stretching

“Peace EarthFIT family! Lev here, just wanted to take a moment to discuss the habit that will be… that we’ll be focusing on this week. And that is recovery. Recovery is so important and often understated and underestimated. If you don’t take time to recover, you’re not going to see the gains in the gym, you will not be able to replenish your energy levels. And over time, it’s really easy to deplete yourself and, for longevity, but also in the short term for your gains is super, super crucial that you take time to recover every day. And, um, so for those of you who are training, for those of you coming to EarthFIT, you have the blessing of having the BioCharger, the sauna, you got massage, you got breath-work and trainers, awesome trainers that are coaching you on how to recover and you know, breathe deeply. And for those of you who are staying at home, I wanted to share three different practices that I use for my own recovery. And they’re very simple. I challenge you to try one for at least 10 minutes every day for your recovery and doing awesome. Keep it up. Hope you enjoy this.”

(1) Body Scan

“Peace EarthFIT family! So in this video, I want to share with you the art of body scan. This is a very ancient practice. You’ll see it in Qigong, in yoga, in ancient Kemetic or ancient Egyptian meditative practices. And the goal of body scanning is to bring your awareness into your body. And, one thing that we understand as holistic practitioners and as health practitioners is that our mind and our body are not disconnected. That our mind extends into all the different areas in our body. They have different intelligences that are stored in different areas in the body. And so this helps to integrate all the different aspects of ourselves. It’s very simple. You can take just 10 minutes or as long as you’d like, there’s no time limit to how long you can do it. And, but you wanna really take at least 10 minutes. So we’re gonna start by just getting in a comfortable position, laying down on the floor, palms facing up towards the ceiling. 

And we’re going to breathe, feeling abdomen and feeling your body as low as you can. You know, as deep as you can bring your breath, you want to bring it there. And as you breathe, you want to bring your, your mind and your awareness beginning with your, with your toes. You’re going to bring your awareness to your toes without wiggling your toe, without moving at all. You want it to be as still as possible, any impulse that your body has to move. You want to just observe it and you want to take note of it, but don’t move. Just try to use the power of restraint and just, just observe your body. So you’re going to start from your toes. Then you’re going to go to the knuckles. When your feet, then your ankle, then you’re going to go up through your legs, into your knee. 

Then you’re going to bring your awareness into your hip. And then you’re going to bring your awareness up through your back, and then your awareness into your shoulders, your awareness into your elbows. Awareness into your wrist, into your hands, to your fingertips. Now back to your pelvic region, bring your awareness up to each organ, your intestines, your stomach, your pancreas, your spleen, your liver, gallbladder, your rib cage, using your breath. All you’re doing is breathing into those places and bringing your mind to those places, bringing it to your heart and your lungs, bringing it up into your face and into your head. And as you go to each area, we just want to relax that area and breathe into that area. And by the end of it, you will find yourself in such a deep state of relaxation and connection in your body. I wish you all success with this.”

(2) Self Massage “Beat The Body”

“Peace EarthFIT family! So in this video, I want to talk to you all about self massage and share with you all the techniques that I use to help relax my body. In my day to day, I do this daily and it’s very simple and it’s a concept called, beating the body. And no, we are not beating the body in a way that hurts the body and causes pain or bruising or anything like that. But we do want to stimulate the tissues in the body by just, you know, with a nice pressure – tapping, in massage you call this tapotement and with this tapping, you know, you can start real gentle and start to the more you can relax, the harder you can actually hit. And every time you hit the body, you breathe and you exhale. So we start off just… (Please watch the video) It’s really good to do on your organs, lower back, the kidneys. You can do it to your arms and you want to really just relax into the strikes and, you know find ways… Once you relaxed, you can actually hit with some force and it’s gonna feel really good, but you want to make sure you’re relaxing fully. So try and be able to touch every part of your body or every needy part of your body, and in case with this a lot of muscle tissue. You want to be able to reach as high as you can on your back. You can try different hand positions, some of you would like to do cupping. Some people use the fist. I like the fist as well as just the flat, flat hand also works depending on the area and the neck you know, you may want to try the fingertips, and just find ways to help your body relax along with this. So that’s one technique for self massage.

Another technique is I like to use glass jars and what you can do, you can wrap the jar in a towel, even better. Fill the jar up with some hot water and seal the jar, and then wrap it in a towel. And now here, you can gently do some, some self massage. They sell, they sell rollers, you know, and a lot of (workout source) That you can buy and basically you find the muscle that you’re tensing and you can just roll immediately out. It’s a great form of self massage. You can do this with tennis balls or lacrosse balls. Some people do even golf balls. That’s really intense, but, you can stick them in a sock and just you know, place them wherever, wherever it feels like it’s helpful. You can place it in your neck, roll on to it in different ways. 

Yeah, real details or you can broaden the strokes. It’s a lot of different places. Just explore, get to know your body. Find those places that your body needs to release the tension, find the places where you hold the tension and relax into it. Anyway, try to spend 10 minutes and just go through your whole body and let me know how you feel.”

(3) Stretching

“Peace EarthFIT family! Just want to take the time here to share with you all 2 stretches that you can do in your day to day, to help with recovery, to restore your energy levels, to increase your vitality and to enhance your immunity in your body. So, the first stretch is a hip opener and a lower back release and it builds energy in the low back and in the kidneys specifically. We’re gonna find a nice, comfortable position with our sit bones on the ground spine, nice and long. Your feet do not have to be squeezed up close to you. They can be in just a comfortable position in front of you. We’re going to take our elbows and press our knees into the ground, and we’re going to initiate a movement of resistance. Wherein applying our own resistance onto our knees and the knees are pressing in towards each other. So it’s going to go like this. We’re going to inhale fully on the exhale, squeezing the knees in towards each other, resisting with the arm. When you come to the top, you’re going to inhale again, keeping that tension and on the exhale, pressing the knees back to the ground as the knees, continue to press up towards each other resisting and just really press those knees down as they’re pressing up. Let’s do it again. (Please watch the video)

All right. So the next stretch we’re going to come and we’re going to be working on our balance on the two sides of the body. And we’re working on lengthening the muscles all along the backside of the body. So we’re going to start by forward bending at the hips, leaning with the heart. We’re going to come down and if you can place your hands flat on the ground, you can bend your knees a little bit and just find a nice, solid position where your feet, your heels, your weight is in your heels and your hands distributed equally. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to walk a little forward and lift one leg up off the ground. In this position, we’re going to inhale, extending our leg and our head and exhale, straightening this knee, and lifting that leg towards the sky… and back. Let me try it again, inhale one more time inhale. Switch leg. Now, after you do both legs, we’re going to come and we’re going to lift up, opening our chest and then bending again from the hips here, sinking into our heels, lifting our toes off the ground.

For those who can’t put their hands on the ground, work with the chair. So you can do the same, the same stretches modified with the chair. So extending, standing the head and the foot, making it long working on your balance, breathing in on the exhale, extending that leg. I hope you enjoy these stretches. You will feel the effects immediately. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me personally, remember to spend at least 10 minutes going back and forth between the stretches in that order, starting with the butterfly stretch, and then going to the lengthening of the backside of the body stretch.”