Nathan

Yes, they can. They are ordinary MP3 files. How you get them onto your phone will depend on your model, technological prowess, etc. If nothing else, you can play them in your mobile browser, but downloading them would be preferred, since that will save bandwidth (which is good not only for Kit, but for you and the environment). If you are not sure how to download files to your phone, or play them, perhaps it would be easiest to install VLC media player, which is free and available for all devices. VLC can open and save the MP3s for you. Let us know if you need help figuring it out.

If that's the end goal, I suggest grabbing a copy of Overcoming Gravity. It's the gymnastics strength training bible, and it will teach you everything you need to know to start your own programming.

I love how confused the dog looks 😂 Please avoid Gymnastic Bodies. You will find many reasons if you search through the forums. Simply put, the programs are concerned solely with making money. GMB, on the other hand, is a friend of ST (Ryan, specifically, but they are all good people) and makes excellent programs. Lots of free stuff available on their YT channel to try out before investing too. Of course, continuing with the Monkey Gym circuits is great too. Have fun with the DOMS 😆

For anyone reading and finding it difficult to visualize what Kit describes above, you can see him demonstrate here (cued to 11:14):

I edited your post and added a code block to indent. If this is what you meant, you should be able to edit and see what it looks like there!

Yes, works great! Thank you!

Thank you! Just a suggestion: If you have a Google account, you can import this to Google Sheets and make it publicly viewable (or editable, if you like). Not everyone has Excel, so this will make the document much more accessible. Or if you'd like I can do it for you. If @Kit_L is interested, perhaps we can make the list of relaxation audios on the website a bit more user-friendly, with durations, or possibly even a sort/search function.

Just noticed I'm in that photo! Good memories Yes, we all do this 😂

Welcome, Ned! Look forward to seeing how your practice unfolds

Was going to say this. Just raise your bum. If you have trouble sitting at 90 degrees, then you simply tilt your whole 90-degree angle forward (if that makes sense). This will also put gravity on your side, as it will be pulling your torso forward (downward, in this case). Just keep in mind that this will make support under the legs more difficult to achieve, so grab all your extra pillows and blankets. Also, be sure to remember that all of this complexity is not necessary. We're just playing with positions here, so that we understand what is happening in the body. You can keep making progress without making it this complicated. But experimenting is fun too

One more from Kit, who will hopefully be back shortly, as Apple claims his PC has been successfully repaired

Yes, this is lovely. You will have some lower back stretching happening here. I initially come from a gymnastics strength training approach, so my thoughts tend to default back to the strict, gymnastics-style shapes. If you want to really emphasize and feel the difference, start with straight legs, and when you fold forward, think about sticking your bum out to the rear and touching your sternum to your toes (so we're tilting the pelvis more than folding the torso). This is just the visualization; you may not be able to bend forward past 90 degrees. Be very gentle - we're just playing here. Your hamstrings will not like this 😆 You can then play with alternating from pointed toes to dorsiflexion to see just how much calf tightness, nerve tension, etc. all affect the forward fold, as well.

It can be! A nice, deep forward fold is really a fantastic stretch for the whole posterior side of the body. That's not how most people think of it, though. People generally think of the forward fold as a hamstring stretch—and it can be a great hamstring stretch—but when they go to do the forward fold, they let the lower back do a lot of the heavy lifting. To really target the hamstrings, you want to hinge at the hips as much as possible, keeping the back relatively straight. You will eventually need to bend the back forward as well, but only when the hamstrings move closer to maximum range. Of course, depending on your goals, you can move in the opposite direction. You can bend the knees, open the legs, etc. to move the stretch away from the back of the legs and into the back. This can feel absolutely lovely

(Just me now) Soreness can be a good indicator that (the desired) adaptation is taking place, but this is not always true, so I wouldn't necessarily go seeking soreness for the sake of soreness. Instead, use it as a source of feedback. For example, the sore lower back after your forward folding sessions could be hinting at compensation patterns, i.e., getting your forward fold range from the lower back rather than emphasizing the hamstrings/calves as much as you could be. Similarly, the lack of soreness in the hip flexors could simply be due to other tissues holding you back from really working on the hip flexors effectively (and this is often the case). So is it that the hip flexors don't get sore? Or is it that nothing gets sore? If nothing, then yes, perhaps you could consider pushing a bit harder.

A reply from Kit: I think the reason is that we believe that we are relaxed when we sleep at night, but unless we do the kind of things that we are doing, most people are not in fact relaxed when they sleep, and this is one of the reason why sleep problems are so common these days. So what actually happens? I think is that where you habitually hold patterns of tension in your body, the fascia involved in that location actually sticks slightly to itself overnight, and this is exacerbated by that same tension. Gil Headley called this “fuzz,“ and if you search on YouTube, you’ll find his excellent presentation on it, with some unique photographs as well. The thing is, though, that as soon as you start moving – literally as you get out of bed – the fuzz unsticks itself, and the next thing you know, whilst you might’ve felt pain, for example, in your lower back, as soon as you start moving around a moment or two later, it’s gone – what happened to it? This is the deep and interesting question for me, but as a pragmatist, I don’t care about the mechanisms so much as just that I know that if you do move, the pain eventually will settle down. This is operative in the short, medium, and long-term – the deeper point being that, as you restore normal movement to any part of the body, any pain phenomena associated with it, regardless of cause, tends to improve.

Congrats! 🥳 Edit: In reply to the no pain milestone

😂 That's the kind of fun we enjoy here

From Liv: "In Stretch Therapy, we typically do all lunge exercises with the front knee angle as open as possible, in order to use the tension produced in the hamstrings on that leg to control the pelvic position, thereby affecting the hip flexor stretch on the kneeling (back) leg." In other words, the hamstring tension helps keep the pelvis tucked (posterior tilt), which makes the hip flexor stretch more effective. The open position also tends to provide more stability than a closed position, at least until you begin to reach very open angles.

Welcome, and excellent! Likely a very good idea. While the movements might be the same, your experience of them will almost surely be different the second (third, fourth...) time around, if you are paying attention. Always so much to learn! Are you doing a relaxation practice, as well? That will supercharge your stretching practice. Lots of free guided lying relaxations from Kit here: Relaxation Wiki. Looking forward to seeing how your journey unfolds!

Hi Jim, It sounds to me like you've just found a few examples of exercises near end of range, which always feels impossible. The positioning of the pelvis in your second movement reduces the possibility of compensation, forcing you to rely on that weak end-range muscle activation. This is what people often refer to as active vs. passive flexibility. Our friend Emmet Louis likes to recommend that people aim for having 80% of their passive flexibility available actively in three planes: gravity assisting the movement, neutral effect of gravity on the movement, and gravity working against the movement. Taking pike (forward fold) as an example, this would be standing pike (gravity assisting), seated pike (gravity neutral), and hanging pike (gravity adding resistance). Working on these movements is probably a good idea!

Pretty sure you cannot buy a mother whale anywhere, but Dave or Cherie might be able to supply a blueprint (or some measurements). I assume you know how to get in touch with them. They're both active on FB, but you can also try tagging them here and they'll probably respond

Hey! Just noticing this. It's been around 1.5 months now. Did you end up doing what you described? How is it going?

This is something most of us have felt, to varying degrees. Please be careful not to feed the inner critic, though. Self-compassion will make the whole process much more enjoyable and more effective. Bring curiosity and awareness to these patterns, but leave out any moralistic judgments and harsh self-criticism, e.g., "I did it again! I'm a failure! I'll never break this cycle!" Swap that with something like, "Oh, wow, it happened again. Interesting. I wonder what was going on in my mind when I grabbed that snack. What underlying need was I trying to meet? What emotions was I feeling? How were they manifesting as sensations in the body? How am I feeling now? Did it meet my need?" Et cetera. Remember that it takes time to establish unhelpful habits, and it will likely take time to unlearn and replace them. But you can do it. And you can build a lot of self-awareness and resilience along the way. Wishing you all the best!

The simple answer is yes. With enough practice, you will become more mindful in daily life, and with more mindfulness, you will open up space between stimulus and reaction, which will allow you to respond. But you can also speed things up by adding some direct work with these specific patterns of yours. CBT is intellectual. It works great for certain issues, and for certain people. Others don't find it very helpful. If you want to go in that direction, I recommend MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy). It's basically CBT, but with the addition of mindfulness practices. However, if you want to try something that you can do on your own first, Dr. Jud Brewer has a great book called Unwinding Anxiety. The title is slightly misleading; it's really about addictions and negative behavior patterns, in general. The book leads you through a process of mapping out your negative behavior patterns so that you become familiar with your triggers, and then it gives some tools (the big hitters are mindfulness and meditation) to work toward changing the patterns.

If you mean this, then yes, it stretches the piriformis. This is exercise 22 "Lying hip (piriformis)" in Stretching & Flexibility (page 68).