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.

 

Office Exercise Series: Chair Twist for Energy and Immunity

Welcome back mind-body students!

You may recall the office exercise series we did on the blog a while back, which focused on keeping you productive and healthy at work. Well, we've got even more exercises for you to try at the office when you're taking a break and re-energizing to get more done.

This week, it's the chair twist! A great way to take stress off your lower back, improve posture, help regulate energy and focus, and keep your immune system working as it should.

Remember to breath deep!

A Few Tricks for Treating Flat Feet

Flat Feet (also called collapsed arches) are a difficult problem to fix. Luckily, many people who think they have flat feet actually just have collapsed inner ankles. That's simpler to fix because the ankles are more flexible and reactive to training.

If your arches really are collapsed, however, you'll need to do the following exercises to reestablish the feeling of arching the foot. By training in this passive way you can reactivate the tendons and ligaments in the feet and hopefully add a little bit of the arch back, one step at a time.

Want to Get More Work Done? Take a Break.

Welcome back mind-body students! I hope you enjoyed the Greatest Hits Workout last week. This week, we have more of a mind lesson.

If you are like me, you like to get things done. You are very industrious. More likely than not you are zipping around every day with all kinds of plans on your to-do list. Many times, you catch yourself thinking about how you could be doing more stuff in the same amount of time.

People like this are often very successful, but they live in danger of burning out.

"Burnout" is when your mind is still trying to accomplish the tasks at hand, but your body is not rested enough to do so. From a medical standpoint, pushing yourself to the point of burnout can be dangerous. It might include high levels of stress hormones than increase your risk of heart attack, or very low blood sugar that could send your body into shock.

Working yourself to that extent may sound crazy, but people have done it.

Most people will just find that they feel "off their game" or really tired for several days, even a month or two. This isn't medically dangerous unless you begin abusing stimulants like caffeine to make up for the low energy. The worst result will probably be that your quality of work declines, perhaps for a significant amount of time.

So how do people who have busy schedules and high-stress careers avoid burnout, and even accomplish more than before?

Take regular breaks.

In Judaism, we have the ancient idea of the "shabbat" which is a practice of rest one day a week. One day each week may not be enough for a high-profile worker, however. Some people work up more stress than a single day can get rid of, so they need less frequent, but longer breaks. Maybe a 4-day weekend every month (assuming you work most weekends).

This resting phase allows your body and mind to heal and incorporate everything you have learned and exercised since your last break. By relaxing down to a healthy baseline regularly, your metabolic systems can reset and prepare for more work later.

And that's how you can do more work by working slight fewer days each month. Instead of working at 70% productivity every day for a month, you come back to work at 100% productivity (after your mini vacation) and that productivity slowly decreases until you take your next break. Each day that you are working at more than 70% productivity makes up for (and eventually more than compensates for) the few days you took off.

I know, for high-functioning professionals, taking four days off seems like a crazy move. But if you can get more work done, and have a nice vacation each month, and enjoy your life more, and spend more time with your family, the only crazy choice here would be not to try.

Happy Stretching!

Mind-Body Workout #9: Greatest Hits!

Hey there, Mind-Body students!

This week we have a fun workout to do: these five techniques are the most popular exercises on my Youtube channel (not including massage techniques or sports tips). So this routine was created by you guys through popular demand!

Good luck!

Mind-Body Workout #9: Greatest Hits!

The first two exercises (the two most popular) are relaxing stretch postures: the chair twist for organ health and digestive regularity, and the emergency posture for the head and neck. How each of these stretches for 1-2 minutes, working up to three minutes each if you can. Remember to do the chair twist to each side.

Once you are done with these stretches, your upper body and torso should be nice and loose, which will help with the remaining techniques.

The remaining three exercises are upper body techniques, some of which are pretty advanced. First we have tai chi/kung-fu blocking for speed with a partner. If you don't have a partner to practice with, you can do this coin-grabbing exercise on your own. Do about 2-3 minutes of this, switch off who is blocking, do another 2-3 minutes, and then repeat. In total, each person should be blocking for 4-6 minutes.

The next exercise is a beautiful medical qi gong movement called "white ape picks up the peach" that really helps increase shoulder and forearm mobility. It also stretches the chest. Do this movement 10 times on each side. Do it very slowly and focus on your breathing the entire time. Thoughts of no thoughts.

Last but not least, we have the most difficult technique: Advanced Tai Chi Ball movement. If you afraid of dropping the tai chi ball, just use a soccer ball or basketball. This will do just as much for your flexibility and balance as using the wooden tai chi ball. You can start with the small circles I show toward the end of the tutorial if your not confident or flexible yet, and gradually work your way to further extending your arm when you practice. Do as many of these circles as you are comfortable with. Twenty on each arm is plenty. Don't push it or go too fast, because you can damage your shoulder if you get out of control.

And that's it for this week! Happy Stretching!

Can't Meditate? Clean Your Room!

People ask me some variation of this question all the time: "Are there any tips you have for how to meditate? I just can't get my mind to sit still no matter what I try."

And the answer is "Of course I have tips for how to meditate!" I've written about them on the blog before. I've written about them so much, in fact, that I have a whole category of posts dedicated to meditation tips.

But all those tips are about how you meditate, or what you should do while meditating. What if I told you that you could do something before meditating that could improve your meditation practice? It might seem strange, but this really works.

Clean your room. Or even better, clean your whole house.

You might be thinking, "What? I close my eyes when I meditate. I can't even see if my house is messy or not." But that's not completely true. Your mind internalizes the area that you live in. Even if you aren't paying attention to the mess, when you are in a messy house your mind functions differently (and not in a good way).

In fact, there are several studies now showing that a cleaner home can lower your risk of heart disease, reduce stress hormone levels, and improve sleep. How interesting that all of these benefits are also benefits of regular meditation.

The reality is that your mind worries about the mess in your home. That mess makes you stressed and scatter-brained, which leads to an even messier house. It is a vicious cycle.

Luckily, most people find cleaning their living space to be very easy. A chore, yes, but an easy one. It isn't like meditation, which takes a while to become proficient in. Nearly everyone knows how to clean a space up.

As soon as your local landscape is more organized and orderly, you will find that your mind is more focused and relaxed. And one of the secrets to meditation is that relaxed and focused minds are better at it than messy and scattered ones. That's why many people find meditation so difficult at first. It's a lot like exercise in that way: it's difficult at first because you haven't done any, but the only way to improve is to keep practicing.

But hey, if you can get a boost just by cleaning up your house, that's good too.

Happy Stretching!