the squash-up: great exercise for sitting meditators, to preserve knee health

 

I sit cross legged on the floor. 

A lot. 4-8 hours a day.

This is what I do immediately after every sit:

48 squashups (or more, but minimum 48).

Why 48? Just an arbitrarily large number, 

but 4 should remind you of 4 noble truths,

and 8 should remind you of noble eightfold path.

What is a squashup?

Why do squats, and pushups separately, when you can do them both at the same time?

From squatting posture, have your hands also on the ground.

There's about 12-20 in. distance between your 2 hands, between 2 feet, between hand and feet, forming approximately a square shape if you were to connect the 4 planted pods on the ground. 

That's just an approximation, play with distances to see what feels comfortable.

What is the goal of this exercise?

To flex as many joints as possible, with jhānic relaxation, to maximize blood flow, lymph flow, qi flow, recover the stagnation from the sitting posture you just did.

Knees, elbows, wrists, ankles, hips, shoulders, should all be getting flexed and pumped. 

If you're doing it right it should feel good, the more reps you do the softer and warmer, more pliable the parts get.

I have most of my body weight shifted on the the upper body planted on the hands more than the legs and feet, because your knees and legs will probably be somewhat asleep, sore, etc. 

Don't go for full extension/limits on the up or down portion of the movement

In other words don't hurt yourself trying to squat push all the way down and all the way up to whatever you imagine "correct posture" looks like. The goal is to prevent injury, not gain injury, and to just move and pump blood into body that parts that are asleep and stagnant

If you're doing the exercise right, you should improving the health of your legs from the increased circulation of everything: blood, lymph, oxygen, qi, etc.

It's like if a beaver damned up a lot of the energy channels in your legs, doing enough repetitions of this exercise should tear down those dams and get the fluid pumping everywhere again. Sorry beavers.

I've been doing this over a year, got great results

My knees feel better now, I'm an old man in my 50's, then they did when I was in my twenties.

It's not just this exercise of course, I do several important exercises from the qigong gorilla arsenal every day, but for sitting meditators who sit a lot, hours every day, you need to be doing this one or something equivalent, or your knees are going to kill you when you get old. 

So right after every sit, I spend about 1 minute doing this:

48 reps at least of squashups

18 reps of cat and the scat (at least)

🙀🐈💩the cat and the scat: great exercise for sitting meditators, squatting safely

https://qigor.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-cat-and-scat-great-exercise-for.html

for cat and scat, as with squashups, you want to be careful to put more of your body weight onto your hands, so your legs and knees don't have to deal with extra strain of heavy load.

Basically, it's like the legs are just squatting just the legs mass, not your whole body mass if you were doing standard standing squats.