One of your practice goals should be to be able to make sense of other people’s movement patterns. Learning how to watch someone move, and see what’s going on, is going to give you really valuable information that you can then apply to your own practice. In the following video clip, I demonstrate two different gait patterns, with different arm swings. If you can start to see how the arm swing differs between the two, you’ll start to gain some valuable insight into how to assess and correct your own movement imbalances.
When you see a series of exercises, you can either look at what’s common to all of them, or how they are different. In this video, I go through several variations of turning exercises, where I’m using the connection between the legs and the spine to drive body movement. Most people will look at the arms in each exercise and say, “those are not the same movements” and that’s true, but they would be missing the most important part: how the legs turn the body.
Next session at Brookline Tai Chi, we are re-introducing a course on the Marriage of Heaven and Earth Qigong. In preparation for the course, I sat down with several Energy Arts instructors who are certified to teach this set, to discuss why these exercises are beneficial, how they related to other forms of qigong, and what it’s like for people to learn some of the stranger techniques involved, like “pulsing” the joints.
Twisting, especially the legs, is one of those techniques that sounds really cool, but it easy to overdo. Going slow and steady with twisting can help everything loosen up. My advice: at first work on feeling what naturally happens rather than trying to make something happen. Develop sensitivity. In this “office hours” clip, we look at twisting the legs in Cloud Hands and troubleshoot some of her stuck spots.
Eyercize is a free, web-based reading pacer that turns any text into a speed reading exercise. But, you can do more than just read faster using Eyercize. You can actually improve how you move, if you follow these simple training guidelines. Part of the reason I’m so excited about Eyercize is how easy it is to use. Check out this video demo where I show you how to turn any web page into a eye training exercise:
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I love a challenging practice problem. One of our Inner Form members wrote to me and said, “I need more flexibility, but I don’t have time to add a whole other stretching routine to my current practice. What can I do?” I have good news if you’ve been mulling over a similar practice problem. It all comes down to how you understand flexibility.
One of my students says that in medical school they were taught how to explain their clinical observations in a way that made them sound more official. For example, if you see something once, you can say that “in my experience…” The second time you’ve observed the same phenomenon, you can say that “in case after case….” Finally, if you’re seeing something more than two times, you’ve seen it “in a series of cases.
The Wall Test is one of my favorite “breathing hacks” – a simple, fast exercise you can do to get feedback on how well you are breathing. Check out this instruction in this video and try it for yourself:
This breathing exercise is taken from a live breathing class I taught last week. In the class, we looked at several different facets of training your breathing, including: The difference between nerves, fluids, and chi when you practice.
