Rami's Blog

Like the Yin-Yang, Eastern Martial Arts and Western medicine are two halves of a whole. My mission is to preserve the ancient mind-body tools and pass them on to you.

 

Achieving Physical and Mental Balance: Part 1

To improve your physical and mental balance, you have to train three aspects of your body.

  1. Your flexibility
  2. Your strength
  3. Your ability to 'experience' your mass

How does this help to balance your mind? Well, exercise is very good for stress reduction and emotional stability. Also, having an unstable and imbalanced body sends unconscious feelings of uneasiness to your brain. If you eliminate the imbalance in your body, you help to take that extra stress off of your mind. So long as you follow my Rule of 80% Effort, you will find yourself becoming more and more balanced, without any pain or extra stress.

This week, we tackle the first half of the flexibility routine.

  1. Hamstrings - Do the "Vitamin-H" stretch 3 times during the day, for 3 minutes each time.
  2. Calves - Loosen your calf muscles with these stretches or these stretches. Twice a day, 3 minutes each.
  3. Quads - Continue to relax the leg muscles with this stretch, or the heron stretch, if you know it. Twice a day for 2-3 minutes.
  4. Hip Extension - Finally, use this new stretch video to learn the "flamingo" stretch for the hips. This stretch should be done twice a day for 2 minutes on each leg.

That's it for now! Next week we'll give you part 2, and the rest of the flexibility set. Then it's on to strength!

Happy Stretching!