Archive for Health and Fitness
Letting Go of Muscle Tightness
Posted by: | CommentsA number of people have been telling me how they try to let go of their muscular tightness, discomforts or pain by either breathing into it, visualizing or using positive mantras.
These methods can be quite useful but we may not always be successful with these approaches.
Your brain is set up to use the natural process of a pandiculation by using Somatics Exercises. These unique exercises send a message from your brain’s cortex through the spinal cord and out to the muscle or muscles which need to let go.
If you practice Somatics, you may be aware how to use the simple 3 step process by actually contracting your muscles followed by the s-l-o-w release and pausing to sense the effect.
When you feel or sense the release of yourself letting go, you are in a state of learning and reminding your nervous system as to the “how to” of actually letting go.
We often try to deal with accumulated stress, tightness or pain by just breathing into it. This works “if” you already know how to let go in that particular area of your body.
Using your mind to communicate with the muscles, reminds them of their function, and serves to creates a memory pattern which reinforces the learning of how to let go.
You are actively creating and releasing the chemicals of relaxation into your body through the 3 step process of a pandiculation which you can use any time you feel the need.
In other words, you’re also creating a reservoir of the feel good chemicals of relaxation which you can bank on.
The more you practice with the 3 simple steps, the more easily you can tap into your natural resource of turning off stress, tightness, discomfort and pain.
Then once you have the hang of it, and your muscles know and remember how to let go, then breathing, visualizing and following through with your intentions and mantras will move you up a notch in realizing your healthy lifestyle.
Letting go is easy once you know how… you can join us on Saturday, August 14th for a live webinar on how to use the P word to get your muscles to let go in your legs, hips, knees, ankles and feet.
World Cup and Recreational Soccer Injuries
Posted by: | CommentsMy beloved beautiful game is center at the world’s stage and yet I continue to see how many athletes didn’t make the competition on account of injuries or are cramping on the field. These injuries happen in the course of a game and in training. 
In the recreational side of soccer, did you know that nearly 570,000 athletes were injured playing soccer in 2009?
While many athletes continue to “stretch” as a means of prevention and recovery many of their attempts are ill-fated and actually compound their problems. New research is out which you can use to benefit yourself.
As a self-proclaimed, Divorce Counselor for Stretching, there exists a more natural way to lengthen your muscles and have them functioning for your peak performance.
Your brain, if you will, is the big muscle which sends messages to your muscles to keep them contracted or relaxed at specific rates of contraction.
By pushing your muscles to lengthen, they actually re-contract.
It’s poignant to watch a calf muscle or hamstring get “pulled” in the course of a game and watch the trainers run onto the field and spray the muscles with the “secret” spray or forcefully try to lengthen the muscle in the opposite direction to gain length.
The obvious signal is the muscle is being shortened. This is what’s happening when you are experiencing a cramp or muscle spasm.
By pushing the muscle, when say your calf is cramping, you’re violating the stretch reflex. No worries… you won’t get a ticket for it. This reflex is what keeps the muscles contracting and set at certain levels. By forcing or pushing muscles into length, it actually recontracts and gets shorter afterwards. This is what they found out about back in 1936.
This protective mechanism is a good thing so your muscles don’t tear. This reflex can be readjusted by the brain instead of using force. If you push it, your muscles will be forced into length but the rate of contraction will continue and can be elevated so that your stiffness remains for longer periods of time.
Instead of trying to lengthen the muscle, the brain can be used to do what is clearly happening in the moment. The cramp is a muscle shortening to protect itself. So shortening it, is what is you can do in order for the muscle to allow itself to lengthen back and reset it’s level of contraction.
Now this may seem counterintuitive. Once you get the hang of a simple 3 step process, you’ll be able to use this natural approach which is systematized by Somatics Exercises. These types of exercises have been prescribed to successfully get people out of pain, stiffness and cramps or muscle spasms.
Your brain is showing what needs to be done but of course we normally “react” by pulling away from any pain.
Learning how to go with it, is what sets you free even though it’s counter to what we’ve been led to do.
Once you get the hang of Somatics, in which the goal, like stretching, is to lengthen the muscles, it’s simply achieved by the brain rather than than forcing a muscle.
Preventing injuries can be helped if the muscles are more relaxed in the first place. So it’s obvious, why make things tighter with brawn when you can use your brain to change how much activity and rate of contraction your muscles have to live with… it’s always easier to move if you’re less stiff, compensated, and not holding on for dear life in those exquisite moments of the mystery and misery of a cramp or muscle spasm.
Upcoming Online Somatics Workshop
Posted by: | CommentsSaturday, June 19th
10am – 1pm Pacific Coast Time.
Guarding and holding onto your muscles to keep protecting yourself is no way to live… and something you’re all too familiar with.
Using muscle relaxants, ice, heat, and other meds hasn’t solved it for you either.
• Do you have to live with it?
• Do you have to keep enduring it?
• Does it have to keep happening to you?
Come join us to unravel yourself naturally by using yourself so simply and easily that it could boggle your mind.
Yes, it’s easy as 1-2-3.
Related Blogs
Take Stiffness Out the Way Nature Intends
Posted by: | Comments
Is this how you get your muscles ready to play or recover from a game? Bags of ice are fairly inexpensive.
Is there a silver bullet or set of pills, muscle relaxants, or balms that’ll take the stiffness out of your muscles?
Each week I get to witness people using a variety of methods like heat, ice, and various balms, just to soothe stiff, contracted, sore muscles.
Some people even chug down ibuprofen right before kickoff.
Other people keep wearing the same brace year after year and all of them are doing the best they can to release whatever discomforts and compensations their body is holding them in.
Even traditional stretching which is now known to weaken muscles is still being used.
Nature, however, has set it up so you can achieve relaxation simply using your brain and flooding your nervous system with chemicals to change the state of your muscles.
By changing the levels your muscles are contracting at, your brain can zap out the stiffness and contracted states you feel and live with.
Merely by spending some time pandiculating yourself, you can achieve the state of calmness, serenity and being-ness with which your muscles will gladly thank you for.
What’s a pandiculation? It’s merely using your brain to change the level of stiffness or contracted-ness your muscles are currently experiencing.
All healthy vertebrate animals have this know-how. They feel their stiff and shortened muscles… then they pandiculate themselves out of it. Afterwards they are ready to move easily, freely and agilely.
So if lathering yourself with creme, popping some pills and wearing braces is working for you, by all means keep doing that…
If these interventions would give lasting relief, I’d be all over it, sadly they’re just band-aids.
Nature has the answer. We’re already set up to pandiculate to take out stiffness and feel satisfied afterwards.
Somatics Exercises, which are the complete reverse of everything else out there, uses pandiculation as the means to moving more freely. Taking out compensatory patterns which bind you and lead to the cause of your stiff, over contracting muscles… is a simple matter.
You can go ahead and keep being a stiff or use that knowledge to change the signals your brain is sending by the simple act of a pandiculation.
Related Blogs
Somatic thoughts on Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution
Posted by: | CommentsSomatics is defined as the body experienced from within. Thomas Hanna coined this term which not only relates to movement as is taught in Hanna Somatic Education®, it also relates to our entire being.
While I normally comment on movement as a key to well-being. Moving to the refrigerator and in the grocery store or sitting down for a prepared meal in a restaurant is another part of a strategy to well-being.
If you’re loading yourself up on packaged foods and expect your body to move well… please try it again and see if you get the same result. I applaud the efforts of Jamie Oliver’s television show and his intent to plant seeds to improve not only how school children eat… it’s a lesson for us big kids too.
Moving well also requires you to nourish your being with food that gives you positive energy and one of the simplest of foods is merely drinking clean and healthy water.
Lack of hydration, ill nourishment and medication, both legal and illegal will take you away from moving well as nature intends, otherwise, all the pandiculators, the healthy vertebrate animals would be in a mess too. Some of them are on account of what they have access to as well as your children and the community you live in.
I know when I travel and can’t get organic food, I’m in a literal bind, which thankfully only lasts for a small duration and when I discover areas which have co-ops and healthy restaurants which I even discovered in Sin City, Las Vegas in a soccer tournament I was competing in…
My hope is that Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution will re-spark what so many have come to understand how food is delivered to children at school, what is available at the grocery store, and what we ingest as fast food.
Healthy minds thrive on good food, physical activity, great relationships and the inner feeling of connectedness. This is somatics. To move with intelligence is our birthright as is evidenced by how we pandiculated in our mother’s womb. To continue to move well is fostered by this intelligent act of pandiculation.
To eat well is a choice to wield another and further intelligence to allow us to move, think and act freely with a consciousness promoting well-being for all of us. Our health care reform moves onward when we all participate in promoting well-being and practicing it… and modeling it for all children.
It’s not always easy to take the time to prepare a good meal, move with intelligence, think clearly and act in a positive manner… but when the seed is planted and we repeat the simple practice of hygiene in all it’s varied forms, then we truly progress to living life as easy and as well as it can be.
It’s an effort that is well rewarded with feelings of pleasure, confidence, and self-actualization. Life is simple… eat well, move well, think well, be well. The paths can be varied, overlap and your somatics sense of yourself will feel and know it. It’s just practice and revolutions such as Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution remind us of our greatness, our capacity to feel it, and that desire which calls us to move forward.
