'm like, ah. Because they're the foremost mobile joints in the body that nobody is able to isolate, differentiate, and stabilize at.

And people are like, oh no, I can stabilize. And then we break down the film and I show them and they're like, holy crap, I am moving at that joint. I'm like, I know. And they're like, but I didn't feel like I was, I'm like, I know. Okay, because question one B, what does stability feel like in your body? I think we've got it all wrong, guys.

So what I'm saying is what we think stability feels like isn't actually what it is. Let me be more specific. So a lot of people think that stability feels like a muscle really burning, or muscles really working hard, or other people feel like good stability as muscles aren't working hard. Or say you're hypermobile or have a connective tissue disorder, or you're in a sport like dance or gymnastics or other sports that you have to over mobilize joints to make a pretty shape, well, you're not gonna have as much sensation in those areas because you've trained yourself out of them, or maybe you never had 'em in the first place.

So when students ask me, what does reflexive stability feel like now if you're not watching on YouTube, I'm gonna describe what I'm doing. I'm making a weird face and shaking my fingers like, woo, why I do that? And I usually follow it up by something really snarky as, and I say, what does happiness feel like to you?

And they kind of laugh. I'm like, no, seriously, what does happiness feel like to you? And they look at me and they're like, what does happiness feel like to you? I was like, I don't know. This isn't about me. It's about you. And then I go, to be honest, I think it's hard to put. To create words to explain what happiness feels in my body.

To me, happiness feels like the perfect amount of cognitive load. Happiness, to me is filled with laughter, but not forced Laughter, like that low belly chuckle, my abs are gonna hurt tomorrow. Now maybe laughter isn't a part of your happiness. Maybe happiness is quiet. For all my parents out there, happiness might be seeing your kids succeed.

And I always, I always ask people to go deeper is like, okay, but if you can't rely on anybody else to make you happy, what does happiness feel like? And I did this with my mentees one year and I sat and thought on it for a while and everybody kind of came up a little empty. And then I said, guys, this might sound pathetic, but do you know what really makes me happy?

And they're like, what? And I was like, laundry. And they're like, say less, but say more. And I said, hold on, hear me out. It wasn't laundry, but what I realized is how my brain works. There's a lot coming in and out at all times. I call it organized chaos, but for me completion. The sense of completion of a task and being focused on the process makes me feel grounded.

And I think feeling grounded is happiness to me right now. Now that might, you might be like, oh my God, that's sad, that feeling grounded makes her happy. Well, it does, and the thing about laundry is I don't. Think laundry's, like throwing shit in the washer and then forgetting it for two days and it gets mildew and then you have to wash it again and do the dryer.

For me, when I do laundry, I wash, I dry, I fold, and I put away. And if you ask my husband, I am very anal when it comes to folding. I have a way that I even fold fitted sheets. That is a perfect square. Um, I joke, it's my first job at Abercrombie and Fitch when I was in college, and if you're young, Abercrombie and Fitch, it was cool when I worked there, at least I thought it was, maybe it wasn't.

Um, anyway, we had to fold everything perfectly and then smoosh it. But because my brain works so fast and takes so many things in, I love my closet. And my clothes to be neat and orderly. When you come to my house, I have renovated a whole room to just be my closet, and it looks like you're shopping. I have it set up, so everything is kind of color coded, organized in a way, because if my closet is a mess, it's just added cognitive load.

And remember I said happiness is the perfect amount of cognitive load. So think about those little things that make you happy, and you might be like, hi, I thought we were talking about stability. I'll get to the point. Okay? But I think it's really important to critically think and identify what do these words mean to me?

Now you can identify happiness and stability completely different than I do. All I'm asking you in today's episode is to think about it, try to put it in your own words. Define it. Define it wrong. Define it weird. Find the right words. I mean, for years I, I laughed at people trying to define Pilates and I, Joseph Pilates says he wanted you to, um, uh, what was the, I'm gonna screw up the quote.

I do quote, I do quotes backwards. Um, but it was like, to develop your body uniformly. Okay, great for me. Developing uniformly is letting the body work as a system where no one part is working harder than the other. And in that our larger joints, more mobile joints, need to do their job. If smaller joints and smaller parts of do are doing the job of the bigger ones, we gonna have problems eventually.

So for me, in order to get that uniform development, I think Pilates is mobilizing certain parts of the body. While other parts reflexively stabilize with respect to the spine, so we move the spine, flex, extend, laterally flex, and when we're moving the spine, we need certain areas to be stable so we can move it.

Okay? Then when we're trying to move our limbs, we need our spine to reflexively stabilized inflection in extension, in neutral, upside down and backwards. I want your body to respond no matter what position you're in. And I want it to respond, not react, because to me, react can lead to pain. React is a gripping pattern.

Sometimes we need to react because we've gotta get a job done right now. Like say I'm like doing pictures and I have to like be in a position for a longer than I want. Well, I'm gonna calm my face look really relaxed, and I might engage my abs really deep to help my brain feel safe in that position, but that's not life.

Okay, so just take the time. Do me a favor. I want you to think about what stability means to you and don't go teaching it like it's gospel to people. Okay? I want you to think about what it means to you. I want you to find, if there's research to support that, I want you to poke holes in your theory. 'cause even when I first developed the four quadrant stability model, and we're talking about reflexes, stability, I realized when teachers would come visit to me, visit me.

They weren't stabilizing. They were gripping. And I'm like, oh, wait a minute. In the effort to get people to respond, maybe their anticipatory reacting, damn it. And then I didn't wanna make gripping, like the worst thing people could do. 'cause then I like vilified, gripping, not, not intentionally, but gripping.

Nobody's gonna die from you, gripping your abs or clenching your glutes while you're doing something. But it's gonna inhibit the other movement patterns, right? So again, we don't want gripping patterns, but if they're occurring, we could use that as an assessment to say, Hey, maybe if I change the sensory environment, I can get a different motor output where they don't have to clench their butthole.

Okay? So teachers, I'm just going to encourage you, it is okay to teach your work. I do it every day, but please stop acting like your opinions are gospel. Also, please poke holes in your theory. Find research to support it, and I dare you to find research that goes against your theories if you have the courage to do that.

To me, you are a true leader and you've got the confidence to be like, yeah, I could be right, or I could be wrong. The one thing I know about stability is it's completely misunderstood, and now people are saying it's not important. Oh. Bitch. It is important. It is very important, but just because we don't understand it doesn't mean it's not important and we don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

I've spent my whole career creating this assessment model, a moving model, but it's constantly adjusting. Right? And why I created this model is I'm like, how can we better identify if people are stabilizing? Okay. Not because I am right or wrong, but because God, I really think if we can figure this out, people will move with more ease.

So join me in this journey. Give me your opinions. Tell me what you're thinking about, because we can't do this by ourselves. All right, so I'm going, before I move on to question two, think about what those questions mean. What does stability mean to you in both movement, in a partner in life, in a friendship.

How does it feel in your body? Well, to me, stability feels like complete distribution of load. And as somebody who never felt that in their body, oh my God, movement was always difficult for me and now I can do it with great form and I feel my body working and I can stay focused. Now, if you always had that distribution of load, like my husband, like who's an athlete.

That might not resonate with you because you've always felt that as you get older and you stop doing your sports, you're gonna feel what distribution of lo losing it feels like and it don't feel good. So do me a favor, just think about it, comment on the post, DM me, send me a carrier pigeon. I am really curious, right?

So question two, are you teaching your clients to react to a unique environment? Or are we just teaching them to complete a certain exercise

and can both be important? Man, maybe you thought I was going in a different way with that question. You know, I just gotta throw a curve ball at you. There's like these two schools of thought, like, oh, I'm gonna just teach functional movements and I want my client to be able to do all these functional tasks.

And then there are these people, no, I want my clients to do these certain exercises, or they wanna get really good at Pilates. And to me, Pilates is a practice. If you wanna get good at Pilates, you've gotta practice those movements. Can they translate into O life and other exercises? Yes. But so can CrossFit, so can yoga.

So I think both are important because we might want to, the beautiful thing about a practice is we start at the bottom and we get better at it. I love. Love, love being focused on the process. To me, I can equate all my success. That did not come until, oh God, my mid thirties. I don't know. I think I was focused on the goals for a lot of the beginning of my career and it looked like success from the outside.

I had a çs studio when I was 24. I owned it for five years. I sold it. Um, I've got a master's degree from Columbia. I'm now doing a doctorate. Um, I have two successful businesses. The neuro studio and the Koppele method.. Yeah, on paper. But I wasn't stable back then. I wasn't grounded because I was always focused on the goal.

In the past kind of 10 years, I really, honestly, I think it was watching Tom Brady, um, and I grew up a Giants fan. Um, I kind of, oh my God, this is like terrible. Everybody's gonna freaking hate me. I have, I am now an Eagles fan, mostly because I grew up a Giants fan. It's like maybe you realize it as an adult, you don't wanna be that religion anymore.

Um, I found, found the Eagles Games to be more fun. My husband's an Eagles fan. I don't want the Giants to lose, but I also don't love how they run their team. So yeah. Giants fans, sorry. I have switched teams, and you might think I'm not a loyal person, but I can't control your thoughts about me. But back to my point.

So anyway, um, giants and Eagles, we don't like the Patriots. Okay. Sorry, Boston people, but I respect Tom Brady. What an athlete. He was like a six round draft pick. He was not a star. He worked his butt off. And what I realized is he would win Super Bowl after Super Bowl, but he just never looked happy. And it's like, oh my God.

Well, how do you feel the day after a Super Bowl? Well, you gotta do it the next year. You've gotta climb that mountain again. And I experienced that when Mariska and I used to travel once a month to teach workshops. I get up there, everybody's excited to hear for me, they clap. It's like this big deal. And then I go home and I'm like, huh.

There was this like level of like, huh, I don't wanna say depression. Because I've experienced that too, and it was different. It just kind of felt like flat affect, not great. So what I realized is if I'm always focused on the goals, I am never gonna be happy. Well, every time I reach this goal, I taught in Japan, Dubai.

I've taught in Australia all over the world. Why aren't I happy? Well, because we're just checking boxes. And ever since I focused on the process. There has been such a level of enjoyment in my work. I wake up every day excited, okay? Not every day, most days, excited. And on those days, I don't wake up excited.

I'm gonna share with you my mantra, mantra, mantra. I literally say this to myself and one of my students, uh, Frederica, who was traveling me with me, so see clients, I said it out loud in the car, and she kind of looked at me. I said, I am so blessed to be able to do what I love every day, even when I'm tired.

Because I don't wanna do this every day, but I'm so lucky I get to, right. So I really believe in focusing on the process. So going back to Tom Brady, he then became a sportscaster and frankly, he was not that good at the beginning and I gave him so much, give him so much credit for sticking it out because we watch a lot of football.

I am married to a football coach and I was like, man, Tom Brady's getting a lot better at this and. I don't know him, but I assume he kind of focused on the process, got better on it. And Tom Brady, if you wanna share your secrets with the three questions, um, followers, please let us know. So all that being said, I think it's great to have a practice.

Maybe you wanna do CrossFit, maybe you wanna do Pilates, maybe you wanna do yoga and get better as at at it as a practice and enjoy the process. That is amazing. But. We also have to, as movement professionals, make sure clients understand that that specific cue was in that moment in time. What I focus on in my work is getting people to focus on a sensory input.

So when you're doing that exercise, what is your brain focusing on? How can we replicate that movement? Right. In certain types of movements, I call it go and flow state. When you're in Go State, that means it's time to learn. We need a new movement pattern. We're either in pain or we're having trouble focusing.

We need to lock in, we need to be strict about our sensory inputs. And then when we're in flow state, I just want my students to go do a workout. Move around. Don't assume you're gonna do it wrong, and then just check in when you're struggling. Okay? Not every day has to be a neuroplasticity session where we're over focused on sensor input.

So ask yourself, do you wanna be a teacher that's focusing on letting clients react to a unique environment, or do you wanna be a teacher that's focused on the process and that you want them to perfect a certain skill? I think you can be both, but I want you to really decide what you want to do with this work, and then no matter what you're doing, can you.

Assess if they are actually stabilizing when you are asking 'em to mobilize, and how do you know this? Well, if you're gonna give them an exercise, I'd love you to step back and ask yourself, what should be stabilizing here? I do this to my students all the time, especially in complex movements. We were doing cat cows and they're like, hip stability.

I'm like, Nope, your hip joint's mobilizing. We're moving the pelvis around the leg. They're like, is it knees, elbows? Feet and hands. I'm like, sure, sure, and sure. And then I go, do they all have to stabilize for the person to do a cat gown? And they're like, no. Well, maybe we look at those areas that should be stabilizing and decide what area that's not stabilizing is moving the most.

Maybe we can create a sensory environment or give them cues to bring awareness to that part and keep it moving. Okay. So moving on to question three, which I am not going to go into detail because I really want you to think about this. Why do you believe your cues or your approach is correct?

Why? Is it because you've tested it, maybe peer reviewed studies or just tested it on your clients? Have you challenged yourself and adjusted based off mistakes? Or is it because somebody you trust like me or one of your other mentors told you to do it or because it felt good in your body? Okay. I asked a lot of questions within a question, so why do we believe the way we teach is correct? Right. And it always amazes me like everybody's like yelling on social media, like, this is the right way. Everybody else is wrong. And I'm like, well, how do you know that?

To me, everybody's a little right and everybody's a little wrong, including myself. Right? Freeing yourself from always being correct is like the best feeling. It's not that hard to do so. If you are teaching the way you do, maybe it's classical Pilates or CrossFit or yoga, because your mentor or a teacher you admire told you to do that and it was correct.

You need to question that. That's not disrespectful. Your teacher questioning me is not disrespectful. It actually tells me you care. It actually tells me you wanna also be a leader, and I'm all for that. I think a lot of times it's because somebody we trusted told us it was correct and it felt good in air quotes in our body.

Now, I did air quotes because sometimes we determine things are good because it felt different. Maybe we felt a muscle we never felt before and we just decided that was good, right? So what I want you to think about, am I teaching this way because so and so gave me this cue and it changed my world? Well, not everybody's like you.

Does everybody define happiness the same way you do? Does everybody define pain the same way you do? Does everybody define stability the same way you do? No. And on the flip side of it, if you believe what you're teaching is correct because you've tested it and you continually to challenge it, keep doing that.

But don't be so distrusting of everybody else who has an opinion. Right. I notice all, I tend not to scroll on social media, um, because I tend to get reactive and that's not the person I wanna be. And I get reactive when I see people being very black and white and they're telling you don't be black and white as they're being black and white.

It's the hypocrisy that annoys me. Okay? But they are trying to share their beliefs because it has really helped them, or they think it has. I think the biggest turning point for me is someone who I actually really like, but I know who has a, lives in a lot of pain and has a lot of health issues, also has a lot of opinions on how other people should live and move.

And I'm thinking, well, maybe we should clean up home first before we start giving. That doesn't mean we're not allowed to have pain, uh, problems at home and stuff like that, don't get me wrong. But I think it could be dangerous working out our problems on other people. Okay, so to sum this all up, I'm gonna start with the last question first.

To bring this to stability is your approach with stability or how you cue stability based off how somebody else taught you and just felt good in your body. Well, I want to encourage you to critically think on why that made you feel good. What was the cue? What was, did the cue change from a sensory approach to your brain and body that changed the motor output?

And instead of giving just that cue, can you maybe say, oh my God, bringing sensory awareness to my visual system or to the joints that were moving when they shouldn't have that changed my life. So this specific cue worked for me because it brought awareness to my brain. Or maybe you're like, no, from a biomechanical perspective, that is a.

Amazing cue and I'm gonna use it all the time. Great, but also critically think and poke holes in the other end. And my critical thinkers, myself included, I'm giving myself this advice, is just because you're a critical thinker doesn't mean you're still not judgmental. We can be judgmental and a critical thinker, but usually when I'm judgmental, it's something that I'm working on being more clear about.

And I don't have the words for yet, but they'll come or they won't and I'll survive. So working our way backwards using this idea of stability and not relying on cues because people told us, can we adapt our teaching or maybe be more clear about our teaching. Of, are we working on the pro? Are we focusing on the process and trying to improve a body of work?

Or are we teaching clients how to react to a unique environment? Can we do both? Can we have certain sessions for each? And I think if you delineate those two, but also put 'em back together, you will have such a deeper understanding of what you do. And again. The other secret to my success is always focusing on the process and being clear about what the hell I'm doing.

I'm always like, why am I doing that? What is the purpose there? Why am I doing this podcast? Well, for me, I'm working on being more streamlined in my explanations, which I am noticing. I am over my 30 minutes, so I need to be more concise. And number two is to share the work I teach in my courses at a way to make it more accessible to people.

So, last but not least, continually think about what stability means to you, what it feels like in your body. And question, are we responding or are we reacting? Are we anticipating or are we letting the force or demands come onto us and we adjust as we need to? I find a better understanding of stability and movement has made me much more stable in life and.

I'm gonna grip here and there. I'm gonna react, but I'm pretty sure I'm also human and so are you. So I hope today's episode got you thinking about stability, asking more questions, and again, share with me your thoughts here. It's only a definition because someone decided it will be together. We can change the definition.

All right guys, I'll see you next time. Keep kicking butt. 

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