WHERE STRENGTH BEGINS : HOLD YOUR BODY TOGETHER

October 19, 2007

THE FIRST STEP

Get excited

What’s in your head is yours to control. Whatever program you dialed in is what is playing in front of your eyes. My screen and your screen are not the same. YOU CHOOSE which buttons you push on the remote. Your world is inside your head. Here’s Lesson 1 in controlling what is in your head so that you can go places that you didn’t think were available to you. You can go anywhere you decide to go.

You are about to start feeling a deeper sense of control over your life than you’ve ever felt. That is your reason for becoming someone who works out. Let the excitement take hold of you.

Why is that little bit of excitement so weak? Why is it so easy for voices that are sarcastic and negative to suppress something so good, by saying “Yeah, fine for you but what about my job, kids, house,…” , “Who cares?” Who has time?”, “It’s too late for me”. You know you’re not a sarcastic or negative person, so why do those voices live in you? The fact is, they live in all of us, every time we think about something new. It must be an evolutionary protection mechanism to make us think twice about jumping in front of an elephant stampede.

YOU KNOW you have some twinge of excitement about how good you might feel. Let those feelings rise up. Move the useless stuff to some dusty unused corner of your brain and let it sit there and talk itself out. You will get so good at doing this that it will become fun to try it with other parts of your life.

Hold your body strong

For the first month, forget about food. Just eat what you always eat. Don’t even think about it. Try not to eat more but don’t make any adjustments. Don’t think about food in that way that you lets you obsess the minute you think of the word ‘diet’.

For a few days or a few weeks, you decide how long, you’re just going to feel what muscles it takes to stand straight and get your energy from your center, or core. It will help you protect yourself from injury and you will feel a source of power that you had no idea was in you. It’s been there all this time.

Do not set aside a special time, just do it during the day when you think of it.

Practice mentally first

I learn well by visualization, by imaging and picturing things. So create 4 images in your mind:

1. Drop your shoulder blades into your back pockets ; you’re not sticking your chest out or pulling your shoulder blades together, or pushing your shoulders down. Just imagine that there is a heavy weight attached to the bottom of each blade making them heavy, so you allow the weight to pull the blades down by just relaxing and giving in to the weight. There is no real active contraction involved.

2. Make your waist as small as possible, not by sticking your chest out but by lifting up and growing from just underneath your ribs There is magnet in the clouds and one on the top of your head, and the 2 are trying to come together. Imagine a tree; the ground line, where the roots meet the trunk is across your hip bones. Feel the trunk growing upwards from just above the earth line. Rise upwards and get up out of your pelvis, feel your waist get longer.

3. Tighten your butt cheeks and squeeze them together a little; it’s the tightening that holds your back but it can be hard to understand the feeling at first and squeezing the cheeks together is a good place to start. Put your attention in that part of your body and try to keep it there during the day. It feels as though your spine is a fencepost sunk deep into the ground. Whatever wind blows, the fencepost will not budge.

4. There is an analogy in Pilates of vacuum-sealing your lower abdominal muscles against your pelvis. The combination of the butt muscles holding the spine strong from the back, and the ab muscles tight at the front, already puts you in a much stronger place.

The exercise is too hard if you can’t hold that position

It helps a lot to prevent back injury because sudden unplanned movements or strains have much less impact when your muscles are holding your body together. You will have lots of new types of movement to try out and it’s important to have a sense of how to protect yourself as new stresses come along. Learn to feel how this stabilizes your pelvis. It becomes harder to lose your balance and your center feels very secure.

It’s a lot to think about all at once. Get the practice of it built in to your daily life. Exercise will present challenges to you to maintain this position and that will be more easily accomplished if the recognition of that supported feeling is already embedded into your consciousness.

Mind and body become one

Start getting your head into what your body is feeling, making the connection between your head and your body. Feel the sensation of actually locking into this position so that it becomes very hard to destabilize you. Eventually you’ll be able to stay this way but be quite relaxed at the same time. I think about an iceberg, with the water line across your hip bones. There is more of an iceberg below the surface of the water, that cannot be seen and this gives the structure enormous stability at the water line.

Move this sensation of new height and stability into your head. The person that you are is taller and more open and is finding a source of power that is going to grow and grow. Feel that your entire being is rooted in Earth and Sea, the ground line and the water line.

It’s a progression; take it easy on yourself; skip a day now and again.

Don’t look for inches melting off; forget it. Only allow good thoughts in. Flick out anything negative the way you would a tick crawling on your arm. Think about sleeping better. Think about becoming more optimistic. Think about little stresses becoming insignificant because you know you can easily cope with them. Find new confidence in yourself from the insurance you have against any type of impact.

Wonder at the person you are about to become.

Posted by Christine Scaman | Filed Under Move Thy Body