Some movement makes you sweat.
Some makes you stronger.
Some simply makes your body feel better when you’re done.
I’ve become increasingly interested in movement that does several of those things at once without beating the hell out of you in the process.
That’s one reason Qigong and Contracted Stretching have remained such a big part of what Peggy and I do.
They look very different.
Qigong is slow and flowing. You move, breathe, shift your weight and pay attention. It can look almost too easy from across the room.
Then you actually do it.
Balance gets involved. Coordination gets involved. Your legs are working. Your posture changes. And somewhere along the way you may notice you’ve stopped thinking about the seventeen other things that were bouncing around your head.
Contracted Stretching comes at movement from another direction.
Instead of simply pulling a muscle into a stretch and waiting, we use the muscle while it’s lengthening. There’s resistance. There’s strength. There’s control.
That’s what attracted me to this kind of stretching in the first place, and after thousands of sessions I’m probably more fascinated by it now than I was when we started.
But here’s the interesting part.
Neither one is really about becoming more flexible.
They’re about becoming more capable.
Can you reach?
Can you turn?
Can you squat down and get back up?
Can you catch yourself when you stumble?
Can you move through your day without your body constantly telling you what you can’t do?
That’s the stuff I care about.
And you don’t need to punish yourself to work on it.
Sometimes ten minutes of slow Qigong is exactly what your body needs.
Sometimes a few Contracted Stretches completely change how a hip or shoulder feels.
Sometimes you need to go for a walk.
And sometimes the smartest thing you can do is sit down and have another cup of coffee. 😄
There isn’t one perfect form of movement.
The goal is to keep giving your body reasons to remain useful.
Find movement you enjoy enough to keep doing.
Then keep doing it.