Brain and Body

Our bodies and our minds have to be in harmony or there comes a break. In assisted stretching I express the external and you the internal. Through our communication we identify, train and achieve the goals that you set. The clearer, better communication we create the quicker and more profound the change and attainment of goals. When solo stretching we have only ourselves to converse with; to both listen and speak. Too often we are only adept at one of these.  This often creates a break where we treat our bodies like a taxi cab for the brain (all brain no body) or train our bodies to be like Camelot however trapping inside little of any splendor (all body no brain).

Any sport, mirroring life, works best when the mind and body are one. It makes sense then to train in a way that actually trains our ability to develop, experience and live like that; connected, whole, one. We practice and train for events all the while living a lifelong Event where there are no mulligans, do-overs, etc. Like sports there are punctuated times considered to carry more weight. Let’s remember that we improve the qualification and quantification of those events not in that moment, but in all of the “mundane” ones leading up to the event. We want to be able to go into the events ready, relaxed, excited. For the most part, it should be a foregone conclusion as to how we are going to perform. To develop this we need to be conscientious in our training. Actually train the mind-body connection not just a better taxi cab.

In martial arts I talk about a training methodology: Coordination, Application, Flow. With arms straight, push lightly down on the chair with palms emphasizing drawing the elbows to your hips – this is an isometric exercise, there is only contraction no motion. Take a few reps (contract, relax, contract, relax) to simply be inside feeling the targeted muscles (see picture). Go slow and with little resistance the key is to really feel and activate the targeted muscles. This is the info that later lets you know if you are doing the exercise correctly. This is your control. The temptation is to want to skip past this phase or speed through it to get to the “good stuff”, but this is the good stuff, this is where you first exercise, train, develop discipline and listening to yourself and create the mind body connection. For that reason, I am going to leave you with this and make you wait until next time for the Application and Flow.