• Main site
  • Forums
  • Kit_L?

kitlaughlin

~ occasional thoughts, images, and videos

kitlaughlin

Category Archives: Stretch Therapy

This is the ‘supervenient’ category: all or our therapeutic and teaching work springs from this entity

Active brand protection and franchising of Stretch Therapy

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Stretch Therapy

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Imre Lakatos, stretch therapy

We have had calls from people involved in our work about what the next stage of development might look like; many ideas are being floated—all this is good. So, in a brief post today, I wanted to air an idea or two, to spark reactions and to foment discussion.

While I am alive, there will be no active brand protection for Stretch Therapy and no franchise models for using our work, beyond attending workshops. The short story is that if my attention, or Olivia’s, is directed to “protecting our borders”, then creativity switches off. I have more ideas per day than I can possibly implement. ST will stay ahead of the curve (and hence be pre-eminent in the field) by being the best, and being recognised and spoken about as the best. Whether this is a slow, or fast, process is out of our control, it seems to me. For this reason, we will be devoting our energy to improving ourselves, our offerings, and the way we teach them.

Regarding the franchising model, I have never heard a franchisee speak a pleasant word about it: too many strictures from ‘head office’; too onerous accounting to calculate the fees and too much talk about what counts as a ‘legitimate’ expense—overall, too much energy in a small business needing to go to accountability overheads. No to franchising. Other models need to be developed if, indeed, they need to be developed at all. In our present thinking, we say we need to see a practising teacher show up at one of the cognate workshops within any three-year period to stay on the current teacher listings on our main site. This is how students find a teacher. As well, we make Vimeo on Demand inexpensive download products, and we sell books (print and PDF); teachers recommend these to their students, and the enterprise ticks along. I should say that making money is not my objective, nor Olivia’s; but living in a capitalist culture, we need to pay bills. A holiday would be nice.

A philosopher whose work I admire, Imre Lakatos, wrote of “degenerating paradigms”: these are knowledge gathering systems who spend their energy protecting their boundaries in preference to creating new aspects to their work; many schools of body work who claim to teach an “original system” fall into this category—failing to realise THE most important aspect of learning, which is embodiment. All originators of all systems departed from what they were taught in order to set up their ‘new’ systems; without fail, they changed the original teaching in the process. This will happen to our work, and should happen. (An aside: I once said to one of the senior teachers that, in the future when I am no longer around, if I hear anyone saying “do it like this because Kit said this is how it must be done” I will strike him down with a bolt of lightning!). I want experimentation and practical empirical research—which anyone can do—to happen, with all present being clear about why this technique is held on to, or why this new thing is better. What I am trying to develop is the most efficient method of tinkering—the fact that we use stretching techniques as the method of exploring this field is due to my own personal history—equally we could be discussing ping pong. All teachers of this system need to see themselves as inveterate tinkerers. Only a fool thinks he knows all that is needed.

Many practitioners fall into a similar category: the worst massages I have received have been from massage therapists with postgraduate training; in the limit case, they end up knowing all about their subject from an academic perspective, but being distanced from the in-the-present activity itself in the process, and not being able to do it well. Where your attention goes, you become.

Anyone can take our work and incorporate it into what they do; this is what’s been happening over the last ten years, and we have noticed that very few teachers of our work position themselves as “Stretch Therapy teachers”. There are many reasons for this, no doubt, but we feel (when I say “we” I mean Olivia and I, as the two core people in this system), that we want to get better, not bigger. This is already happening as more people like all the excellent people on the Forums take up, and contribute to, what we do. What we want to do now, with the ten or so years’ of experience of teaching Stretch Teacher workshops behind us, is concentrate more on how to get better. We have some clear ideas about what that will entail, and some not-so-clear ones, and this is what we need the Forums and the workshops for: to clarify and select the best directions for everyone involved in what we do. When I make any decision, the heuristic I use is simple: ‘What is the decision that will bring about the greatest good for the largest number of people involved?”

Getting back to Lakatos for a moment (and I wrote extensively about this in my Master’s thesis, and it was a central idea in my PhD research in talking about lean learning systems), if you are not creating, growing internally and externally, and if you are not constantly re-specifying your objectives and trying news ways of reaching those objectives, then you are dying. Of course, we all share that fate, but many are dead before this event occurs. We don’t want that.

This is why I am suffering through the 45 day ‘ballistic stretching protocol’ (many hundreds of dynamic repetitions of both loaded and unloaded stretching: how else can I know what effect this approach will have on me? This is “conscious suffering”. Something will have been learned, and embodied, by the end of this period. There is no other way of getting this knowledge.

It might be worth reading these posts before engaging with what I write above:

http://wp.me/p1QR8D-kI (Where are the wise?)

and

http://wp.me/p1QR8D-jb (The genie is out of the bottle, and she ain’t going back any time soon)

and

https://kitlaughlin.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/the-90-day-blog-challenge-and-the-50-year-test/ (short one that ends with the “50-year test”)

There is so much more to say on this, but short story is no border protection, and no franchises.

Thanks to dog for the correction to the last link.

What use is stretching?

06 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Stretch Therapy

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

flexibility, stretch therapy, stretching, why stretch

On the eve of releasing the new Stretch Therapy products I find myself reflecting on how this material may be used and who it best be used by. In the making of these programs I have realised that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about what ‘stretching’ is and what it might be used for. Adding to my perception of the need for clarity is the recent increase in interest in something which is generally referred to as ‘movement’, as an activity of its own, and the lack of general understanding of the relationships that exist between ‘range of movement’ (ROM) and movement itself, with its additional skills of timing and precision.

Speaking most generally, many of our students want to acquire new movement patterns (like going to pole dance classes or they begin to study a martial art) but they find they simply can’t put themselves into the required starting positions. For example, suppose a movement pattern begins in the full squat, and you can’t actually do a full squat keeping your feet flat on the floor, what do you do? So one way of looking at our stretching work is to see it as a series of graded solutions to an infinite number of movement challenges of this type. Another good example is a movement pattern that begins in the full bridge position: if you can’t do a full bridge then you can’t even begin. There are hundreds of other examples.

And all of this became very clear in the filming of the new products because in each of the products (Master the full squat, Master the forward bend, and Master legs apart, for example) we needed to begin at the beginning. So let us talk about the full squat for a moment: ankle and hip ROMs (and leg muscles that are simply holding too much tension for the knee joint to fully close) are the limitations to being able to squat all the way down with your feet flat on the floor. The question then becomes, ‘in order to get into the starting position, how can we loosen the ankles, hips and the lower back’ so that the starting position becomes possible? This is why I referred to stretching and range of movement: just to start to learn a new movement pattern assumes that the capacity to put oneself in any starting position is there. Very often it is not.

And exactly the same constraints apply to learning any kind of gymnastics or other strength training: is there sufficient range of movement available? To put it another way, if you cannot get yourself into the starting position, how can you acquire the strength that is necessary to complete the movement? Well, what most people do is they cheat; if you get away with the cheat you’re good to go but many people force themselves in the process, trying to speed up the process. Think of the overhead squat position (where one is in the full squat holding a weighted bar overhead). This position requires the range of movement for the full squat but, in addition to the flexion movement in the shoulders and the extension that required in this thoracic spine all at the same time. How are you going to get that? Unless you are already close to being able to do this practising the OHS by itself will not be the most direct route to the ROMs you need.

If I may say one of the great attributes of the Stretch Therapy system is that you can find a solution to any range of movement problem you find yourself in. The ST system explicitly spans rehabilitation for problems like neck and back pain all the way through to someone trying to refine the full side splits—and everything in between.

Movement as an activity has become extremely popular in the last five years or so. It is also the case that ST has incorporated a huge amount of additional movement into its system because we have been working with movement teachers ourselves (plus many of our teachers are also teach movement). The ST system explicitly fosters this kind of cross-fertilisation. I also want to say that we were doing many similar things a long time ago, too (consider the ‘Unnumbered Lesson in Stretching & Flexibility, and all the ‘warm-ups’ in the same book), and we were hardly the first. We have excellent movement teachers here in Australia; Craig Mallett and Simon Thakur are two who I know personally and work with regularly.

If you want to start moving like these guys can, you will need the fundamental tools that allow your own body to firstly acquire the range of movement that these activities require and this will mean removing any restrictions to that range of movement. This is exactly the point at which you’ll need our work. I have worked with many tens of thousands of students over the last 30 years. I cannot recall a single one that did not have a restriction in his or her body at some place. Removing the restrictions is exactly what the ST system is all about. Once a restriction is removed the body can be positioned bio-mechanically optimally and then new movement patterns and whatever strength is required to support these can be learned safely and efficiently.

Now I realise in describing things in these terms I am generalising and glossing over many, possibly great, chasms; this is the nature of discursive discussion. But we have been paying very close attention over these last few years to the problems that many people have had in trying to acquire specific kinds of strength, whether it be in the Olympic lifting world or whether it be in the men’s gymnastics world. Very shortly we will be releasing the program Master the full back bend. And the last item in this program is a brilliant exposition by Olivia on our approach to how to perform a very common exercise (in gymnastics, it’s called the arch body hold and in other systems has other names, like Shalabhasana in Yoga). And the critical difference between our approach and most others is the development of the capacity to feel precisely what’s happening in the body and which parts of the body are involved in whatever one is doing. Once this awareness has been developed it is then used to a particular purpose. Let me illustrate.

The arch body hold for many people is felt only in the lower back, in a cramping or spasming kind of way. This is because of two main factors: one, there is insufficient extension, or backwards-bending ROM, in the whole body (and so all the posterior chain of muscles are having to work much harder than they need to and hence the muscles involved are much closer to their failure point than an analysis of the weight of the body parts suggests), and two, the glutes (as the main extensors of the legs in relation to the spine) are simply asleep. Effective cueing is about waking up this connection and is more important for many people than any other single factor. We have cued literally hundreds of beginners in the arch body hold and none of them have experienced any lower back pain. But it is not just about cueing: it is about effective breaking down of a whole body exercise into its component parts which are themselves related to range of movement and specific activation patterns.

For example it will be simply impossible to cue the glutes in a strong extension movement if, at the same time, the hip flexors are already under stretch; this is “simple” neurophysiology. The nexus is something called the reciprocal inhibition reflex (Sherrington’s second law): that a muscle cannot be activated voluntarily if its opposite (or antagonist) has reached the end of its range of movement. The solution is to increase the range of movement of the antagonist before attempting to cue the action you want. Almost all of the ST exercises use a combination of reflexes to maximise their effectiveness. I have written about this extensively elsewhere but I will mention simply that each exercise uses the reciprocal inhibition reflex; every exercise is organised to reduce the apprehension reflex to a minimum; and we use the post-contraction inhibition reflex to momentarily increase range of movement. All are well documented and have sound scientific bases.

But it also must be said at this point in the discussion that not all is happy in science-land. The rise of the scientific method in routine discourse and the rise of evidence-based medicine in our nation’s health systems has led to the presumption that scientific understanding is actually necessary for best practice. This is very rarely the case because, in my experience, best practice is usually years ahead of scientific understanding. Just because there is no scientific evidence or justification for something is no argument against its potential usefulness. Asking for this kind of evidence before embarking on a course of action, with the sub-text that this is necessary in order to begin practising something, will lead you far astray. Before scientific understanding (causal /analytic) is the empirical method; empirical is a fancy way of saying ‘suck it and see’. In other words, experience and observation usually come before causal understanding; this has been so for the entire history of science and is unlikely to change any time soon. My feeling is that the motive behind needing a scientific reason to do something—over the direct experience of trying something—is more about one’s attitude to uncertainty than anything else.

And, because of this misplaced reliance, we have a small body of unimpressive research into stretching, and which has allowed people to make all sorts of bogus claims ‘like stretching will not affect one’s propensity for injury’ or that ‘stretching will not reduce delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS)’, for example. It is absolutely accurate to say there is no scientific evidence to support these claims but it is also accurate to say that there’s no scientific evidence that supports the counter claim: the fact is that research has simply not been done and, speaking properly, science therefore has nothing useful to say on those subjects.

When I say “the research hasn’t been done yet” what I really refer to is the time periods of the existing studies (usually a university semester; way too short to be able to have any meaningful conclusions) and the actual methods used in the research itself (research design; the ‘stretching’ techniques used, etc.) And on that latter point, I mean that very little of this research is in any way specific about exactly what sort of stretching was used and how the stretching was varied to suit the particularities of each of the individuals in the study. I have never seen a single reference to this critical point in any paper I have read on this subject.

I mention this last point because we have found that adapting a stretch to the actual in-the-moment experience of the individual is simply the most important determinant of whether or not a stretch is going to be effective. And this is precisely the reason why a sets and reps approach to stretching is always going to be ineffective when compared to a system like ST. In this system, the quality of, and the depth of, the experience in the moment is the key focus.

So getting back to the forthcoming Stretch Therapy products. A program like Master the full backbend which will have an extreme backbend as its end pose, begins at the beginning as all systems must do. The full pose is broken down into what I call a vocabulary of flexibility which initially is based around single joints. To illustrate, loosening the hip flexors is absolutely fundamental to any decent backbend. In fact, tight hip flexors are the cause of most of the cramping and pain that people experience when they first tried to do spinal extension movements; this is because the muscles on the inside of the curve being made by the spine have a tendency to go into spasm (just like when you point your foot); we have found that the general rule is that any muscle asked to do work at the contracted end of its range of movement is liable to spasm; something that we demonstrate on every workshop we run. This is not a design fault by the way; it is simply the way the body is organised. Add to this tendency the hip flexors’ inhibition of the glutes, and you begin to understand why so many people have problems with backward bending. What follows is a brief meditation on other aspects of ‘stretching’.

To start, the acquisition of flexibility by adults is a completely different problem set than with children. Adults, by definition, have experienced their second growth spurts, usually (but not always) in their late teens. There are many reason for this critically important difference, and these can be canvassed below if anyone’s interested.

The key point here is that standard methods (like “hold a stretch for 30”) will not be effective in changing any present patterns that adults have. This is because to a considerable extent, these patterns have become ‘set’ in an adult; this is completely different to the conditions in a child’s body.

For adults, a different approach is required. I can say that I have tried every approach that has been written about, and many that have not. What I want to share with you here I have not written about (apart from oblique references in my past books) but personally have found to be of the deepest importance. What follows are the core conditions for an adult to change his/her body–mind in a way that observers would describe as “he/she has become more flexible”.

One’s pattern of flexibility is actually one’s “self”: one’s personality, self-beliefs, fears, and so on. One’s emotional self is precisely this pattern. When we talk of body language, this complex patterning is what we refer to. The way a body is held, in any moment, communicates this internal state to the person with whom one is interacting (or observing).

The essential conditions for flexibility to change have two parts. One is the exploration of new ranges of movement, and the other is how this can be ’embodied’ (retained in the body and incorporated in the activity in question).

There are environmental conditions that one must consider, too. When stretching, heat needs to be kept in the body: the work of remodelling fascia is best done by slowing the rate of heat loss. All one needs is tights and tracksuit pants. Ambient heat is no help here: the human body is expert at shedding heat (the result is that no matter what exercise is being done, or what the ambient temperature is, the human body core temperature hovers around 98.6 F, unless something goes wrong, like rhabdomyolysis).

Only a very narrow window of increased temperature is required to open the window to changing one’s patterns (2 degrees Celsius). To put this in perspective, a lukewarm bath is 40 degrees C (a fraction above body temperature) and a scalding hot bath that you could not immerse yourself in is only 44 degrees. The point is that the reactions that we are trying to influence in the body change radically over very small temperature variations. This ‘window’ can be opened by slowing the body’s normally very effective temperature shedding strategies by wearing the recommended gear, and worn on the bottom half of the body only. Presently, the mechanisms behind these changes remains unknown; what we can say, experientially, is that warmth in the muscles works.

A side note: when using the Contract–Relax approach to increase ROM, as long as additional contractions can be performed, and new ROM explored, we are working on the somatosensory cortex and what tension it believes is necessary or useful. We are remapping what the unconscious part of the brain believes is the appropriate length-tension relationship in the various body parts. But when no more improvement in ROM can be achieved, we are now up against restrictions in the fascial structures themselves. Maintaining as much heat as possible in the body allows gentle and slow fascial remodelling. The way this is done is to back off slightly from the maximum ROM end position, and wait—minutes, for some muscle groups (this requirement depends on relative muscle size). Subtle movements (“pulsations”) at the end of the range of movement can help you become familiar with the new position; you will find that this can help you relax more deeply in it, too.

The second and equally important point is that flexibility cannot be achieved by force or by intensity. I know this is counterintuitive to a degree, because we have to exert some force to provoke any change (in strength training or in any other) and in flexibility work, effort is needed. But, and this is a huge but, the force is used only to make, or re-make, the connection to that part of the body. Once the force has been applied, the body has to be brought to a state where it’s willing to let this protective tension go. All humans have perfect flexibility while under anaesthetic; as they regain consciousness, though, individual patterns re-manifest. The point is that force cannot change the pattern: the trigger to change this is not consciously available to us.

In fact, in the ST system, we use the bones, muscles, and fascia only to remap the brain; this is what provokes the changes we regard as “becoming more flexible” in the short term. Further, heat allows the fascia to be remodelled once the elongation is experienced. Both are necessary. Effort is only required to the extent needed to provide the proprioceptive feedback to that part of the brain that decides how much tension to maintain in any body part, and its pattern around the body. As well, the degree of force that is required to bring this change about cannot be known ahead of time. Personally, now, I need 80–100% contraction force; other students need only 10%, and any level above 50% in these students actually has the opposite effect (the body experiences the force in the stretch as a direct threat, and literally creates additional tension to ensure the elongation does not happen). The capacity to tolerate more tension (hence stronger intensity of the stretching experience) can be learned; but it cannot be imposed: it has to be allowed, and can only be experienced, and embodied.

To achieve this goal of knowing ‘how much’, each individual’s attention has to be turned inwards. No teacher can do this part of the process. Unless the brain and sensory being is directly involved in the experience of stretching, it will not be effective. The most important questions for the acquisition of flexibility: What does that feel like; where do you feel it; and how can you relax further into it?

Only an individual can answer that question and—critically—determine the time it takes to relax into the beginning of a stretch; the most effective contraction time, and how long to spend in the re-stretch. Each will unique to the individual. It can only be experienced, then learned, by each person individually; it cannot be reduced to a formula of number of seconds, or number of reps, or percentage of maximum strength in the contraction. This does not come naturally to anyone with a ’sets and reps’ approach.

As an aside, this is the hardest point to get across: there is no formula for adults; only an approach. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it! This uniqueness of response is also the reason why the research into stretching has provided so little illumination: all modern research relies on statistical analysis of groups. Such research has nothing to say about the individuals comprising such groups. Our method begins, and stays with, each individual.

The author thanks Dave Wardman for comments and vulgarities! And he suggests further reading:

Neurobiology of Fascia – http://www.rolfingtaichilondon.com/ARTICLES/fascial%20plasticity%20schleip.pdf

Behind the scenes on the “How to sit for meditation: setup exercises” shoot.

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by kitlaughlin in Mindfulness, Photography, Stretch Therapy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

"How to sit for mediation: setup exercises", FCPX, Final Cut Pro 10, multi-cam editing, panasonic G6, panasonic GX-1, panasonic GX-7, Sony PCM-10

Some of you will know that I have been co-presenting at a number of traditional Buddhist meditation retreats for some years now. My co-presenter is my good friend (and wandering Dharma teacher) Patrick Kearney. For many years he had been telling me that many meditators were having trouble sitting comfortably. And on the very first one month silent retreat that I attended, as soon as the silence was lifted, all everyone could speak about was the kind of pain they had and where there pain was located!

Now, it is often said that pain can be a meditation object and because so many people are in pain when they sit (and because that actually what’s happening in big ‘R’ reality) then pain is a meditation object for many sitters. This pain mostly manifests in the knees, hips, back and neck. But a long time ago I asked myself, ‘What could meditation be like if you were able to sit perfectly still and perfectly comfortably for an hour or more?’. I have been able to do this for many years now and I can report that the experience of meditation can be substantially different from what was reported following my first one. As a result, I have spent a long time researching all the important exercises to let people sit with minimum tension and no tension concentration spots in the body. I mention this last because if you had any sore spots in the first 10 or 15 minutes of meditation, by the time that 40 minute mark comes it’ll be the only thing you can think about. For me personally, this seems like an inefficient use of the time and process.

The technology for recording high-quality video and sound has changed remarkably in the last 10 years. Some of you know that I was a filmmaker in earlier life and we used 16mm film and analogue magnetic tape sound recorders to make documentaries then. A small crew was three people and very few filmmakers were able to make programs with more than one camera at a time: apart form the personnel needed, film was very expensive and the making of the final film requires an extensive editing process after it has been exposed in camera. Film is difficult to handle and is vulnerable to x-rays and other events that are common to the world traveller (not the least of which is the possibility of any film being stolen as one of mine was when I was passing through the Philippines one year).

Today I set up my two Panasonic cameras and set the white balance to tungsten. We have special “cool fluros” as they’re called which are perfectly colour balanced to 3200K, and provide an even light which has almost no heat associated with it, unlike normal tungsten lights which are very hot (and so a small space like the studio with four or five people working in it becomes uncomfortably hot very quickly).

The two cameras I have chosen are Panasonic G6 which is available for about $500 these days and a Panasonic GX1 which I bought brand-new for $179. Our cameraman has my other camera, which I have written about here, the Panasonic GX-7; he is setting it up for the forthcoming ST for GST programs, which we start soon. And I have a couple of very inexpensive zoom lenses and a few primes. These particular Panasonic cameras have a unique feature as well, something called the extended tele (ETC) mode, which means that you can double the effective focal length of any lens sitting on the front of the camera (because the sensor is 16 megapixels and hence almost 4000 pixels wide). When you use the extended tele setting the camera simply crops the centre pixels required for 1080p or (what we use) 720p. And using the AVCHD codec (and sourcing your cameras from the US which I always do, for the more useful frame rates) then we’re not limited to the 30 minute recording limit set by the EU which for reasons known to no one, apply here in Australia. Both of my cameras can record up to the full capacity of the SD cards or the full charge of the battery, whichever ends first. Today I recorded for just over an hour continuously and both cameras recorded files of about 7 GB in size.

At the same time I had set up my Sony PCM-10 recorder using its XY microphone configuration and I suspended it from one of the struts in the ceiling, so it was about 3 feet above my mouth when I was sitting down. The remarkable thing about top micing (which Hollywood has done for years, except there you need some brawny guy on the end of a long boom) is that you can move around in the sound cone and the sound does not change very much at all. The quality of the sound I recorded today is excellent and because I was being top mic’d there is no handling sound from my clothing (which is always a problem with lavaliere mikes) and there was no squeaking sound from my knees or feet on the cushion either. And all of these extraneous sounds are out of our experience of hearing, but sound recorders record what is actually there and that’s quite instructive thing to reflect on, too.

The technique is to start the sound recorder, check levels, then start recording, and then turn on each camera and use the focusing button to focus on the front of the meditation cushion I was sitting on. The inexpensive zoom lenses I used on both cameras today have an advantage in this situation: they are relatively slow in terms of their aperture—but the great thing for me in this setup meant that I had quite a deep slice of acceptably focused space to work in (as I wrote in another post, depth of field is a function of aperture and focal length). I know the shallow depth of field is all the rage these days on Vimeo and YouTube, but if you want to make an instructional video, deeper depth of field is usually the way you need to go, especially if your talent is moving around.

Then I used my old-fashioned slate (sometimes called clapperboard): making sure it could be seen by both cameras I simply clapped the top part together with the bottom part to make a sharp sound. I slid the slate out of the picture, took off my glasses, and taught the one-hour class exactly as I would have done had I been sitting in front of a room of meditators. What a liberating experience for a filmmaker I can tell you!

Once I had finished recording the program I switched off all the machines and took their SD cards over to my editing room. I am using Final Cut Pro 10 (FCPX) now and I ingested all of the footage into an new Library that I’d set up to the occasion. Once all three digital files were in the program, I examined each clip and found the slate sync point on each and FCPX went to work. Only seconds later I had a multi-cam clip set up and I pulled it into my timeline. Editing in FCPX is simply a matter of clicking on which camera’s view you want to see at any time. I did shorten a few things (including a couple times during the program where I went to check to make sure the camera were still recording because this is all fairly new technology). And cutting those bits out was a matter of a few clicks.

Now as I sit here dictating this blog FCPX is doing the second compression of the program. We are experimenting with different frame sizes and different compression techniques to see how we can get the best possible program for the smallest possible size. As soon as I get back from Adelaide, I will upload to our Amazon Web Service and go live to the world.

Please excuse (and advise me!) of any typos: I dictated this via Siri in about 20′.

The genie is out of the bottle, and she ain’t going back any time soon

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Monkey Gym, Stretch Therapy

≈ 2 Comments

These last few weeks have been my all-time, fastest–deepest, learning experience (apart from the time I almost died in hospital).

The result of these events is that I needed to think and re-think about why it is we do what we do. If you had been following this blog, you will have seen that there have been a few posts on the philosophical foundations of Stretch Therapy. But it’s not just philosophical foundations: it’s the ethical ones too, and most people who have not studied philosophy as deeply as I have will not be aware, perhaps, that ethics is an area of inquiry all by itself in philosophy-land. Whether or not there is any ethical basis to the doing of what we do is connected to the individual who is doing the doing. This is entirely dependent on what kind of human being they are; their values; and the morality based on these.

As an ex academic (philosophy of science, relevant logic, human ecology), my main concern over ten years of post-grad. research was the limits to scientific understanding (and, not coincidentally, this refocused my interest in traditional Buddhism and meditation). As JimP commented the other day, academic research is conducted in a relatively very open environment (except for Big Pharma’s research): academics present their findings in open seminars; we publish our work explicitly to invite criticism and commentary; we engage with colleagues expressly to both share and to further the enterprise. Publishing means your work is ‘out in the open‘: anyone can access this information and use it any way they like. In academia, all one is required to do is to acknowledge one’s sources.

The general point is that knowledge cannot be controlled: as soon as you publish, in whatever form this occurs, you must let it go. This is what publishing is: the deliberate dissemination of the thing you have created, for criticism and potential up-taking/inclusion in other bodies of work. In our work, we don’t just ‘permit’ this: we encourage it explicitly, and the repayments have been magnificent: everyone involved in our work feeds back their insights to us, and the system grows. As I have observed recently, we have learned more in the last 3–4 years than the previous 20 for this reason alone. In reality, I have become the collator for ST, rather than its originator—and I am delighted with this development. ST is, explicitly, a collective enterprise.

Our intention is to share the info. that we have at the lowest cost to the user that lets us continue, and we want to learn from our students which is why we run our forums, and the manner in which we run our workshops. They are workshops in the deep-meaning sense: interactive, creative, where everyone can have a voice if they want—definitely not a lecture from an ‘expert’. All this is why our system works: it has been tested by many tens of thousands of people just like us. We incorporate feedback quickly and dispassionately, and are happy to acknowledge when something proposed by someone else—perhaps not in the system—works better than what we are using. Anything that does not work is ruthlessly cut. This is because we have a passion for an impersonal objective: more closely understanding Reality in its myriad forms, as this applies to movement, flexibility, and our objective, “grace and ease in the body”.

The genie is already out of the bottle, and it cannot be put back. Let’s hang on to her robes, and enjoy the ride! Let’s see where this can go. Let’s have some fun, do some good, and make some money, in that order.

In our endeavours, we have had extraordinary support from our students and Forum members; and many people have made themselves known to us of the express purpose of offering assistance. Thank you, everyone.

How and why we do things in Stretch Therapy the way we do

06 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Stretch Therapy

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

copyright, gedanken, kit laughlin youtube channel, making decisions, stretch therapy, the 50 year test, what's best for all concerned

We have a completely open system in Stretch Therapy. By ‘open’ I mean it that we set no boundaries around our work and we encourage our students and our teachers to study with whomever they wish, and to teach our material to whomever they wish. All we ask is that any new techniques they learn that might be able to be pressed into the service of Stretch Therapy be brought back into our system. As most of you know we have 100 videos now up on YouTube where we give away many of our ‘innermost secrets’! ‘Innermost secrets’ in inverted commas here to signify ironic use: the fact is that we do not have any inner secrets. We want our little bit of knowledge to get out there, and get traction on real-world problems, as soon as it can. Personally I do not enjoy YouTube clips that are 100% commercial promotions for the business being advertised. We try to include useful information in all of our clips, including our promotional ones.

I want to talk for a moment about why we have completely porous boundaries around our work. A very famous philosopher called Lakatos once coined the phrase “degenerating paradigms”. What he was talking about is what happens when the creator of any system tries to protect the content of that system too vigorously. The result is that the system becomes protective and inward looking and, most importantly, defensive. The deep problem in adopting this stance is that it pretty much kills the originator’s creativity. But that’s not all. By adopting a protective stance one is inward looking, rather than outward looking, by necessity. This is the antithesis of the Stretch Therapy philosophy.

We are outward looking—we are trying to find new ways and new techniques of doing what we already do. We will share our information with anyone who is interested. Anyone who wants to teach our system will be given all possible support. For example, anyone who repeats one of our workshops does it for 50% of the cost of the original one, and if they wish to repeat again it drops to 25% and so on. What we have found is that anyone who repeats our workshop eventually contributes more than what they take away the second and third times around. And in fact, on the figures that Olivia keeps, a huge percentage of people do repeat workshops, some a large number of times. We love this and they become friends too.

We don’t control the teaching approach of someone who teaches our system. In saying this I mean we have assembled a body of knowledge and we do wish that body of knowledge to be taught as effectively and as accurately as possible, but we never specify to our teachers how they are to teach that material. The results of this is that each teacher interprets and presents the material in their own way and in the process their own personality is uniquely reflected. They develop a unique voice. This is our principle of embodiment: making the work your own. In the process of embodiment, new and interesting details are learned; and we benefit. And many new techniques have been created in the embodiment process.

In the process of not controlling the dissemination of knowledge a wonderful teaching atmosphere is created. It might surprise readers to know that some of the best exercises that we teach were taught to us by students in beginner’s classes. When the teaching atmosphere is open and free the creativity flows brilliantly. And because each of our classes is a mini-workshop of its own all students feel free to contribute anything that they feel might be useful in the moment—this is where some of our best techniques have come from. If your students simply follow orders you’re missing out on this incredibly fertile source of new ideas.

One of the reasons why people want to control the teaching process is they feel it’s too easy for them to lose control if the class or the workshop becomes a free-for-all. Of course this is true but it’s a very simple matter to limit that aspect and bring the focus back to the larger task at hand. Many times I’ve been asked a number of questions by an attendee on a workshop and I always indulge the first few, but if I feel that the dialogue is becoming too much about them as an individual I’ll simply say, ‘let us talk about that later’, or ‘I’ll come back to that’ once we do whatever it is that we are about to do. This aspect of control is simply a function of the skill and experience of the presenter or teacher.

As for trying to control the copyright of one’s material, that is trying to put the genie back into the bottle. Because of the internet, the genie is already out of the bottle. So the best you can do I feel is to encourage the accurate sharing of what the genie has to offer and stay far enough ahead of the rest of the pack so that people want to work with you personally in the workshop situation. As well, if you are a leader in your field, people will want to buy your products and read your books and talk about the work that you do. This of course is not why you do it, but it is simply the outcome of always doing the best you can and trying to nurture the incredible group of people who always assemble themselves around individuals who are trying to do something well.

If you are following our YouTube channel you may have noticed that we always use a Creative Commons license system which only requires an attribution of the source of any idea. In Australia copyright comes into existence as soon as any new idea comes into form, be it a YouTube clip or a book or an audio recording. The situation is different in other countries we understand. One of the reasons I put many of our new techniques up on YouTube free is to help associate these new ideas with the brand Stretch Therapy and to show the world ST’s capacity to innovate. Now, time will tell, but so far the putting up of information which in other systems you would have to pay for has meant that our workshops are always full.

In the first draft of this post, I had written “I don’t want to be working 24 hours a day, seven days a week; Olivia and I simply want a lifestyle that is an enjoyable one and where we make enough money to pay the bills!” This assessment is not accurate, and I am grateful to Dave for pointing this out. We are living our lives; this is not a phase. Philosophers do gedanken (this is a German term meaning ‘thought experiments’; these are free, quick and often remarkably revealing), so let’s do one now: if we won the lottery, and had more money than Croesus, what would change? We both think that we’d fly first class instead of economy, but would not change much else. We would program in real sabbaticals, and would make them a priority in the annual schedule. We would hire more people to help us (for example, I need a red-hot FCPX editor, and soon). This way, only the scope and magnitude of what we are trying to do would change; and change in such a way as to assist the basic project, which is to get the information out there.

Also in terms of trying to protect copyright I made a decision a long time ago that I did not want to spend my life being a policeman. I am an ex-academic and plagiarism is pretty much the only crime in academia. As a result I have the habit of acknowledging all of my sources and I’m delighted to do that and I have the same approach to all of the teachers that I’ve been fortunate enough to work with. There have been a few examples of people taking my work and incorporating it into a book and marketing it as their own work and there’s nothing I can do about that. Of course I could take them to court on the basis of breach of copyright, and I have the documentary evidence to support that, but the point is that that approach is antithetical to the larger project which is about creating and being as open as possible.

Finally, in terms of being concerned about protecting ideas or protecting copyright, or any other ‘problem’ or ‘dilemma’, or anything I think is important or worrisome, I apply what I call “the 50 year test” to determine its true nature. The test is this: ‘Who will give a fuck in 50 years?‘ So far, no apparent dilemma or ‘important’ decision that I’ve been presented with has actually passed this test.

And, as a dear friend said only yesterday, ‘Any experienced resistance is, and can only ever be, the mind’. Once that is recognised, I fall back on the ‘second order’ decision process which is to come up with a solution that is the best for all concerned. My sense is that the direction we are on in this life will have wheels for some years to come.

 

Stretch Therapy™ for Gymnastic Strength Training (“GST”)

03 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Monkey Gym, Stretch Therapy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

GST, kitlaughlin.com, kitlaughlin.com/forums, master the back bend, master the pancake, master the pike, Stretch Therapy for gymnastic strength training

Stretch Therapy for Gymnastics Strength Training (“GST”)

This two-day intensive workshop is purpose-designed for all men and women pursuing strength training following men’s gymnastics’ strength training protocols. We will present solo and partner versions of most exercises. We will cover all necessary partial poses, progressions, and associated techniques (like fascial releases) to be able to do:

  • pike
  • pancake
  • full squat
  • full back bend (the bridge)
  • shoulder extension, and flexion
  • full hip mobility

Achieving a full pike and a full pancake requires stretching the calf muscles (including the often-neglected posterior fascial line), all three hamstrings, all adductors, and a small muscle in the hip called piriformis which is a surprisingly common (but often unsuspected) limiter of these fundamental movements. Practising the pike and pancake by themselves is relatively inefficient, in terms of results gained for time spent—there are better ways.

The techniques we will use to achieve the pike and the pancake are all partial poses and/or fascial techniques. The core method used is the Contract–Relax technique, as developed by our team over the last 25 years. We will also use innovative agonist–antagonist moving stretching techniques which will actively assist flatter pikes and pancakes, by activating the hip flexors and TFL in their maximally shortened positions—this provides needed strength in the fully contracted position as well as provides the brain with a novel stretch sensation. Fascial releases on gracilis and the inner hamstrings will be done on all attendees, where needed.

The full squat requires considerable ankle flexibility and hip mobility and we will show you a range of exercises that will allow you to do this movement with good foot alignment, preserved arches in the feet, and no support. On most workshops when we begin, only about half the room has a decent full squat, but by the end almost everybody does.

We will cover assistance techniques for hip internal rotation (this will complement the external rotation exercises that work piriformis, above, too).

We will practise all partial poses leading up to a full back bend. To this end we will show you effective partner stick stretches that will open the chest and shoulders, in preparation for full dislocate movements, and then add the hip flexor/quadriceps, passive back bends over supports, and rib-cage mobilisation exercises so that the body is prepared for the full back bend. Solo alternatives will be taught as well. In addition, fascial releases for the diaphragm and rectus abdominis will be done for all attendees.

In the process of going through these partial poses, you will learn exactly which structures are limiting your present movement patterns, so future practise becomes very time efficient. Often, only a small muscle or narrow line of fascia is the restriction—finding and changing these are the keys to unlocking your body.

Experience has shown us that adults following gymnastic strength training regimens frequently injure themselves. We will practise a range of extremely effective rehabilitation–treatment exercises to address these kinds of problems. As well, there are a number of stretching exercise that actively assist in recovery and we will do these, too.

Kit has an extensive rehabilitation background and has worked with many elite and Olympic athletes over the last 25 years. He is the author of Overcome neck & back pain (now in its 4th edition) and Stretching & Flexibility (15th printing). Search for him by name to find his site, his forums, and his YouTube channel.

Where does tension come from? Revision I

21 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Mindfulness, Relaxation, Stretch Therapy

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

blaming others, stress, stressors, the mind is lying to you

Today’s blog was inspired by recent correspondence. This is how it emerged; my comments are the plain text; hers are the indented blue blocks of text:

In an email about pain in her body, caused doubtlessly by tension, she wrote:

I then started my career where my first two employers so far have been extremely unfair and I have had to share cramped office spaces with several disgruntled employees who constantly interrupt. Now, since I’m not sure you know how this affects a developer: let’s just say distracting a developer constantly is like the worst type of brain torture and is extremely stressful. One has to constantly try to go in and out of flow and attempt to retain tons of information in their head while trying to converse and taking notes about that conversation. This is why most advocate to not interrupt the developer 🙂

Then we spoke about exercise solutions for the tension; she continues:

Since then I’ve had a only had a few tension headaches which I have been able to relieve through self massage. Since I can now feel all my tension I’ve also been working on the rest of my body. I think this is a fairly accurate diagnosis of the problem because I have almost exclusively been doing this. I have not changed any of my other behaviors, and work is still extremely stressful, and the tension still gets worse, while at work, regularly, but is now manageable.

There you go: sound analysis, I’d say, but there is one more piece to the puzzle; below. The correspondent continues:

The main difference now is I have no migraines and am losing weight easily. Way more easily then it has ever been. My personal theory is that the muscle tension caused extreme tension headaches, and this additional nervous system activity combined with high stress caused a lack of seratonin which then would cause my debilitating migraine (dark room, no noise, let me try to sleep).

If you put your body in a situation (externally generated; internally reacted to) that it does not like, it will do its best to shut you down. Self-preservation, that’s all. If it gets extreme enough, the body can actually give up and get terminally ill. There is a decent literature on this. This literature began with the still-relevant Stress of Life, by Hans Selye, a brilliant thinker and researcher. The Stress of Life, published in 1953, started the longest-lasting (still in force) revision of Western medicine. This book is referenced in all my publications.

Now, back to working on the true source of all my problems :), stress and unfair treatment.

If you have not cultivated a relaxation habit (activities that foster the direct experience of being deeply relaxed while you are awake) you are missing THE most important attribute that a person in the modern work environment can have.

I want to elaborate on this point today. Assuming that Darwinian evolution is an accurate description of how species evolve over time and in relation to their changing environments, then it is time to consider how the relaxation response might benefit the modern human. Up until this time the fight or flight response was what gave individuals within a species a competitive reproductive advantage. It has been argued in many places that our own species’ capacity to rapidly manifest the flight or fight syndrome is what has led to the industrial revolution and the destruction of our planet, but I digress. Fight or flight’s time is over, however, except in personal emergency situations where you will have no control over it anyway: it will simply manifest.

The fight or flight response can give rise to anger and many other powerful emotions, which these days have to be subsumed back into the body that gave rise to them rather than be expressed. This swallowing, or repressing, of these desires may give rise to a variety of illnesses, too, over time.

No longer is it desirable to assault one’s boss (no matter how wilful or stupid he or she may be) or to go on a anger fuelled rampage, no matter how good it might feel at the time. No, the parasympathetic nervous system’s opposite response, described by Benson as The Relaxation Response in his small gem of a book by the same name, is now the most desirable adaptation we can display in the modern workforce. Following the Darwinian metaphor, we might say that the capacity to manifest the relaxation response in the workplace will confirm a similar competitive advantage at the individual level of analysis.

What is more futile than someone telling you to relax though? Much more likely is the opposite response! What I have learned however is that if you have had a sufficiently large number of repetitions of the experience of being relaxed, the option to recreate it at will in your body/mind whenever you need it is there. Repetition is required, however, like all habits. Further, there is a key to actually accessing this:

The easiest way to elicit this response at stressful times is to drop the awareness into the lower abdomen, take a deep breaths into that place and, as you breathe out, let your shoulders drop, let the throat relax too, and let that feeling of relaxation be experienced by the whole of the body.

If you can do this in stressful moments then you may be able to pivot; that is, instead of your body and mind moving into your personal reflexive pattern of behaviour when stressed (anger, frustration, depression, etc.) you may be able to choose a different pattern.

To this end, I have recorded a number of lying relaxation scripts, found HERE.

Use any of these scripts as a daily practise for at least a couple of months; together with the stretching and self-massage, you will be a different person in six months—and what stresses you now may very well not stress you in the future. Any stressor’s reception in the body/mind is unique—what stresses me might be water off a duck’s back to you, yet the external event may be identical. This demonstrates that the stress reaction is individually constructed.

I am highlighting this aspect, because when faced with a stressor, the mind will automatically reach out and blame the stressor, usually adding a self-justifying reinforcing argument: this (my anger) is the fault of the stressor—how do I know this? Because of the stressor were not present, I would not be angry (or whatever your reflexive pattern is). This is a lie.

Here is an example (and referring to what you write above) there is no such thing as unfair treatment. There is only the idea of unfair treatment, excepting all-out assault, covered above. This might seem ridiculous, but bear with me for a moment. People will simply behave the way they behave and the only choice you have in these moments is how you react to that behaviour. You will never be able to change someone else’s behaviour, either, and directing any energy in this direction is a waste of a valuable resource. If, at a deep level, you think/feel this behaviour is unfair or wrong or shouldn’t be happening then you’re not accepting the reality unfolding in front of you. That is precisely what causes this reaction in your body. Stress is simply resistance to what is actually happening.

‘Stress’ manifests as muscular tension and as disturbance to the tranquility of the mind, in addition to the well-documented flooding of the system with corticosteroids, heavily documented in the literature on stress.

There is a further dimension which might be helpful. You write below about stupidity; contrary to what you think, people are actually doing the best that they can, even though their behaviour might be appalling. In my experience very rarely is there any malice in stupidity. And, most importantly, their behaviour actually says nothing about you.

There is no such thing as having no choice; the mind usually separate options into only two when in fact there are always many. I will elaborate on this aspect in another piece; it’s enough to say presently that the mind’s fundamental act is to cut reality in half: the half it wants and the half it doesn’t. The binary perspectives that plague public life are the evidence: the vast majority of disputes are positioned as choices between this and that; never is this perspective either exhaustive or accurate.

Speaking more generally, a teacher I worked with once helped me very much when he explained that we have little choice about the large-scale things that happen in our lives; but we have any amount of choice in what we decide about how we react to them. This latter aspect is really what free will is all about. If, like most people, there is no capacity to choose how to react in the moment, but instead we simply react reflexively in most situations, then we have no choice at all. This is life for many people.

Comments/disagreements/refutations most welcome.

Addendum, an attempt to frame a different way

Here’s a thought experiment: you and a friend are out and about. Something happens and you are both witness to it; the exact same thing/factor in the environment. She is annoyed by it, though, and you are unmoved by exactly the same thing, and you wonder why she is annoyed. This happens every day; no one notices the obvious aspect: the reaction is in the individual doing the watching/experiencing. The mind immediately sees the reaction (in her case annoyance) as being caused by the factor in the environment; and this is not accurate. This is the absolute core awakening experience: to see this lie told to us by our minds every day. This reaction-being-linked-to-what-is-experienced is the core of all human suffering.

Brilliant post on Kim’s site (bestwinesunder20.com.au)

07 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by kitlaughlin in General, Stretch Therapy

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

cholesterol, diet, eating real food, kitlaughlin.com, trans- and cis-fats

Hello everybody,

I want to draw your attention today to an article on my friend Kim’s site which not only is brilliantly written (and in my experience and from my research is 100% accurate), it is also a terrible indictment of the modern medical machine. The article points to the tremendously powerful control that the pharmaceutical industry has over the funding and the propagation of research, and how research that does not fit its preconceived perspectives is actively held back or squashed completely. Read the article here:

http://bestwinesunder20.com.au/cholesterol-myth/

I would like to supplement this with a chapter from the book Stretching & Pregnancy that I wrote some time ago. The central message of this chapter is that if one wants to eat well, then one needs to stick to the outer aisles of most conventional supermarkets. Avoid the central corridors or what I call ‘the Badlands‘ as often as you can. One might venture there for, say, toilet paper or soap, but definitely nor for food.

The central aisles contain manufactured food. Any processed food has had its fats hydrogenated at the least; hydrogenation is an essential part the manufacturing processes to avoid spoilage. The problem is that trans- and cis-fats are the inevitable byproduct and you want to minimise their ingestion. The truly excellent book by Udo Erasmus with the title Fats that heal; fats that kill is extremely instructive on manufacturing processes (his PhD was on food chemistry).

Sticking to the outer aisles of a supermarket means that your diet will consist of vegetables, some fruit, meat, poultry, dairy, and fish: real food in other words. Notice that all these substances are actually visually recognisable as “food”. The link below yields a PDF of this chapter; although written some time ago, is still completely relevant.

http://www.pandf.com.au/Articles/sensibleeating.php

Enjoy and don’t forget that movement is as essential to the body daily as food and drink.

5 x 10″ free handstands today: a watershed, and thanks Yuri and Charm!

30 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by kitlaughlin in Monkey Gym, Stretch Therapy

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

handstand drills, handstands, kitlaughlin.com, Monkey Gym, stretch therapy, Yuri Marmerstein

I wandered down the street looking for a kids’ playground here in Atlanta today. The two men I asked directions from seemed both friendly and suspicious; and they did tell me where the park could be found. I wonder if the ‘stranger-danger’ POV has tipped too far in the direction that the rest of the US seems to be in these days (able to be experienced at any airport): the state of high alert?

Anyhow, I found a lovely park under a railway line; clean air, grass, wood chips, and ladder bars: everything the non-gym junkie needs for a workout. Today, though, it was all about “HS”, to use Coach’s terminology: the free handstand. I had planned to repeat the series Olivia, Robin and I learned from Yuri at the last workshop in C’ville, but there was not a suitable wall (or tree) to be found, so having had a few days off from the 90-day HS challenge (so, for me the count restarts today), I decided to try to kick up into free HSs.

Before I describe today’s events, though, let me describe the drills that we had practised with Yuri. Many of you will be familiar with the chest to the wall preparation element that Coach teaches: for me, the hardest part is the pulling down of the ribs (lat tension pulls them away from the body in this position), and maintaining the essential hollow and all glute and leg contractions.

But it was Yuri’s approach to the back to the wall version of the same preparation element that has had the most effect on my understanding of how to achieve balance in a handstand. The rule sounds like simplicity itself: simply have your fingertips a few inches away from the wall and kick up into a full handstand. Then concentrate on all the usual cues: pressing the hands strongly away from you into the floor; squeeze the glutes; tuck the tail; and extending the legs up towards the ceiling in the plane of the wall and thereby lengthen the entire line. Once in that position though, Yuri’s approach is then used.

He told us not to try taking one leg at a time away from the wall or even to try to bounce both legs together away at the same time but use a different approach. Once in one’s best, straightest and tightest position, Yuri recommended simply pressing the fingers into the floor while keeping the entire body tight, and using the finger–hand–forearm strength to press the insteps away from the wall, pivoting around the wrists. And if you pay attention in the same position you can simply tilt yourself back into the wall support by pressing the heel of the palm into the floor. This simple technique teaches the body–mind exactly how to use the strength in your forearm to control the critical forwards–backwards whole–body movements when in the air.

It works: I kicked myself up into a handstand using the method I favour (which is to have the shoulders well in front of the fingertips in the kick up position). After a few attempts I got to the balance point and immediately squeezed my glutes and reached my legs up into the air with everything held tight. For the first time ever I was able to move my whole body forwards and backwards and I stayed up in the air I guess somewhere between 15 and 20 seconds—but not by accident; I was feeling as though I was actually controlling the movement for the first time.

A number of things amazed me in this first attempt. The first was that, of course, compare to someone experienced like Yuri, my corrections required much more strength and of course the timing of them was nowhere near accurate enough so I used too much strength backwards and forwards many times (so, too much correction and over-correction). I remembered Yuri mentioning that (just like when one is shooting a rifle or pistol) there is no such thing as a still fixed balance position; there are only more and more subtle movements around the balance point. I competed in the Olympic pistol event over a number of years and this was my experience with the sight picture perfectly: no matter how good you become the pistol is always moving. The better you get, the circle simply become smaller and smaller, exactly like the handstand.

In the space of the next hour I repeated this hold, about six or seven times. In the last two I made myself say aloud the “one Alabama, two Alabama, etc., etc.” mantra out loud to make sure that I was actually breathing properly. I was able to get to ‘three Alabama’ or ‘four Alabama’ both times. How ever long the hold was (let us say around 10 seconds) the biggest lesson for me today was not the length of time held, but that for the first time in my own body I could feel how to balance, and felt the balance. What a rush!

And as I sit here looking at my hand I can see that the whole heel of the palm, from the base of the thumb to about halfway up the side of the palm, has been quite strongly abraded by the concrete I was working out on. Another thing that I have noticed is that the fingers and the palmar surface forearm muscles have had the most tremendous work out. And in a couple of the balances where I was just about to lose balance (going over backwards) I could feel that I was pressing my fingertips into the concrete with literally every gram of strength that I have. Now I understand part at least of why Yuri’s forearms are like Popeye’s!

As well as I was becoming a bit more tired I found that I was letting my elbows bend and yet I was still able to push myself up into a straighter handstand once I had achieved that critical balance and I could feel that the elbow bend is an emergency correction of the position as well.

Of course today could be a complete fluke and perhaps when I try again tomorrow I may find I can’t balance at all! If I do find this I will immediately go back to the to the wall drills that we have spent so much time on.

So closing today, may I simply publicly thank Yuri for his magnificent handstand tutorials during the last workshop we ran in Charlottesville and also thank Olivia for the hundreds of repetitions of the floor preparation drills that she has made me perform. It is all the floors drills that allow one to feel one’s body’s line once in the air; I am certain of this.

Stretch Therapy Paul Watson Interview, Tru Pilates, C’ville, VA

29 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by kitlaughlin in Photography, Stretch Therapy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

kitlaughlin.com, Panasonic GX7, Paul Watson Transform Fitness NYC, Robin Truxel Tru Pilates, stretch therapy

Hello all; I am currently teaching in Studio Lotus, Atlanta, and today is the first off—the Into the Stretch experiential three-day has just finished.

So I have had time to edit and title an interview I shot in Robin Truxel’s lovely Tru Pilates studio in Charlottesville, Virginia. Miss O and I were presenting the new-format Stretch Teacher workshop: the first three days is Into the Stretch; the second three days is the Stretch Teacher part (how to teach what you have just learned).

There were two standout aspects of this six days, for me: one was being so ably assisted by Olivia, and the other was the presence of four of the Gymnastic Bodies graduates, the first is Paul (the interviewee) and the second is Yuri, the handbalancer (and who I learned the band shoulder mobility sequence, one of our YT videos), the third is Mike, and the fourth is Dymion (I am not sure of the spelling of his Russian first name). At every break, everyone was upside down, practising their handstands; this was fun for the participants and the presenters alike.

So, here is the Paul interview:

It’s hard to see just how big Paul is, because he is so beautifully proportioned—but big he is, and a lovely person, too. I am so pleased that our work is getting out to a larger audience as well.

A technical note: this was shot on the new Panasonic GX7; I am so happy with the stills and video output I have bought a second unit. The quality of the video using the mp4 720p/30 option is excellent (and the files sizes are much more manageable than the 1080p/30 options). I recorded the sound on a Sony PCM-10, using the built-in mics; and edited/titled in Final Cut Pro 7. I will be writing more about this setup in posts to com.

← Older posts

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • August 2019
  • October 2018
  • August 2017
  • May 2017
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • March 2016
  • January 2016
  • July 2015
  • February 2015
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • September 2012
  • October 2011
  • September 2011

Categories

  • General
  • Mindfulness
  • Monkey Gym
  • Photography
  • recipes
  • Relaxation
  • Stretch Therapy
  • Technology
  • Travel

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy