MCP1 Action Vectors, Part 1 of Improving Muscle Control and Proprioception

This is part 1 of a series of 5 yoga workshop videos designed to help you improve muscle control and proprioception.

In this workshop, you'll learn and practice "Action Vectors". Action vectors are a means of using reaction forces to move parts of your body in clearly defined directions. As a you'll gain awareness of how you are interacting with the floor. You'll also learn to feel and deliberately move parts of your body relative to your foundation. 

While it doesn't sound like much, not many teachers focus on teaching you how to feel and use your connection with the ground. It tends to be taken for granted. Or it tends to be taught with flowery metaphors. Here the focus is on clear directions that allow you to focus on using the floor and at the same time moving specific parts of your body in response.

One advantage of this technique is that poses like downward dog, side plank, and even yoga push up (), you can learn how to lift up or push up into these poses with less effort and more awareness. 

Learn Your body

MCP stands for Muscle Control and Proprioception. All of these workshop videos are based on the idea that muscle control and proprioception go hand in hand. Muscle activation is what gives you proprioception. At the same time, improving your ability to proprioceive your own body helps to improve your muscle control.

For all of these workshops, the main focus is on exercises to help you internalize the respective techniques. So rather than having to remember (or try to remember) different muscle control techniques, you are given exercises in the form of a routine to help you create muscle memories for each technique.

This workshop includes a quick reference PDF with pictures of all the poses as well as a summary of the basic action(s).

It consists of 4 videos:

Introduction, 1:44

• Part 1, 18:24 (Standing Forward Bend, Side Bend, Pyramid, Down Dog 1)
  
• Part 2, 19:45 (Triangle, Side Plank knees, Side Angle, Side Plank Top foot, Wide Leg Forward Fold, Side Plank Bottom Leg)
  
• Part 3, 13:59 (Minstrel F-Bend, Lunge, Down Dog Knee lift, Push up 1, Bridge, Push up 2, Down Dog heel lift, Twist, Finish)
  
• Part 4, 1:01 (Endnotes)
  

The exercises are taught as "follow along". However, for each exercise, it is strongly recommended that you also practice without the video. You can watch an exercise, doing it with the video, then pause the video and repeat the exercise by yourself.

Videos are in mp4 format and are downloadable (they can also be streamed using the gumroad app).

Whether on a Mac system or Windows, VLC is a very handy viewing app that allows you to create playlists so that you can seamlessly play all videos without having to operate any controls.

When making a purchase, remember your Gumroad login details (generally an email address and whatever your password is).

You can always download videos to different devices. You can also download updates when they become available.

30 Day Guarantee

If you aren't satisfied with this workshop you have 30 days from the day of purchase to get a refund. To instigate a refund, use the email address located at the end of the included pdf.

This series of videos won't make you a master of your own body, but they are designed to help get you on that path. If you look at smartphones, compared to the old "dumb" cell phones prior to the first iPhone. Smartphones are smart because they can sense your touch and respond in different ways to your touch.

The muscle control and proprioception workshop videos are designed to help you become smarter in your own body by learning to better feel it and control it.

This is something that you can carry into all aspects of your life.

But even aside from that, a focus on feeling your body (and controlling it) is a simple way of becoming more present. Rather than doing lots of different poses, one after the other, to turn your thinking mind of, here you can focus on the creating sensations within your body (by turning muscles on and off) to help turn of incessant thinking.

You could think of this as a type of conscious movement because each action, each movement is clearly defined. As a result, you can focus on doing it.