Wall hip flexor stretch, partner and solo versions

Tags

kitlaughlin.com, wall hip flexor, wall quad stretch

To begin, my sincere thanks to Linda (my wonderful Vancouver host), Matt (‘Mash’) Farrell (for helping LW and I on the workshops, and modelling for some videos) and Jen and Laura, owners of the wonderful Driftwood Dance Academy, where I presented the latest workshop and made the video I want to talk about today.

Have a look at Driftwood Dance Academy HERE.

Now to the new video: Jim Pickles has posted a new thread over at the Forums; I will link to it at the end of this post, and I hope to develop this theme further.

Check the latest video out:

I have not played with this hip flexor variation for some time; in doing it a few times during the just-finished Stretch Teacher workshop, I feel I have underestimated its importance: I now feel it is one of the strongest front-line (in the Anatomy Trains sense) fascial stretches on the planet.

It is infinitely scalable, too, as well as having the capacity for the practitioner to be able to move the locus of the stretch anywhere from just above the knee (like our floor quad stretch) all the way to the diaphragm (once you get deep enough into it). It is particularly effective as a mid-quadriceps stretch, too.

The Forums thread, started by JimP can be found HERE.

Comments most welcome, here or over at the Forums.

Day three of the Vancouver Stretch Teacher workshop relaxation script uploaded

Tags

lying meditation, relaxation, Yoga Nidra

Hello all,

In the earlier post, I neglected to mention that we have been using the new all-experiential Into the Stretch as the first three days of this workshop; it has gone better than even I had hoped, and two of the attendees have loved it so much that they are repeating the same three days in Edmonton, in a couple of weeks.

Today, I am uploading the last of the relaxation scripts; this one is slightly longer, and has a different flavour, and is slightly slower. Let me know what you think.

http://kitlaughlin.com/bodypress/Driftwood_STrelax_Day3.MP3

This one features more gently tension activities and is about 24′ in duration.

As well, we will be making some new YT clips, among them much-requested shoulder pushdown which, amazingly, we have never shot. Stay tuned.

Day one and day two Vancouver Stretch Teacher workshop relaxation scripts

Hello all,

A quick post today to let you know that the relaxation scripts from Day One and Day two have been uploaded and are ready for you to download.

http://kitlaughlin.com/bodypress/Driftwood_STrelax_Day1.MP3

http://kitlaughlin.com/bodypress/Driftwood_STrelax_Day2.MP3

These are already MP3 format, so your players (iPhone, iPod, etc.) should recognise them immediately. These are short versions, about 20 minutes each, and Day 1’s includes the setup instructions.

Please let me know what you think. Cheers, KL

I have noticed that WordPress is occasionally inserting ads; I will have to pay $30/p.a. to get rid of these—please let me know if they are intrusive.

Issuing the 90-day goblet squat challenge: notes from Vancouver

Tags

Cossack squats, goblet squat, lifting stones, Skandasana, speed skater squats

ONLY in California

Seen on the air bridge: could there be any more useless, sign-of-the-times sign than this? If it is accurate, what is a rational response, I wonder—sue the Californian legislature? What were they thinking?

When Linda picks me up, we always go to one of the Earl’s chain of restaurants: great food, wine by the glass, pleasant waitresses, and a relaxed ambience.

Matt, Linda, KL

I stay on Prospect; I like this sign mostly because it reminds me of that priceless line from the moving “Flying High”: Leslie Neilson exclaiming “Nice Beaver!”

Prospect is the highest street on the mountain

The 90-day goblet squat challenge:

The challenge is to goblet squat (or some variation) for the next 90 days.

Here are some images taken at the Lynne Creek (I believe) yesterday. I realise that what I am showing here is not, strictly speaking, a goblet squat, so named because the weight, often a kettlebell, is held in the upraised palms (think heavy pewter goblet!) with the elbows locked into the ribs, but this stone was relatively heavy (about 30–35Kg, I think) and I decided to hold it the way McGlashen stones are lifted (and sometimes carried).

Starting position

First, one must ‘address’ the stone: weight evenly on both feet, and a firm grip taken. I used a hybrid clean movement to get the stone into this next position; this means a combination hip drive and, once the stone is moving, bending the arms and getting the stone into position for the squat. A breath is taken in, and:

Setting up

Down into the bottom position. I do not let my lower back round at all (you keep an extension tension in the lower back to do this, and this tension and the resulting position means that the glutes are maximally activated for the drive out of the bottom position). The only effort I feel is in the glutes.

Bottom position: note straight lower back

I have been goblet squatting with multiple sets for the last two weeks, with a minimum of 50 reps being the goal: here is a typical workout:

5 x 10 reps, 16Kg KB (day one)

3 x 10, 2 x 15, 16Kg (day 2)

1 x 20, 4 x 15, 16Kg (day 3)

5 x 10, 16Kg, (deload day); I have a light day if my hip joints feel at all sore.

Since I have some to Vancouver, I have been using river rocks and stones I found in the back yard (granite, similar to the river stones, but rougher in shape). Yesterday, in addition to doing sets of five with the stone shown above when we walked the river, I used a smaller stone to counterweight a Skandasana and a Cossack squat sequence; I will ask Mash (Matt, above) to film this next week, assuming the good weather holds.

None of these routines are taken anywhere near failure; they are more like a weighted mobility sequence. Nonetheless, this short time has put noticeable weight on my glutes. When I get access to a bar, I would love to combine these with glute-ham raises; in the meantime, I will use Speed Skater squats as a variation.

I will shoot a proper goblet squat instructional video using Linda’s heaviest KB, a 12, some time next week. Try these; they feel great in the body and are the perfect antidote to a sedentary lifestyle.

“Into the stretch”: Cri’s reworking of the introductory three-day workshop title

Tags

kitlaughlin.com, Princess Bride, stretch therapy

I had to look this one up: there is a scene in Princess Bride where the already-dead Wesley describes what he’s about to do to the dastardly prince.

The prince challenges Wesley to a sword duel, with the standard opening challenge: “To the death!”. Wesley responds, “No: to the pain!”, and outlines his plans.

See the scene HERE.

And what does this have to do with today’s post subject line? Our host in Italy, Cristina Ferri (Studio38) has suggested that instead of “Intro. to Stretch” as the name for the introductory three-day workshop we are proposing as the entry point for someone interested in any of the streams of the work, it be renamed to Into the stretch.

Further, she has suggested the tagline:

Into the Stretch: a deep body and mind experience

Olivia’s take: Into the Stretch: a deep body experience

When I write the full description of the contents, a major theme will be ‘learn to feel your body again’, as so many have commented on this aspect recently.

What’s the relationship with Wesley’s statement? I’m not sure, but in the spirit of rendering stream of consciousness, on day two of The Darkness*, I post here.

I like the new name; comments please.

————-
*The Darkness: that time in Australia’s history when an opposition leader was able to dupe the majority of the populace with an entirely negative campaign, rendered in a policy vacuum (where their policies were hidden until the last moment and—when revealed—were the sitting government’s own policies, apart from the desire to get rid of the ‘carbon tax’, which was not a tax, either).

Final product title, and how workshops will be offered in 2014

Tags

kitlaughlin.com, Stretch Practitioner (Therapist), Stretch Teacher, stretch therapy

After much discussion, I have decided that this will be the new title and sub-title:

Stretch Therapy™
How to attain ease in the body and graceful movement

I will be grateful for final comments.

So, future workshops will flow from this decision, too:

Intro. to Stretch
The very first experience any new person will have of the ST method, this three-day workshop will be completely practical/experiential, and will include a relaxation session each day. Anyone, whether an individual wanting to have a ‘body sabbatical’, or a practitioner wanting to become a Stretch Teacher or a Stretch Practitioner (Therapist in some jurisdictions) will need to begin with this workshop. Someone who has done Intro. to Stretch may choose to go on to the Stretch Teacher or Stretch Practitioner streams.

Stretch Teacher
An additional three-day workshop will focus on teaching the attendees how to teach a decent stretch class: this includes all the staples such as essential functional anatomy, how to teach multiple variations of the same exercise at the same time, how to structure a class, and how to correct a student’s form. The additional three-day workshop may be done any time after the Intro. Completion of the six days entitles an attendee to attend a Stretch Teacher Certification examination, too.

Stretch Practitioner (Therapist)
A Stretch Practitioner will begin with the Intro. to Stretch, then takes a second, different, three-day workshop that focusses on how to treat common problems like neck and back pain, in the one-on-one rehab. or clinic situation. This includes the latest research into these problems, tests on how to distinguish structural from functional leg-length differences, the critical exercises to relieve low back and neck pain, and more. Completion of the SP six days allows an attendee to call themselves a Level One Stretch Practitioner.

Level Two Stretch Practitioner (Therapist)
This additional two-day workshop focusses on neural repatterning, muscle activation, and a full revision of all the key stretching and strengthening exercises. In addition, Level Two includes how to test and treat shoulder and arm problems, including RSI. On completion, an attendee may call themselves a Level Two Stretch Practitioner. We are in the process of designing and implement an SP certification scheme, too, but this has not been finalised. Please subscribe to our occasional newsletter to be kept informed of developments, HERE.

The ST system requires teachers and practitioners to engage in regular refresh and upskilling. This can be done every three years by attending any of the three-day workshops above. Heavy discounts apply to anyone repeating any workshop or attending the other stream’s workshops: we want you to be as good a teacher or practitioner as you can be. See the main site for details.

When anger takes over (impetuosity #1)

When I was in Edmonton last, anger ‘came upon me’, as the Tibetans like to put it. This is how it happened. I wrote later to a friend; this is the edited version.

At around 03:15 in the morning, about -25C outside, and perhaps not the best start to a teaching weekend, a young man kept banging on the outside fire door; this went on and on until I woke up. I opened my door and saw this face in the approximately 300 x 300mm reinforced glass opening in the door, about 10m down the corridor.

 

I let him I’m; he was yelling about being locked out of his room for half an hour; I did not think to ask him his room number or where his key was, or what he was doing on the fire escape, and (this is the surprise) I was so annoyed at being woken up I grabbed the front of his jacket, said, “you woke me up” and shook him (like push-pull; not quite punching, but then like that while not letting go; I am pretty strong, as you know; he shook like a rag doll. In any case, it was over over in a few seconds; and honestly, I can’t remember more detail than that). He was quite a bit taller than me, but none of that matters in the moment. 

 

So, wide awake by then. I was so annoyed I could not talk to him. He was annoyed that I shook him, and he stalked off complaining.

 

I went back to bed and, amazingly, was able to sleep within a half hour.

Why was I reminded of this?  The night before last I was awoken by loud young men; I opened my door to see the last of them in the doorway, looking back at me. “Keep the noise down!” I yelled at him; he was large, in a football top, and surprised. I gave him the #2 look, and held his gaze for 20″ or so; he turned and went into his room.

Back to sleep.

How Microsoft’s Albert Carter took control of Olivia’s new MacBook Air, and deleted stuff…

Tags

Adobe, Dreamweaver, kitlaughlin.com, Microsoft Office 2011, Open Office

This is such a 21st century story. Imagine my annoyance as someone in a land far away was able to take control of Miss O’s new computer, and delete the record of the Live Chat conversation we were having before I could copy it, in order to take the record of the extraordinary chat somewhere it could do some good. This is the back story:

We bought a new 11″ MacBook Air yesterday; a custom build (max RAM, i7 fastest chipset, etc.); we then faced the task of ‘migrating’ all of her present applications and data files over to the new machine. Accordingly, we made a Time Machine backup (because the Airs do not have an Ethernet port, and Thunderbolt can’t be used by Migration Assistant; and Time Machine backups are supported for this function) and, after de-activating all Adobe software, 27 minutes later, the backup was complete and error-checked.

Now, in addition to the Creative Suite, she uses Microsoft Office 2011, too. You might think ‘Office 2011 is so yesteryear’; I know, but the back story to this part of the back story is that we bought Microsoft Office 2013 earlier this year and it was crap: major bugs—Miss O may weigh in here and add detail. So, we took it back after seeing plenty of other ‘this software is complete shite’ reviews, got our money back, and Office 2011 was re-installed after uninstalling 2013. Each install of a version of Office requires a process called “Activation”; I am sure readers have been there themselves.

The two parallel sets of problems began when we tried to open Adobe’s Dreamweaver, now part of Creative Suite 4: the resulting error message (150:30) when searched for on the net reveals gems like THIS; click if you want a headache. Byzantine hardly begins to describe the suggested fix processes (theres not one, there’s nine); and the first two ‘solutions’ were not even possible: the file you are supposed to delete did not even exist on the new machine.

And a glance down the rest of the multiple ‘fix’ levels showed that even Adobe does not give a rat’s ar$% for its customers:

Show me you care

The list has not even been completed, and clearly has not been checked.

Contacting Adobe’s Live Chat was a complete waste of 40 minutes; the position the tech took (after futzing around completely unhelpfully for 35 minutes, and all of this in a Live Chat type-only interface) was that CS4 was now two generations old, and tech help only applies to CS5.5 and CS6. His solution was to say ‘we can’t help you; and that’s what’s written on the Adobe site’ (that tech help only applies to current versions). Why not say that 40 minutes before?

So, going old-school, I used App Zapper to delete all software and all system-generated Adobe files, and then reinstalled the entire Creative Suite 4 afresh. The installer accepted the serial number and, once installed, allowed activation. That problem is solved, and she has been able to edit her Rowing Australia site several times since without a problem.

Now to the fun part: opening Word from the Microsoft Office suite brought up the Activation dialogue; entering the correct product key brought up an error message with the words “Product has been activated too many times”. WTF? It’s true that Miss O and I change our machines annually (or more often sometimes), but we bought a three-person ‘Family’ pack, and there is zero indication anywhere of any limit to the number of times the product can be activated on one’s computers.

As an aside, other software vendors control activation one’s email address being registered with them, and it works perfectly for the other 30-odd softwares I use. Both our emails are registered with Microsoft; and from the user’s perspective, that approach looks like a reasonable way to control piracy. I run Office on both my machines, and she runs the third copy on her single machine; all should be legal and A-OK. Not so, apparently.

So I tried phone activation; that did not work either—after entering the nine strings of six numbers from the Activation pane multiple times via the phone’s keypad, I was connected to a number that has no one attending it—three times. A google search revealed a hidden technique: if you dial the Help number, and say nothing and press no keys, then (after listening to all the options three times, a process that took four minutes and was only marginally preferable to root canal work sans anaesthetic), then you get a live person.

This person listened to my description of the problem; and promptly handed me over to tech person #2, who (of course) knew nothing of the immediately previous conversation and needed the entire explanation once more. Tecchie #2 yielded a six digit number that I was told to enter into a particular window that I had been navigated to, via the phone. This URL connected me to a a Microsoft Help portal, and clicking on the link downloaded, then installed “LogMeinRescue“. My “conversation” in the Chat window within LogMeInRescue began with someone who identified herself as Deborah.

Now, the scary stuff begins: I “talked” with Deborah, tech #1, and explained the problem for the seventh time; she promptly handed me over to Albert Carter, tech #2. I described the entire background once again, and asked Albert to reset the Activations register, as I owned the software, and had been using it in the way it was advertised as being able to use; Albert replied, “Certainly”.

Albert then asked to take control of my machine to look inside the registries ‘to see if I can work out where the problem is); I said OK. Not only did he do that (I could see the logs of all the places he copied from and/or visited), he looked through all my Applications, Preference panes, and all this at lightning speed (might have been an automated process, thinking on it now). As well, he looked through the Documents folders and elsewhere, and then declared that I had “two options”: a ‘OneTimeFix ($59.95 + GST) or an escalating series of “Help” options, including the $399 + GST one, where Microsoft would remotely take control of my machine on a regular basis and “clean the registries and caches…” and a whole lot more. I declined, and said that I did all that routine OS maintenance myself, already, and we had had no problems up to now.

I then repeated my request for having him reset the Office suite Activation register; he insisted that my only option to be able to use software I legally owned was to pay more money; the $59.95 + GST was the cheapest option.

I told him (still via the typing interface) that was disappointed in his response. I then said that I was copying all our Live Chat to take the discussion up the line (and was about to move my cursor to the window)—whereupon he once again took control of my machine, selected and deleted the entire record of the interaction, closed down LogInRescue, and vanished.

Miss O and I looked at each other—what just happened? Is this the face of Modern Microsoft? Was this series of actions even legal? Was this even Microsoft’s real Help site???

I decided immediately to search for alternatives to MS Office—and there is one: Open Office, an open source program. It’s free, and regularly updated. Miss O and I tested it; it opens and edits all Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents, has the identical command sets, and a nicer looking interface as well. We brought App Zapper out, locked and loaded, and zapped every Microsoft product on her machine; ran Cocktail and repaired Permissions. We are hoping that Albert does not reappear. It’s anxiety provoking, frankly: this individual has been deeper into the hardware and software than the machine’s owner has.

On reflection, it’s clear that Adobe and Microsoft both are doing their best to push customers to an on-going payment scheme (on Adobe’s side, it’s their “Creative Cloud” pay-by-the-month-forever solution; on MS’s side, it’s forcing users to enter maintenance contracts simply to be able to continue to use software you own). I say no to both. We do own CS3 and CS4 separately, and these copies are working on our machines (presently), but over time we will be searching for other open source alternatives to these programs, too. I find the business practises of both these companies to be utterly unacceptable and coercive—and, for all I know, some of their actions may even border on illegal; personally, I find them repugnant. I will never use a Microsoft product again, of that I am sure.