The extremities of our bodies serve us as our interface with the surrounding environment. The way that the characters from the Avatar movie use their braids to interface with other lifeforms, is the way we use our hands, connecting our brains through our nervous system to anything we touch. When we understand how to manipulate what we are holding, we can then control it with our mind through our bodies.
Our hands and our feet, our wrists and our ankles, to me, are some of the most important parts of our body to spend time maintaining, and this article is all about the wrists and hands.
Self-treatment techniques like self-Shiatsu are important here, but to be covered another time. This article will focus on stretching, slow controlled range of motion exercises, and loading the hands with our bodyweight. This prepares us for and leads us toward hand transitions, which includes skills such as crawling, handstands, yoga poses such as downward dog, ground vaults, and cartwheels.
This week's online class focuses on this, but I also have some resources for you to follow to get some of the ideas if you haven't subscribed to my online classes.
For a follow along video guiding you through some key wrist stretches, please check this link or click the image below:
In our class, we also explored the fundamentals of loading the hands. I don't have a YouTube tutorial going into detail about this, but I do have a short video that will guide you though the initial transition to bearing your weight on your hands:
We also explored some dynamic hand transitions like lazy cartwheels, and ground vaults. This is where things get fun. I don't have videos on YouTube of everything we did, but here's a Tuck Cartwheel tutorial that will walk you though something interesting to explore:
The online class for this week is a 30+ minute walkthrough that really leans more into some interesting progressions to connect these elements all together.
If you want to see the full online class, it will be available for about 2 months when it will be replaced with the next video. I'd love to keep them all online and available indefinitely, but hosting videos can get expensive, so I am limited by how much online storage space I have to use.
You can read more about and sign up for my online class subscription through the link below. Thanks for reading!