Everything in Proportion: Dr. Leslie Russek

Interview by Katrina Castro

Dr. Leslie Russek is a professor of Physical Therapy at Clarkson University, a practicing physical therapist, and the advisor and chief instructor for Clarkson’s Aikido club. Her Physical Therapy practice is influenced by the philosophy behind Aikido, which is to help and protect those who are in pain. She graduated from Harvard University with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics in 1984, obtained a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1987, and graduated from the University of Vermont with a B.S. in Physical Therapy in 1991. She has been practicing Aikido for 20 years and has been a regular instructor for 18 years. I had the opportunity to sit down and learn about her philosophy behind the breed between Physical Therapy and Aikido.

Prior to your involvement in Aikido, I understand that you were busy with your research in Biomechanics. What sparked your interest to join Aikido?
It was kind of an accident. I have been doing Martial Arts all my life. I started doing Judo when I was nine years old. It was offered at school and I took it. It was a neat and nifty thing to do. Plus, I have two older brothers who picked on me so it’s kind of practical too. I did Judo for about seven years, and when I was in college I stopped doing it because the goal of Judo was to win competitions. It wasn’t necessary to improve ourselves and to refine our skills. You would learn a new technique but then in competition you’d fall back to what worked. So I stopped doing Martial Arts for a year or two and then accidentally met up with somebody who was doing Aikido. As soon as I saw the art, I knew it was a perfect match for me because the goal was not to win. The goal is to control our own ego, to try to improve ourselves and the other person is the polishing stone that helps us to do that. So it’s not about what we do to the other person it’s about what we learn in ourselves.

How did you get into Physical Therapy?
After my PhD, I started a post-doctoral position at the University of Vermont, looking at muscle mechanics and how it is that the molecules that make up muscle can actually produce force. I did that for about a year but my values shifted. Being a research scientist wasn’t going to make me satisfied with my life in the long term. I had funding and I was in one of the best labs in the country to do this. Everything was as good as it could be but I felt that if I continued to do that for another ten years, I would look back at my life and I wouldn’t be happy with what I had accomplished. The shift in values occurred because of my participation in the martial art of Aikido which teaches that the warriors learned their skill so that they could serve and protect people. I felt that I had a lot of knowledge but it wasn’t necessarily doing anybody any good. Physical Therapy was a way that I could take the knowledge that I have of the human body and how the human body works and apply it in a way that would touch the lives of those I come in contact with and actually make a difference to real people rather than the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. To me both of those values, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and doing something that benefits specific people are both good values and so I have no regrets about what I had been doing. However, my focus shifted and Physical Therapy was a way to take my background and apply it in a way that would be personally rewarding to me.

Are there any overlaps between Physical Therapy and Aikido?
The physical aspects of Aikido overlap with the physical aspects of Physical Therapy in many respects. For example, in Physical Therapy, when I am laying my hands on a person to stretch out a muscle, I have to be relaxed for them to relax. If I touch the person and I am tensed, they’ll tend to be tensed. In Aikido, it’s exactly the same way. When somebody grabs my wrist and I am tensed, they’ll tend to be tensed. If I am relaxed, they almost can’t help but relax. So, the same physical skill and the same sense of connecting to a person from my center that is used in Aikido are used in Physical Therapy. So if I am doing a massage, I move my whole body. This is also an Aikido skill. There is an interesting overlap between the physical aspects of both of them because both need to be consisting with how the body functions effectively.

What kinds of research in Physical Therapy are you involved in?
My primary emphases are on chronic pain syndromes. The ones that I am interested in are headaches, fibromyalgia, and something called hypermobile joint syndrome where people are very flexible. People who have one of those conditions tend to have one or the other ones.

But as a martial artist, isn’t flexibility a good thing?
Everything in proportion. It’s like the string of a musical instrument. You don’t want it too tight or too lose. It has to be just right. If you are too tight, yes, it puts stress on your body, but if you are too flexible, it puts different stresses. Imagine if the tires on your car were able wobble side to side when you are driving, the bearings would wear out because they are not functioning the way they are designed to. So people who have a lot of flexibility do have a tendency towards injuring themselves or a tendency towards more pain. Not everybody does but there is a higher incidence.

Does any of your research affect how you teach Aikido?
Probably not directly because my research is in chronic pain and those are the patients that I treat as well because I do still treat patients. I had to learn to be fairly empathetic and gentle with people when they come to me with a lot of pain and they have been bounced around the medical system by people who said to them, “There is nothing wrong with you,” or “There is nothing I can do for you.” People come to me with a lot of pain and I tend to use a gentle touch with them. That’s consistent with the philosophy of Aikido which is the only reason a person would try to attack you is if they are in a lot of pain. There has to be something that is sort of hurting them enough to drive them to do something destructive.

What spiritual or religious belief do you practice?
I believe that there is some spiritual force but I don’t belong to any of the Churches. I do very much like the Japanese religions and philosophies that everything in nature is embodied with some sort of spirit of the universe and there is a harmony in the universe that humans should try to be in tune with, rather than imposing our will on the universe. We should try to be in harmony with it.

Does this philosophy affect how you treat your patients?
Very much so because the human body needs to be in harmony as well. And when it is out of harmony that is when you have pain, like the string of a musical instrument, if it is too tight or too loose, that is when it doesn’t work. If muscles are too tight or too weak or we are putting stresses on our body, that is when we have pain. So a lot of what I do as a physical therapist is to educate people how to be more in harmony with their bodies. It is one thing for me to touch a person to make them feel better but my goal is to teach them how to be healthier.

Other than Aikido, what else do you like to do on your free time, if you have any free time?
Not very much. I have dogs and right now we just adopted a third dog, my husband has gotten into dog sledding and so we got a couple of pure bred Siberian huskies that he is training to pull the dog sled. . I find that having dogs helps me to let go of the day. Dogs are just there, they are present in the moment, they have an absolute joy of life that they sniff on the ground and it’s so exciting!

Would you say that you are more fulfilled by your current profession?
Definitely. I’m satisfied in a different way. Back when the search for knowledge for its own sake was my value, I loved being a research scientist so that was the greatest thing on earth. I had a job where I could do what I loved doing. So, I was happy back then too. When my values shifted, there was a period of discord between what I was doing and what I needed to do. So now, I guess I’m pretty happy.

  Katrina Castro will be graduating from Clarkson University with a B.S. degree in Technical Communications this December. Her professional interests are in publications and professional writing. She has taken various Martial Arts such as Kickboxing, Kung Fu, Tae Kwon Do and Judo.