Muscle Control and Proprioception for Better Flexibility

Muscle Control and Proprioception for Better Flexibility is a set of 6 video workshops (and ebooks) designed to help you learn to better feel your body. The whole series of workshops are designed so that you can learn to feel and control their body easily. 

We've never met and so I don't know your current level of experience, nor your level of body awareness or control. And so these courses have been designed and organized so that you can learn muscle control easily. It's based on my experience both from improving my own flexibility and also from experimenting with these techniques in my classes. 

Part of the experimentation process included seeing what worked and what didn't. Part of it included learning how to effectively teach these techniques. 

These courses have also been designed so that even with basic actions, you can still learn something. So even doing something as mundane as allowing your hips to move when you push against the floor can lead to unexpected insights if you focus on feeling your body while doing the exercises. 

That being said, if your budget is limited, and you are pretty good at self-learning, then you may find that you can pick things up pretty easily jumping into the workshops midstream. 

These workshops are in video format with a pdf quick guide. 

Videos aren't always the best mechanism for retaining information. However, these videos are designed so that you can retain information. Actually, the exercises are designed to make it easy to retain what you see and hear. And you do that by doing the exercises both as you watch the video, and then repeating the exercises while pausing the video.

Muscle control is sometimes hard to capture with a set of pictures. And even with video, it's not always visible. However, the build-up to each exercise makes it ideally easy to learn each exercise, particularly if you do the exercises in the order given. 

And so that you don't have to watch each video over and over (though you can if you want or need to), or so that you can easily recall a particular instruction, a quick reference pdf has also been included. 

Note the word "workshop" in this products description. These style videos, though I do spend a few minutes to focus on particular points in the context of particular exercises. They are classes or workshops which present exercises and information in small chunks so that you can absorb the information by doing the exercises. And so that the need to think is minimized, each workshop focuses on the same basic technique. You then learn the technique by practicing it in a variety of poses or positions. 

And the exercises themselves require your awareness. So that you can focus on feeling your body while you do the movements, each exercise is taught with very clear, simple and short instruction sets. 

You should be able to easily remember these instructions. You can then focus on repeating the exercise. In the process, you experience  your muscles turning on and off and you learn to feel your muscles turn on and off (provided you are looking for the sensation in the right place!)

In some cases, the focus isn't so much on feeling muscles, but feeling your bones. But in either case, provided you move slowly and smoothly (which is something else that the videos are good for, it gives you an idea of the pacing of the movements) it's reasonably easy to learn to feel your body. And because it can take to move slowly and smoothly, you'll also be improving your ability to control your body.

And so this isn't a regular yoga class where you do the videos as a workout. The intent of these videos is to teach you to feel and control your body so that you can use the muscle control and proprioception that you learn when working towards improving the flexibility of your hips or legs. 

And that's another reason for including an array of techniques. In the course of teaching muscle control in my classes, I've found that some techniques work with some students, some techniques work with others. Even for myself, on any given day I find that I have to experiment with different techniques. And really what I'm doing isn't so much experimenting with different techniques as it is feeling my body and then responding with a particular muscle activation based on what I feel.  

If that sounds difficult or challenging to you, all I can say is give it a try. While I was in the army I was an armorer. I fixed rifles. And at the time I thought I would never be smart enough to study or learn about electricity or electronics. It seemed like magic to me. When I left the army I applied to University and eventually made my way into the Systems Design Engineering program. I learned that electricity and electronics are not hard to learn if you approach it with a step-by-step systematic approach. 

And that's the approach I've taken with muscle control and proprioception for better flexibility. The whole program has been designed to make muscle control and proprioception (they are both aspects of the same thing, if you want to control your body you have to be able to feel it) easy to learn. And the thing is, it's like learning to ride a bike. Once you learn how to feel your body, (and you do this bit-by-bit) it's not something you are likely to forget.

And that in turn can make it easier to learn new actions. Instead of trying to memorize movements by their external shape or form, you can remember them by feel.

Note that I've been publishing videos on youtube for a few years now. These videos are not filmed workshops. They are done in my home with a tripod mounted camera. The videos aren't scripted either and so in the process of explaining some exercises I do run into problems. And some of these problems may be (or the same) as problems that you . And so as well as learning muscle control, you'll also get some idea of how to deal with muscle control problems. 

Each exercise is clearly defined with a minimal number of discrete instructions. You should find it easy to hold these instruction sets in short-term memory so that you can then practice the exercises while the video is paused. You may find that you can easily remember 5 exercises or more if you learn them and review each exercise. (If you can only remember 3 at a time that's fine ). The point is that by repeating the exercises without the videos you can truly learn the material.

Plus, each workshop focuses on repeating the same action in a variety of poses. So really, all you have to remember, once you've repeated the action a few times, is the poses. And even those are, too an extent arbitrary. The important item of learning in each workshop is the action itself.

This package has three options. 

All options include:

• Focused Floor Pressing (MCP 4)
  
• Control part 1 (a flexible approach MCP 5))
  
• Muscle Control Part 2 (a flexible approach to flexibility MCP 5a))
  

Options 2 and 3 also include

• Yoga for your Shoulders
  
• Muscle Control for Flexibility (the original muscle control program)
  
• Active Stretching
  

Option 3 also includes

• Action Vectors (MCP 1)
  
• Foot Exercises for Proprioception (MCP 2)
  
• Frictional Resistance (MCP 3)
  

Please also check out the Muscle Control Package for more muscle control package options. (The options are designed to be complementary to the options presented here.)