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.
