At this year’s California WorldFest in Grass Valley, I led two in-person workshops on sequential stretching™ on July 14 and 15.
The Friday workshop included these stretch sequences:
Dominant Arm Swing
Table to Cat to Cow stretch
Expanding Cavern
The Saturday workshop included these stretch sequences:
Shoulder Circles
Walking Tripod
Head Lateral Swings
I feel that the workshops went wonderfully this year. Despite the heat, there were lots of pine trees for shade in most parts of the festival. I also felt like I made real connections with the participants and opened up their minds to some of my crazy stretching methodologies. I hope many of them will follow up by booking (currently free) individual lessons and/or following along with videos I’ve made on the techniques.
This year, I brought the microphone and amplifier again in case they were needed, but I decided people could hear me OK without them so I didn’t use them. This seemed to help improve the experience without the equipment in the way of talking with the attendees.
I also made time in between stretch sequences to ask about where and how they are feeling the stretch and get additional feedback. I found the responses fascinating, especially how each person experiences the stretch sequence in completely different parts of their body. Some of the more flexible attendees even found they didn’t feel some of the stretches at all because I failed to mention how to scale the stretch for different levels of flexibility.
Attendees seem to have the most trouble with two aspects of the stretch sequences:
- Moving slowly. This is something that comes easily to me, so it’s a great reminder that it doesn’t come easily for everyone mentally or physically. In the future, I’ll try to make some time to teach how to build up the ability to move slowly.
- Keeping arms up in the air for several minutes or more. I do strength training regularly, which might make this easier for me. However, I also think that even people with less strength can overcome this by:
- taking frequent breaks from the movement
- re-framing the issue of muscle fatigue as being instead about the body telling us we’re using the wrong muscles for that position
- decreasing how high you go in the motion
About 12 people in total attend the workshops, which was a nice improvement over the 5-6 people last year.
I am again grateful to Kat Pierdon for assisting me with the workshops, especially with promotion.
