Do you wish you could move with more strength, agility, and no pain, but think you're too old for that? Well, let me introduce you to fascia dancing. As the creator of fascia strength and power, I developed fascia dancing to help people over 50 build strength and agility.
But what if you can't dance? Don't worry, I got you covered. I'll guide you through two levels of fascia dancing from simple to more challenging so you can feel your body get stronger one step at a time.
But first, let's see what fascia dancing looks like. Here's what the beginning version of fascia dancing looks like. It might look a little simple, but there's actually a lot going on here.
I'll show you the more advanced version in just a bit. As you watch me, you might be wondering, how can this strange looking movement actually make you stronger in everything you do? The answer, if you use my three fascia strength principles I'm about to show you, fascia dancing unlocks your body's natural elasticity, what I call fascia strength, not the stiff, exhausting muscle tension most people rely on.
Let me show you how this all works by adding my three fascia strength principles to fascia dancing. Go ahead and get your feet about shoulder width apart or so, something that feels comfortable. And I want you just to do the basic fascia dancing movement where let's say the left arm comes forward and you extend the elbow and then you retract that one and the right arm goes forward, right shoulder goes forward.
And we're just going back and forth just like this. Now, if you can feel your shoulder and your arm muscles are doing most of the work. Our goal when we add all three of the fascia strength principles, which I'm going to be doing right now, is you're going to feel less and less shoulder effort, and you're going to get to the point where your arms feel like they're basically floating.
Like right now I feel like my arms are maybe buoyant in water where they're doing very little effort because my fascia strength, my elasticity is powering the movement. So the first fascia strength principle to get you there is we need to be in a spring-loaded posture. Meaning the the the posture has elasticity in it.
And we do that by stretching the fascia wets suit. We want a good alignment but we want a stretch in the in in in the tissues. So suspend the head upwards, crown of the head up, shoulders down and back, tailbone down.
So we got head up, shoulders and tailbone down. We get a stretch in the fi in the spine. That's a stretch in the fascia wets suit that creates elasticity.
Now think just an internal stretch left to right across the chest and the back. Just make your shoulders wider and broad and that creates a little more stretch in the fascia wets suit. Think of your body taking up more space internally.
Basically, we don't want too much tension, internal tension. Now, we're into muscle tension and there's no elasticity, but we don't want slack either because there's no elasticity there as well. We want internal stretch on good alignment.
And then what I want you to do is once you got a nice alignment, you feel a little internal stretch. Now move your arms back and forth and think of the stretch in the fascia wets suit is helping you power the arms. So now it'll take a little less shoulder effort.
Now because we got elasticity, fascia strength from the posture, that's the first principle and it's a good start, but it's still incomplete. We need to power this movement with the next two principles. The next one is move from center.
We're going to move from our waistline. Let the let the center power the movement instead of the shoulder muscles. When I say center, I mean waistline basically the front, the sides, back in the kidney area.
This whole center area is going to become active and it is going to be the main power source to move my arms. My shoulders just sit on top of my rib cage down, head up, and my waistline now moves kind of like a belly dancer or a salsa dancer becomes a power source where now my shoulders don't have to move or the shoulder muscles don't have to work very hard to get this motion. So, finding your center can be elusive.
And I'm going to give you a little tip to help you. We don't want to move from our hips. That's a little different.
We want to move from our waistline. So, what I want you to do is anchor your mind, your mind's eye onto your belly button. Think of the right side of the belly button going forward.
And as that goes forward, it sends the right arm going forward. Now, as you move the right side of the belly button forward, at the same time, take the left side of the belly button and move that backwards. And that moves the left arm backwards.
Then do vice versa. Left side of the belly button forwards, right side backwards. So now the belly button is steering the waist.
And because it's all connected all the way up to your arms, the waistline, the center is now powering my arms to go back and forth. Moving from center. And when you get it right, you relax your shoulder muscles.
The center's doing all the work. And my arms right now feel like they're floating. If you need to take a step, that's fine.
You don't have to stay rigid in one stance with this. We got two of the three principles down. The third one is the cherry on top.
It brings it all together. And that is your springboard feet. As you're moving from your waistline, you're going to go ahead and start activating your feet.
You're going to be pressing the balls of the feet and your toes against the floor gently. This completes the whole line from foot all the way out to your fingers. Now you got total body connection elasticity.
If the feet are disconnected and they're just in your shoes doing nothing as you work, it's like you got casts on your feet and they're not involved. The body's disconnected and basically you're leaking power. So, as I go forward with this right side right here, my right ball of my foot is just pressing into the floor gently.
And then the opposite, the when I go the other way, the left ball of the foot and the toes press in real gently. Don't do it too hard. You'll cause tension.
Just real gently. Just like that. And when you get the feet connected to the floor with that gentle pressing of the ball of the feet and the center working together, it's like the feet and moving from center are synced together and they find a rhythm.
And when you find that rhythm, that's where the magic is. And that's when you'll start really moving with elasticity and your shoulder muscles are basically taken out of the game. There may be it feels to me like maybe this is 10% of the effort out of my muscles in my arms and my shoulders.
The rest of my body, my center, my feet, my elasticity stretch and the fascial wets suit that is doing most of the work. So how many reps? How much should you do this to get better?
At first, what I want you to do, do shorter 20 second little sets of just trying to find use your mental focus inside your body. Stretch the fascia wets suit, find your center, and try to find your feet and try to find that rhythm. And you just keep working at it.
It is a skill. Don't think of this as like hard work. You got to, you know, bust your butt and try to get some gains.
The more relaxed you are, make sure you're breathing and just internally making these different these little bit of tweaks. Ah, there's my center. There's my feet.
You start putting it together. Do 20 second sets. Maybe you can do as many as you want throughout the day.
You'll start to get better and better. Then one day, and I get this from clients, they'll call me or text me, "I found my feet. I found my center.
" And it's almost like a a V8 moment. Remember the commercial, the V8 juice where they said, "Wow, I I just had a V8. " Well, you get that V8 moment and it all just feels like it's blending together and you found this springy elasticity.
There is when we can work off of that. And what I'd like to do now is show you an advanced workout with with uh fascia dancing. And I'll add a little bit where you do a threeinut set.
three minutes of fascia dancing and you get going. Let's say the first and you can mix this up however you want, but I'm going to say first 30 seconds just do some fascia dancing, but start taking steps. You just take little steps just like this side to side.
And you can put it to music if you want. You can find a rhythm and you do 30 seconds. Then we're going to add some difficulty by squatting lower.
As I do the fascia dancing, as I squat lower, my heels come off the floor. I don't want if I keep my heels on the floor, eventually I'll bend forward. I don't want to do that.
I want to keep this alignment. So, as I squat down while doing the fascia dancing, my heels come up a little bit. And the lower I go, the more they come up.
That's so I can keep the alignment. Now, if you can't do that, the balls of your feet aren't strong enough. Um, we need to work towards that.
So, don't go down too low. You won't be able to do it. You'll start hurting your knees.
Don't go into pain. It's also difficult to move from center when I squat down. Your spine stiffens up.
So, if you can end up, you know, working towards going all the way down like this, where you're still moving from center just like this, and you're on the balls of your feet, heels up, you're really making your spine real nimble, very cat-like, because all the tension it has has to release. Those tense muscles have to release in order for you to move from your center in this compromised position down low. Make sure you're breathing.
Again, if that's painful, it's quite advanced, don't go low. Just do 3 minutes of doing some stepping just like this. Squat a little bit.
That's fine. Come back up and make it your own. Want even a bigger fascia strength challenge?
I just added a new exercise to the bonus section of my fascia strength and power program. It's called fascia dancing with resistance. You'll use a resistance band or light dumbbells to take your elasticity to the next level.
But here's the catch. If you start musling through it, you'll lose effect. The goal is staying relaxed and springy while under load.
If you got the program, you can check it out now. If not, there's a link below so you can see if this training is a good fit for you. That's all for now.
I'll see you on my next video.
