Natural Hard Exercise - Stuart's Community Health Stewardship Continues
Monday, January 18, 2010
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
Reader Stuart Wood did a magnificent thing. He took charge and started teaching my work to reduce the high rate of strain-related injuries in his community for projectsranging from school health to senior health to water harvesting in his arid city of Tucson.
Stuart writes:
"The second group of pictures in the set are from a water harvesting project run by the Water Management Group here in Tucson. We spent 5 hours digging and bending and planting. The structures make use of street run-off in a way that reduces road and water pollution while at the same time "greening" the street by providing the plants with water which will eventually shade the side-walk and street and reduce the "heat-island" created by all the asphalt and concrete that attracts and absorbs sunlight/heat.
"This was my first time volunteering with them and I didn't get a chance to teach but I did figure out how to dig and bend correctly myself. It was a work-out and felt really good. I have dug in the past for long hours with improper bending and what it a difference it makes! Soon I hope to teach the other volunteers so that in addition to being good stewards of the community they can also be good stewards of their health.
"The watershed admin is thinking the best thing for me to do would be to teach the various instructors so that they could then oversee the volunteers throughout the city.
Stuart will retrain participants' bending so that their exercise is healthy for themselves and the community
"I was looking at your website (DrBookspan.com/Academy) and seeing the part about scholarships for Native Americans and the elderly, that intrigued me a lot. There is a large reservation just south of town for the Tohono O'odahm Indians, I have been thinking about how neat it would be to teach some of them.
"Recently there has been a wellness program implemented by the City of Tucson to reduce work-related strains and injuries. They have not been exposed to your work yet but they have been exposed to stretches that are potentially damaging at worst and ineffective at best! My friend spoke kindly of me and how your blog and my advice had helped him so, when I talked to his supervisor, he was more than helpful in suggesting ways in which I might be able to teach city workers in various settings and occupations."
More work is in progress. Reports to come.
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure about you. We were born to manifest the glory that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. As we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
--- Read success stories of these methods and send your own. See if your answers are already here by clicking labels, links in posts, archives, and The Fitness Fixer Index. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, click "updates via e-mail" upper right. For personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Limited Class space for personal feedback. Top students may earn certification atDrBookspan.com/Academy. Learn more in Dr. Bookspan's Books.
We planted a vegetable garden this Spring in my mother's field. Hard exercise changed a rocky ruined area into beautiful food. It's getting cold now. Readers asked how the garden turned out. Here are stories:
We are harvesting. By afternoon it is dark with a large orange moon overhead lightning our work. The hard work keeps us warm.
When we first cleared the area, we filled the wheelbarrow with concrete slabs, pried and dug from the patch. Paul bent to grasp the wooden handles. When he rose lifting the handles, the barrow was so heavy that both handles snapped, scattering everything. Paul is strong.
We sawed and attached new handles. Much good squatting, bending, rising, lifting, and reloading. Paul bent well (upper body fairly upright, knees bent over heels). At almost seven feet tall, he needed to bend low. When he rose, the wheelbarrow handles were so high in the air, the front of the barrow tipped forward so far that contents spilled everywhere.
Hoeing a field, breaking concrete, digging stumps and rocks, bending and reaching, lifting right, hauling bales of compost, and all the rest that gardening can involve, is more exercise than you can get in a gym. It combines hard natural movement using much of the body at once to give muscular and cardiovascular exercise. To pull weeds, you squat well, both heels down, loosen roots with a digging stick, grasp weeds at the roots, rise pulling slowly. Over and over. Rise and bend. Garden prayer.
We were amused that more grew outside than inside the garden. Outside, tall weedy grasses grew everywhere. Inside, small seedlings grew into low herbs and vegetables. Deer and other animals didn't eat our garden. We had built a 6-foot fence around it, but deer can easily jump that height, and small burrowing groundhogs and rabbits can wiggle through or under. What we had done is leave them a bushy meadow near the garden area, with plenty of food and hiding places. They didn't need to bother the garden. The municipality cited my mother for a violation of some kind for not mowing her "lawn." Sorry Mom! We paid it for her.
Large slabs of concrete lay buried, inches below the surface of much of the area we wanted to plant. We needed to break and remove them. I managed to lift Paul's huge sledgehammer, swinging it with both hands over my head. It came down on the slab and bounced. I tried a wider stronger swing. It was heavier to swing than it looked. It bounced off the concrete each time. I handed it to Paul. He swung it quickly with one arm, splintering the slab. We dug the dozens of new football-sized pieces and made a rock border for the flowers nearby.
We gardened without pesticides or chemicals. We hauled hundreds of pounds of compost that the municipality gives away free at the recycling centers. Thank you recycling center for all the good exercise, compost, and manure. Plants grew healthy and didn't need chemicals to fight insects. They could fight them from their own internal health - people can do the same much of the time from simple good health practices. Plants manufacture their own anti-inflammatories against disease. That is part of why eating vegetables and fruit is good for your own health against inflammation.
The work it took to eak out a few plates of vegetables for each meal reminded us of subsistence farmers - how worrisome it is to have to rely on what you can scratch out of your own soil. If we had to last the winter on what we grew, it would be a long thin winter. Much of the world does not sit around indulgently with fast food in the refrigerator. Many do not have refrigerators. Before spending money on junk food, then complaining you are too heavy, think. Save the money. Improve your health. Refraining from eating does not make anyone fat.
The tomatoes grew tall and long. They grew so much that we could not find the strawberries.
We are saving the seeds from the sweetest cantaloupe, the largest cabbages, and the most wonderful purple peppers and white eggplants for next year.
The wonderful Thai bamboo hoes we brought back with us have shrunk in our colder dryer climate, loosening the heavy metal shovel-heads so they tilt sideways with each overhead swing. We have been fixing them, then going back to hoeing. The ground will soon freeze. Hoeing is more upper back strengthening and work than anything in a gym, even more than all the pushups and handstands that I love. Bend knees, upper back upright, breathe in, swing up, breathe out, swing down. Over and over.
Saturday night was Halloween. The World Series was playing. Paul didn't want to disappoint me by not going out to see the fun going on for Halloween in the city, and would never have said anything. I put on a costume and sat with him to watch the game. It was a great evening. The next day I put on a scarecrow costume and we worked in the garden.
We were just two city kids, who grew up in urban slums. I didn't know about gardening, but we read, worked, learned from mistakes, and sweated under the hot sun and the cold evening air.
Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and The Fitness Fixer Index. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. For personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Limited Class spaces for personal feedback. Top students may apply for certification throughDrBookspan.com/Academy. Learn more in Dr. Bookspan's Books.
For weightlifters who enjoy Olympic lifts, rows, cable cross-overs, curls, and all the other good stuff with endless heavy weight, you may like growing vegetables.
We have been tilling a vegetable garden from a rocky field at my Mom's. Seems her home was built on landfill. We had to sledge-hammer and pry concrete slabs - prodigious squatting, levering, clean-and-jerking, and hundred pound medicine ball throws over the just-built garden fence into a pile. Then lifting and hauling away the pile.
Carrying sand, earth, rocks, weed bales, tree branches as heavy as you can lift, over uneven rocky hilly earth back and forth from the truck, the field, and the new compost pile a hundred feet away for hours is functional weightlifting. Hours of repetition-maximum (RM) hoeing gives a harder abdominal, arm, and gluteal workout than it looks.
Healthline software still isn't uploading my own photos. At left above, a photo of a statue with too much lumbar curve/hyperlordosis to be healthy, but in general doing functional weightlifting. Use your muscles to prevent overarching like this when you swing a sledge, a kettlebell, or other weight. For Fitness Fixer posts on neutral spine and hyperlordosis, click the photo or here.
Over the winter while visiting home in Asia, my husband Paul and I went to a workman's shop. The store-keeps remembered us and smiled. The first time we went there years ago, they were so sure we were lost tourists, they took our shoulder and gestured at a restaurant. In the best Thai I could manage, I explained that Paul is a carpenter, has done forge metal work, and loves old-world tools, strong bamboo handles, and hand-hammered metal. They smile each year we return. In the US, we live in a crowded urban area with minimal bricked exterior in deep shade from surrounding buildings. Vegetable gardens don't grow. Paul wanted to plant my Mother's field - a brambled overgrown area.
In the Thai tool store, I explained with the words I knew that Paul was looking for a specific Thai tool, shaped like a backward shovel, that you use in overhead action, like a mattock (flat bladed pick).
Quickly, excitedly, word went from the store-keep, to her friend in the next shop, to the next, and next:
"Man who good to Mother of wife!"
The coconut telegraph was happy. We bought two heavy tools, called "job" in Thai. Both had thick lovely bamboo handles. One was giant sized for Paul, the other for me. Fun getting them through flights and US customs.
Mom had asked a local man what it would take to clear her field, and he told her a blowtorch, a machine plow, three men, and a week. Paul and I cleared it in one day in early April with a digging stick and the Thai hoe-shovels. The ground was half frozen. Six, or so hours massive exertion - first clearing brush and tall grasses, then hours of half-squats to seize handfuls of stalks, standing back up to pull them with grip strength. Then excavating slabs of concrete and discarded materials with a pry bar, the Thai digging tools, and bare armed weight lifting.
The packs of seeds we had scattered in assorted flowerpots, pans, shoeboxes, and containers sprouted over just a week into tiny plants - broccoli, cabbage, pea, hot and sweet peppers, strawberries, eggplants, and assorted spices. We have been learning about complementary planting - plants, just like people, who are better and healthier with specific other kinds of plants so that chemical fertilizer isn't needed. We are learning about plants that repel pests, instead of using insecticides.
We got a rain barrel to reduce water bills. We attached an old broken hose. The holes made it a natural soaker hose. We poked more holes and arranged it around the garden for drip irrigation. We don't know the water quality of either the rain or from the tap. We will send six dollars and a soil sample to an agricultural university for testing. Maybe other toxic things are in that landfill that we don't want the vegetables absorbing. Maybe commercial food factories have the same problem. Many things to learn.
Weeks pass squatting and sitting well to plant seedlings, still hitting buried rubble. More lifting and hauling. Each night we are too tired to worry or think anything bad. We are barely were able to lift hands and feet. I consider what people for thousands of years have been doing just for subsistence farming, day after day, year after year. I thought of Fitness Fixer success story Ivy and her story - Farm Work, Lifestyle Exercise, and Preventing Overuse Pain.
We thought we planted everything, then found a half pack of pea seeds left. Paul mentioned we didn't have one more container for them. I laughed, "we didn't have a pot to pea in."
Ideas:
If you're a tough vital strong person, or want to be, dig a garden.
If you don't have anywhere to dig one, hook up with some nice elder who wants one, a community group, Habitat for Humanity, or someone who doesn't want to exercise like this but still wants a garden.
Contact your community to see about organizing parents and children out in sunshine for functional exercise doing good for all.
If you only want one hour a day of hard total body fat burning muscle building exercise, only plant a small vegetable garden.
No need to buy fancy tools, use what's handy.
If you don't want to exercise so hard, try a single pack of seeds in some potting soil in almost any container on a sunny windowsill. A chance to get the vegetables you like.
Fancy individual peat pots and seed starters aren't essential; a simple pack of seeds can get you a pan full of fragrant oregano, said to be very healthful. It gives a gasp of wonder (to me) when seedlings actually sprout.
Before the 2008 election, a video appeared by Roger Doiron (I don't know him, just liked the video). He asked the next President to grow a garden. It did come true. Here is his viewpoint of getting your own garden started, showing various bending, occasionally good:
Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from fun ones. Before asking more, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, or in the Fitness Fixer Index.
Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books. Get certified - DrBookspan.com/Academy.
Here is Fast Friday Fitness - Bend right and pull one of the highest nutrition garden items, free, even if you have not planted a garden:
Find dandelions. You can tell them by their jagged leaves. The leaves gave them their name, from the French for 'dents de lion' (tooth of the lion).
Use good bending, with squat or lunge, to pull free nutritious food. Many people will let you have theirs free.
You can eat the green, the flowers, even the roots. USDA Bulletin #8, "Composition of Foods" (Haytowitz & Matthews 1984) ranks dandelions in the top 4 green vegetables in overall nutritional value.
Dandelion has long been known as a top nutritional food and even medicine. The official name, Taraxacum officinal, comes from the Greek, 'taraxos' meaning 'disorder' and 'akos' meaning 'remedy.'
Eat the greens as salad, sautéed like other green vegetables, or make juice. Greens are best fresh and young, just before the plant flowers. Greens have bitter taste (like coffee and beer) that is said to aid digestion. People who are accustomed to junk sweets may not like them at first, then they taste better over time, and mixed with nuts, spices, and vinegar.
Dandelion flowers are pretty in salads and on vegetables, or use them to make wine (to be covered in posts to come). Dandelion root contains inulin, a soluble fiber which does not raise blood sugar or triglycerides, making it helpful to people with diabetes. Dig roots in early spring or fall. You can eat them as is, or soak them in a jar of brandy or vodka for four weeks (or more) to make a tincture.
Now you can stop using poisonous and expensive chemicals on your lawn too. Better not to add these substances to the water system, or to yours.
The good news? Even when you pull them to eat, they come back to make more free nutritious garden without work.
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Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from fun ones. Before asking more, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, or in the Fitness Fixer Index.
Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books. Get certified - DrBookspan.com/Academy.
Spring Garden is Fitness Health Goodness as a Lifestyle
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
United States First Lady Michelle Obama led the way to dig and sow a vegetable garden on the south lawn of the White House. Local primary school (elementary school) students helped, and are scheduled to continue sharing the work and knowledge and benefits of planting, weeding, caring for, and harvesting vegetables and herbs for the White House kitchen.
The first lady is developing programs to promote healthy eating for American families. In an interview, she stated, "My hope is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities… Its most important role, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at a time when obesity and diabetes have become a national concern."
Plans involve the entire First Family. President Barack Obama is scheduled to help weed and tend the garden.
In the 1990's US President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton tended a rooftop vegetable garden.
In 1943, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden in front of the White House. (In the 1920s she was also prominent in the movement to allow women to vote in US elections.) Her White House war effort Victory Garden inspired millions. By 1945, 40 percent of produce in the US was grown at home.
Read about teaching neighborhood children self-respect instead of vandalizing, and to reap what they sow, and share what they harvest for healthier neighborhoods - Lifestyle Fitness for Kids Through Gardening
For more Fitness Fixer on each topic, click labels gardening and green fitness under this post. The label children gives fitness of all kinds for children.
Questions come in by the hundreds. See if your answers are already here - click Fitness Fixer labels, links, archives, andIndex. For personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Limited Class space for personal feedback. Top students may earn certification throughDrBookspan.com/Academy. More fun in Dr. Bookspan's Books.
Autumn Yard Work - Limiting the Person Instead of the Injury Again?
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
A Medline article on autumn yard and housework gives a list from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, which they say will reduce injuries. Their list includes doing less, lifting lighter loads, not lifting overhead, or using turning action to the side.
The Orthopaedic Surgeons' list is another case of limiting the patient to limit the pain.
It is unfortunate to instruct patients to do less physical activity. It is no mystery that restricting activity reduces strength, flexibility, and balance. When patients become tight and weak, they are next sent to physical therapy to lift weights and stretch. Instead, go outside. Get free exercise, get stronger, increase balance, have some fun instead of being held back.
It is not a mystery that if you spend an afternoon bent wrong over a rake, lifting wrong, and hunching your shoulders, you will be achy. Have fun doing yard work in the fresh air in healthy, commonsense ways:
Carry Heavy Leaf Bags - check if you lean backward to hold and carry loads. Instead of leaning, which pinches the lower spine, stand upright, use neutral spine - Prevent Back Surgery
You Don't Need Expensive Ergonomic Rakes And Tools Or Fancy Padding. The majority of the world does far heavier work with far less. Bend right (links above) instead of bending over. To prevent hand irritation and blisters, don't clench your grip and be willing to toughen your hands and skin. Being too delicate means fragile skin. The soil has many substances beneficial to health and disease reduction, some documented to reduce depression. Post on this to come. Don't be too afraid to get dirty.
Doing less is a flawed approach to preventing injury in the short term, and over the long run, will undermine your health and abilities. Use your brain for healthy, fun ways to keep doing more of your favorite activities.
"You're never too old to become younger" -Mae West
--- Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from fun ones. See if your answers are already here by clicking links and archives and the Fitness Fixer Index. Read success stories of these methods and send your own. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy. ---
Here is Fast Friday Fitness - easy, good tasting, healthful food you can grow yourself in your kitchen. Sprouting seeds can be fun to do with children to teach them many things about food, responsibility, biology, and more. Mung beans are a good easy bean to start with:
Spread a bunch of dry beans on a plate. Add enough water to wet the beans. Leave out on a sunny counter.
Rinse beans and plate daily, and return beans to the plate with fresh water.
Within a week, you will have fresh sprouts.
Above photo is a plate of mung beans a few days after sprouting
Sauté lightly in a pan with balsamic vinegar, a slight amount of olive or grapeseed oil, and season with any variety of healthful spices that you like - curry, pepper, fresh lemon, etc. Scramble the sprouts into whatever vegetables or other good food you are cooking.
If you eat the sprouts when they are barely sprouted, it will taste nuttier. If you wait until the sprouts have grown long, they will taste more like greens.
Sprouted sunflower, clover, broccoli, radish, lentil, mung bean, and pea sprouts taste good and have many vitamins and disease-fighting phytochemicals. Sprouting seeds and grains reduces the amounts of phytates in the food, which in turn, increases absorption of minerals like calcium.
Related Fitness Fixer:
Junk Food Through Your Skin? tells how sprouts contain sulphoraphane, which activates cancer-fighting enzymes in your own cells throughout your body, making sprouts healthy not only when eaten, but when used as part of homemade sunscreens.
full squat for chores with feet facing the same direction as knees, and both heels down
A Thai villager sits straight, getting nice hip stretch, and keeps ankles straight - see Unhealthy Yoga Ankles
Our friend MomPon is relative to the abbot of the Muay Thai Monks on Horseback near the border of Myanmar (Burma). We stayed with her during the time we spent at the monastery. She sits straight and comfortably in full squat to get things for dinner from her garden, then to wash dishes in her kitchen. We do the same when we help. She stands straight with chin in to reach overhead to get tamarind fruit from her tree, see - Change Daily Reaching to Get Ab Exercise and Stop Back and Shoulder Pain.
Our friends, the elder Thai ladies, sit straight while they watch a parade - Healthy Sitting
A villager takes his children for a fun ride, while sitting straight. See how a reader fixed upper body pain from biking in Freed From Pain, He Rides Again
Sitting straight to wash the kids.
I gave these villagers soap bubbles for their baby. They played for hours. Enjoy life, laugh, and share good times.
"Gardening requires lots of water - most of it in the form of perspiration." ~ Lou Erickson
Involve children in gardening at any level. Getting outside to dig, bend, stretch, think, and create in the fresh air is health as a lifestyle - improving physical skills, knowledge, confidence, cooperation, discipline, caretaking, and purposeful activity.
"What this country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds." ~ Will Rogers
A few weekends ago, the Philadelphia City Gardens Contest ran final judging. Husband Paul and I are judges. I don't know much about horticulture, but Paul does, and I am good at holding the clipboard and getting dirty.
Each judging team travels to gardens all over the city, grouped according to garden purpose. There might be community vegetable gardens in the city's most blighted areas, flower gardens grouped according to size, or mixed use individual or group gardens. Gardens are judged for many points including health and variety of plants, whether natural or inventive bug and weed control is used, and interesting use of materials. In past years we visited a garden in one of the most difficult areas of the city, which had made neat container gardens from tires dumped in the area. Another garden gleaned trash from the street to help clean the neighborhood, including a bathtub and vacuum cleaner, reborn in the garden with painted smiles, streaming vines of flowers, posed like characters at a tea party. We met 90-year-old ladies who tended their garden in dresses and church hats, teaching neighborhood children self-respect instead of vandalizing, and to reap what they sow, and share what they harvest for healthier neighborhoods.
"Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar." ~ William Wordsworth
Last year we judged the city's Children's Community Gardens. Here are some of the stories to give ideas and inspiration for yourself or community:
Miss Vanoka Morris Smith and the kids of the Blaine School Strawberry Mansion were a shining example of showing kids how to be fit in body and mind, with teamwork and love. There were no treadmills or artificial exercise. All the kids involved got real fitness as a lifestyle. These inner city kids were well-behaved, disciplined, and educated. Each knew every plant, and information about them. The all-organic garden used heirloom seeds, vegetables, pollination by bees and butterflies, rotating beds to promote soil health, and complementary plantings to combat harmful bugs. They painted garden scenes on plant beds, picnic tables, and the tool shed. They learned discipline and got exercise and dignity by keeping all the areas clean.
"The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it." ~ John Ruskin
At the Urban Nutrition Initiative in West Philadelphia, Debbie Harris's high school students created a health and life-enhancing school-wide program of cooking and nutrition that they call "personal and social change through food." Students get to keep the proceeds from their Farmer's Market, learn healthy social structure, get a high amount of functional physical activity, and the educational message that "Vegetables are cool."
"The philosopher who said that work well done never needs doing over never weeded a garden." ~ Ray D. Everson
St Paul's Church on Stenton Avenue began reclaiming a garden from a neglected site to encourage children to have reflection and contemplation outdoors. The garden joins their columbarium (low wall containing parishioners ashes), along with physical activity – a "prayground." They plan to incorporate garden plants and themes with their Sunday school teachings: kids will plant their prayers, and they will build small climbing apparatus with 'eight fruits of the spirit' on each of the eight rungs. Like life, their garden space is a work in progress.
"There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling." ~ Mirabel Osler
At the Beacon Summer Program at St. Sulzberger School, Crystal Martin teaches 8th graders botany using the garden and microscopes to see leaves and bugs. Built in a flood prone area, the garden is divided into three distinct "watershed" systems - country, suburban, and city - with different drainage systems. The different drainage clearly teaches the effect on the garden – three distinct garden looks and conditions result. Corresponding wall murals teach the crucial message of balancing need for water and drainage.
"Gardening and laughing are two of the best things in life you can do to promote good health and a sense of well being." ~ David Hobson, The Mad Gardener
Get inspired and think how you might like to get started. Young children can learn responsibility by having their own area near your shared area. Babies can sit with you and play in the dirt. On a small level, children can start with sprouting mung beans on a plate (posts to come will show how) and plant a windowsill of seasoning herbs for healthier cooking. Older children can grow healthful chemical-free food and flowers for the table and instead of unhealthy offerings at bake sales. They can learn that good posture during movement is healthy, natural, and good exercise. Get library books on composting, small building projects, organic gardening, and beautiful use of space. Learn the simple elements of a Japanese rock garden or Zen garden, called karesansui. Use healthy bending with one foot in front of the other (how to lunge) and feet side by side (how to half-squat and why it is great). Breathe. Smile.
"We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, that peace and abundance may manifest for all." ~ Dorothy Day
--- Read and contribute your own success stories of these methods. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy.
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Urban site before reclaiming photo 1 by jared CityGarden 2 photo by stu_spivack CityGarden 3 photo by davidsilver
Stuart will retrain participants' bending so that their exercise is healthy for themselves and the community
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