You can use these tips to get the most out of your Freedom Stretch workout. These tips will intensify the exercises and are suitable for almost all people but please decide to use them or not based on your knowledge of your body and its limits.
- How you hold the stick while doing your exercises can change the experience greatly. To maximize results, you can hold the stick between your thumb and index finger using light pressure. Pull outward with each hand creating a light tension. Most of the exercises can be done with this method. A few of them, the ones going across the chest area, can be done by reversing this and pushing your hands inward. Doing the exercises this way will allow you to target muscles more deeply and effectively.
- Keep your arms extended straight out from your body when possible.
- Remember that your spine is your core. Good posture lets you feel that your spine is the center of all your body. All exercises should be done with the sense of the spine as your core. It will change your experience.
- Learn from these exercises how it feels to have good posture so that you can begin to carry this improved posture with you when you walk, stand, sit and do many of your daily activities. This way you can be doing Freedom Stretch even when you are not intentionally exercising. This is the real purpose of Freedom Stretch – to make it part of how you stand, sit and move. To make it part of your life. In a way you can be doing Freedom Stretch 16 hours a day (that is if you sleep 8 hours).
- When possible do the exercises in front of a full-length mirror. This will give you feedback on how your posture is changing.
- When doing your exercises, search for your “new” muscles. These are muscles that have become underused and neglected. Gradually endeavor to activate them in your exercises. You will find that you start to use them more in all your activities making your movements more fluid and efficient. This will help you perform better in sports or any other activities you enjoy.
- If you find yourself working in an awkward position, you can position your legs in a different stance enabling you to still keep good spinal alignment while you work.
- Allow yourself to make the changes to your posture and muscle use gradually. If you have been moving and standing incorrectly for many years, it will take a little time but you will start to feel the difference right away.
- Doing the exercises everyday is best. You can do an abbreviated version of the exercises if you don’t have time. For example, doing the first 5 or 10 exercises in the morning and the rest in the evening. At work, you can do them on your break or lunch hour. Just bring a length of rope if you can’t use a stick. (Workout is most effective using a stick).
- Enjoy your exercises as you feel your muscles and whole body being activated for the first time in a long time.