The point of having good walking patterns, and doing yoga, is simply to have a body that works more efficiently. And translating that efficiency into ease.
At some point in every first session with a client, I lay them flat on the floor for exercises and then watch carefully how they get up.
I don’t care how old you are, we should be able to get up off the floor with relative ease, let alone grace, into our seventies if not longer.
It is amazing what I see both from twenty-year-olds and sixty-year-olds in both good and bad ways.
It is more painful for me to watch someone who is twenty-five and doesn’t get up easily than to watch someone who is in their sixties or seventies.
As a yoga teacher, I am always taking mental exercise notes about where my students are at in a given posture.
The picture above is a classic example of something that should be easy but rarely is.
The underside of our forearms tend to be tight due to a modern world in which most everyone is on a computer for a long time each day and often holding their arms in an incorrect way.
As I type this my forearms are resting comfortably on the desk.
This is the opposite of how it should be. My forearms should be floating above the desk as the fingers hit the keys.
As a result the muscles of the underside of the forearm tend to be very tight and underused.
When I put people into the stretch in the picture above they usually scream.
My response is simple. The more something hurts the more you need to do it until it becomes easy.
The main thing is that everything should be easy.
Next time you stretch or work out take your own exercise notes about what is easy and what is not.
Try to start to develop an understanding of your own body and what it will need to make everything easy.