[sticky entry] Sticky: Intro post

Aug. 7th, 2016 08:40 am
rydra_wong: A dancer (Anie Hanauer) crouches in a performance by Candoco. She has a prosthetic arm. (body -- annie)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
This is a comm for exploring the experiences and meanings of movement practices, whether a practice is labeled as “sports”, “art”, “exercise” or something else completely, whether it’s Olympic lifting or Zumba or rock climbing or ballroom dancing or tai chi or Pokemon Go or a walk around the block. Let’s compare notes and geek out.

What I originally wrote when floating the idea of the comm (minor edits):

I’d want it to be a place where people can share and compare experiences (and books and films and random thoughts) across disciplines. I want to know how my experiences with climbing relate to other people's experience with ballet, or yoga, or Brazilian ju-jitsu. Or long walks. I want to hear from people who don't do a particular movement practice any more because of reasons. Or why a particular practice connects for a particular person. I want a place to discuss how mental illnesses affect/are affected by our movement practices, or how we juggle movement practices with mobility impairment or chronic pain, and what all of that means for ideas of "fitness" or “health”, and how we do these things in bodies which aren't "ideal" or don't fit conventional standards for "sportiness". I want to talk about gender, obviously. And what it means when we have sports injuries, do activities involving risk, or other things which are not considered "healthy" in pursuit of our movement practices. And whether ballet pointe shoes are or aren't like climbing shoes, and how one learns to fall in all the different activities that involve falling, and all the possible cross-activity forms of geekery, as concrete or theoretical as we can manage.

ALL THE THINGS.


Just to add to that: the comm is open to anyone who’s interested, whether you currently have a movement practice(s) of some kind or not. If you don’t, or you don’t ever want to, but are still interested in reading about them — you are as just as welcome.

Also, given how loaded and complicated the topic of bodies can be, I’d like to pre-emptively ask people to watch out for (and avoid) ableism and fat-shaming in particular, and also to refrain from giving unsolicited advice. If weight or food/nutrition feature in a post, please put it behind a cut.
rydra_wong: A dancer (Anie Hanauer) crouches in a performance by Candoco. She has a prosthetic arm. (body -- annie)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Outside Online: Quinn Brett Shares Her Adaptive Yoga Routine

Former big-wall climbing badass Quinn Brett is a wheelchair user after a horrendous 120-foot fall on El Cap in 2017. She's a lifelong yoga practitioner and now teaches yoga group classes including both wheelchair users and able-bodied people, and also runs online Yoga For Paralysis classes.

The short routine in the article looks like it could be useful for anyone who spends a lot of time sitting (whether in a wheelchair or other chair) and wants to work on hip and spine mobility.

Quinn's ep on the Enormocast climbing podcast:

Episode 169: Quinn Brett – Forward from the Fall
tei: Rabbit from the Garden of Earthly Delights (Default)
[personal profile] tei
It occurred to me this comm might be interested in this podcast episode, an interview with Ess Hodelmoser. Ess is a contortionist I've been vaguely following for a while, and this interview was a frank discussion of so many of the things that drew me into their work. They're a nonbinary artist who started contortion as an adult, following a career in competitive Muay Thai and subsequently a serious traumatic brain injury. They also have a degree in disability studies, and in this discussion have a lot of fascinating things to say about the art of contortion as an exploration of what it means to present bodies organized in acceptable vs. unacceptable ways.

Here's one of the pieces that they talk about a lot in the interview:

tei: Rabbit from the Garden of Earthly Delights (Default)
[personal profile] tei
I'm curious what everyone's physical practices are looking like if you're mostly on lockdown due to COVID? here, it's finally gotten warm enough to be outside comfortably for activities other than running, so I've been trying to do some gymnastics-type training in the park and am considering ordering a slackline and some rings that I could hang from a tree branch.

The downside is that I really don't like people watching me. :P
abyssinia: Sam Carter's first view of Earth from space and the words "all my dreams" (Default)
[personal profile] abyssinia
*waves* This comm has been pretty quiet but hopefully there's still some people around.

In my early 30s I was very active in a variety of ways (multiple recreational sports, crossfit, bike commuting, etc) but then I spent several years going through a tailspin of moving/illness/etc. which saw me spending significant periods sedentary or getting minimal exercise.

I'm now in my late 30's and working on getting back to being active and trying to be slow/methodical about it through a mixture of recreational sports, running, and getting back into Crossfit. I've been working hard to build slowly and incorporate rest days. But I'm still finding post-workout recovery to be much harder than it used to be. I seem to be tired/sore after exercise for a much longer time or much more intensely than I feel like I should be.

I don't know if this is just the price I'm paying for being older and trying to get back into shape, or if I'm doing recovery work poorly. So I was curious what other people do for recovery - things they find helps or hurts? I'm interested in things like activity level/type, possibly food/nutrition, or other things I can do.
seasonoftowers: (Default)
[personal profile] seasonoftowers
What sort of upper back stretches have you tried and liked? I've been giving cow face pose a try lately, but it doesn't quite compute yet.
seasonoftowers: (Default)
[personal profile] seasonoftowers
As I've mentioned in my journal, I've found that attempting pigeon pose helps with a hell of a lot of highly annoying physical issues I've had the past year. Note that I say attempting, and not succeeding - I can maybe get 8 inches above the floor on my bad side before my hips start turning. I wonder how best to proceed from here - do I keep doing as much of the stretch as I can do correctly, or are there other things I should try first?

Stretching

Feb. 14th, 2019 09:53 am
rydra_wong: A dancer (Anie Hanauer) crouches in a performance by Candoco. She has a prosthetic arm. (body -- annie)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Linking with permission -- [personal profile] kaberett and others discuss research on the benefits (or not) of stretching:

[personal profile] kaberett: On stretching
starwatcher: Western windmill, clouds in background, trees around base. (Default)
[personal profile] starwatcher
.
*waves* Hi. I forgot about this comm until I saw Rydra's post, then realized maybe someone here can help me.

Long story short -- I'm spending week-on week-off between my dad's town and my town. My dad's town has a good indoor community pool, which is reserved for lap-swimming 3 evenings per week. Since June, I've improved my time for 50 laps (.77 mile) from 66 minutes to 54 minutes, 10 seconds. \o/ So I do an extra 5 laps, for a total time of 59 minutes 50 seconds. (I'm slow, but I keep going and going and going...)

I don't have that opportunity in my town, so this week I finally decided to start making use of my treadmill that's been gathering dust for lo, these many years. I managed a decent pace -- 2 miles per hour -- for 35 minutes.

BUT!

Details inside. )
lunabee34: (Default)
[personal profile] lunabee34
My 16 year old daughter is a runner who has been having tendon issues that interfere with her running. She hasn't been able to run since the first week of December. She is sad, frustrated, sleeping poorly, and managing her anxiety poorly as a result. The issue is currently with her foot.

Does anyone have any suggestions for exercise that might not exacerbate the injury? Once the inflammation calms down, walking seems to be okay, but she really wants to be doing something that gets her heart rate up and is more of a workout. We tried the stationary bike, and after about 16 minutes, her foot started hurting. Swimming is out because there's no indoor pool in our town.

I'm just at a loss. I feel so helpless and bad for her. She tested positive on an autoimmune scan, but we can't get into the pediatric rheumatologist until March. I tried to get her GP to call them and expedite the appointment but he won't do it because he doesn't see enough evidence that it's a rheumatology problem instead of a musculoskeletal one. He is referring us to PT, so hopefully that will happen soon, but in the meantime, I don't know what to do to help her get the exercise she needs.

Help!
rydra_wong: Tight shot of a woman's back (Krista of stumptuous) as she does a pull-up. (strength -- pull-up)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Upper trapezius muscles: can I kill them? how do I get them to shut off, or at least stop trying to do all the work?

I am doing a lot of shoulder exercises to try to get my scapula behaving properly, and yesterday I realized that the multi-day headache was very likely due to my upper traps trying even harder than usual to get in on the action and do the work when they are not needed or wanted to, and thus my neck locking up even tighter than usual.

I will take any suggestions anyone's got on how to get them to disengage while engaging middle/lower traps and rhomboids.
havocthecat: the lady of shalott (Default)
[personal profile] havocthecat
Before I go all out and hire a personal trainer (which, uh, I cannot afford given the dance costs in my life), does anyone have any links to suggested knee and leg strength training exercises for someone who a) does not have much in the way of equipment and b) has knees which are moderately fucked? (Ligament and/or tendon strain, plus arthritis.) Also I have balance issues due to various reasons that are too complicated to get into here.

Please keep in mind that I am not looking for medical or insurance advice and can gauge and manage my own needs in respect to that.

Thank you!
rydra_wong: A dancer (Anie Hanauer) crouches in a performance by Candoco. She has a prosthetic arm. (body -- annie)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Because I know a lot of y'all are, I thought this might be of interest:

GMB: Hypermobility Exercises: Keeping Yourself Injury-Free while Training

The article is appropriately clear that they're not qualified to give advice for people with EDS and other full-on connective tissue conditions, but it's got tips and some interesting exercises for building strength and stability at the point just before your end range of motion.

As always, I pass it on under Bruce Lee rules: take what works for you and discard the rest.

ETA: I'm not hypermobile myself so can't evaluate directly; if you are and this seems obviously off-base, please comment!
kaberett: a dalek stands at the foot of a flight of stairs, thinking "fuck." (dalek)
[personal profile] kaberett
Earlier this week, in my own space I wrote a lengthy post about pacing, bracing and exercise with hypermobility-type EDS. This talks (somewhat frustratedly) about the Many Physiotherapists I saw who had no idea what to do with me, followed by a specialist hypermobility clinic who did. Have not had the brain to link sooner, did not have the brain to cross-post, but please go play if you're interested and I'll do my best to engage over there! :-)
chalcedony_starlings: A black left guillemet to the left, on a flat darkish purpleish background. (imetagon)
[personal profile] chalcedony_starlings

β(The bulk of this is cross-posted from our personal journal, but a few minor details are access-locked.)

Today, at the urging of a good friend, we wound up trying ice skating for the first time! “first” meaning that the zeroth/first of us had taken some basic classes about… fifteen years ago? We weren't sure whether there was any motor memory of it left. This is also part of more general Adventurousness Training, of which “retraining the visceral, body-facing side wrt things like risk tolerance” is a major part.

Illum was fronting most of the time today; at some point I want to try it more thoroughly myself, but I still caught a lot of it.

Results so far:

  • No reliable memory of how to brake properly.
  • Error recovery is still pretty wonky in general.
  • How to balance on the ice seems mostly workable.
  • These reflexes work for falling, sort of.
  • It's an interesting sort of exercise… I assume this involves core muscles quite a bit?
  • These foot arches complain a lot, and it's not clear what to do about this.
  • They don't have half-sizes of skates, but a 13 “wide” worked better than a raw 13.
  • No reliable memory of how to properly lace the things either, [personal profile] 403 had to show us. c..c
  • Definitely noticing a lot of flickery signaling waking up on the other side of the system↔body rubble while trying out motion in that environment.

I'm a little stymied by the foot arch issue, since that seems the most significant. These feet have gotten pretty wonky over the years in general, and I feel like there might both be some arch issues and some circulation problems. Same for the sizing… I don't know if any of this is common enough that any of y'all might be able to give quick answers to it.

Thinking of going back for some basic classes, resources permitting. Would appreciate sharing of other experiences, or feedback on ways to get more out of this kind of practice. :-)

(ETA: oh, for those of you who might not be aware, since I'm not sure we've posted here before: we're the in-same-body successors of the one behind this comment thread, and the “get the somatic link working properly” matter has surfaced in its own way in our era, having undergone interesting twists and turns. Just in case the context is useful.)

rydra_wong: A dancer (Anie Hanauer) crouches in a performance by Candoco. She has a prosthetic arm. (body -- annie)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
[personal profile] marina has an interesting post about movement skill and learning:

the one where it's obvious I've never done gymnastics
rydra_wong: Text: "Your body is a battleground" over photo of 19th-C strongwoman. (body -- battleground)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
[personal profile] truelove talks disability, athleticism, and existing across categories that ableist society has "conceived of as mutually exclusive binaries":

disability and ability are non-linear functions or possibly non-euclidean physics
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