30-Day Recap

Five weeks ago, I thought that I'd kick January off with a 30-day challenge -- posting one movement evaluation/corrective/whatever a day on our Facebook page. I'm posting all 30 challenges below and challenge you further still to do all 30 of these every day in February, starting today. I'd also love to know which of these was your favorite? Mine was Day #2, "Paint a globe." This one feels so good, I ended throwing it into my next book as a shoulder-mobility test! Enjoy!

Day 1: Sit down on the floor *right now*. Count to 30. Get back up again. The end. YOU'RE ALREADY NAILING IT THIS YEAR!

Day 2: Pretend your upper body is surrounded by a globe. Use your finger tips to “paint” the globe’s inner surface to the best of your abilities. Now that you’ve met your shoulder girdle’s FIELD OF USE, consider your MOST FREQUENTED shoulder motion/position (computer?) and how much of your potential you use on a daily/yearly basis. Ponder this: Unused areas of the body atrophy and clump together unnaturally. And, strong tissues sitting next to weak ones, are natural stress risers (aka areas with greater risk for injury). Go paint your globe again.

(Note: For those that have a hard time visualizing where the globe is, reach your arms straight up. That’s the top of the globe. Your arms, relaxed down by your sides are touching the bottom. Your arms reaching out to the side are touching the walls. Dig?)

Day 3: Arrange your sternum so that it's (more or less) vertical. Now, lower your chin towards your chest. Take 10 slow breaths. When done, bring your head back up, but know that this can happen in different ways. The first is via lifting ONLY the head (upper cervical extension). You can also get your head up by lifting ONLY your chest (aka rotating your rib cage). Finally, keeping your chest down and head down, create the “lift” by extending the rarely used joints in between the head and the mid-back. Overuse-hypermobility of the neck and rib cage makes for a stiff and underused upper spine. Let’s start changing that today!

(Note: There isn’t a pic or video for this one, but you can find this actual exercise and the correctives for this immobility in the Alignment Snack titled “The Back Bone’s Connected to the Other Back Bones,” which can be found in the Virtual Studio Membership.)

Day 4: Keeping legs straight, bend forward at the hips, shifting your butt behind your heels, until your torso is parallel(ish) to the ground. Now, slowly shift your pelvis back and forth, right leg then left leg, etc.. Ready for an eye-opener? Do this same exercise keeping BOTH butt cheeks on a wall as you shift. You’re likely to find that instead of only shifting, you might have also been twisting, drawing one cheek away. See what it feels like when you get rid of the subtle avoiding. We are not always doing what we think! Find a video demo here (click).

Day 5: Today, bring your foot up to surfaces of different heights, no helping with your hands. Try it in the bathroom, where the tub, toilet, and counter offer three altitudes. How does the strength and mobility of one hip compare to the other? How often do you take your hips out in the natural world (where everything is not flat and deep hip flexion is necessary!) and expose them to their full ranges of motion? Today, fake it by “climbing” all over your house and neighborhood! (photo of your foot up on the ledge by wood stove)

Day 6: Lie on your back, placing your arms by your sides. Without touching the ground with your hands or feet, roll over onto your stomach and once more to your back. Now reverse direction. How does it feel to revisit one of your first-ever feats of strength?

Day 7: Stand on two legs. Feel it. Close your eyes. Feel that? Now, open your eyes and stand on one leg (no bending knees or raising arms). Then, try it with eyes closed. Work to minimize wobble but in a relaxed, groovy kind of way. Without clenching. RELEASE the muscles that are knocking you over. Repeat other side.

Day 8: Twisting your pelvis doesn’t actually make you less wide, but when looking dead on, you do actually measure narrower. This is why models are almost always photographed with rotating bits. Today's challenge: stand in front of a mirror and assume “the position” you take on when checking yourself out. Any twisting? This habit of subtle rearrangement to appear different than you are creates (all the time) the very muscular imbalances you are working on (some of the time). Make your work stick by knocking off the contortions! (Don’t twist to look smaller? How about lifting the chest and flexing your elbows outward to look bigger? Same phenomenon.)

Day 9: 70 million people suffer from a digestive disorder (60 million are constipated. WHAT?) Stop sucking your stomach in. Get on your hands and knees and let your belly fall toward the floor. BONUS POINTS if it touches. Just kidding. Let your pelvis un-tuck, but you can keep your ribs from dropping to the floor. People mistake "sucking it in" for TvA use, but they are not the same thing. Before your core muscles can kick on naturally, you've got to stop the "sucking it in" habit.

Day 10: Lean forward, using your hands on the floor to get down onto your hands and knees. Get back up. Do it again, watching how you use your hands. Do you stay up on your finger tips or rest the palms on the floor? Twist one hand, but not the other? This reveals a lot about your upper body tension patterns. We tend to use our fingers because our fingers and wrists are tight. But avoiding "palm down" only worsens the problem over time. Get up and down a few times with your new "palm flat" method. See how it feels. Add "palm down" to your other floor exercises (like lunges, etc.).

Day 11: Stay off (or pre-set a time limit) of Facebook tomorrow.

Day 12: Laugh, really loud, for one minute. The louder the better.

Day 13: Relax your knee caps! Learn to stand quad-free and share some of the work-wealth with your BACK SIDE. Here's a helpful video from the Alignment Monkey (click). If you're already a knee cap pro, try lifting and lowering your cap while STANDING ON ONE LEG!

Day 14: Begin sitting cross-legged on the floor, preferably on a folded towel or pillow. Now, do your best to “paint” the largest imaginary circle around you on the floor. Twist, lean forward, stop when you want. Move when you want. All the while doing your best to keep your bottom anchored to the floor. Repeat with other leg crossed in front! You're welcome.

Day 15: Meet your tight quads! Lie on your belly, bend one knee, and reach back to grab and ankle. Easy? Next time, keep your pubic bone DOWN (and ribs, eventually) on the ground. Reach back to grab an ankle without widening the knees or lifting the pubic bone (aka overextending the lumbar spine). There's a video w/more demos at the end of this post (click).

Day 16: Stand with your butt on a wall (heels just in front, but not touching). Bring your mid back (bra strap or HR monitor location) to the wall w/out tucking your pelvis! (Your spine should be able to move without your hips adjusting.) Can you get the back of your head to touch w/out thrusting the ribs! If no, time to mobilize the thoracic spine! P.S. Just doing this "exercise" helps.

Day 17: Your life has not always been straight out in front of your (the chalkboard, your computer screen.) It's time to look up! Placing your hand on your sternum, lower your ribs and keep them there. Now, slide your chin back so that you're making a double chin. Once your head is back and ribs are down, lift your chin (and entire face) toward the ceiling without lifting your ribcage. Stop when you feel resistance (don't force it). Keep your shoulders down. Look a little to the right. To the left. Mind the crunching. Work more on your neck and thoracic spine tension.

Day 18: Today, monitor your jaw, neck and shoulder tension All. Day. Long. When you remember, scan to see if you are hiking up or wrapping forward your shoulders, over-clenching your jaw (should be mouth closed, but teeth apart), or lifting your chin. Undo them all, as frequently as you can. (The weirdest part tends to be looking forward from the center of your eye socket instead of the bottom. You've got all these unused eye muscles to stimulate!) Happy scanning!

Day 19: Today, do not cross, clasp (in front or behind) your arms. Don't put them on your hips, shoulders, arm rest thingies, or in your pockets. Non-working arm postures are a way of passively reducing the load off the thoracic spine. You can USE your arms for "doing" stuff (please!) but all those other things weaken the upper spine over time. Prepare to be uncomfortable, but also prepare to work more by simply by "not" hanging your arms on stuff (like themselves). {And bonus challenge: Start watching what other people HAVE to do with their arms to keep their spines from collapsing forward.}

Day 20: It's Piriformis Day! Sit near the edge of a chair and cross your ankle over the opposite knee. Untuck your pelvis. BOOM. Repeat other side and do both 5 more times today. Bonus points for doing it WITHOUT a chair (but make sure you keep your shin vertical and untuck your pelvis as much as you can). Pic and video in this post (click).

Day 21: Stuff. You've got to let some of it go. Today, get rid of 30 things. 30 old emails. 30 loose socks. Stuff you don't wear. Stuff filling your desk, junk drawer, refrigerator or mind. It will take you 15 minutes. Go.

Day 22: Exhale. At the end of every regular exhale is a SECOND exhale to be had. This is not a full, forced exhale (after the second release you could still force more air out), but where your habitual gut tension has been interfering in your natural inhale/exhale volumes. Play around with this and see what happens to your subsequent inhales.

Day 23: Sit differently today. Whether it's on the floor, or right now, in your chair. Sit differently. Rotate a hip. Cross an ankle. Do something different. (I just drove, ferried, drove, flew, and drove again. A chair was unavoidable so I mixed it up!)

Day 24: Mantra: “My body is like clay, not cement.” These footprints were left by the SAME left foot (mine).

My hip was internally rotated during the one on the left and in “neutral” during the one on the right. You might have “flat feet” but feet are not clumps of cement on the end of your shins. Feet (and all your parts) are malleable, and their end-shape is determined by the position and use of all of your other muscles.

Day 25: Uphill, downhill. Just like shoes weaken the foot muscles, constant flat ground atrophies the other 359° of the ankle's potential moves. Going up and down stairs is still "flat walking" so today find a hill, big or small, and USE YOUR ANKLES TODAY!

Day 26: ELBOW CHECK. You might not do upper body exercises (read: planks, downward dogs, push-ups, etc.) but everyone loads their upper body from time to time and many use their ligaments (non-force generating) instead of their muscles (force generating). Use the video in this post (click) to check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Day 27: De-text (and keyboard) your thumb. Again, it's not the position of typing that's problematic, it's the FREQUENCY of this joint configuration. Explore greater thumb range of motion by toggling your thumb like a video game joystick. Stabilizing the wrist and upper thumb joint, move the bottom of thumb through its entire possible motions -- going "big" and slow to see where you need to pause for a stretch.

Day 28: Go time how long it takes for you to walk 100 steps. "Brisk walking" is defined as about 100 steps per minute. Walking at this pace is shown to improve fitness (slower walking is good for your health too, but fitness and health have different measures), so head out to see how your walking stacks up! If pain flares up or prevents you from hitting this pace, prioritize correctives to address the issue -- before your body's larger mobilizing mechanisms are compromised by something local to the foot, knee, hip, etc.

Day 29: Put you right hand directly on top of your right shoulder! Your triceps and wrist extensor tension might make this tough but keep working on it throughout the day! Common cheat: wanting to hang on the next, just beside the shoulder. Repeat other side -- or do them at the same time! (And a happy hello from all the Restorative Exercise™ teachers in training!)

Day 30: Undo your keyboard wrists. Did you have trouble with Day 29's challenge? Your wrist extensors might be tight. Place the backs of your hands together in front of you and, keeping the thumbs and fingers touching, lower the wrists until they are at the same altitude as your elbows. If the fingers or wrists break away from their counterpart, you've gone beyond your range of motion. Go back to where they touch. Enjoy.

Day 31: I've shared 30 alignment check points this month. This large number may imply that the path to health is never-ending and the scope of your "problems" is vast. But today I encourage you mull on this: You are just right.
You're not a heap of problems but a person surviving your life, for which you've done beautifully. Work on your body because you choose WELL, not because you are trying to AVOID, because you HATE some part of you, etc. This is about LOVE. SELF LOVE: The ultimate challenge Give yourself a little visual reminder to carry with
you all day!

xxxooo,

KAB