week 8

Free your head.

This weeks challenge is a movement meditation and one of my favorites from Mary Bond over at Heal Your Posture. It's also is a nice follow on from the whole 'getting rid or your pillow rant' from last week as it's something to help restore mobility at the joint between the top of your neck and your cranium, the area that so often expresses stress as rigidity.  It will be particularly useful if you have to spend long hours in front of a computer screen. 

Like most of the challenges I'm posting, this is not a one-time exploration, but rather a practice to incorporate into your self-care routine and it can be done anywhere. The meditation asks you to “draw” circles and figure 8’s using your uvula (that strange bit of flesh hanging in the back of your throat) as a stylus, and rather then make you read a long badly written post by me you can check out Mary's video below, she describes it wonderfully!

Enjoy!

Getting On, Getting Around

Getting On, Getting Around - An insight into mobility & ageing from Close-Up Research on Vimeo.

Dr Andreo Spina

This guy because he talks ALOT of sense and researches and practices with this in mind...

Check out Andreo's instagram, youtube and blog feed for snippets. It will get you thinking.

"Flexibility and stretching does not decrease the chance of injury.  Flexibility is the ability of an articulation to achieve a range of motion passively.  For example, if you are passively doing the splits or passively sitting in a stretch, just because you can passively achieve a range of motion in a joint or articulation doesn't mean it will translate into an ability to utilize that range of motion in a functional movement pattern or a particular sport oriented movement... Mobility is flexibility plus strength and control...Just holding a static position doesn't get you to a point where you are strengthening the ranges of motion."

sit down, stand up

Can you get up and down off the floor without “touching” anything?

" My oldest client ever was a woman named Myrle. She was 89 when she started seeing me and we worked together for 5 years. When we first met, I asked her to get down on the floor and back up. I wanted to get a sense of her functional strength. It took her about 2 minutes to get down (with the use of a chair) and it took her 72 minutes, 4 pieces of furniture, and every one of MY muscles to get her back up again.
She was mortified and told me how the exercise brought up memories of her mother. She had cared for her mother in the end stages of her life, and when she watched her mother struggle to get off the floor, she swore “I will NEVER be like that.” Of course, most physical goals require some sort of physical practice beyond grand declarations. Myrle, like most people, didn’t get down on the floor regularly the last 20 (or 40) years and so the muscle strength necessary to do so silently slipped away..."

Read the rest of this brilliant blog post from Katy Bowman here.

Saturday Cartoon

LOVE this!