Alleviate • Stretching – SRS

Light as a feather but strong as steel inside.
This is a good metaphor to describe the people who stretch regularly.

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For stretching, our goal is to aim for the lightness that we can feel in every part of our body and be stretchy.

But what does lightness mean?

It means we don’t generally feel the blockage or heaviness in any part of the body, and that we can easily do poses at any time, anywhere. A blockage is a flow of Qi being interrupted. When we feel somewhere is blocked, we feel the discomfort from the part of the body and it usually makes us moody.

Meanwhile, the heaviness generally comes from the overused muscles whether it’s by a prolonged issue or a new activity has been taken. Imagine a runner finishes his serious training session, his legs are now tired and sore. But the weary muscles aren’t limited to only the leg parts, so the next day he wakes up, he starts to feel the weight all over him and he might think of his body like a sail for a second. These kinds of situations are far from unheard of. They happen to ordinary people too.

*Notice that heaviness does not mean the weight of a person, but rather the cause from the muscles used and inflexibility that without proper relief.

When light exercises, like walking, or even holding the phone, happen repeatedly without alleviation, blockage, hidden pain, or heaviness will take forms and grow on us. But sometimes, problems develop too slowly we don’t realise, like the fable of the boiling frog.

So the feeling of lightness, if one can feel its state, can be a measurement for ourselves to determine our overall health, including mobility, flexibility, durability, and so on.

Though keep in mind that:
Feeling light does not equal to weak.
Feeling light should have a sense of strong inner power within, and that is the strength.
Feeling light is the whole body state, while the parts of the body should be smooth and painless.
Feeling light is ongoing, not being hold up by the daily tasks.
Feeling light means we’re always ready; be on the move if needed.
Feeling light takes efforts and times.

Stretching is a quick and resilient method to alleviate our stressed body and enhance the lightness over time.
Besides the physical improvement, Stretching also helps improve thinking. The more one stretches, the time of one will become slower to the personal perspective in his/her world. This directly reflects the inner world, so certain concepts will then be developed. The tolerance, the understanding of life, the joys of living, will merge when one starts to stretch.

Before we talk more about stretching, one thing to note is that stretching and Yoga are two different practices but they overlap.

For me, as I’ve mentioned in previous stretching articles, I incorporate Yoga techniques that I learnt from my Yogist friend into my usual stretching routine, as a dancer. Therefore, I’m referring stretching method but really, it has many other outside elements being added in, like Yin-yang and so on. Hope that makes sense!

One concept for where to begin with stretching is to think of Balance. Stretching is easy because whatever the habitual postures we have been doing, we stretch them with the opposite directions.

*As you can see here, if I spend a lot of time sitting, my back, core and areas around are going to be stiff and irregulate over time. So, I’ll practice “the wheel” to balance it out and ease the unwanted pain in it.

The more repetitive movement is being performed, the easier for one to master it.

Applying “the balance concept” to our body, we can correct and fix the “abused” area and relieve the pains from not being stretched enough.

Think of an imaginary axis and a curve around us as we stand, however the median line leaning front or back, left or right, up or down, we focus on the opposite direction to stretch, this way we can truly develop our personal stretching routine and balance the used parts, whilst improving elasticity and flexibility on our joints, muscles and anything in-between within our body.

See? How simple Stretching actually is, and fun.

As we now get the direction going, let’s talk about the power that makes the journey happens.
Many of us, who did not attend Yoga classes or have not been taught about stretching, might not know the key to improve the flexibility is to use power to stretch. While it’s not wrong to be relaxed to stretch, to further improve the range of flexibility of a muscular area, we need to give power to its area to stretch in a relaxed state.

It might sound confusing. A simpler way to put this is to flex the stretching muscles while doing it. When you flex the muscles, there will be a power given and that helps against the stretching action, acting as a sustainable balance for better improvement. Think of a rubber band being stretched, it always needs both sides that are being held to make the stretch happens.

Okay, so when to implement?
-Whenever you feel stiff, or anytime really. It’s recommended to stretch when the energy isn’t too low, as we don’t want counterproductive efforts.

For how long?

• Seconds to minutes or hour.

Tip(s) for during it:

• Be naked is the fastest way to improve your stretching, as you eliminate the limitation of clothing.
• If you don’t know what to aim for as a starter, aim for the flexible back( Upper, Middle, and Lower), and flexible hips and pelvis. *A flexible back a SUPER important!
  ^ Simultaneously, stretch the calves and shoulders.
• As you stretch more, you’ll encounter a period where more problems are coming out, which are good, because they’re the telling from the body that many areas are needed your attention.
  ^Don’t rush on doing them though, keep them in mind and do them one by one. Our body needs adjusting time for natural changes.
• Enjoy and happy stretching :)

The goal:
For the beginners: Set comfortable, realistic goals for yourself to approach learning moves.

For the advanced: Find some gymnastic moves to do. They have awesome consecutive movements that can push your limits.

All in all, be super light and super flexible. It’s for yourself, not for anyone else. You keep doing it because you love health and flexibility.

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*”Stretching helps improve thinking concept” comes from my best friend, Reflex, who is a visual artist, tagger(graffiti artist), and breakdancer. He is the perfect example of “weight and height do not define a person”, and that many of his dance movements come from very good flexibility, you can check it out more via his Instagram here.

Photo by Javardh from Unsplash

Stretch it up!

There are many poses with different variations for you to choose from. Sometimes we might get confused by the overwhelming selection. Therefore, before stretching we need to develop our stretching system. Because everybody has their own needs and conditions, I’m using body parts as the foundation layout so you can develop upon according to your lifestyle.

Using the body parts as the segment, we will always pay attention to our body as it’s how we access to the system, and in return, it will tell us where we need to train and areas to release the persistent pains, and being able to quickly adapt the changes from our work, body, and time conditions.

Before we dive into the case study, there are three types of connective tissues inside of our body that worth to mention. They are muscles, tendons, and ligaments. These soft tissues are basically responsible for body movements.

Muscles, as we’re all familiar, are specialised tissue for contraction and relaxation in a simple sense.

Tendons are the tough, white, connective tissue that attaches muscles to bone. Although they cannot contract themselves, they’re strong and stiff, with the remarkable ability to store and release energy for your force production.

So when you move your bone, you contract your muscles, but it’s not your muscles pull on the bone, is your tendon. All the force goes through the tendon, which is why they have to be incredibly strong.

Ligaments are connective bone-to-bone tissue, some are white, sturdy and inelastic, others are yellow and elastic. They serve to support the internal organs and hold the bone together. Their primary goal is to stabilise.

Now, exercise and activity can strengthen muscles, tendons, bones, and ligaments through a process known as remodeling – the breakdown and growth of new tissue. But when tissue breaks down faster than it can build, injuries occur.

So where the pains are?

For people who work in retail or hospitality, standing is a must-do bodywork. Some workers might need to stand for hours before they could get some rest. The resting is a temporarily pause but lacking enough time for the body to recover. So, in the long run, the frequently used muscles will tense to almost rigid. Specifically, we’re looking at the lower back, thigh, calf and the rest of the leg. Too dense that the tendons would overwork, with no proper relaxation and allowing time for recovering, the mobility in each part of their muscles will be limited by discomfort. This is how an inflexible body affects a person.

Another situation is people who are working in an IT, finance environment, the office will be their workspace. Sitting on a chair and maintaining a few used-to postures throughout the day, so when they get home the tensity of their muscles start kicking in like a debt bill but they’re too tired to do anything. Normal resting does not have enough time to fix the cause. they’ll need extra effort to ease the pain. The common muscle problems are shoulder, elbow, wrist, and the whole back.

The least example is farming and fishery. Although the outdoor environment is pleasant, workers need to bend a lot in between their tasks. Like checking the soil or utilising the equipment, they don’t realise the strain on muscles will steadily creep on their back if they don’t enact sooner. The familiar body problems are the lower back pain, and, not being able to stand straight properly.

The problems we have mentioned above are commonly known as overuse injuries. Regardless of how simple some postures are, combining with enough intensity, duration, and frequency, they can make some serious damages to the tissue.

Obviously, every job has its advantages and disadvantages. This article is to bring awareness of the cause rather than scaring you away from not doing anything. As we can identify which postures doing are hurting us, we can find the solution.

To prevent injury occurs in the first place we need to keep four tips as a reminder in the stretching system:
– Rest when you feel pain or overly sore
– massage tightens areas to release tension
– Gently stretch
– Proper rest

If it’s seriously injured, I suggest you seek professional help. Although we might have a common sense of what the normal procedure or treatments are, it’s always better to have someone’s else opinion on the problem that you’re encountering.

This stretching system can be formed only we understand that Massage takes away fifty percent of its own. Like the Tao symbol, only stretching as one element isn’t enough to sustain the system itself. Massage is the relaxation part of the stretching system, which I’ll cover in the next coming articles.

Now we get to the fun part of creating a system for our body health! Grab a pen or computer, we gonna go for a little mental processing!

There are four steps involved.
discover the problem
Find the solution
Set goal
And create a realistic timeline for our expectation, I’ll provide examples.

Ask questions:
What problems I have right now?

Example:

What poses can relieve pain?

Example:

(If you’re unsure about which poses will help, don’t worry. I’ll cover them soon.)

For the Goal setting part:
1)What benefits will you get by reaching a goal?
2)What drawbacks will you get by not reaching a goal?
3)What efforts will you make to achieve your goal?
4)How will you know you’ve achieved your goal?
5)What first steps will you do to achieve your goal?

Example:

Realistic timeline ( for visualisation)
In 3 months
In 6 months
In 1 year
and so on..

Example:

By having a clear, structural system for yourself, it is an assertive way you’ll make a strong commitment to and stay within. I hope this article helps you develop a stretching habit and love stretching as much as I do.

Why do we need to stretch?

We come to this world with our soul, a body and mind. If we don’t take care of our body, who’d do it for us?

Out of all the things you don’t care in this world, you want to care about your health. Without the body helps you, you’re merely a soul with a bunch of concepts, nowhere to be utilised.

Before we dive into the topic, I want to state that there are subtle differences in between stretching and Yoga, so I’m discussing the common areas of two.

We grow up with a sense that stretching is the warm-up routine for us to play sport. Nobody has told us stretching is another subject we need to spend additional time on, just like all the other sports.

You’ll start to feel the stiffness when you pass the twenties. Like your muscles will be out of shape and starting to deteriorate. Soreness and inconsistent sleep become the new set of reminders for you with the news every morning.

Our body needs extension. Haven’t you realised that we shrink ourselves very often?
Just think about what are the most frequent postures you do throughout a day?
Maybe standing? Sitting? Walking? Crouching or lying? These postures are most frequent we humans do throughout a lifetime. We never aware of it until the AH-HA moment kicks in.

If you know you’ll be doing those postures day after day, shouldn’t you do other postures to balance it out? Like if you crouch too much, do a wheel pose. In fact, this is what stretching all about. Work on the opposite side of the body parts that you’ve used, to balance and maintain the wellness.

As we remind ourselves in the need of extension for our body, we slowly develop a stretching habit, and the passion will grow from there. Building a healthy routine starts from the smallest thought, with consistent energy streaming in.

The habit can be as little as 2 minutes a day for the start. keep it for a month, but be consistent. The main goal here is to get yourself to like stretching, before moving onto more progressive stages.

Our body development is constant, and recessive after hitting each peak. The cycle continues until we pass away. When we don’t stretch, the most obvious thing we’ll notice is the gears of ours are rusting on the edge. We’d need extra force to play the sport that we used to very good at. And because we never learnt that stretching is another sport, which is essential before doing any sport, we’d think it’s our body aging, naturally.

The first benefit of stretching is, reversing aging. Now, our body will age this is the fact. However, through stretching daily, it’ll slow the progress and rejuvenate your mental health. Our body is a vessel only. Your mentality and how it’s thinking toward your body determine the speed of the aging substantially. If you keep on thinking you’re old, even though you’re only twenty-three, for example, chances are you’ll age a lot faster than the people of the same age.

Stretching is to help you break the mental aging image. As you stretch, you’ll know your flexibility, which is something it can improve through repetition. Some talented people might inborn with incredible flexibility, but it doesn’t mean they don’t require the action of stretching. The more you stretch, the more you can feel your body isn’t that old you once thought. Never too late.

Another benefit in stretching is that you’re vitalising not only your strength, but also every part of your body; the skins, underlying muscles, bones, ligaments, and internal organs. The reason is simple, stretching requires your whole body to focus, to stretch.

Meditating. As you stretch at ease, you’ll concentrate on your breathing while doing poses. This allows your mind absent from thinking of other things. There are two benefits, the first one is you’re basically in the flow state. The second benefit is you’re training yourself to be more focused. This skill will help you to be more attentive and observant when you’re outside, dealing with other people, in a completely different environment.

Stretching is a way for you to connect with your circle. As you build up your habit, it’s always good to tell your friends about what you’ve been up to lately. Getting them to be aware of the importance of stretching, you’re basically helping them to avoid getting injured. Good flexibility and enough Warm-Up reduce such risks considerably.

There are certainly more benefits you’ll get from stretching. But I’ll let you explore, and comment down below about your discovery! If you don’t get the benefits as I stated above through regular stretching, I’d suggest you to try on Yoga. Frankly, stretching is the entry, doing Yoga is the goal for you. Because I have a dancing background, and have been stretching for years, even through I didn’t take it seriously until two years ago, it was plain and simple for me to understand these concepts and applied to my own after learning Yoga.

I’m happy that I’d finally touched on Stretching this topic as it has been sitting in my head for a while! I hope it helps you in any way!

One last thing, check this girl out if you haven’t already. Rebecca Sereda, a former world-class gymnast, suffered debilitating back pains which set her back to retirement eventually. Her dream to be on the Olympic floor had been crushed to pieces. How she overcame the tragedy and looked back her footprints is motivational and inspirational. Here is her story.

In the next coming health related articles, I’ll be sharing methods I use in Yoga and simplify it to stretching in general, along with a few other ‘self -regulating’ methods to maintain One’s health. I call it a ‘Self – regulating system’.

Photos by Marion Michele, Cathy Pham, Giovanny Ayala, Jakob Owens from Unsplash

I can do any exercise!

People avoid doing exercises because it takes a lot of time and physical efforts. The statement is true, however, if you know how to use mental effort to reduce the height of the mountain, you will climb to the top soon enough.

To reduce the height means scaling down to the acceptable amount of work you can take once at a time. To climb a 16 metres high wall indoor, you would guess how to reach the ring.

This is where the progression stage comes in. As easy as it sounds, you break down the task to digestible amounts, be comfortable with each stage before moving onto the next phase. Remember, the wall will always be there, or you can find another wall to climb, therefore, there is no need to rush the process. The goal is to get to the top. Speed is another matter.

For people who have suffered injuries, examine your state of being when picking up a sport. Take 0 to 10 as an estimation of comfort, if anything below 6 I would suggest you take it easy for now. Though it doesn’t mean giving up entirely. Getting back to the game slowly and keep on picturizing yourself doing the sport, so your body will heal faster according to your mental anticipation. Don’t loosen up the fire.

Somehow the fear of using your body might be unassailable, you can start doing stretching to reconnect your body as an alternate approach. Try and do yoga. The meditation and movements of stretching will certainly help you overcome some of the hurdles. At least it worked for me.

Be rational about your injury, no need to add extra emotion on the bruises, like a disappointment. Injury is a fact, disappointment is the feeling you created to express your state of feeling. It does no good in healing at all.

Okay, so how to make exercising easier and attainable?

First, we need to set the right mindset, then we will be practical.

Three mindsets you need before going to the progression stage.

– Don’t get too serious, relax!
Ask any top athletes, they will tell you the same thing, relax. Remember that you do it because it’s fun.

Being serious is just a mode, relaxation should enact in your mind and body whenever you do the sport. One thing to test the relaxed state of you is that can you smile on the spot? When you get too serious, your mind will likely narrow to certain parts for your execution. While it helps in some ways, It usually skips the flexibility in thinking. Especially when you’re feeling discouraged! Don’t fall into this trap.

Please kindly tells yourself that it’s okay, it’s just a game. If there is winning or losing, doesn’t matter! As long as you’ve given out 100%, try the best you can to achieve the end goal, everything else is secondary. It’s all about having fun in the process.

– Imagine the fun, joyful outcome, rather than bitter ones.
It’s almost too easy for all of us to imagine something bad as the end of the result. But it takes effort and faith to imagine a good one. Confucius says – he who says he can, and he who says he can’t, are both usually right. Isn’t true?

The outcome partly depends on your thinking towards. Remember the world is sharped by your imagination and perspective? If you think the class will be boring before going there, having unsatisfactory images in your mind, the class will very likely to be as boring as hearing a long dull speech. We all have been there.

If you can think a joyful outcome, you’ll likely to end one. You would then love to go back again. Why only thinking about the negative ones when you can think better?

To subconsciously motivate yourself to achieve something, you need to imagine the positive outcome. Not even for tuning your brain thinking better, but also you love a good, happy experience rather than going to the gym, having an ‘another day, another set’ thinking.

– Understand that you control the speed, Always
Many of us thought that increasing speed will help the learning process better. Like, the faster you read, the better you will get, right? It may work for some people, but not for others.

In actuality, speed and learning are two separate matters. Take rock climbing as an example, how fast you reach to the top is one goal, how can you reach to the top is another goal. Once you’re able to travel comfortably, the speed will increase itself because the patterns you created in climbing its wall are thickened every time inside your brain and muscles.

The Progression Stage

Anything you can accomplish if you can visualise them in the progression stage.

I’ll be using rock climbing, assuming everybody has done it, as an example for you to get a better idea of how to go through the progression stage. Though you can apply this system in any other sport.

One thing keeps in mind that all systems are pointless if you don’t put into work. When you start the workout, remember this, less talking, more doing.

1) Define Your goal, Set Smaller Targets Under It.
It can be as big as Everest mountain, but you need to be very practical and persistent. The formula to the achievement is the same and the time limit on the project is entirely up to you.

Rock climbing for instance:

The goal: A 17 metre wall.

Set smaller target 1, smaller target 2, smaller target 3 and so on under it. The targets are changeable as you progress. I have attached two examples in a document for your reference. Besides exercising, there is much more going on in life, like work, gathering, family union, etc. The list goes on. So be flexible but determined on your fitness evaluation.

2) Learn The Knowledge Of Its Field
For example, in climbing, you would need to know which parts of your muscles are doing the work.
Get a blank paper.
Take guesses.
Then check your guesses.
Correction.

You have just learnt groups of muscles that will be carrying out for the task so you are very certain what to train. Easy.
Make it fun, so you will continue to improve your climbing knowledge, not only physically but mentally. Also, consult the experienced or professionals to gain their perspective in climbing and technical knowledge. Making friends with common interests, why not?

3) Stretching
this is so important I have to make a stage for it. The progression stage is the stages that you keep on going back and forth. It’s not finishing the first stage then moving onto the second, forgetting about the first one. First, second, third are the orders, but these stages should be the combination of all time when your body can unlock them.

Going back to stretching, if you’re not flexible, like rising your arms straight up to the ceiling is strenuous enough, needless to say, you have to re-take baby steps. The range of your locomotion in stretching is the range of your mobility in action. Therefore, stretching is essential in doing any sport.

4) Learn The Poses And Hold
You want to maximise the effectiveness of climbing with less energy used because you’re focusing on quality instead of quantity. Are you flexible enough to step one foot on one side and the other on another side? Do you have the inner strength to pull yourself up? Are you able to hold on those crazy small rocks and still have the power to go higher?

All Actions base on poses. Knowing what kind of poses your body will likely be doing, hold them to train your inner strengths, like doing yoga poses. Remember breathing. It will help you stay focus.

You should be very comfortable with the poses you need, so you can work on the climb motions. ( You can certainly do both, this way, you’ll train faster and your body will adapt the power of resistance better. But be realistic about your self-limit.) Remember, resting is as important as exercising.

5) Track Your Progress
This is something I wish I’d known earlier. Tracking your progress not only providing an absolute clear visualisation, but also allowing you to adjust the smaller targets anytime to achieve the bigger goal. Grab a piece of paper, or a tracking app if you like, draw out a few lines and lists, giving the overall percentage of your current process.

You don’t need to be so precise, as I know some people do. I usually have a rough draft so I know how far away I’m from the finish point. No need to stress over the progress if you can’t meet the target. Remember we talked about flexibility? As long as you’re true to yourself, missing a few targets it’s fine because you know you’ll get back to them. Sometimes it’s okay to pause, to wait, to let your body adapt.

6) Embrace The Correction Process
Don’t treat it as a ‘Damn it, I have to do it again.’ thing. The correction process is the game-changing tool in sport, basically in anything. Try and film your actions, to see what you can improve. Filming yourself while doing the task is like having a mirror for your correction. Don’t be embarrassed about it, nobody will see those clips but you, expect you share. But pretend that someone else is watching, so you’ll be pushing yourself, trying to give 100% effort.

Alternatively, find friends or experts for their advice on improvement. When you’re the one who is doing, you will always miss out something in the process because it’s the first point of view nature. Having others to watch on the side and listen to their suggestions afterward might help you improve faster. But be aware of good and bad advice. Good advice you note them afterward and put them into practice next time. Bad advice you can discard them after showing the appreciation to the person of their time watching.

If you never correct yourself from doing the incorrect forms or techniques, you either end up getting an injury or not being able to advance the next level.

Combining these six methods, you will get in good forms, correct techniques in climbing. Frankly, the correct form and technique are what you need in doing a sport, so you don’t get injured. Keep on practicing, you will be able to hit the ring of 17 M wall in no time.

After achieving it, then what?

Reward yourself! Then set another target and encourage others to do exercise. It is a memorable journey worth to spread. Share the experience with others so you might spark up their interest in exercising. They might not be able to get your enthusiasm right away, but you will inspire them into sporting. And one day, who knows? they might come back and say thank you, that you open their fitness door.

Do you like this article? I would love to hear about your fitness milestone and goal! I’ll go deeper about stretching and a few health areas in the future. Share this article if you like, and don’t forget to subscribe for more health and fitness sharing. Thank you for reading!

Images by Free-Photos, OpenClipart-Vectors, Michal Jarmoluk, 7163893, Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay