Every six months or so, one of our Senior Instructors at Brookline Tai Chi tells me that he’s had an amazing revelation about how to do the kwa squat. The kwa squat is one of the very first things we teach, he’s been doing Tai Chi for 40 years, and he gets new insight into it all the time. Amazing, right? Tai Chi and Back Pain One of the reasons we get so interested in this exercise is its power to relieve pressure on the spine and open up important joints of the body.
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.
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.
Frozen shoulder is one of those terms that people accept with resignation and it seems like a plausible explanation…until you start to poke around in your own nervous system. If you’ve ever been told you have a frozen shoulder, I urge you to look a little bit beyond the (overly) simple mechanical explanation. Obviously, I’m not diagnosing your shoulder from a YouTube video, but I just want you to ask a few more questions and try these two experiments:
In just ten minutes of head-to-toe movement, you can get rid of stiff joints in the morning. What’s the secret? There isn’t one really…you just have to move every single joint. Z Health exercises for joint mobility give you an easy template to use to get this done, though. Check out this example of head-to-toe joint mobility:
The metronome-like quality of the music got me. Sorry! You know why I like metronomes.
And they’re all in pain! When it comes to the aches and pains of moving around, you might be in pain from your day job, your vigorous exercise routine, or even a mindfulness practice that doesn’t involve any movement. Ever wonder why? The reason is exactly the same in each case: in your pre-conscious mind, you are basically trying to outsource your own movement patterns, from a body part that should be doing the job, to one that’s willing to, even though it isn’t designed for that job!
Update: We’ve just released a new video-based course that shows you how to loosen up your hips and become stronger and more flexible! [CSSBUTTON target=“/fix-your-frozen-hips/” color=“66ff33”]Check It Out[/CSSBUTTON] Original Post: I know the weather is getting warmer, but as I look around, all I see are frozen hips. We just aren’t a squatting culture. We sit in chair, couches, cars. Look around the room you are in right now and see how all the furniture is designed.
