I really didn’t want to move on this evening. My day started at 5:30a. I was at school from 7a-3p and then worked till 7:30. My knee was achy from trudging across campus. The hills wreak havoc by the end of the day… especially downhill. The voice in my head was very adamant that I needed to lie down. The more I checked in with my heart and body, the more I could feel the voice was wrong. It was because of my long day and achy body that I needed to move.
The next question was how hard. Did I need an easy restoration or a workout? I made my way to my movement space and proceeded to listen and allow my body to tell me what it needed.
In this session, I worked on wrist and shoulder mobility. I pulled out the staff for the second time in a week. I love using the staff to explore shoulder to hip mobility. I picked up some of these staff movements from my teacher Joseph Schwartz of Applied Anatomy. It is super challenging and feels amazing. I forgot how much I love using such a simple tool. The half kneeling spirals feel simply amazing. So much unwinding from the day.
I love working on my deep resting squat. Three years ago, I could not even get into the deep squat position without falling over backward. It took me about seven or eight months to just get down, but I could only hold it for about 10 seconds. It took me 6-8 more months to develop a full minute.
My deep resting squat is not perfect by any means, but this is a massive improvement, with room to grow. I’ve put in a ton of work and can feel the payoff in my body. I still experience chronic pain, but so much less of it is from back pain, hip pain, or neck pain.
In this session, I continue to play around with the staff focusing on the mobility relationships between the scapula, thoracic/lumbar spine, and hips.
By the time I finished with this short session, I was feeling really good about making the time to move as opposed to doing nothing. It was a choice well made.
Whenever I work on shoulder mobility, I make a point to add some stability work. This is a very short addition, but I was tired and already achieved what I needed from the evening’s overall session. My focus at this point was to load up the shoulders and try to get to bed by 10p. That 5a alarm clock is pretty daunting at this point in the evening.
I begin with some pendulum planks and then slow bear crawls. On these bear crawls, I like to exaggerate the stability movements of the scapula around my rib cage. I want to ensure that I can absorb the forward crawl from an open to a closed packed scapula and that I can drive away from the closed packed to open scapula going backward. This is to make sure there are no gaps in my scapular stability… which there are… and I’m always working on them.