Monday, November 9, 2009

Parasympathetic Nervous System Influence

"Rest and digest." The Z stuff is amazing. I'd like to come up with a writeup of how I personally see and understand the small bit of Z I learned at R-Phase, but I want it to be concise and at the same time easily comprehensible for anyybody out there, so it'll probably take a few more days. But I've already started practicing the talk as well as the walk :)

As soon as I arrived home, I started out working with my family. They all got pretty excited (except my husband, ever the classically stoic type, he just kept smiling at the sudden reduction of the funny "sweep" of his right foot he had had ever since he was a kid, a sort of a bit incredulous and confused but anyway appreciative smile... ). My son enjoyed "being made strong", my younger daughter got rid of her loud, "thumping" walk that had been also causing her heel pains for quite a while now, and my elder daughter was so fascinated altogether she announced she wanted me to teach her "all the moves and all this stuff" right away (she's 13) :)

I did a short demo in my morning group during the warmup, too, as a result of which the right shoulder ROM of a client improved instantly from what you would call Nazi-style lockout to full vertical. Later, in the middle of the workout he came up to me and asked: "Would you please do that magic to my other shoulder, too? It's so cool there's no tension, restriction, whatsoever on my right any more..." The beauty of the whole thing is, it is you, my friend, that should perform the "conjuring trick" for it to last, and I can teach you how... :)

Friday, November 6, 2009

Cooooool!

The fifth day of Z-Health R-Phase is over, we did the written, teaching and assessment testing today. I think I did quite well - which is really easy as all you have to do is follow the protocols by the letter and pay attention to details with the drills and everything else takes care of themselves as if by magic. And exactly this is what is on my mind all the time: this is like magic. We spent 5 days going over background and theory and all that, and it all makes perfect sense, and I do feel comfortable with all that in general, but still, it is still way beyond my comprehension when, in particular, I see tilting one's ankle 3 times gently to the side make a chronic shoulder pain go away, on the spot... ?!?

Also, I was lucky enough that I got the chance to have my injured leg checked by Dr. Cobb personally! Wowww :) It was massively frightening to be confronted with the fact that my center of gravity was inches away from where it should have been... Was it a wonder, then, that I had balance issues even just standing on that leg?!? He worked with me on that a bit today, he put me in one (two, actually) of the most weird positions imaginable and all I had to do was a few small pelvic tilts (he called them nerve glides). And!!! Lo and behold, there was I standing on one leg, planted like a tree, and even did my first ever stable pistol on my left leg there and then! (He did hold my hand for all cases but he didn't actually support me). Woohoo!! Freakin' awesome, and at the same time, sort of, mystical :)
And on top of all that, he said the balance issue was probably not from the knee tendinitis but the other way around, and it all goes back to an impingement of a nerve by scar tissue of a many years old abdominal surgery incision... A glimpse of how endlessly much I don't know I don't know.

Another really cool thing was that yesterday during lunch break Kenneth The Dane Of Pain personally taught me the Viking Push Press, the jerk and checked my bent press too. There were, thank God, no really big issues, but, as we all know, it's the small details that make the big difference :)

Am I lucky or what? Life's soooo good! :)

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

FMS, Z-Health and such

We had another FMS-weekend with our one and only Brett Jones at the end of October, which was, as expected, a blast. Lots of AHA-moments, for me personally also some unpleasant news: he scored me two asymmetrical 1's (HS left, ILL right) and even the TSPU was 1. I was not that much surprized by the former, all the more by the latter (I used to be a solid 3 on that). Brett had a fully comprehensible explanation for it (injury and pain messes up or even blocks your stability patterns to protect you, so to say, from yourself), but still... Okay, I know what to do and I'll fix that, but I wouldn't have thought it'd have such an effect even after half a year or so.

But now I also see why it was (and why it necessarily was) the case and now I don't even understand what I was so surprized about, lol. This Z-Health stuff is amazing, and although we are only at the end of the second day yet and we only got just a small glimpse of the system, it brought about, like the CK-FMS, an instant paradigm shift, from the biomechanical approach to the neurological one and that makes the whole thing frighteningly large-scaled and at the same time so logical and, actually, simple that I get light-headed just to think of it.

More to come and 'get busy being afraid': in addition to broomstick voodoo I can now cast or break a spell (if I so wish, haha) with one touch :)