Writing about hating exercise the other day, I mentioned how I hang from the pull-up bar in my office a couple of times a day.
Usually this hanging is in between trips in and out of the office and lasts a few seconds before I move on to wherever I was heading.
In the course of writing blog posts I usually surf the web looking for information or images and tend to stumble on many interesting things, most often to distract me, but sometimes to inspire.
Ido Portale is someone I appreciate and have written about before; his improper alignment video is a favorite of mine.
He has a great approach to movement.
I found my way to a post of his hanging from one arm.
The post clearly states that you should be able to hang from both arms for two minutes before hanging from one arm for a minute.
As someone who has long been tormented by the inability to do a pullup, I figured this might be a good place to start.
I broke out the timer and began to hang. I stopped at forty-five seconds because my hands hurt too much.
Since that first attempt, I have been doing a series of 30-second hangs which my hands mind much less.
And my email now informs me that the weightlifting gloves I ordered have shipped and I believe that one-minute hangs are coming soon.
Known as a dead hang, which often precedes a flexed hang, it works the hands, forearms, and wrist flexors, as well as the trapezius if you spend some of the hanging time with flexed shoulders.
In classes that I teach, I often talk about the journey the shoulder has taken from compression to suspension to freedom.
A great deal of yoga is about compression: planks, handstands, etc.
And we could all probably do with a little suspension.
The night of the first day that I performed the series of thirty-second hangs, my right side—my trouble side—ached every time I sat down or got up from a chair or couch.
It was pretty alarming but I know that my muscles adapt fairly well and I felt great the following morning.
It has been about a week of this type of hanging and I am really into it.
I have written about a neck issue that I have been dealing with since last winter and after that opening on my right side, my neck has felt spacious in a way that it hasn’t for quite some time.
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