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.
- Put your feet about two shoulder breaths apart, squat down as far as convenient. Move your butt left and right as much as possible.
Exercises
- Flow Run. Find a “lane” over and through the many fallen trees on the ground, over the Rocks and the rope. Run it for 20 minutes again and again. Try to get it quiet and flowy. If it does not fit you, adapt the lane.
- Circuit: Rope traverse and L-pushups.
- Rope traverse: Hang under the rope, move yourself from one tree to the other several times. Play with the technique! Try to get from hanging on the rope to clinging to the tree.
- L-pushups. Have your hands on the ground, the feet on a table, a 90° angle at the hip (so your body is a lying “L”). Try to do pushups. Help yourself with the feet if necessary.
- Apnoe exercise: Breathe 30 times into the belly, slowly and deeply. (Its similar to the Wim Hof method, but slower and just into the belly. Although the Wim Hof breathing gives a greater feel, I prefer to train the divers breathe, because I do not risk getting unconscious.).
- After the last time breathe out and just sit there and wait what happens, without force.
- Repeat this immediately afterwards. This time, after the last time, breathe out, stand up and walk slowly and quietly, fully observing all your feelings.
- Repeat again, this time with pushups.
- Eccentric stretching. Get your muscles into stretched positions while under medium tension (either gravity or a resistance band).
- Bathing in the pond. Put at least your bare feet into the water, more if you want. Try to be fully aware with what you feel (outside and inside) while doing it. Try to become aware of the thoughts that come with that. Just play with it, no pushing.
Tools used
- Start slow, keep going. Technique training is harder in uncomfortable conditions. Is is more difficult to enter “playing” mode. You feel clumsy, things don’t work like they used to. What can help is to start slow, with “safe” techniques, repeating them with variations. And gradually enlarge this cloud of possible movements. Important here is not to stop and think for too long. If you doubt and don’t dare what you wanted to do, do something easier. After a while you will sweat a bit, forget about the rain, have a feeling of what works and what not and just play with that.
- Circuit: What can circuit training have to do with joy? Actually, if done right, the frequent change of exercise, the not-all-out, the change of effort and relaxation (while other parts of the body are under strain), the repetition, the intensity, the focus on technique .. can lead to doing a lot of workout without having to push much.
Its all a question of finding into the rhythm and dosing the effort right.
It is important to focus on “grooving in” more than on “working out”, especially in the first round. Once you are grooved in, you can go to the max, and it is much more joyful then! And if it is one of these days, where you struggle with grooving in, you are training that, and going to the max does not make much sense anyway. - “Flow Run” The concentration on the technique, the increased feel of competence in every round, the balancing, the change of tasks keeps you in the moment.
- “Fully aware walking”: Also called foxwalk. Very slow walking, with full consciousness. Slow enough so that the balance changes all the time, but slow enough that the feelings don’t fall behind, is a good technique to practice keeping the “three bodies” in sync. The fact that we do it without breathing amplifies the awareness.
- Surrender: Both the apnoe techniques and the entering cold water target surrender. Cultivating the “observing what happens (without pressure)” can help build a habit of “feeling in and observing the situation” as soon as stressful situations arise, instead of panicking. The water stays cold without you doing something. You don’t have to “do” something like when running and you can fully focus on observing. And playing with the thoughts and feelings that arise.
- Stretching and tension: Disclaimer: I’m definitely not an expert here, this part should be written by somebody having more experience with Yoga!
Alternating tension and stretching, Stretching while under tension. Contract while in stretched positions. All this gets you a better feel how your body moves, what it can do and how, and whats inside.
Train Joy 