Flat Stomach Improved Vitality, Reaching Higher

天門亢

The gate to the Heavenly Palace is haughty

 

 

 

 

Old practices based on change were very adaptive, a thing which is almost lost in today's mass teaching, posture, routines and exercises being quite standardised and always to be repeated the same way regardless of the different body shape and transformation. Before, they were considered to be tools that one could modify, not only according to its body, mind and level of understanding, but also simply to what kind of objective one would look for. To make a comparison, nowadays practice provides a toolbox with one screwdriver for each specific use and size while old practices gave you one screwdriver with the possibility to change the heads accordingly to your needs. The search was then to find what was essential and what could be modified. And since those practices also deeply modified the body, a new body meant new rules. It naturally took a profound understanding of the method to be able to determine the core principles of one’s practice. In this spirit, when one trained the flat stomach and fought against gravity, changing totally the postures to fit such purpose was not an issue, as it has actually already been described in a previous post.

Training the flat stomach is a question or redirecting one’s routines, using tools and specific breathing. The present post will first deal with the type of changes and exercises one shall look for.

 

 

 

 

I. Targeted Changes

As briefly described in another previous post, modifying small details inside the body can lead to flattening the stomach. Actually, with the exact same weight but just different body angles, one can look chunky or slim, it is just a question of knowing how to stand correctly.

The first part to target, because it works as a root for the backbone, is one’s butt. Indeed, one has to look how the same posture, stretching … done a bit differently will end up tensing it. Even while sitting, one can actually, by adopting a correct posture, tense this part of the body. What is targeted is, of course, fascia tension, which can be maintained for a long time, almost effortlessly, not muscle contraction that cannot last long. Such skill would allow one to use the butt cheeks correctly in their pillow function while sitting and to avoid having the lower back slowly but surely dwarf when bearing too long sitting periods.

The second part is, logically, the tip of the backbone, especially the head. Here, one has to find the angles that will expand and tense the neck to pull up the backbone and specifically keep the cervical vertebrae from becoming too loose.

The rest of the backbone is quite a peculiar work on the backbone which, unfortunately, cannot be described in writing as it has to be specific to each and every person.

One can also, of course, adapt his/her training to target even more verticality and the swallowed stomach.

II. Specific Training

As mentioned earlier, posture angles were quite freely modified for old practices with change as their cornerstone. Therefore, to train verticality, one would just have to modify any of his/her routine posture(s) to something close in spirit to what is called Urdhva Hastasana in Yoga. Changing then the hand angles according to the original posture would help to work on different webs of fascias.

Semi-static training was meant to teach the body to reach for the skies every time it would extend. Basically, it was a two-time movement where the body would retract as much as possible, almost in a fetal position and then extend upwards, the backbone straightening, the stomach disappearing even more, the side of the waist curving inside, the neck extending…

Movements would apply, legs in motion, the same principles. There was, also, some customised walks where one would gallop, jumping up at every gallop. Furthermore, whether in motion or semi-static, it was also a time to make some fascia webs and muscular chains much more involved in the motion, like the butt cheeks or the lateral fascia webs.

If, for young professional teenagers in the old days, this was an easy transition, it is totally different for adults in the leisurely world. Still, by reconnecting some webs and learning how to integrate them fully in one’s motion, one will gradually feel more feline in his/her movements. Apart from redirecting one’s training, some tools could also be used to improve verticality.