Releasing Tight Spots

Welcome back. This is more of a tutorial. Even though I'm here to teach you, I'm primarily a student, so every time I run into a problem, I try and figure it out. It's just a little Rubik's Cube, just a little experiment, and I let my body be that experiment, and I'm hoping it'll go down that road with me. So this is something that has worked for me, and I hope when we go through it, it'll work for you. The idea is, any area you're tight, I feel that if I go into it where I'm familiar and the muscle's short, I can start there. It's familiar. And then I use that same action, but lengthen it up. Less familiar, but I feel that connection. And then we'll reverse it. We'll just go back and we'll squeeze the muscle tissue in a different direction, and then see how it feels in part four, which is just stay soft. So we'll see how that goes. What I'm going to try to do today is open the chest and maybe move towards the peak pose of will, something I've been working on. So the first thing I'm going to do is go into plank. Now in plank position, I feel familiar here. I move forward on the toes, back, swirl around, and I'm just going to take a couple of breaths. So just two breaths today. Inhale once, exhale once, inhale two, exhale two. Now I'm going to lengthen those arm, the muscles in the arm by moving to downward dog. There's that nice stretch. I might even bend the knees to focus on opening the chest. This is that eccentric contraction of the muscles in the arms. And again, deep breath one, and deep breath two. Now I'm going to come to my knees and we do something that feels different on the arms. Even though I'm still stretching the front body, which is getting me ready for will, my peak pose, I'm reversing what happens in the arms because I feel this is where I need my work. So as I bring the hands back, here we go. Flash dance with core connection, the quads open, the chest, the rib cage, with the arms stretch in a different direction. Deep breath one, and out one. Deep breath two, and out two. Now this fourth part is just to really experience how that feels in the body. And that would be a complete sequence in itself. I'm going to lie in heart and a hammock. Some people call it puppy dog, some people call it anahathasana, heart opening chakra pose. It doesn't matter what it's called. This is what it feels like. Suffening, but less weight on it and just feeling the tissue lengthening. If you can relax your head, that's fine. If you feel like you need a little bit more, you look between the hands. Now, the more I activate the hands, the more work in the forearm and hands, the softer I can feel an opening in the shoulder girdle. Deep breath one, deep breath two, and then slowly come on up. Now there's lots of different transitions we could do. We could do cat and cow, but I always like to do a twist and maybe a side body stretch. And it really for me neutralized the spine before I go any further. So the twist, the side body stretch I've decided today is right angle pose. So we get back into what's familiar in our body. And I'm not too worried too much about the legs. I want to really feel the side body open. So from the baby toe of the back foot, that's my anchor. I lengthen forward and I reach and that feels so nice. Deep breath one, deep breath two and down. Just like that we can do a twist. I'm going to do a really basic twist. Left hand on the ground. Same shape. Inhale, right arm up. Deep breath one. And only if you want to add it. Deep breath two. Now we're going to do that same thing on the other side. Right angle pose. Now I know my belly will take off, my back is tight if I don't engage here first. So inhale, feeling it move through the body. And that one. Deep breath two. And that two. So there were the two variations of one opening and two lengthening.

If you can do lengthening for both great. Here we go for the twist. Inhale up. And again. And down. So that is round one. We're going to take it a little further again with round two and see if we can open the tissue a little bit more. So moving into round two, we're going to try through downward dog. Now I might move into asymmetrical or just favoring one side of the body over the other. And that'll get me deeper into the tissue. Slowly moving in there. So here we go down to downward dog. We've been here before. And I want to stretch and open the body in one direction. One. Open. And deep breath two. Now to come out of it I'm just going to rebalance the body by squeezing forehead to knee. And back to downward dog. Now I'm going to include that twist. Here we go. Right hand goes all the way anywhere outside the left leg. Deep breath two. And now we'll try that exact same thing on the other side. Inhale, right leg up. And open and stretch. Deep breath two. Forehead to knee, give it a squeeze. And bring the leg back. And this time we just cross the body. Your left hand slides anywhere outside the right leg. And stretch. Deep breath two. And out. I'm going to drop and just take a rest for a second. Now we're going to go into part two, which is dolphin pose. This is where we again use the tissue, but we keep it in a lengthened stage. So going beyond down dog now. We're going into dolphin where we drop to our elbows. One, two. And really focus on lengthening back and lengthening the tissue, the chest, the arms. And deep breath two. And slowly dropping down. And now I want to squeeze it back. And a nice pose to do here will be crow pose. So I took my toes, knees wide. If you can do it, do it. You can always do malasana. This is a variation where I'm still rounding and squeezing, but I want to kind of juice it up here. So I'm just lifting, feeling the tissue, shoulders away from the ears, and slowly lift up. And this action helps engage all that tissue I've been lengthening. Deep breath two. And out two. Now I'm going to come and lie on my back and do bridge pose and do a very gentle bridge pose. And so for bridge pose, I really want to take it easy. I want to really feel the benefits of the work I just did. So lie on my back, feet hip distance. I'm going to just move this little, ah, much better. And pull the heels in. I'm going to start with the hands by the side. Core connection, just lift up. Now I'm not going to talk it too much through this shape.

I just want you to feel the stretch. Knees moving away, tailbone towards the back of the knees, action in the feet, chest towards the sky. I'm going to soften. And just for one, I want to just feel what it feels like to stretch the arms over a head. So inhale. And exhale. See how that feels in my body. Now that's round two. We're going to just do a little stretch to release the side body. So we did this one before. It's the James Brown. Get up and ready to do my thing. Just a gentle side body stretch. And then I'm just going to turn that into a twist. And any twist will do. I want to take it a little bit deeper today. So just dropping the right hip down. Deep breath too. And now we leave that same two little transition poses on the other side. And side body stretch. Deep breath one. Deep breath two. And twist. And I like to move in and out of it. Because sometimes it just feels a little robotic and I forget to actually feel the tissue. I'm so busy trying to create a shape. Just take one more breath. Because I'm a L'Oreal girl and I deserve it. And that's it. And that's two. So now we're going to go for round three. So here we are. Round three. Just taking it again a little bit further. Always just building on what we did before. So this first shape should look familiar. Three legged dog and we turn into the wild thing that really helped me open up my chest. Deep down dog. Inhale. Left leg up. And open. I try and take my time here because I like to feel if I'm connected to the centre of the body. And then bring the leg down. Just the toes. And I spring open open open open open. And even though I'm reaching, I'm really focusing now on opening across the chest. Deep breath too. And out. Far head to knee. And down. Let's try that on the other side. Inhale open. And slowly come up to fingertips. Where's that centre of the body? And that's just being playful. Again, inhale open. Deep breath too. And back. Far head to knee. And down. Now at this point, and it's only if it works for you, you can do headstand prep or headstand. And at some point when headstand feels okay, why not? Why put the reins on? Alternatively, if it's asking too much and it's changing how you feel in the nervous system, that can be your peak pose. So we put the arms down.

And then when I move into it, I'll be really focusing again on opening here with the workload. So we do our little hand positioning. Elbows under shoulders. Crossing the hands. Snuggling in the head. If it feels comfortable, try not to jump. That keeps the connection less towards the ground and always in the centre of the body. Deep breath one. And out one. Deep breath two. And out two. Now I'm going to add a little bit of core work by just coming down halfway. And down. And child's pose after headstand. And then we'll go to position three. We're going to go to pigeon pose. See how that feels. Left leg. And back. I'm going to hold here just a little longer than two breaths, maybe four. We'll have that same feeling now on the other side of the body. Holding for four breaths.

Now I've chosen a more passive stretch for the next one because I know I'm working towards a specific one that I've been working towards for a while. So I'm going to go for reclined hero pose. We give that a go now. Just to get some opening in the leg tissue. Just lying back. Stretch it out. And usually for all these ground postures, might stay a couple of breaths longer. Otherwise you might start to feel like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland just always going. We'll try the other side. Now some people like to do both legs at the same time. By all means. And now the two, the twist, the lateral stretch and the twist, I'm going to do lying down the supta position. So lying down, starting with if it feels okay, you can do with bent leg like an happy baby. Or if it feels okay, supta parangasasana. Just gently open out. And now. Now we might do variation here. It can be bent leg, straight leg or even this, again, it's just like monkey twist where you bring it across. And I hope I don't squash anything here. And maybe you can bend your right leg. Just stretch it out. And release. Now we'll do those two same shapes on the other side. So if the straight leg version doesn't work, if the happy baby version doesn't work, you can always just do lying down tree pose. Always optional. Just opening the front side of the body. Here we go. And then we get ready for the other side. The same. Without creating too many options, bent knee, straight leg. Poor microphone. And now we're going to try the peak pose. So for me, I've been working on this a while.

It's we'll open the chest. Lying down, gentle bridge, snuggle, snuggle, holy. Exhale. Now when the hands are planted by the shoulders, if I get it, if I don't get it, honestly, as long as I'm using the tissue, I'm changing my relationship. So more, I'm already in a good place. I'm going to do maybe a push up onto the head. Reset the hands. And pull the knees into the chest. Release any tension in the back. When she wipers, swish, swish, just a couple of times. So thanks for joining me on something I've been working on and I hope it'll help you if you're working on it too. Namaste.