BrickhouseBodymind.com is a mind body fitness blog, encouraging personal transformation and bringing about total fitness through informative articles on integral lifestyle issues such as stress relief, sexuality and relationships, and transformative practices like strength training, meditation and yoga. The website is designed to help you train your body, sharpen your mind, and unleash your spirit, making total fitness a reality for everyone.
Just in time for summer, one of the best flat-tummy core exercises I know - the spinal rock. In this episode I explain some tips for getting better results from the killer ab exercise, the spinal rock.
Special thanks go to Becca Davis for the production photos, Robert for his camera work, Signal Path for the intro music, and as always my wife for allowing me to spend time on this exhilarating diversion. Please let me know how you like the video content by commenting below, and don’t forget to subscribe via e-mail or rss so you don’t miss the next great recipe, article or video on integrating mind and body fitness.
This episode is a video response to James’s recent comment about asymmetry as it relates to joint mobility programs. I want to thank James for his comment, and I also want to make clear that this drill as well as the one in Episode 1 come from Andrey Lappa’s Dance of Shiva system, not my own head. I only present these exercises to give you an idea of the types of movements I work with everyday to improve my long-term health. If you’re interested in detailed instructions of this extremely complex system, I strongly suggest picking up his DVD.
In this episode I demonstrate the power and challenge of asymmetry in the vertical arm movements of Lappa’s system. These movements work the arms through their entire range of motion - internal/external rotation of the humerus, pronation/supination of the forearm, flexion/extension of the elbow, and flexion/extension of the shoulder. As you work with these movements, be careful not to let your shoulders become tense and creep toward your ears. These movements should be fluid and free. Try also to activate the bandhas as you get more comfortable with the practice. Enjoy!
If you haven’t already, be sure and subscribe via e-mail or rss, so you don’t miss the next episode. Thanks a ton to Robert for the use of his garden and his nice camera work, and thank you for watching!
Okay, so this is a post announcing the first of what I hope will be many BrickhouseBodymind Blueprints. These are pdf documents and will be of the same nature as my posts here on the blog. The blueprints are printer-friendly, miniature e-books that are aesthetically designed and contain high-quality images where appropriate. They will cover subjects I consider to be core elements of the Brickhouse Bodymind integral fitness lifestyle. I hope these will be more user-friendly to readers than filling a long blog post with a bunch of pictures. We all know what a nightmare those can be to print.
This first one will be freely available at the link below for as long I feel like leaving it there. In the foreseeable future, these blueprints will remain free of charge to those who subscribe to my e-mail feed, so go ahead and jump on board if you like what you read. If you’re subscribed already via a feed reader, I’m going to try and figure a way to make these things available to you as well. I’ll let you all know how that goes.
This blueprint is a detailed discussion of the use of the yogic bandhas to insure proper structural alignment in posture practice, in general exercise, and in life. These techniques are best explored with an instructor to give you immediate feedback, but this document should give you a good idea of what’s happening and why it’s to your advantage to explore these actions in depth. They are obviously part of the yoga tradition – and as such have innumerable applications within the practice of hatha yoga – but their practice and benefits extend far beyond yoga asana. I practice these techniques lying in bed at night to calm my mind and first thing in the morning to loosen up and energize my core. I find they are fantastic tools for building and controlling sexual energy and for increasing sexual longevity. They are great for helping maintain proper alignment while lifting weights in a gym setting as well. The applications really are unlimited.
First off, a quick apology for letting nearly two weeks go by without a post. I have been earnestly training for this race, as well as getting together material for a string of features over the next couple of weeks. There’s a new episode of BrickhouseBodymindTV going live tomorrow, followed closely by a long article on using the yogic bandhas to enhance core strength and ensure proper alignment in all you do, then I’ll be releasing the BrickhouseBodymind Blueprints for effective warmups and cooldowns that go along with the intelligent stretching articles. So again, sorry for the lengthy absence.
That said, the OT50 is actually two races, one that is 50 km (approximately 31 miles) and another that is 50 miles, both of which started at Maumelle Park just outside Little Rock at 6:00 a.m. on April 19, 2008. The bulk of the distance in both races ran along the Ouachita Trail from its trailhead at Pinnacle Mountain State Park and followed it around the north side of Lake Maumelle. The outbound leg included a jaunt up the east side of Pinnacle Mountain, which is a steep climb from about 400 feet above sea level to the summit at 1011 feet. Here’s a map of the course with landmarks and mile markers, or you can download this kmz file to scope out the Ouachita Trail 50k course for 2008 in Google Earth.
Editor’s Note – What follows are my personal impressions and interpretations of Scott Sonnon’s latest book, Prasara Yoga: Flow Beyond Thought. My use of the term “integral,” both in the title of this article and throughout the body of it, to describe Coach Sonnon’s work is not meant in any way to confuse it with nor to marginalize Sri Swami Satchidinanda’s Integral Yoga Hatha or Sri Aurobindo’s The Integral Yoga, both of which stand on their own as seminal works. I only mean to indicate how Scott’s approach employs the primary integral strategy (which produces the All-Quadrant integral model described in my article on Integral Fitness) of assimilating truths from all sources available, whether ancient, modern, or somewhere in between, in order to present the most complete picture of human development possible.
I’d like to start by thanking one of my readers, Duff (of fallingfruit.tv and precisionchange.com), for turning me on to the work of martial arts champion and Circular Strength Training® developer Scott Sonnon. For a voracious seeker of light like myself, personal development can be charted along a path upon which the most significant twists and turns are tied to landmarks such as the reading of a specific book or the discovery of a specific writer or teacher.
At age 29, my own path has several of these major landmarks – Roshi Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillar’s of Zen; the wonderful fiction of Tom Robbins, which led me to Alan Watt’s The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are; my first yoga teacher, Matt Krepps, who pointed me toward Godfrey Devereux’s Dynamic Yoga, and the work of Jed McKenna; the fiercely voluminous library of Ken Wilber; and now Scott Sonnon, who has empowered me to take yet another turn in my personal journey.
What Scott Sonnon presents in his latest book, Prasara Yoga: Flow Beyond Thought, is a digitally digestible, postmodern path to enlightenment. With the human body as the vehicle, it is an exquisitely sophisticated, integral approach to Hatha Yoga.
