Stretching for mobility, flexibility, wellbeing

[Papayapple]

Overall I agree, I am all for the return to the natural habits, but still, there are things that cause me to question that kind of opinions.

A bed of straw is definitely better to sleep on than the mattress!  I've slept on straw tucked under the tarpaulin floor of a tent in the wild, and it was the best sleep of my life(how many nights in the row? I mean: everytime I tried sleeping on the floor on few blankets I was astounded, but then few nights later I would start to get sick of it. Too hard.(Maybe it's just a temporary excitement of a new sensation?) More blankets didn't help. I can only back that up with the fact that the best thing that ever happened to my back was buying that 400$ mattress. Better than yoga, better than acupuncture.) Such a difference. I am only very curious about sleeping in a hammock. I just heard it's incredible.

 

at one point (on dry clover hay that smells like paradise) everybody in our group pulled off between 14 and 18 hours of sleep in one stretch, the bodies seemed to be making up for all the sleep lost under "civilized" conditions. 

After all, wasn't that just mostly because you've been out on holidays? For me it's a tricky thing. Many important factors come into play. Like when I was a kid, sometimes the best sleep I had was while sleeping on a pile of teddy bears and hard toys or in the weird position, embraced by my mom on the nights when there was peace at home.

 

 

There's a thread somewhere where I shared my quest for the perfect sleeping surface for the spine, qi, and so on, and although it is not a bed of straw I ultimately zeroed in on, it's most definitely not a mattress that causes your mingmen area to sag (leaking qi from the Gate of Life all through the night) and is the root of much back pain and bad postures (an epidemic). 

 

I sure would like to know more about this.

 

As for sacrificing the knees -- no, of course not, but I think higher up the thread it has been discussed.  You should never squat with your knees going past your toes, or in or out -- keep them smack over your ankles -- and you can practice (on flat surface for starters) as high as you can manage and squat lower gradually, the action is in the spine and the hip joints, not in the knees.  Do stuff to elongate your spine and open your hips for a good squat and leave the knees out of it, they are there for the ride only and should not take any pressure onto themselves.  Good luck. 

Oh w8 I haven't actually tried sitting higher, that kind of does the trick! (Increases the backsplash dangerously though lol. And the risk of shitting on the rim while knees kept above ankles. hah. What went wrong?! Imagine how these colonists must have felt when they decided to switch. Damn!

[gendao]

Think of it this way.  The sitting toilet was first invented in the 16th century, wasn't accepted until the 19th century, and was unknown to the majority of the world population till a few decades ago, even though Westerners have been widely using it for about a hundred years, give or take.  The inventors of the sitting toilet were not men of medicine.  The rationale for their invention was that the sitting position is more dignified and should be adopted by the British colonists in order to set them apart in their elimination habits from the natives they ruled.  

 

We didn't evolve to do anything but squat when we need to go.  The new technology did eventually eliminate the normal natural body use we've evolved for the task, but the driving force behind these new developments had nothing to do with what's healthy for any organs (the sitting toilet happens to benefit none) and everything to do with turning a rather unhealthy idea of a "dignified" dump into a commercial enterprise of global profitability.  Scroll up the thread for those pictures they use to "reeducate" the Chinese right now.  This was done to Europeans and Americans a hundred years earlier, is all.        

 

We actually live in a world where fubar ideas turned into corporate profits supply an environment we take for granted that dictates to us how we use our bodies from birth to death, and most of those ways to use our bodies are physiologically insane.

And the manifold impacts of being "WEIRD" are also deeply mental and subconscious, too!

 

For example, "WEIRD" people tend to grow up in very linear, unnatural environments - which then affects our perception of the world like an invisible template.

Heine focused on the different ways people in Western and Eastern cultures perceived the world, reasoned, and understood themselves in relationship to others. Norenzayan’s research focused on the ways religious belief influenced bonding and behavior. The three began to compile examples of cross-cultural research that, like Henrich’s work with the Machiguenga, challenged long-held assumptions of human psychological universality.

It was in the 1960s, for instance, that researchers discovered that aspects of visual perception were different from place to place. One of the classics of the literature, the Müller-Lyer illusion, showed that where you grew up would determine to what degree you would fall prey to the illusion that these two lines are different in length:

Researchers found that Americans perceive the line with the ends feathered outward ( as being longer than the line with the arrow tips (A). San foragers of the Kalahari, on the other hand, were more likely to see the lines as they are: equal in length. Subjects from more than a dozen cultures were tested, and Americans were at the far end of the distribution — seeing the illusion more dramatically than all others.

The distinct ways Americans and Machiguengans played the ultimatum game, for instance, wasn’t because they had differently evolved brains. Rather, Americans, without fully realizing it, were manifesting a psychological tendency shared with people in other industrialized countries that had been refined and handed down through thousands of generations in ever more complex market economies.

The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do — the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like — but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception.

For instance, the different ways people perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion likely reflects lifetimes spent in different physical environments. American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of varying dimensions. Surrounded by carpentered corners, visual perception adapts to this strange new environment (strange and new in terms of human history, that is) by learning to perceive converging lines in three dimensions.

When unconsciously translated in three dimensions, the line with the outward-feathered ends © appears farther away and the brain therefore judges it to be longer. The more time one spends in natural environments, where there are no carpentered corners, the less one sees the illusion.

As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations — with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.

In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others — and even the way we perceive reality — makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners — outliers among outliers.”

Interestingly, they seemed much less concerned that they had used the pejorative acronym WEIRD to describe a significant slice of humanity, although they did admit that they could only have done so to describe their own group. “Really,” said Henrich, “the only people we could have called weird are represented right here at this table.”

Still, I had to wonder whether describing the Western mind, and the American mind in particular, as weird suggested that our cognition is not just different but somehow malformed or twisted. In their paper the trio pointed out cross-cultural studies that suggest that the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group. WEIRD minds are also more analytic, possessing the tendency to telescope in on an object of interest rather than understanding that object in the context of what is around it.

The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world. While studying children from the U.S., researchers have suggested a developmental timeline for what is called “folkbiological reasoning.” These studies posit that it is not until children are around 7 years old that they stop projecting human qualities onto animals and begin to understand that humans are one animal among many. Compared to Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.

Given that people living in WEIRD societies don’t routinely encounter or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural world. “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”

Cultures are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing versus urban or suburban — there are hundreds of cultural differences that individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among other aspects of our psychological makeup.

We are just at the beginning of learning how these fine-grained cultural differences affect our thinking. Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places. Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners. Research published late last year suggested psychological differences at the city level too. Compared to San Franciscans, Bostonians’ internal sense of self-worth is more dependent on community status and financial and educational achievement. “A cultural difference doesn’t have to be big to be important,” Norenzayan said. “We’re not just talking about comparing New York yuppies to the Dani tribesmen of Papua New Guinea.”

Because of our peculiarly Western way of thinking of ourselves as independent of others, this idea of the culturally shaped mind doesn’t go down very easily. Perhaps the richest and most established vein of cultural psychology — that which compares Western and Eastern concepts of the self — goes to the heart of this problem. Heine has spent much of his career following the lead of a seminal paper published in 1991 by Hazel Rose Markus, of Stanford University, and Shinobu Kitayama, who is now at the University of Michigan. Markus and Kitayama suggested that different cultures foster strikingly different views of the self, particularly along one axis: some cultures regard the self as independent from others; others see the self as interdependent. The interdependent self — which is more the norm in East Asian countries, including Japan and China — connects itself with others in a social group and favors social harmony over self-expression. The independent self — which is most prominent in America — focuses on individual attributes and preferences and thinks of the self as existing apart from the group.

The classic “rod and frame” task: Is the line in the center vertical?

That we in the West develop brains that are wired to see ourselves as separate from others may also be connected to differences in how we reason, Heine argues. Unlike the vast majority of the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically. That is, the American mind strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its pieces. Show a Japanese and an American the same cartoon of an aquarium, and the American will remember details mostly about the moving fish while the Japanese observer will likely later be able to describe the seaweed, the bubbles, and other objects in the background. Shown another way, in a different test analytic Americans will do better on something called the “rod and frame” task, where one has to judge whether a line is vertical even though the frame around it is skewed. Americans see the line as apart from the frame, just as they see themselves as apart from the group.

Heine and others suggest that such differences may be the echoes of cultural activities and trends going back thousands of years. Whether you think of yourself as interdependent or independent may depend on whether your distant ancestors farmed rice (which required a great deal of shared labor and group cooperation) or herded animals (which rewarded individualism and aggression). Heine points to Nisbett at Michigan, who has argued (pdf) that the analytic/holistic dichotomy in reasoning styles can be clearly seen, respectively, in Greek and Chinese philosophical writing dating back 2,500 years. These psychological trends and tendencies may echo down generations, hundreds of years after the activity or situation that brought them into existence has disappeared or fundamentally changed.

Edited February 6, 2017 by gendao

[dust]

A request for ideas.

 

Recently I've been doing back squats, trying to improve both strength and comfortable range of motion in the deep squat position. Along with other hip and posterior chain exercises, my hips and hamstrings have opened up well in the last year or so. My adductors, however, don't seem to want to play along.

 

It seems that whatever I try -- various stretches, strength work, patting (paida), etc -- after a few hours they go stiff and sore and it's like I never worked on them. Even after resting for a few days, they remain stiff. They haven't increased in flexibility in months.

 

So I figure something else is going on. E.g. maybe the problem is with the opposing muscles, the abductors, being too tight? Or I'm doing something during the day that's killing any work I did during training? Something I'm eating??

 

Cheers

[Rishi Das]

abductors, yea...i'm in the same boat, always pretty tight. interested to hear others feedback...

Edited March 10, 2017 by Rishi Das

[Papayapple]

I have found that swinging yoir arms and legs and running are very effective ways to stretch. And safer for me actually.

[Stonehouse]

I learned the hard way that stretching/exercise is not an optional activity if one is concerned with any kind of physical health. I have spent the last few years working extraordinarily long hours at a desk job, and my reward was muscle wasting down the left side of my body. 

I'm seeing a physiotherapist for exercises, massage and accupuncture, all of which has helped immensely. At the centre of my treatment is a regimen of squats and leg bridges intended to return muscle mass and correct the imbalanced caused by my poor work posture. 

I wish I had been more attentive to my body this past few years, rather than fixated on foolish pursuits. 

 

Edited July 26, 2017 by Stonehouse

[johndoe2012]

I tried a 10 minute routine from the Dara Torres resistance stretching youtube videos and had a real nice release of energy flooding the body.

 

It reminds me of Hanna Somatics which I did a lot long time ago.

 

Some say negative emotion is just bodily tension being interpreted wrongly. Probably part of the truth since stretching releases a lot of the negative stored emotions and leaves you more happy and balanced.

[silent thunder]

3 hours ago, johndoe2012 said:

I tried a 10 minute routine from the Dara Torres resistance stretching youtube videos and had a real nice release of energy flooding the body.

 

It reminds me of Hanna Somatics which I did a lot long time ago.

 

Some say negative emotion is just bodily tension being interpreted wrongly. Probably part of the truth since stretching releases a lot of the negative stored emotions and leaves you more happy and balanced.

Lots of spontaneous shaking, hopping, flapping, slapping and thumping going on in my life these days.

 

Throughout my day at work particularly, I'll become aware of a seemingly random impetus to shake, hop and slap my body... so I go with it.  My coworkers find this endlessly amusing.... "hey check it out, Creighton is slapping the shit out of himself again...."  "need any help Creighton?"

 

Sometimes there is a warm rush and a cascade of energy through the body as a result. 

[Hancock]

On 3/9/2017 at 1:45 PM, dust said:

A request for ideas.

 

Recently I've been doing back squats, trying to improve both strength and comfortable range of motion in the deep squat position. Along with other hip and posterior chain exercises, my hips and hamstrings have opened up well in the last year or so. My adductors, however, don't seem to want to play along.

 

It seems that whatever I try -- various stretches, strength work, patting (paida), etc -- after a few hours they go stiff and sore and it's like I never worked on them. Even after resting for a few days, they remain stiff. They haven't increased in flexibility in months.

 

So I figure something else is going on. E.g. maybe the problem is with the opposing muscles, the abductors, being too tight? Or I'm doing something during the day that's killing any work I did during training? Something I'm eating??

 

Cheers

 

 

Your joints need to be involved not just the muscles bro.  They're key to movement an upholding things comfortably.

Edited August 3, 2017 by Zenmode

[yyitself]

Thank you all for your suggestions.

 

In the next days , I'll test some of new stretches.

 

I would like to share with you a youtube's channel, the Yoga TX. They helped me a lot.

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAwPqAM_ONIyI1EHU5hDe4Q

 

There are some many videos with asanas to improve your flexibility.

You can watch a different movie everyday.

[gendao]

Here's a good basic checklist for your flexibility:

1) Front ("American") splits

2) Side ("Chinese") splits

3) Back bridge (Wheel pose)

4) Uttanasana

5) Upavistha Konasana

 

Ido's actually not quite as flexible as I thought he'd be (although still more than me!), but then again this video is also 8 years old... 

 

But how'd you guys do?

Edited August 28, 2017 by gendao

[yyitself]

Hello everyone!

 

These last days I tried some new stretches that you suggested here, the easy ones. 

Nevertheless, the majority of these stretches are very dificult to execute or in some I need a friend to help me in stretching.

I have a yoga mat and some pillows. 

 

Can you tell me some stretchings for beginners like me please?

 

Thank you

[gendao]

On 1/21/2017 at 7:17 PM, Taomeow said:

Think of it this way.  The sitting toilet was first invented in the 16th century, wasn't accepted until the 19th century, and was unknown to the majority of the world population till a few decades ago, even though Westerners have been widely using it for about a hundred years, give or take.  The inventors of the sitting toilet were not men of medicine.  The rationale for their invention was that the sitting position is more dignified and should be adopted by the British colonists in order to set them apart in their elimination habits from the natives they ruled.  

 

We didn't evolve to do anything but squat when we need to go.  The new technology did eventually eliminate the normal natural body use we've evolved for the task, but the driving force behind these new developments had nothing to do with what's healthy for any organs (the sitting toilet happens to benefit none) and everything to do with turning a rather unhealthy idea of a "dignified" dump into a commercial enterprise of global profitability.  Scroll up the thread for those pictures they use to "reeducate" the Chinese right now.  This was done to Europeans and Americans a hundred years earlier, is all.        

 

We actually live in a world where fubar ideas turned into corporate profits supply an environment we take for granted that dictates to us how we use our bodies from birth to death, and most of those ways to use our bodies are physiologically insane.   

Not only that, but even just the very concept of a stationary TOILET is anti-Natural.  Because out in Nature, you'd "never" take a sh*t in the same place twice - but all over the place, dispersing fertilizer/seeds wherever Nature calls within the natural flow of life...  And that flow is FREE, not FIXED!

 

Life just sure is an interesting journey of folding and molding to become "something"...and then later unfolding and ironing out all those (cultural & other) creases to return back to your formless, original Nature.

Edited September 3, 2017 by gendao

[RobB]

HI,

 

These guys are interesting: https://physicalalchemy.com.au/ I'd also recommend Kit Laughlin's book.

 

Cheers

 

Rob

[silent thunder]

4 hours ago, RobB said:

HI,

 

These guys are interesting: https://physicalalchemy.com.au/ I'd also recommend Kit Laughlin's book.

 

Cheers

 

Rob

Really appreciate you sharing this.  Potent stuff!  Thanks!

[windwalker]

Use this to train, and test people wanting to train in taiji. 

although in my practice we do not use the wall.  

A good way to test those feeling they can do things 

in normal way with out any type of training. 

 

hope some find this useful 

 

 

 

[windwalker]

 

 

This might also be considered a type of stretching strengthening practice.

Not something I've practiced nor would recommend unguided....if one messed up

it could be bad.

[phil]

 

[Taomeow]

I think my videos of Susan Harper and Emilie Conrad showing what Continuum Movement looks like got removed not once, but twice, don't remember exactly, but I guess it was an honest mistake on the part of whoever removed them.  You really might think you're looking at something entirely else when you see Continuum Movement, but I assure you there's no erotic context to it, and the body part you are looking at is the back, just the back -- moving in a way most people have never seen the human body move, or thought possible.  I've been working on making my spine fluid in a similar fashion.  Let me try displaying it as a link, maybe this won't be found inappropriate.  And I assure you it's not.  The origins of life that went into the theory and practice of this modality were not sexual, sexual reproduction is a much later evolutionary acquisition. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gd7FWYp-jQ

 

[silent thunder]

16 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

I think my videos of Susan Harper and Emilie Conrad showing what Continuum Movement looks like got removed not once, but twice, don't remember exactly, but I guess it was an honest mistake on the part of whoever removed them.  You really might think you're looking at something entirely else when you see Continuum Movement, but I assure you there's no erotic context to it, and the body part you are looking at is the back, just the back -- moving in a way most people have never seen the human body move, or thought possible.  I've been working on making my spine fluid in a similar fashion.  Let me try displaying it as a link, maybe this won't be found inappropriate.  And I assure you it's not.  The origins of life that went into the theory and practice of this modality were not sexual, sexual reproduction is a much later evolutionary acquisition. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gd7FWYp-jQ

 

I vividly recall the first time I encountered that very video and began searching out info on Susan and Emilie. 

Stunning work.  Visceral connection to baseline functions.

 

So fluid the movements at times seem... alien.

 

[Taomeow]

41 minutes ago, silent thunder said:

I vividly recall the first time I encountered that very video and began searching out info on Susan and Emilie. 

Stunning work.  Visceral connection to baseline functions.

 

So fluid the movements at times seem... alien.

 

 

That's the thing!  Not alien, indigenous to watery planet Earth! 

 

I've been learning from a different source (there's a guy in Australia who has step by step instruction videos, very easy to start if one is interested), this one shows a bit of a "what can be done" at a later stage.  Actually, come to think of it, I started learning this type of movement with a qi machine (invented by a Japanese guy who was observing his koi fish and got all envious :D) that awakens lateral mobility, a long time ago.  I still have the machine,  though seldom any time to use it.  Should probably sell it...   

[hierundjetzt]

On 9/19/2017 at 5:02 AM, Taomeow said:

 

That's the thing!  Not alien, indigenous to watery planet Earth! 

 

I've been learning from a different source (there's a guy in Australia who has step by step instruction videos, very easy to start if one is interested), this one shows a bit of a "what can be done" at a later stage.  Actually, come to think of it, I started learning this type of movement with a qi machine (invented by a Japanese guy who was observing his koi fish and got all envious :D) that awakens lateral mobility, a long time ago.  I still have the machine,  though seldom any time to use it.  Should probably sell it...   

What is that source in Australia? I would be interested, thanks

[Taomeow]

41 minutes ago, hierundjetzt said:

What is that source in Australia? I would be interested, thanks

 

The guy named Simon Thakur.  He had a youtube channel years ago when this thread came to be, I don't remember what it was called but you can punch in his name and something will come up.  He's also on FB (Ancestral Movement group).  

[hierundjetzt]

18 hours ago, Taomeow said:

 

The guy named Simon Thakur.  He had a youtube channel years ago when this thread came to be, I don't remember what it was called but you can punch in his name and something will come up.  He's also on FB (Ancestral Movement group).  

Thanks a lot!

[RobB]

On 01/08/2024 at 7:03 PM, Taomeow said:

 

The guy named Simon Thakur. 

 

Simon is great! He had a video up on YT of a talk he gave in a park somewhere. Got into mirror neurons, animal mimicry and all sorts. Well worth a listen.