One Health Massage with Roselie Rasmussen

04/27/2023

Do you want to increase your fitness level?

I specialize in helping people who might be worried that they’re too out of shape to start training, or that they’ve got too many complicated conditions to train safely. Of course those with a history of exercise fit in as well.

If you’d like help with guidance, motivation and accountability you can have those things in a relaxed, compassionate environment at a small group personal training series.
Small groups are social and supportive and help people stick with it.

What I’d like to know is, if this is something that really matters to you, when could you show up?

What hour of the day would you come to a fitness group? Are there days of the week that work better for you?

I’m planning my next fitness series and wonder at what day and time to offer it.

12/14/2022

The truth is that even when we feel like we’re fairly fit, we all still have areas that we never, or rarely, exercise.

Weakness can surprise us, showing up in places where we were sure we were strong. But finding it can answer a lot of questions. You can see clearly why a movement that didn’t seem like it should be so hard, or so uncomfortable, was causing you so much trouble.

Want to know more? All the details of getting help improving your mobility, endurance and recovery time are on this page:

Weakness can surprise us, showing up in places where we were sure we were strong. But finding it can answer a lot of questions. You can see clearly why a movement that didn’t seem like it should be so hard, or so uncomfortable, was causing you so much trouble.

12/02/2022

Why you should train in your 60s.

Is it really worth the effort?

I think what worries people more, is not how many years they have left to live, but what those years are going to look like.

I would say that in general, people don’t know how much control they could have, and do have, on the extent and rate at which their physical ability declines during their older years.

So I’m going to tell you. Because the difference you can make is huge.

The actual effects of biological aging are notoriously difficult to measure. This has to do with how studies are designed, who shows up for those studies and the difficulty of separating biological age from the overlay of secondary aging, meaning the effects of lifestyle choices.

Nevertheless, the best that science has to offer on the subject tells us that training can be used to counteract the effects age has on many of our domains of function. A domain of function is something like strength, coordination, balance, postural control, or speed. Training is not the same as exercise. Exercise is healthy movement. Training is healthy movement with a plan. It’s the difference between going for a walk, or getting out your map and walking across the country. One option gets you moving around for an hour or so, the other option gets you somewhere.

Why start training in your 60s?

It’s an arbitrary chronological age. If you’re already training in your 40s and 50s then keep at it! If you're in your 70s, 80s or even 90s it is not too late to start. Resistance training is still effective even at 90+ years of age. I suggested the 60s because it seems to represent a transition time for a lot of people. Careers might be coming to a close and children are leaving or have left home. Someone might be looking at the decades ahead and thinking about what they want to do now. It’s also a time when aches and pains or increasing stiffness are starting to really hamper engagement with desirable activities.

For example, it tends to be somewhere in the 60s that someone would consider giving up backpacking because they feel their knees can’t take it anymore, or give up paddle sports because they are worried about their shoulders. But like I said it’s an arbitrary, chronological age. The older humans get, the more variability there is between individuals.

Here’s a quote from the Functional Aging Institute on that point:
“While literature often reports average declines in physiological systems there is a high degree of inter-individual variability reported in the same literature. This means that while studies may report that a particular component (physiological system) declines on average 30% between the ages of 50 and 80 the actual range of decline among individuals may be as large as 10-60%. Practically speaking, a 10% reduction in that particular component may have no significant effect on the individual while a 60% reduction may cause significant problems and even lead to an active pathology.”

Whether you experience a 10% decline in a given physiological system, or a 60% decline is the part that will be affected by choosing to train that system.

There is a threshold of functional ability. Below that threshold is disability.
Likewise, for each activity you want to do there is a threshold. When your physical ability is above that threshold, you can do the activity, when it is below the threshold you can no longer do the activity. See my article, “Are you strong enough?”

These thresholds of function are often mistaken by people as either pathology, or the inevitable effects of growing old.

When you’re avoiding things that you used to enjoy in life because you’re concerned about hurting yourself. This is when quality of life begins to deteriorate. It can happen at any age.

Training is about regaining and maintaining your quality of life.

The body is always changing. Quadriceps atrophy is measurable after only 2 days of disuse (and that was in 20 year olds). The time when we’re likely to dip below the threshold that’s needed to maintain a desirable activity will be during a period of disuse. Disuse can happen because of the seasonality of certain activities, i.e I don’t garden in the winter (much) and I don’t ski in the summer. It can also happen because sometimes we get sick or injured and are forced to slow down or stop while we recover. And oftentimes recovery is taken only to the point of regaining adequate function, but not taken to the point needed to withstand (or prevent) another injury.

The scientific literature on the effects of exercise is quite extensive. There are a lot of positive effects. It used to be that the research community thought that there might be a cut-off age when the effects of exercise would become different for, say, a 70 year old than they were for a 20 year old. Now it’s accepted that exercise has the same positive effects on human beings regardless of their age. Of course there are differences in starting point and priorities, but the way exercise affects a body is the same.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the benefits of exercise (usually in the form of training), at any age:

Increased ability to sustain moderate activity with less cardiovascular stress and muscular fatigue.
Cardiovascular adaptations at rest and during acute exertion.
Higher bone mineral density.
Lower central body fat and higher muscle mass. (Which affects insulin utilization, growth hormone and lots of other body chemicals in positive ways.)
Metabolic changes.
Healthier nerve-muscle junctions and increased firing rate of motor nerves, leading to greater contraction speeds.
Improved functional ability, especially with strength and power exercises.
Improvements in balance and agility. Decrease in fall risk.
Faster recovery times, both from injury and exertion.
Improved psychological well-being (including both reducing risk of, and treating, clinical depression and anxiety).
Improved cognitive function. (From exercise! This is important!)
Fewer injuries.
Increased mobility, (i.e. controllable motion at a joint).

I could quantify these things and get much more specific, but I’m trying not to get into the weeds. The upshot is that in many measurable ways progressive exercise can reverse the effects of aging in the human body. Training will keep our level of function above the threshold that allows us to enjoy the activities that create our quality of life.

We can increase our abilities faster than age makes those abilities deteriorate.

If that sounds like a good thing, then let's start training.

I have a small group personal training series for increasing strength and mobility for gardening and hiking starting soon:

If you’re someone who has made gardening or hiking a part of your life and you want to keep at it despite mobility and strength challenges creeping up on you, then this small group, personal training series is perfect for you.

10/07/2022

Music Appreciation, Wine Appreciation, Body Appreciation?

What do these three have in common? They are all about getting more out of sensation.
Heightened sensory awareness means that we become more alive and more immersed in all that the present moment offers.

In order to live well in a body it can help to appreciate, and intentionally explore, its capacity for sensation.

This can be particularly helpful in giving us greater discernment about which sensations are helpful and health promoting and which sensations aren’t.

For instance loud noises and bright, flashing lights could be considered fun, but if we could feel our body amongst all that sensory bombardment we might find that we’re having a stress response and very tense.

Maybe this is why the world seems to trend in the direction of faster, louder, harder, brighter, and spicier, saltier, sweeter. We all want to feel sensations. Sensations make us feel alive.

The trouble with a lot of intense sensory stimulation is that it makes it impossible to feel more subtle sensory information. After eating ranch flavored chips a fresh, sweet carrot can taste quite bland. But there is still a lot of delicate flavor in the carrot. In fact I would say that the fresh, crisp carrot wins hands-down for truly satisfying sensory stimulus, but it's subtle. You might even have to close your eyes and direct your attention into the experience it offers.

Heightened sensory awareness doesn’t come from having more intense stimulus in our environment. It comes from developing our own capacity to feel, taste, listen and generally sense things. It isn't just noticing our surroundings, it’s noticing how our surroundings interact with us, and how we respond.

We are alive. In each moment we are responding to and being shaped by anything and everything that’s around us. This state of aliveness goes much deeper than our thinking, self-aware brains. It runs through our tissue and exists on levels that we’re not conscious of. We, our bodies, are aware of and influenced by our environment at less than conscious levels at all times.

For instance, if you were riding a roller coaster everything in your environment would be so intense that you would probably be completely unable to notice how you were feeling. But at the end of the ride you would see how you responded to your surroundings when you tried to pry your stiff and tense body out of the seat.

Driving on the interstate, while more ordinary, can also feel like this.

If you want to reach toward the greatest range of subtle sensations, you would start in stillness in a quiet room with your eyes closed. Like this you could direct your attention to the quieter sensations that you can feel inside your body. Then move on to the surface of your body and the space just around you, and then notice the environment, like smells, and sounds in the distance. This all takes some time. It’s not a single sitting sort of thing.

From here you could do two things. Still with your eyes closed, introduce a little movement someplace in your body and savor all the sensations of that movement with curiosity.

Or you could open your eyes, turn your head this way and that, and notice instances of a particular color.

Then you can take this practice out of the quiet room and onto the street so to speak, noticing the sensations of your body while in the midst of a conversation, or while sitting in the corner of a coffee shop. Or start to notice the sensations while engaged in more vigorous movement.

It’s important to stay curious, without analysis.

There’s already a tendency to spend more time trying to figure out our bodies, then there is listening to them, noticing them and feeling them.

Feeling our body is a way to spend more time becoming alive…but a lot of our sensations are as subtle as the flavors of the carrot.

To get the best of these articles, delivered monthly for free; go here

My goal in having this blog is to help people feel less worried about their bodies, and to spend more time feeling at ease and able to bring their best selves forward into a world that needs them.

07/07/2022

Strategies for Aging

Is it better to “Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

Or is better that we:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

“Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them” might sound like it applies mainly to martial circumstances rather than our attitude to back pain.

Under the right circumstances a graceful surrender may hold just as much nobility as opposing overwhelming forces until we no longer have the strength to stand.

But what are the “right circumstances” for a graceful surrender? And when is it better to exert ourselves to change something?

“May God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The wisdom to know the difference.

The crux of the matter is finding discernment about what we have the power to change and what we don’t.

With this strategy we need both the qualities of graceful surrender and we need courage. But above all we need some clarity on when to apply the strategy of acceptance and when to apply the strategy of courageous change.

Where do we find that clarity? Where is the guidance on what potential we should aspire to?

Will our doctors tell us to challenge ourselves? Will the family members who have faced old age before us have the wisdom to guide us?

Personally, knowing how human beings get stuck in patterns of dominant logic and group think I would rather be guided directly by God, or by peer reviewed science, but not by anyone’s interpretation of either one.

Perhaps my main point today is that when we are considering our capabilities and our potential, particularly as we age, whether we have articulated it to ourselves or not, we are making a choice. That choice is between accepting what we find, or applying ourselves to change it.

In order to change something, it’s necessary to believe that change is possible.

05/24/2022

Feeling Strength and Unity in the Body

It can be difficult for a person to figure out how much load to put through their body and when to stop. This is maybe why hard exercise has a reputation for being brutal and silly phrases like “No pain, No gain” have emerged.

Learning to feel the sense of integrity, strength and complete body unity solves both the problem of knowing how much to do, and knowing when you’re done.

First, if you can do the exercise while maintaining the feeling of integrity and unity, then you’re doing it right. That’s the right version for you.

Then, once you can no longer maintain that feeling of solidity, when it feels like your body is starting to turn into a collection of uncoordinated parts, then you know that you’ve done as much as you can do and it's time to stop for now.

That’s failure, it’s simple, straightforward, and really not so bad.

It’s actually not brutal at all, it’s completely loving. Failure is about loving kindness. The kindness comes in because you have allowed yourself to see clearly where your edge is, and you’ve allowed yourself to accept it. To try something and allow yourself to clearly see and acknowledge when you’ve done as much as you can do and then to rest, is an act of self love.

Self love is good to practice on a regular basis, and exercise helps us practice it.

So, let’s see if we can find that feeling of strength and unity, shall we?

We’ll use Plank position, because it’s physically challenging enough to create a lot of noticeable sensation, and straightforward enough to not have too many details to focus on at one time.

I’ll describe the basic position, but that might not be the right starting place for you. If the position I describe doesn’t work for you, it means we have to change the position until you can feel solid and strong when you start.

Start with your hands and knees on the floor, shoulders over hands, hips over knees. Palms should be flat on the floor. If this is a stretch for your wrists then hang out in this position for a minute or two to let them get used to the stretch before you put any more weight on them.

Push your hands into the floor and straighten your elbows. Roll your “elbow pits” (that’s actually called the antecubital fossa) in the direction the top of your head is pointing. Feel your shoulder blades move more firmly onto your back when you do this.

Straighten your legs and place the bottoms of your toes on the ground. You might step back slightly as you do this so that your arms stay vertical.

Keep your hips straight so that they neither drop down nor lift up. If it feels too challenging to have them perfectly straight it’s okay to lift your hips a little bit toward the ceiling, but do the minimum amount possible.

Again press your palms into the ground and, at the same time, press your toes into the ground. See if you can feel the solid shape of your body between those two points.

This is the basic plank position.

If you’re in this position you might notice a few common areas of physical weakness. Areas in your body that feel like they can’t take this amount of load, or that are giving you an “uh-oh” sort of feeling. Those would be:

The wrists: With this physical deficit you can still practice plank position while you do other work to correct the deficit. You would modify the position by bending your elbows and placing your forearms in contact with the ground either with your palms downward or pressed together.

The knees: This position can highlight knee instability. The position itself is strengthening, so if what you’re feeling in your knee(s) is tolerable you can just be aware of it, but keep doing plank. If it's not tolerable then you’ll want to look into doing more specific knee rehab which I won’t cover here. You can continue practicing plank by placing your knees on the ground but keeping a straight line from your knees to your shoulders. You’ll probably want a cushion under your knees.

The spine: You might notice a disturbance in your low back or thoracic spine. This means that the work isn’t traveling through your abdominals or that your abdominals are too weak right now for this more challenging position. Try engaging your abdominals more until you no longer feel that feeling in your back. You can also try decreasing the load by dropping down to your knees, or you can lift your bottom toward the ceiling a little more so that the abdominal muscles don’t have to work quite as hard.

A great variation if you’re feeling too much disturbance in either your knees or spine is to not do plank on the ground, but rather to place your palms against the cushioned edge of a piece of furniture. Try something about 24 inches high and see how that suits you. If it still isn’t working try something at countertop height.

The neck: Again, see if what you feel is tolerable and decreases with repetition. An isometric contraction to the muscles on the back of your neck is more likely to be helpful, so long as it isn’t more load than your body can tolerate right now.

Now that you’re in the basic position lets work on accessing strength, unity and the sense that your body is one perfectly controlled and coordinated whole.

You might get tired. Take a break when that happens.

With your hands, press yourself away from the floor. This will cause your ribcage to move slightly toward the ceiling and you might have a sense that your arms and torso are now forming an inverted U. Don’t let your shoulder slide up to your ears when you do this. Continue to rotate the elbow pits toward the head.

Next tighten the tummy muscles a bit, just so that there’s a sense of engagement. Experiment with lifting your pelvis toward the ceiling and dropping it toward the floor, until you find the perfect place where the abdominal muscles are engaged and pulled closer to your spine and your spine feels supported by the abdominal muscles. It’s a sense that the abdominal engagement is connecting the lower body to the shoulders, rather than feeling like the spine is taking the load of connecting the upper and lower body.

Tense the legs a little, like you're gripping your own thigh bones with your thigh muscles. Then push the bottoms of your toes into the floor. You want to feel that there is a solid line from your pelvis to your toes.

Now press your hands into the floor while pressing your toes into the floor and maintaining engagement with the abdominals. See if you can feel how pressing your hands into the floor helps you press your legs into the floor.
See how pressing both your hands and legs into the floor helps tone the abdominals and teach them how to carry the load through the middle of your body.

Next, while maintaining all this beautiful integrity you can flex all your toes so that you rock your body headward a little. Then press your hands into the floor to rock your body back toward your feet. See if you can feel how your body is acting as one strong, solid whole as you shift it forward and back by pressing with your toes and hands. If you don’t feel it, check to see if your arms are making the U shape, your legs are engaged and your abdominals are connecting your upper and lower body. If your butt is clenched, unclench it. Let everything that isn’t doing work relax.

I’m hoping that you’ll get what I’m talking about, but it might take a few practice sessions. Or you might feel like you’ve got it, but then as you practice multiple times you might find that you shift from getting it, to really getting it.

Knowing this feeling will also tell you when it’s time to stop doing an exercise.

To illustrate that, just go back to your plank pose and hold the position until your body shifts from feeling solid and strong to feeling like a collection of parts. You’ll probably notice this in your back first as your abdominal muscles tire out and the load shifts onto your spine. Or you might notice it in one of your knees. It’s a bit individual.

The idea is to fatigue yourself efficiently. A normal or ideal amount of time to reach fatigue with this static hold would be about 45 seconds to 1 minute.

Now that you know what strength and unity feels like in the body you can also recognize when you’re not feeling it. You can use this feeling to correct any exercise until you reach the feeling of your body being one solid, strong, coordinated piece.

05/11/2022

The Magical World Underneath Your Skin

There isn’t just one type of touch.

Massage is a huge field. It can be used for everything from providing comfort and pain reduction in a hospice setting, to treating either current or long standing rotator cuff lesions.

And there are lots of different techniques for achieving these goals. There are the sensuous, body-length strokes of a well-oiled lomi-lomi massage, the foot-delivered, stretching-oriented Thai massage, the technical light strokes of Manual Lymphatic Drainage, the specific cross fiber frictions of a well assessed treatment massage, the static pressure of Shiatsu or acupressure, the deep shearing of myofascial release. It goes on and on. There are a lot of types of massage out there.

Whatever it is we’re trying to do with massage there are two classes of effect that are possible; mechanical effects and reflexive effects.

Mechanical effects are highly overrated. These are the effects that people tend to think are going on and are the reason why they go to get a massage. These are things like busting up scar tissue, lengthening fascia, elongating and softening muscles, and increasing circulation in blood, interstitial and lymphatic fluid.

This last effect, increasing circulation, does actually happen and is a useful mechanical effect of massage. However it's actually not possible to lengthen fascia or muscles via the pressure that the massage practitioner exerts on those tissues. They are very tough tissues and the amount of pressure or tensile stress that would be needed to change them would result in major injury and lawsuits.

Which brings me to the heart of massage, reflexive effects.

The scope of reflexive effects possible is many and varied. Reflexive effects are those effects that involve creating a stimulus in the sensory system, that is to say, giving your body news about its environment. Which then travels to one of the processing centers of the central nervous system and from there creates an effect in the body. This effect could take place at the location that the sensation was detected, or it could take place elsewhere or throughout the whole body.

This could be something as simple as applying pressure to a tendon so that the stretch reflex comes into play and causes release of muscle contraction. Or it could be something as complex as allowing the nurturing, non-threatening touch that the body is receiving, to switch the entire neuroendocrine system from a survival, fight-or-flight state to a state of regeneration and preparation to thrive.

The way that touch can do all of these things is via the many types of nerve endings that are embedded in our skin and other tissues. There are nerve endings at varying depths under the surface of your skin.

There are several different nerve endings that tell you about nuances in touch. For instance, there is a specific nerve ending that wraps around the base of each of the hairs on your body. So when a tiny bug walks across your arm and bends a hair over, you feel it. Or if a breeze moves several hairs you feel that.

There are also different nerve endings for deep pressure and for light pressure. Some are formed like an onion and some like a tiny spray of tentacles. Some are like flat paddles.

Some nerve endings specifically tell us about shearing or pulling motions that travel through the skin, or even to the deep fascia that covers the outer surface of the muscles.

The way they turn the movement of your skin into a nerve impulse is a process called mechanotransduction. That means that they convert mechanical distortions into electrical or chemical signals.

Mechanotransduction works deep inside your body as well to form and reform your cells. For instance the squashing of osteocytes in your bones through load bearing exercise tells those cells to create bone along the lines of force that they feel.

Some touch receptors get used to sensations quickly and some don’t get used to it. And some of what we train ourselves to adapt to is probably cultural. For instance, our nerves adapt to the feeling of our clothes or the pressure on our bottoms from the chair we’re sitting in. They don’t adapt as fast to stretching sensations, deep pressure and shearing sensations.

Another interesting thing about these nerve endings that tell us about touch when they are squeezed, flattened or stretched, is that they (or some of them anyway) can tell us about whether that feels good. So, they don’t just give us information about pressure, but they give us their qualitative interpretation. In other words, some types of touch convey a feeling of well-being through the nerves, while other types of touch are interpreted as noxious or threatening.

You might be able to imagine how it would affect your body to have someone touch you roughly, without care for your well-being, and with the intent to supersede your own will with their own. At the very first contact you would know that something was up, and your system would brace itself for the threat.

Conversely, if you’ve ever had a friend place a comforting hand on your shoulder or arm, you might have noticed, or be able to imagine how that conveyed peace and safety to your nervous system.

When touch, specifically massage, doesn’t target the very limited mechanical effects, and instead focuses on creating a stimulus that allows for the almost unlimited range of reflexive effects to take place, then the body can soften muscles, lengthen fascia and make changes to the neuroendocrine system that allow us to thrive.

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04/07/2022

Why I like (ridiculously) ambitious physical goals.

I’ll admit, there is something to be said for doable goals. Mainly it’s that you can work toward them for a while and then achieve them. It’s satisfying to see definite, measurable signs of progress.

But what I don’t like about those kinds of goals is that they’re over too quickly. If you start with a goal that feels doable you’re limited to only creating goals that don’t stretch you too far, that don’t require deep change. It’s like being stuck inside the borders of the known world. There’s nothing really new to discover.

A ridiculously ambitious goal on the other hand, sets you on the road of discovery.

I don’t know what physical feat you, the individual reading this, would call a doable goal, because in this moment we each have our own capacity. What makes a goal ridiculously ambitious isn’t the actual goal, it’s how hard it is to you.

If the push-up is something you can’t do right now, but with steady work you could do one in 3 to 6 months, that makes it a straightforward, doable goal.

If you struggle with getting up and down off the floor right now, the push-up might not even be on your radar of potential goals because it’s so above and beyond your current capacity. The commitment it will take to achieve the goal can be counted in terms of years, rather than months. I like these kinds of goals. This is a (ridiculously) ambitious goal.

The “ridiculously” is important. It brings levity into holding this goal. You mean it when you say it, but your whole identity isn’t tied up in it.

A ridiculously ambitious goal is one that you’re not sure you’ll be able to do.

I’ve mentioned before that my own personal goal is to be able to do a kong vault. Though sometimes my goals wander a bit to other really difficult physical feats that require a lot of strength and some other qualities, like balance, power, and plyometric elasticity in the wrists.

They’re the kind of things that if one just attempted them they would probably end up with an injury.

I’m not saying I’m a super athlete. What I’m saying is that setting oneself a five years maybe kind of goal not only allows the heart to soar with previously undreamt of possibilities, but it also keeps us focused, gives us something to work towards and keeps us challenging our capacity.

Again the problem with easier goals is that they’re over too quickly. If the goal is too close to the place you’re starting from you don’t really get to take the long road of self-discovery.

What I’m really after here is not so much the Kong Vault (though I am seriously pursuing that goal), my underlying goal is to continue to show up, because continuing to show up and explore my physical limits is what will serve me.

Each goal I attain on the way matters and is deeply motivating. It’s motivating to see change. And because one doesn’t finish with exercise any more than they finish with washing dishes, it's better to have a goal that I can work on in stages that’s going to take me several years.

Why not choose something that will keep you engaged since you’ll be showing up anyway? And what could be more engaging than exploring the true outer limits of your physical potential?

Maybe you're thinking that it would be too crushing to spend 5 years working toward something and never achieve it? But failure is impossible. If you keep showing up and lovingly challenging yourself, your capacity in all the domains of physical function will increase. That’s not failure. That’s success.

Or you might be thinking that you’d prefer more instantaneous gratification. Well, instant gratification probably isn’t actually satisfying, but I like a short turnover on my efforts and rewards as well. There will be many measurable rewards on your way to the ambitious goal.

Every ambitious goal can and should be dissected so that you know how to work toward that goal.

Take the Kong Vault as an example. Where to start?
Kong Vault - American Parkour - Parkour / Free-running

If you look at the motion, you’ll see that there is a leap, which is a motion involving lower body explosive power. This could be achieved by squatting with weight or jumping. Then there is a straight arm impact which would necessitate developing wrist and shoulder strength in both the muscles and the non-contractile structures. This could be achieved by many shoulder pushing exercises and lower level plyometrics for the wrists. Then there is a quick tuck where the knees are pulled into the chest. This involves a lot of hip mobility as well as hip flexor and abdominal strength. And finally there is a slight push off from the arms, which would require a lot of shoulder mobility.

To efficiently create change from where I am now to what’s needed for the exercise, I can challenge each of these motions on their own before I attempt to string them together.

The most straightforward place to start would be in gathering basic strength in a plane of motion that's similar to the plane of motion used in the completed motion. So, when you look at the arm position for the kong vault you can see that the starting position is pretty similar to a push up. A push up is an efficient body weight exercise that will help gain the basic strength needed. Or if you note the quick, tight tuck you can see that basic abdominal strength is a good starting point, and from there it could be made more specific to the tuck motion.

The measurable rewards on my path to the kong vault include:
Gaining the ability to do a push-up
Measurable increases in back extension and glute strength
Measurable increases in abdominal strength (being able to to a candlestick or a sit-up)
Increases in wrist and hip mobility (a better squat, which is useful for gardening endurance)
More shoulder strength and mobility which in turn means that I don’t overload and aggravate my shoulders as often if at all

Basically what I’m trying to say is that if you can do an 18 inch Box Jump,73-Year Old Box Jumps then climbing stairs and getting down to and up off the floor will be no problem. It’s not about the goal. It’s about the lifestyle you want to have.

If you dream for a minute, what ridiculously ambitious goal presents itself to you?

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