Between 24 March and 2 April 2020, each day we released here* one free Stretch Therapy video program!
Among the 10 programs are stretching classes, mobility sequences, bodyweight strength sessions from the Monkey Gym, and long-held lower body stretching exercises. All programs are follow along.
A number of the videos have (underneath the video) additional explanatory material (in text), and links to related articles and reference documents.
* You can view the videos here in this webpage – simply click on the ‘Play’ symbol at bottom left of each video – but you cannot download them from here. However, if you click on the word ‘Vimeo’ at bottom right of each video it will take you to Vimeo itself, and there you will find a Download option.
These videos will stay live and available (free!).
Video 10 - Thursday 2 April
Like the BodyLine circuit below (Video 4), you will begin by warming up wrists (and get to watch some nice rope climbing as a distraction!), then L-sit prep., arch body hold prep. (lower body in this episode), reverse plank (in our view, the most important shoulder pre-hab exercise out there, done the way we do it), and gymnastics planks, the perfect complement.
The final part of the circuit is a number of band-assisted chins, lock-offs, and negatives. If you can’t do chin-ups or pull-ups well, this is the place to start. Liv could only do one chin before working on this same series, and within four months, was able to do nine perfect repetitions of full hang, slow full-bodyweight chin-ups. If you are brand new to chin-ups, the best place to start is simply to try hanging from something – this can be scaled by keeping your feet in contact with something so you are in complete control of the amount of load as you get started.
Monkey Gym (MG) is the strength and agility wing of the ST system. The foundation of any effective strengthening work is sound biomechanics, and we start there. Adding strength on top of unsound foundations simply will not work, long term.
The Monkey Gym (MG) work spans explicit rehabilitation through to the development of dynamic strength; we all sit somewhere on that continuum (from injured to elite performance), and a good strengthening program needs to begin with the objective of getting the basics right.
The Monkey Gym protocol begins with these assumptions:
• you cannot increase strength safely without the capacity to hold any desired spinal alignment;
• you cannot increase leg and hip strength without efficient foot and ankle alignment and accurate knee tracking; and
• you can’t increase pushing and pulling strength without active and balanced rotator cuff activation and an efficient scapulo–humeral rhythm.
We can describe these attributes in a positive way as “efficient spinal alignment” and “sound biomechanics”. MG starts by addressing these whole-body capacities, one by one.
One of the foundations of the Stretch Therapy–Monkey Gym system is the belief that bodyweight exercises, when made appropriately difficult by manipulating lever lengths and stability bases, using minimal equipment, will provide all the strength most people will ever need.
In the MG system, any exercise can be made more difficult (“forward engineering”) or easier (“back engineering”), and – for instructors – this means that what you learn can be shared with your clients immediately. In the Monkey Gym system, all exercises, whether static or moving, are both diagnosis and treatment alike, and we will show you how to identify common weaknesses in your own, and your clients’, bodies.
—
This video was filmed in the original Monkey Gym at the Australian National University Sports Union building in Canberra.
Video 9 - Wednesday 1 April
An essential component of the pancake is anterior pelvic tilt. It is this aspect that many people struggle to master, even people who are relatively flexible in the other muscles involved in the movement, so hamstrings, adductors, etc. In this sequence, Liv explores a variety of techniques to feel how to actively move the pelvis – actively means using muscles in the hips and the groin to do the movement
Find a related article on the ST website – The Pancake: reflections on mastering the essential anterior pelvic tilt.
This video was filmed during a Monkey Gym workshop at Stretch Therapy HQ in Greenwell Point, NSW – in the Monkey Gym!
A number of attendees are Stretch Therapy and/or Monkey Gym Teachers; others operate training facilities. Because of the coronavirus, their sessions will likely be disrupted presently, but they’ll be back! And, some of them have, or are in the process of, setting up to offer online sessions. Find their contact details below.
Canberra
John Travers – ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Penny Travers – ST Teacher
Travers Training – traverstraining.com.au : www.facebook.com/traverstraining/ : www.instagram.com/traverstraining/
Markus Zellner – Senior ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Louise Raisin – ST Teacher
Stretchability – www.stretchability.com.au
Ben Brikcius – ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Strength & Flexibility – www.strengthandflex.com.au : www.instagram.com/strengthandflex.com.au/
Thomas Emerson
Praksis – praksis.com.au : www.facebook.com/praksiscanberra : instagram.com/praksiscanberra
Newcastle, New South Wales
Helen Ilich – ST Teacher
movementcontinuum – www.movementcontinuum.studio : www.facebook.com/movementcontinuum.studio/ : www.instagram.com/movement_continuum/
Drysdale, Victoria
Malcolm Boulter – ST Teacher and Practitioner
Scoliosis Therapy Centre – www.scoliosistherapycentre.com.au
Dodges Ferry, Tasmania
Christine Gaby – ST Teacher
Healthy Horizons – healthyhorizons.com.au : www.facebook.com/healthyhorizonsdodgesferry/ : www.instagram.com/healthyhorizonsfitness/
Video 8 - Tuesday 31 March
Compared to the Charlottesville mobility program (Video 2, released on Wed 25 March), there is a greater emphasis on the lower body in this one.
* neck flexion and extension, and neck lateral flexion; neck rotation
* neck half circles
* shoulder shrugs, shoulder depressions; shoulder protractions and retractions
* arm circles
* middle back standing rotation, becoming a dynamic version
* spinal movements: back arch and tail tuck (pelvic tilts)
* hip circles, then whole trunk circles
* knee circles and ankle movements
* partial and full squats
* lunges both sides
* side lunges
* forward bends over bent legs
* supported Cossack squat warmup
* wrist circles
* wrist extensions and flexions
Video 7 – Monday 30 March
The outer hamstring – biceps femoris – is in most people the tightest in the hamstring group. In this exercise, precise positioning cues – in particular positioning the pelvis – are given to ensure no avoiding this muscle in the stretch, which the body tries desperately to do!
This video was filmed during a Monkey Gym workshop at Stretch Therapy HQ in Greenwell Point, NSW – in the Monkey Gym!
A number of attendees are Stretch Therapy and/or Monkey Gym Teachers; others operate training facilities. Because of the coronavirus, their sessions will likely be disrupted presently, but they’ll be back! And, some of them have, or are in the process of, setting up to offer online sessions. Find their contact details below.
Canberra
John Travers – ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Penny Travers – ST Teacher
Travers Training – traverstraining.com.au : www.facebook.com/traverstraining/ : www.instagram.com/traverstraining/
Markus Zellner – Senior ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Louise Raisin – ST Teacher
Stretchability – www.stretchability.com.au
Ben Brikcius – ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Strength & Flexibility – www.strengthandflex.com.au : www.instagram.com/strengthandflex.com.au/
Thomas Emerson
Praksis – praksis.com.au : www.facebook.com/praksiscanberra : instagram.com/praksiscanberra
Newcastle, New South Wales
Helen Ilich – ST Teacher
movementcontinuum – www.movementcontinuum.studio : www.facebook.com/movementcontinuum.studio/ : www.instagram.com/movement_continuum/
Drysdale, Victoria
Malcolm Boulter – ST Teacher and Practitioner
Scoliosis Therapy Centre – www.scoliosistherapycentre.com.au
Dodges Ferry, Tasmania
Christine Gaby – ST Teacher
Healthy Horizons – healthyhorizons.com.au : www.facebook.com/healthyhorizonsdodgesferry/ : www.instagram.com/healthyhorizonsfitness/
Video 6 – Sunday 29 March
This class takes you through all neck movements (done on the chair), all hip movements, plus the elephant walk (for hamstrings) and a lovely kneeling version of a side bend for the spine.
00:00 Chair neck flexion
02:43 Chair neck extension
04:45 Chair neck flexion with slump
05:09 Chair neck flexion with slump, adding rotation
07:25 Neck rotation
09:06 Chair piriformis
15:15 Floor kneeling side bend
21:09 Elephant Walk
25:30 Toe stretch (prep. for floor lunge)
29:34 Solo floor lunge
39:03 Wall groin (bent knees apart; partner version shown – can be done solo)
45:53 End of class
Video 5 – Saturday 28 March
One of the most problematic muscle-fascial areas in the body is piriformis. This video sieges that area of the hip and as Liv discusses, provides a similar effect to the partner versions of the exercises that work this area. All the moves are both strengthening and stretching and use micro-movements, pulsing, and directed breathing to work their magic. And, not to forget the ** long hold ** aspect!
This video was filmed during a Monkey Gym workshop at Stretch Therapy HQ in Greenwell Point, NSW – in the Monkey Gym!
A number of attendees are Stretch Therapy and/or Monkey Gym Teachers; others operate training facilities. Because of the coronavirus, their sessions will likely be disrupted presently, but they’ll be back! And, some of them have, or are in the process of, setting up to offer online sessions. Find their contact details below.
Canberra
John Travers – ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Penny Travers – ST Teacher
Travers Training – traverstraining.com.au : www.facebook.com/traverstraining/ : www.instagram.com/traverstraining/
Markus Zellner – Senior ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Louise Raisin – ST Teacher
Stretchability – www.stretchability.com.au
Ben Brikcius – ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Strength & Flexibility – www.strengthandflex.com.au : www.instagram.com/strengthandflex.com.au/
Thomas Emerson
Praksis – praksis.com.au : www.facebook.com/praksiscanberra : instagram.com/praksiscanberra
Newcastle, New South Wales
Helen Ilich – ST Teacher
movementcontinuum – www.movementcontinuum.studio : www.facebook.com/movementcontinuum.studio/ : www.instagram.com/movement_continuum/
Drysdale, Victoria
Malcolm Boulter – ST Teacher and Practitioner
Scoliosis Therapy Centre – www.scoliosistherapycentre.com.au
Dodges Ferry, Tasmania
Christine Gaby – ST Teacher
Healthy Horizons – healthyhorizons.com.au : www.facebook.com/healthyhorizonsdodgesferry/ : www.instagram.com/healthyhorizonsfitness/
Video 4 – Friday 27 March
This video features warm-ups for all the parts of the body that the circuit emphasises, and an approximately 39-minute follow-along whole body strengthening routine. This includes planks, L-sits (partial and full), different hollow variations (tuck, open, arm positions), arch variations (arch body hold, partial and full), reverse planks, different push-ups, and … everyone collapses at the end!
Although we are known for stretching, Kit sometimes reminds people that he probably knows more about strength training than stretching! And Olivia was a gymnast and gymnastics coach for years, so she’s not a stranger to strength training either.
We used to run classes at the Australian National University called “Specific Strength Training Techniques” and, later on, “Strength & Flexibility (S&F)”, which were a combination of many techniques gathered from around the world to help people become strong, get better coordinated, and move better, quickly and efficiently. The background to this is that Kit trained in a professional boxing gym for a few years in Sydney (Bernie Hall’s) before he went overseas to live in Japan for four years, and at a different time in his life he was also a competitive Olympic lifter and has lifted in a number of powerlifting competitions as well.
We ran the strengthening classes alongside the stretching classes the entire time we were teaching at the ANU in Canberra, which was about 27 years. And we had as many Strength Teachers as well as Stretching Teachers; some of these are still working, a number appear in today’s free video, and we will link to their sites below.
In the first class of any S&F course (which usually run for 14 weeks, a typical university semester), the teachers would ask the students what they wanted from the course. Perhaps predictably, some of the young men said they wanted to have a bigger biceps, and some of the women attendees wanted to be able to do their first chinup. At the end of the introductory session, Kit would always say ‘what we’re going to teach you is awareness‘ – and then he would jump up onto the chin up bar and show how chin-ups can be done with arms only or back muscles only or a combination of the two. He would explain that the different variations, for different purposes, are achieved by self-cueing, and to be able to do that effectively you have to be able to feel what’s happening in your body and know clearly which muscles you’re using to do what work. The precision of this self-cueing is one of the hallmarks of our work. Another example is the full squat: many people will use mostly the quads to do a full squat (and these are the people who feel the effects of the squat in the lower back the next day), but ideally we want the glutes and other important muscles to be involved in this fundamental action as well. So we developed techniques that allowed each student to know whether or not they were using their glutes and if they were not we cued them into action!
We decided to call our facility “The Monkey Gym” after Kit came up the stairs one day and saw a training session in progress – there were people swinging across the room backwards and forwards on the Roman rings; there was a group of women over at the chin up bar helping each other to do beautiful chin-ups; someone else was climbing up and down the rope and being encouraged by his friends, and there was laughter and joking everywhere. Everyone was working hard and everyone was having a wonderful time, and it sounded just like being in the monkey enclosure at the zoo. We feel that training is not training, it’s playing. Adult playing, and that’s what we wanted to encourage. The Monkey Gym was born that day. [See one of our two Monkey Gym logos below!]
In the coming period, we will make more follow-along strength training videos. We will be specialising in bodyweight techniques that can be done at home with little, or no, equipment.
If you have not watched and tried this exercise yourself already, a perfect example of the precision of our cueing can be seen in the Arch Body Hold tutorial, taught by Olivia. Kit regards this as a master class in the Monkey Gym system: what to do if you feel this, rather than that, and working through all of the possibilities with the model* until perfection is achieved.
Find the Arch Body Hold tutorial on Youtube and Instagram
* Many of you will recognise the ‘student’ in this video. Lo and behold, he’s in today’s BodyLine circuit also! It’s a small world really, and we are all fortunate that there are so many magnificent people as part of the Stretch Therapy Community.
Over the years, we have had two main locations for our videotaping and our image making. As readers of Stretching & Flexibility, and Overcome Neck & Back Pain, will know, the first venue was the Posture & Flexibility (P&F, the former name of Stretch Therapy) room at the ANU in Canberra. It is a matter of record that the first edition of Stretching & Flexibility was the first all-digital book ever produced by Simon & Schuster anywhere in the world – and that was because we took all the images ourselves. We set up an infinity background in the P&F room, and used a tiny 1.3 megapixel Nikon COOLPIX camera plus a giant studio flash to shoot the images. There are over 700 photographs in S&F, and because we were able to provide the publishers with all of the images (in fact we provided them with a fully laid up text including images), they were able to publish what would otherwise have been a prohibitively expensive book. This was the time when the transition from the printed silver halide process to digital was just beginning. Each 10 x 8 image (required for the old approach to laying a book up), if printed conventionally, would have cost $10 so the image cost alone would’ve been over $7000, and that’s not allowing anything for the photographer!
It is also a matter of record that Overcome Neck & Back Pain was the very first Simon & Schuster publication that featured an accompanying videotape product. When I asked the production manager why he would not put videotapes into the book stores alongside the books themselves, arguing that the videotape was simply a different form of the intellectual property, he replied, “book stores don’t sell videos”. I then called a few book stores that I knew well, and I found that the reason bookstore didn’t stock videos in those days was that for historical reasons, videotapes attracted the same discount as audio tapes. Plus for security reasons the tape was still kept behind the counter – thus each videotape used up twice the space a book did. As soon as we told the book stores and our publishers to give the same discounts on the books as the videotapes, we moved thousands of them. The valuable lesson here is that if the envelope appears to be solid, look on the outside of it: for the most part it will be an historical legacy or just plain laziness. The fact is the product manager had no idea why bookstores were so resistant to taking videos, and he didn’t ask. Amazing: this was his business, after all.
The other location for our videotaping, in fact all the mastery series were filmed there, is the purpose-built photography studio I had at Kambah (Canberra), a separate building out behind our house. When I sold my share of a property down in Burmagui, I suddenly found that I was liable for a significant amount of capital gains tax. Luckily, the accountant we had at the time suggested that it would be better to spend that amount on fixing up my photography studio than giving it to the government, a sentiment I wholeheartedly endorsed. We decided to put down a big red carpet and have a lovely soft timber background instead of a standard studio for the Mastery series, to give it a more personal feel.
Our present house in Greenwell Point has a three metre ceiling ground floor – the ground floor was a Council requirement because we live in a floodplain (some of you will have seen some photographs that show the Buddha swimming during one of our recent flooding events). The whole ground floor is covered in firm but resilient rubber matting, which I fitted myself, and the high ceilings mean that we can place the lights properly. To film, all we do is hang up a huge seamless background in one corner of the studio. And the studio also features two sets of ladder bars. My apprentice at the time, the redoubtable [DW]*, rang around a number of Canberra schools to source gymnastic equipment – because a government department had decided that ladder bars and the like were too dangerous for school children to use… the same schools had been using that equipment for many years previously. Their loss our gain, I thought, and we made a decent donation to the school as well. We have two sets of ladder bars in the Greenwell Point studio; I made one from the remnants of the ex-school gymnastics equipment, and I liberated the massive wood and metal set that had been in the Monkey Gym at the ANU for 70-odd years, as far as we know, and now they have a new home!
* Dave Wardman
Physical Alchemy – physicalalchemy.com.au : www.facebook.com/physicalalchemy : www.instagram.com/physicalalchemy/
The Greenwell Point studio is the best we have used so far, although sometimes the bird life around us is so loud that we can’t actually record useable sound. And this studio now has our ATEM switching software, which takes the output from four or five cameras simultaneously and allows one of us to choose the best shot for the scene we’re shooting, and we record the final output “live-to-disk”. In this way the spontaneity of a live performance is preserved completely, and it also keeps us on our toes – we do not let each other go back and re-shoot parts of a scene. This is tough love!
A number of those who appear in this video are Stretch Therapy and/or Monkey Gym Teachers. Because of the coronavirus, their sessions will likely be disrupted presently, but they’ll be back! And, some of them have, or are in the process of, setting up to offer online sessions. Find their contact details below.
Canberra
Merryn Brown – Senior ST Teacher, Stretch Practitioner, and Monkey Gym Teacher
Strength and Mobility – www.strengthandmobility.com.au : www.instagram.com/strengthandmobilityau/
John Travers – ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Travers Training – traverstraining.com.au, www.facebook.com/traverstraining/ : www.instagram.com/traverstraining/
Byron Shire, New South Wales
Ben Exton – ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Endurance Exercise Physiology – enduranceep.com : www.instagram.com/enduranceexphysiology/
Brisbane, Queensland
Craig Mallett
Craig – along with his wife Cherie Pollach – was a long-time student of ST, in Canberra and beyond. He is now an instructor (and student) of the Daoist tradition called Ba Men Da Xuan. He runs classes and workshops, and online training and courses.
Find Craig online at: www.craigmallett.com : www.facebook.com/CraigMallettDX/ : www.instagram.com/craigmallettdx/ : YouTube
Video 3 – Thursday 26 March
This is a whole-body, follow-along mobility session – slightly more focus on the upper than lower body. The sound at the beginning is slightly dodgy (that’s a technical term) – the perils of live recordings! And, a bit of video is ‘stuck’ from 1.20–1.50 (showing a beautiful meditation bowl!) but you can follow clearly via the audio.
Time points noted for each element:
NECK
(0.23) Flexion/extension (chin-to-chest/head back, with jaw slack)
(1.25) Lateral flexion, L/R (sideways, ear-to-shoulder)
(2.16) Rotation, L/R
(3.08) Rotation with 1/2 circle to front, L/R (turn head to look over one shoulder, trace chin along collar bone)
(4.02) Full neck circles, L/R (ear to shoulder with nose pointing to your front as you pass each shoulder, so lateral flexion in this part of the ROM)
(4.55) Neck protraction and retraction (with long neck/crown of head pulling up to the ceiling with retraction)
SHOULDERS (plus emphasis on movement of shoulder blades (scapulae)
(5.49) One shoulder shrugged to ear while other pulls down away from the ear, alternate L/R
(6.13) Elevation/depression (
(6.55) Protraction/retraction (pull shoulders to your front, spreading shoulder blades apart/draw shoulders behind you, pulling shoulder blades together)
Shoulder circles, single (could also do double, too), forwards and backwards:
(7.55) arms hanging by sides;
(8.42) forwards with thoracic spine in flexion;
(9.10) arms to front at shoulder height;
(9.36) arms straight up next to ears
ARMS, including elbows and wrists
Two arms swinging forwards (shoulder flexion) and backwards (shoulder extension):
(10.02) arms quite straight;
(10.50) elbows bent
(11.13) Arms swing out to sides then up and over with elbows bent
(11.15 to 11.21) Fiona, checking form!
(11.36) Elbows: arms to sides (crucifix position): bend elbows and swing hands to front of shoulder then straighten arms to side;
(11.56) circle around the elbow joints
Elbows: arms to front at shoulder width, bend and straighten at the elbows,
(12.41) palms facing middle,
(13.02) palms ups,
(13.12) palms down;
(13.22) repeat with fists and wrist flexion
Wrists: arms bent with elbows at waist,
(14.05) straight hand wrist circles in both directions,
(14.30) repeat with fists closed
(14.46) Hand curls: curl fingers, then make fist, then bend wrist; open out hands
(15.30) Single arm circles, across chest, clockwise and anti-clockwise
(17.00) Single arm circles, forwards and backwards (so, shoulder flexion/extension plane), L/R (try to make the circles as large as possible, and let the shoulder move (up, fwd, down, bwd) with the arm circling movement
(18.29) ‘Hug’ and ‘pec. swings’ (swing both arms across the body to ‘hug’ yourself; then, let both arms swing out behind you, varying the angle each time to stretch the chest muscles)
SPINE
(19.22) Rag doll … bent knees, drape forward over the legs in to forward bend, hand briefly, stand up
(20.55) Roll down to forward bend, then curl up, spinal flexion and extension;
(22.01) can also add an arm swing to the movement, reach arms our past knees in the roll down, then reach arms up and overhead at the top of the curl cup
(22.58) Pelvic tilts, ‘tail tuck’ (Elvis) and ‘bum out’ (J-Lo)
(24.40) Hips: Circles, L/R, draw a circle with your tail bone, plus let the hips push out to your sides; big circles! (25.45) Hips side-to-side
(26.24) Waist side curls: Stand upright, needs a bit bent and tail tucked, keep hips still and curl the torso to the side and reach arm down the leg.
(27.08) As above but with one arm raised above the head (next to the ear), keep hips still in a L/R sense, L/R
(27.58) As above but alternate arms each time and let the hips swing from side to side (body makes a ‘bow’ shape), L/R
(28.41) Knee/ankle circles: L/R, feet and knees together, can let the big toe joint come up (in a left/right sense) as necessary
(29.48) Ankles: knees over toes … feet and knees together, work on keeping heels down and try to press knees over the toes … leads to full squat movement; can add reaching arms out to your front as you squat down to counter balance
BALANCE with leg extension work
* Stand on one leg, lift other leg to 90 degree dip flexion with knee bent:
(31.35) to front,
(33.21) to 45 degree angle between front and side
(35.03) maximum hip abduction + external rotation (so thigh stays pointing to the ceiling) … for all three positions above, extend knee without dropping leg down to the floor; hold 3-count, repeat 3 times: L/R
This video was filmed in Charlottesville, VA USA, at truPilates. tru’s owner, Robin Truxel, hosted Kit for many workshops when Kit presented in the US, as well as sponsoring Kit’s US work visa, which is no small undertaking. Most of the tru instructors are trained Stretch Therapy Teachers, and a number are Monkey Gym Teachers, too.
truPilates has, in response to the coronavirus situation, introduced online classes – these are open to everyone! Find details on tru’s website at www.trupilates.com/livestreaming. tru is also on Facebook at www.facebook.com/trupilatescville/.
West Bloomfield, Michigan USA
Mike Goldfield
Senior Stretch Therapy Teacher, Stretch Therapy Practitioner, and Monkey Gym Teacher
Email – mhgoldfield@gmail.com
Based in Las Vegas, California USA
Yuri Marmerstein
Yuri Marmerstein is an extremely talented hand balancer, and both an excellent teacher and friend of Kit and Liv. He has attended and assisted at many Stretch Therapy workshops around the world. He teaches hand balancing, acrobatics, and the physical arts. He offers one on one coaching, group training, and online coaching, and educational material in the form of text and video.
Find Yuri online at: www.yuri-mar.com : www.facebook.com/yuri.marmer : instagram.com/yuri_marmerstein : vimeo.com/yurimar/vod_pages : YouTube
New York City, USA
Paul Watson – TRANSFORMGST
Paul has trained with Stretch Therapy in many locations, and hosted us in NYC for an ST4P workshop. TransformGST is a strength and conditioning training facility with a focus on bodyweight exercises that combine strength and mobility. Their goal is to develop both strong and flexible bodies in a sustainable and engaging way for any fitness level.
Find Paul online at: www.transformgst.com : facebook.com/TransformGST : www.instagram.com/transformgst/?hl=en : YouTube
Video 2 – Wednesday 25 March
This might not look like a technique, but it is: stretches held for minutes at a time, at an intensity that allows normal breathing and complete relaxation of the body and the mind most strongly affects fascia. Accordingly, once new ROM has been achieved by Contract–Relax and pulsing, the end position is backed off slightly, and held in the most relaxed way possible for anywhere from one to ten minutes … or longer!
As Liv discusses, these long-held versions provide a similar effect to the partner versions of the exercises that work these areas.
This video was filmed during a Monkey Gym workshop at Stretch Therapy HQ in Greenwell Point, NSW – in the Monkey Gym!
A number of attendees are Stretch Therapy and/or Monkey Gym Teachers; others operate training facilities. Because of the coronavirus, their sessions will likely be disrupted presently, but they’ll be back! And, some of them have, or are in the process of, setting up to offer online sessions. Find their contact details below.
Canberra
John Travers – ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Penny Travers – ST Teacher
Travers Training – traverstraining.com.au : www.facebook.com/traverstraining/ : www.instagram.com/traverstraining/
Markus Zellner – Senior ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Louise Raisin – ST Teacher
Stretchability – www.stretchability.com.au
Ben Brikcius – ST Teacher and Monkey Gym Teacher
Strength & Flexibility – www.strengthandflex.com.au : www.instagram.com/strengthandflex.com.au/
Thomas Emerson
Praksis – praksis.com.au : www.facebook.com/praksiscanberra : instagram.com/praksiscanberra
Newcastle, New South Wales
Helen Ilich – ST Teacher
movementcontinuum – www.movementcontinuum.studio : www.facebook.com/movementcontinuum.studio/ : www.instagram.com/movement_continuum/
Drysdale, Victoria
Malcolm Boulter – ST Teacher and Practitioner
Scoliosis Therapy Centre – www.scoliosistherapycentre.com.au
Dodges Ferry, Tasmania
Christine Gaby – ST Teacher
Healthy Horizons – healthyhorizons.com.au : www.facebook.com/healthyhorizonsdodgesferry/ : www.instagram.com/healthyhorizonsfitness/
Video 1 – Tuesday 24 March
This is one of the infinite variations on the exercises/movements described in the “Un-numbered Lesson” (lesson 8 in the sequence) in Stretching & Flexibility (2nd ed.) – see full details of this book at stretchtherapy.net/stretching-and-flexibility-book-by-kit-laughlin/.
seated quadriceps 1:44
diamond pose 4:54
lower back and hip 7:13
cross-legs hip and lower back 9:18
new floor seated rotation 12:54
single leg soleus 15:10
instep 17:37
tailor pose 19:26
lotus pose prep 21:24
floor lunge 24:38
hip flexor plus quadriceps 29:59
full squat 32:45
elephant walk 37:55
Skandasana 39:40
floor piriformis 44:21
seated lateral flexion 47:51
middle and upper back 50:14
elbow and arm back bend 52:24
three lower back relaxation poses 57:15
front arm/chest, wrist flexion/extension 59:03
neck flexion, lateral flexion 59:48
pike 1:02:40
lotus prep. revisited 1:05:57
advanced piriformis 1:06:54