Kit_L

No. https://youtu.be/KvAto6yIGLY?t=667 When you lift the knee away from the floor, as shown, you are stretching anterior tibialis. If you are a heel striker, then this muscle can get very tight and painful. If it goes on for long enough, shin splits can results. The strengthening element can be done in the same position—try to drag your toes, as if through the floor, to the knee. This is an isometric strengthening exercise for the same muscle. There are others, if you search the net.

That is wisdom, @Gareth O Connor. Many people have found it by strengthening the anterior shin muscle, anterior tibialis, and lengthening it as well (which is done by sitting in the same floor position that you stretch the quads in, but lifting the knee away from the floor), can help with that shin pain considerably.

Yes: pressing the feet away slightly will activate the quads, and inhibit the hamstrings. Try doing the exercise in a more relaxed way the next time you try it – the straight leg version of that exercise is going to activate the hamstrings no matter what you do. But if you push the feet away from you very slightly to activate the quads, and then squeeze the glutes together to feel where they are again, and then press the heels onto the ground you may be able to activate the glutes more. If you can activate the glutes more that will definitely reduce the hamstring requirement. But in any case, activating the hamstrings in that exercise is not necessarily a problem because the hamstrings can act to do that task—in this way, the exercise become a hamstring, strengthening movement. Try the next attempt with the least amount of tension that you need in order to create the shape that you want and then simply add the additional activations as we've discussed and see whether that changes the hamstring dominance.

The way to de-emphasise the hamstrings is to gently tuck the tail once in position—and when you are thinking about the next step, press the floor away from you, emphasising the heels. The "press floor away" cue works way better than "lift the hips". The reason, I suspect, is that 'lifting the hips' is a much more common daily life type of cue which plays into your existing patterns, whereas "pressing the floor away by pressing on the heels" is novel and seems to activate the glutes strongly. Let us know!

The not so obvious thing about using parallettes or yoga blocks is that you can start the exercise with your bottom well above the floor. This means you can practice the exercise, with bent knees, even when you're not strong enough to lift your whole body weight off the ground fully. Parallettes or some other support for the hands and wrist make this exercise completely scalable. For example, by bending your knees but leaving your heels on the ground, you can lift your whole body off the floor, then try as hard as you possibly can to bring the knee to the chest – one leg at a time if you have to. You'll get airborne very quickly.

I think someone as fit as you will be perfectly fine doing 10 on each side for your first attempt. Just make all the movements as slow and as smooth as possible and you'll be able to feel just how strengthening this apparently simple exercise is.

Precisely this. As mentioned several times, this is often the way we realise that big change has happened. Me, too!

Don't try 40 reps the first time—you might be able to do it, but the DOMS could be epic! Doing all parts of the movement slowly and smoothly is the key.

Try this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knqCZRIVGp8&t=2s Little balance required; same muscles worked. I do sets of 30–40. Leaning forward and coming slowly out of the bottom position activates the glutes hugely. Slowing everything down increases the strengthening effect, especially the negative part.

With respect to the L-sits, two bricks on their flat (or two yoga blocks) with the fingers pointing down can reduce the wrist stress considerably (this is what parallettes do, too).

@Rik: that sounds quite incredible – I've been teaching these materials for 25+ years now, as you know and to many tens of thousands of students, and we have never encountered that reaction before. Please ask your buddy what arises in his or her body before the experience of discust manifests. As well, you might consider asking what memories from the past are invoked in the practice, before, after, or during the experience of discust. There is definitely a deeper story there, I would say. We do have a number of recordings that do not feature the opening and closing of the hand, so you could volunteer to select a few at random and try them out yourself and eliminate the ones that do feature this particular element. If you look on the list of recordings on our site, you'll see that some of them do have the elements listed and you may be able to find one or two there that don't feature this particular element. In Buddhism, disgust is an aversion response (the three 'poisons' are craving, sometimes called desire, delusion, or ignorance, and aversion, or hatred). It is often possible to get deeper into these responses, to see what is underneath and what might be giving rise to this particular response. If your friend is prepared to explore a bit, there is potential gold to be uncovered if they are prepared to endure the disgust reaction for a moment or two, consciously relax in the face of this response, and stay with the sensation to see what might reveal itself.

Research "Long slow distance". This is the cornerstone of any endurance training, and it doesn't matter what the sport. It takes much longer than you want. When I was a middle decent runner, specialising in 800 and 1500 m, I used to run 160 km a week in the winter training season, about three months long. This is completely standard and I have heard of people running over to 225 km a week in recent times. The biggest downside of this kind of training, in my view, is the risk of injury, because the joints seem to take more of the forces than when you're running faster, and you tend to switch off a bit mentally when running well under best pace. Once my fundamental aerobic conditioning was at the point where my resting pulse rate was 42 beats a minute, I then changed my approach over to a method called fartlek which mixes slow and fast running. It is an easy thing to research and it was very popular in my area when the Finns were the best distance runners in the world.

Yes, I do.

I felt my quad and glute on the working leg tense up while watching your video… You absolutely have that activation down on the right leg. Is the left leg trailing behind a bit? If so, it's exactly the same for me. In fact my right leg (the shorter of the two) is always a bit stronger and also I'm a bit better connected to it neurally than the left leg but both are so much stronger than they have been in the past. This is how it goes. Great work.

I am sure that this is accurate. The position, the precise position, of every bone in the body is governed by the balance of forces acting around that point. Just like the temperomandibular joints, where ribs attach to the sternum has no precise location – there is movement potential there always, and that is to protect the heart and the lungs from impact injuries, most anatomy must believe. All the work you have done in the last little while has changed where the balance point of those forces are, and the bone now sits in what we call its minimum energy configuration. This is very desirable. What we called the "apprehension reflex". It is a real thing. All good; carry on.

If you are talking about the elephant walk, then it all depends how you do it – depending on how you hold parts of the body, all of the effects can be in the hamstrings; can be in the outer hamstring (the attachment under the glute); the lower back; and the hole of the posterior chain from the back of the neck down to the soul of the feet – I'm talking about fascia here. You have to play with it to find out how to do it the way that benefits you the most. All of our exercises are like recipes in that sense – you have to do the exploration and the seeking.

Recovery includes recovering from stretching/limbering too—if the muscle is still sore, a bit of limbering is fine, but no C–R stretching. Is it the elephant walk that is leaving you sore in the hamstrings, or the other exercise you do? It is not clear from what you write.

Oh yes. The neural system connects all parts of the body to each other – and really should be a thought of as a single system with many, many parts. Waking up the proprioreceptors and mechanoreceptors in the feet changes your capacity to balance and move forever. This is why we recommend doing some barefoot work as one of the fundamental principles of the system, and also to do drills – like walking carefully on gravel – to explicitly wake them up with all of your awareness is in those parts of the body. Waking up this sensory dimension will mean that your body's own reflexes will manifest when they need to rather than you consciously bracing because you think you should. Principle # whatever: no unnecessary tension (which then creates the idea of necessary tension, which can be let go of immediately when no longer needed—think of doing a chin up for example).

That's the gold, right there.

The footage is objective! Most of us have no idea how we hold our bodies in particular shapes – and in fact the way we hold tension in our body is our personality. As you stretch and remodel the structure, so too does everything else that is associated with it change, once the changes have proceeded far enough.

Literally all of the movement and movement therapy people, including myself. The fact is that spinal pathology is normal in the statistical sense, for anyone over the age of 30 (this was my Master's research area, as it happens). And the research also shows that extruding/extruded discs performed just as well mechanically as normal discs in terms of doing the work that they are supposed to do. One of the reasons why there's been so much focus on flexion is Stuart McGill's work, which was computer modelled and not based in reality, suggested that with respect to flexion that discs had a finite life. I do not agree with this. There are many reasons, including overnight water imbibition which, if you look it up, only happens if movement is part of your normal daily routine. All parts of the body need to be moved. Speaking more generally now, and I have worked with some of the best Pilates practitioners and teachers in the world, most Pilates practitioners do hold unnecessary tension. The bracing that is so beloved of the Pilates world happens automatically if your proprioceptive and mechanoreceptor systems are well tuned – and this takes movement and practise. In other words, the bracing that one needs should happen completely automatically and it will TA is active. The easiest way to make sure that it is active is to wake up the proprioceptors and mechanoreceptors in the feet and the hands, where they are most numerous. These organs, part of the fascia, are fine tuners of all motor activity. There's no point in bracing if you don't need to brace – and you will not consciously brace quickly enough in an emergency – this has to be trained into the body so that it reacts by itself. This is a fundamental part of our work and the other movement therapy people I referred to above. And there is one more reason to cultivate flexion – all fascia is pain sensing and pain reporting, that is fascia is nociceceptive in nature. If you are not moving the fascia, and the tissues underneath the superficial facial layer, that alone can signal pain in your system. When I first studied anatomy and physiology, fascia was described as "inert ground substance". We now know that in fact all of the standard nerve endings found in muscles and skin are found in fascia as well (look up Robert Schleip and Thomas Myers, both of whom love our work). And the old adage of use it or lose it still applies here I think. The key thing to keep in mind with someone with the background like yours is proceed with caution but (and this is a big but!) hold the lowest amount of tension in your body as possible as you play around. That means keeping your whole tummy area soft—poke your finger in there now and it won't be! As you're experimenting, do not anticipate that something is going to hurt. If it hurts it will, and that will pass. And if you don't anticipate it, you will not be holding that anticipatory tension that we have found is completely normal for someone who has an injury in the past and who is working on it in the present moment. What we named the "Apprehension Reflex" in the second edition of Overcome neck & back pain, and the increased resting muscle tension that this creates, is one of the main causes of re-injuring an area that you have hurt in the past. The part that you've hurt has to be re-exposed to the stress that you think created the injury but in a context where the body realises that the movement that hurt it in the past is not hurting it now. This changes everything. Do you want a body like a cat? This is one of our mantras as well, as you probably know, and if you ever picked up a cat you will know that they are utterly and completely relaxed and their bodies drape over the support. They embody the concept of no unnecessary tension. And yet they can generate about 70% more force than a dog, for example, of the same size and weight. This applies to the whole of the cat family. That's more than enough for today!

I am. But this is not an "all or nothing" thing: the degree of allowing flexion in the lumbar spine while doing this exercise is completely and safely controllable. If only to stretch the involved fascia, some flexion capacity is good. In this exercise, you are in full control of the degree of flexion you play with. Yes, and you can find other experts who disagree with this position, too. If this is satisfactory for you, do the exercise the way you are doing it. But be aware that the purpose of the elephant walk is to stretch all of the posterior chain – from the neck down to the ankles – and as I mentioned above, just exactly where you're stretching and the degree of the stretching is completely controllable by a person doing the exercise. Personally, I want all the joints in the body to be able to move so that my overall movement pattern uses the least energy, and holds the least tension. There are many reasons for this, including cultivating the state of deep relaxation while being awake. I have pathology in my spine of the sort that you talk about above, but my movement is supple and much more like a 25-year-old's than my current 70+ year-old body. Everything in this life depends on what you want. This freedom of movement is what I wanted when I started this project. I have written about this in some detail in the book Stretching & Flexibility. Bracing with TVA in this exercise is completely unnecessary. This is just my personal opinion and you do it the way that feels right in your body. On the other hand, if you want to explore a greater movement potential in your own body, then consider carefully experimenting with this exercise in the way that it is taught – no bracing, as much relaxation as you can bring to the task, and complete immersion of your awareness in the part of your body that you are working on. On the other hand, if you are happy with the state of your body currently, then doing the exercise in a way that feels safe to use also perfectly fine.

This is genuine progress, Matt. I am always interested to read your insights – and it is absolutely accurate that over sometimes long periods of time, there does not seem to be any progress – then suddenly you can do something you couldn't do a year ago. Your Tailor pose experiences parallel mine, too. When I first tried the Tailor pose my legs were over 45° away from the ground! The one comment I would make for anyone else reading this is do not make the mistake that the vast majority of beginners make. When nothing seems to happen after a few weeks or a few months, they conclude that the system is no good or not effective and they stop. We have had quite a few of those reporting here over the years, and of course when they stop absolutely nothing happens. All excellent. Carry on!

Once I finish this boat work, I am going to make a little video which shows me doing this very low–stance squat walk/duck walk. Personally I find the duck walk (where your quads are under stretch, and your glutes in contact with your heels) to be easier to do than this new one that I'm talking about. And the reason is, I think, that in the very bottom position of a duck walk, you're really supported by the tension in the quads and the compression forces between hamstring and calf muscles and, until you want to move, you can rest there on the balls of the feet. When you're in a 2/3 squat position, you're not getting any support anything except your muscles (and you can really feel this)!

Yes, Stretch Therapy. We were the first to coin the term "functional anatomy" – that is the identification of anatomical differences that make a difference to movement; to the experience of living in the body; the relationship between one's physical state and one emotional state; and so on. Of course, all this ground had been ploughed in some form before (for example, Plato once said, "economical movement is a pleasure to the eye") but we were the first (as far as I know) to put it all together in this form. There is no anatomical sub-discipline that does what you're asking about, as far as I know. Great question.