The second training was kind of a variation of the first one. Here is a quick recap of what we did.
Warmup
- Turn wrists, turn elbows, turn shoulders, use full range of motion
- Go on all fours, put little weight on the hands, push body up with the wrists. Stretch lower arms in several directions. Carefully feel into your wrists, what feels good and what not.
- Swing whole body, feel the blood pouring into your fingertips.
- Swing even more until knees touch the ground.
- Make circles with knees (around hips).
- Make circles with feet (around knees.
- Turn your ankles.
Exercises
- Intuitive Running: Run through the forest, balance on fallen trees, jump over rocks.
- Animal walk mixed with rolls, every time it gets strenous, forward and backward. Feel dizziness, hear your heart beat!
- Monkey walk mixed with sideway rolls.
- Stand, feel your feet on the ground, circle your weight around the center of gravity. Try to make the circles smaller, until you hit a spot where you can stand most effortless.
- Try too keep this effortless feeling while starting to run (not too fast)
- Try to keep this feeling while running uphill
- Long monotonous workload (animal walk or lunges). Keep your attention in your body, keep your couriosity.
Tools used
It was a quite simple training we did yesterday. But we already used many tools to enjoy training:
- “Brain dump”: write everything you ponder about or any unfinished trains of thoughts on a piece of paper. Put it in your pocket. You can continue after training (if its still important then)
- Continuous attention. While doing the “intuitive run” we have to observe the environment at any moment, reacting quickly to obstacles. This keeps us in the right mode.
- Keep mindfulness: This is a hard one! When you are forced to do something where you can’t stop or do breaks. Your only chance here is to stay in the mode of mindfulness as good as possible. You may have noticed that while it gets difficult quickly, there comes a “second breath” after a while. When you can reach a “stable state” at a higher level of effort. And use your hard breath or the alternation of contraction and relaxation as anchor. Don’t be disappointed if it didn’t work yesterday, it requires practice and depends on daily condition.
- “Observation break”: Stop doing what you do, check your physical and mental status.
- “Paradox break”: Break up monotony in an exercise by doing something which makes you loose control or orientation a bit. For example do a somersault while crawling on the floor. Enjoy the dizzyness or use the moment of disorientation for an observation break.
- “Posture of least effort”: What we did before running. Move body in circles, find the posture most in-balance. These postures also exist on all fours or while carrying heavy weight.
- “Take balance with you”. Try to take a balanced and effortless feeling into movement. In our case from standing to running. But can also be from lying to standing up.
- “Observe and stop when closing down”. What we did with hillrunning. Start with “eyes wide open”. Observe your body and mind while increasing effort. Catch the moment when you start “closing down” (grimacing, pulling shoulders forward, stomping,…). Try to stay open as long as possible.
- Use short relaxation as reward. After the hill runs, we stood or sat for a few moments. Hear the heart beat, hear the sound of breath. Enjoy coming back into the comfort zone. Don’t skip this! We are in training and not on the run!
Train Joy 