The Octopus aces the President's Fitness Test
if she can put her book down long enough...
Preliminaries:
Qoya and Conscious dance classes in Kalamazoo: We'll be dancing together on Saturday, April 15 at 9:30am (new time!). It's a shorter class, more like what I teach on the Mackinac Island retreats--only about 30-45 minutes--so it's a great opportunity to jump in and try conscious, inspired dance without a big time commitment. I'd love for you to join us--just send me an email to sign up and get the class details.
Healthy eating lunch-workshop in Kalamazoo: only a couple weeks left until my spring workshop, "Healthy Eating for Everybunny--more than just rabbit food!" We'll be meeting at 11:30am on Wednesday, April 19, to eat a delicious, healthy lunch together, and learn an easy way to put together healthy meals with my meal template. I'll cover some basics of good nutrition plus give you lots of opportunities to ask questions and pick my brain for your particular situation. I hope you can join us for lunch and learning, just send me an email to sign up and get class details.
I vaguely remember when we had to start doing the President's fitness test in middle school. It was one of those gym class activities that seemed more like torture than anything else. On the plus side, no one was throwing a ball at me or expecting me to hit anything with a ball. But it was a fairly excruciating exploration of the different ways that I didn't have any strength. I remember doing well with a hamstring stretch, but also failing miserably at sit-ups, and push-ups and chin-ups and running. It was painful, both physically and socially, but then again gym class always way.
In retrospect, I didn't realize that all those activities weren't measures of some inherent ability that you either had or didn't--and I didn't. They were skills, and could be improved through training and practice. If I had really wanted to, I could have worked at those components of the fitness test regularly and gotten better at them over time. Given the training, I could have done as well or better than anyone else in my class.
Would I have been willing to take the time away from reading to do that? Maybe not. But it would have been nice to have understood that it was, at least, an option.
This year, I'm doing a couple different certifications--massage therapy as well as biomechanical corrective exercise (why stick with one when you can do two?!). As I'm waiting for the massage course to begin, I'm working through as much of the corrective exercise class as I can, so I've really been going in-depth into it over the last few weeks. It's been fascinating.
Biomechanical corrective exercise is a way to address the physical imbalances that arise from our modern lifestyle. Pain the the feet, knees, back, and neck can come from any of a number of causes, but frequently it stems from poor posture: rounded and hunched shoulders, flat feet, collapsed knees, tipped pelvis. All the different ways we take our bodies out of proper alignment, creates tension and eventually creates actual physical changes to muscles and connective tissue to compensate for it.
Fixing it--especially after decades of bad habits--isn't as easy as just standing up straight. We need to gently coax and muscles and connective tissue back into a state that is able to be in alignment. In the ten years or so that I've been reading about alignment, I've found several people who are very knowledgeable and insightful about biomechanics and alignment. Katy Bowman, in particular, teaches specific stretching and strengthening exercises in an approachable and accessible way.
What I hadn't seen, though, was a comprehensive approach to put it all together. That's what this certification does--teach how to assess alignment issues including those that cause pain and disfunction, and the step-by-step approach to fixing it for the long term. As someone who naturally thinks in terms of systems, I'm super excited to see how all of this works together.
What really impresses me is that the instructor, Justin Price, works in a systematic way: release the soft tissue, then stretch, then strengthen. Move progressively through the steps instead of trying to do everything at once. It explains why I'd had success in dealing with my heel pain years ago, and also why other things (neck tension and a shoulder issue) wouldn't go away or got worse the harder I tried to fix them.
I'm excited to start playing with these ideas--I'll be writing more about them here, of course, and will probably pull out some components for in-person workshops as well. It feels empowering to be able to see that the "I'm getting old" aches and pains that are starting to crop up are actually things that I can address through corrective exercise.
Warmly,
Adrienne