split squats for sitting meditators with tight hips

 

I discovered a great exercise to stretch all the muscles in upper leg and hip.

(and even the lower legs, calf muscles on both legs depending on careful foot placement)

split squats, but doing many reps to emphasize stretches rather than trying to dip low (knees almost to ground) to burn your thigh muscles for muscle growth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EswpoF3TxkU

Like Jade Wushu champ doing at beginning of video.

Body builders doing split squats to get bigger leg muscles squat lower and slower.

Jade is mostly flexing to dynamically stretch and work towards doing full splits as in Chinese wushu training.

I find the best for deep hip and upper leg stretch (for sitting meditators looking to gain pliability) is somewhere between those two extremes.

The entire video of Jade above, 10min, is really good to stretch all around the leg.

I do something similar with my crab side shuffle stretch.

Ps: gorilla warfare

There's an important lesson here on guerrilla warfare (meditators looking to add to their bag of tricks to improve pliability and flexibility).

Split squats have been around forever.

I dismissed the exercise, thinking it's just for muscle heads trying to get big muscular legs and toned butt.

And I dismissed the wushu martial artists version in Jade's video, because that crowd, like gymnasts and contortionists, practice extreme and dangerous methods to gain super flexibility.

But all these years I missed out the fact, had I not experimented with it sooner is if you tune the exercise just right, it's great for stretching many parts of the leg and thigh quickly, in one exercise (whereas normally you need 4 or 5 exercises to stretch all parts of the leg).

So the lesson as always, it's NWBH.

It's not what you do, but how you do it that determines if something is useful, safe, or dangerous.

DWTD🐕: taiji and internal arts body movement

 Ideally should move with the whole body.

What happens in practice, beginners learn by looking at what the hands and arms are doing, 

and imitate that first,  

and then dragging the rest of the body along with the hands.

Tail wagging the Dog.

It takes years, even decades for energy channels to open up, 

for one's whole body sensitivity to reach the point where one can directly can clearly see 

what body parts is leading what, and whether the whole body moves together in perfect unison.

For beginner and intermediates, if you're going to err better for the hands and arms to lag the torso and legs (tail moved by dog, lags the dog).