Walking/Paddling Nov 2024 Audios +

At the end of the class some of you asked for help with the classic pain that kayakers get, which they can experience later when walking or, as last Sunday, when sitting on the floor. The thing is, this ‘classic pain’ has several different ways of showing up. With Aylin, as you’ll see in this video, the pain is related to the front of the hip, just up from the direct line of the femur. With Randal, it is the muscles that rotate the leg inward. With Carol, if I recall correctly, it is right down in the hip joint. And none of this necessarily tells us the ‘cause’—it just tells us where it hurts.

I can make three generalizations: your pattern is probably largely about how you try to stabilize (which is ironic because if you want to be less tippy in a kayak, your best bet is to keep your hips loose). Second, you may be ‘co-contracting’—maybe Randal is simultaneously using his muscles to rotate his thigh inward AND to rotate outward—fighting himself. (Or not.) Third, you almost certainly are chronically contracting the hurtin’ muscles. When you walk or paddle and shift from side to side, can you let go of the side you just moved from? If you have your weight on your L foot and then as you exhale, do you LET GO of those muscles and engage the opposite ones? (Exhaling is nice for letting go, right?) Try doing the shift from L to R, R to L with your total emphasis on what you let go, rather than on what you engage.

A Little Extra: Lowering your Center of Power

And here’s a piece to add in to Preparing to Walk (and Paddle), which you can do as a 4-minute meditation or you can just fold into the full lesson. But, you ask, why do this? If you believe that the power of your paddle comes from the pelvis, then you want to have your center of power, to feel it, way down in your pelvis, and this will accomplish that.

If you want to feel calm and at one with the world, that’s good too.

Oh, and if you want to feel calm, joyous and at one with the world, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faN0kPOQykM

Notice how Fred Astaire draws that beautiful plumb line not only through center and spine but also along one heel/hip joint to the other. And if you dream of ‘wearing your kayak’—notice how Fred ‘wears’ the coat rack.

Here are the connections between walking and paddling for this class (and the whole series):

• If the sitting position of the kayak makes you sore in/or when getting out of the kayak and first walking around, you might use some of the variations in the walking part of the lessons before and after kayaking. Don’t stretch on active, contracted muscles! Use these walking variations to relax the muscles, then stretch all you want. (Though you may then find you need the stretching less.)

• Consider the notion of pulling yourself onto your forward leg versus pushing off from your back foot as an analog to your paddling stroke. And as for the back foot, compare pushing off as though pushing the earth behind you (a real thing), pushing off as though bouncing yourself forward (maybe more real!) and rolling over the ball of your foot. They all three describe the same action, but as you know, how you conceptualize a movement can subtly change its organization. By imagining these peculiar differences, you also awaken your awareness. So then consider how you push off from the water… kayak forward. Ocean backward. Or the ball of your foot is like the plant of the paddle in its little firmed-up-watery post-hole. How does this change your awareness of paddling?

• Throughout this series, I have made reference to the way the ground can support you in the sense that it keeps you from falling through and it can also support you by being the place from which you spring up. This is true of water, too, though it is more complicated. If you hit the water in a cannonball, it will ‘support’ you by stopping you as solidly as the ground would (for a short time). If you lay in a balance brace without gouging into the water with any of your body parts,the water will support you as the ground does. If you put your paddle in the water at the right angle and speed, the water will be to your paddle as your foot is to the ground: a place to spring forward from (or a place to move the world backwards from, if you like that better).

• In the first three lessons, I was trying for a connection between one’s gait when walking or one’s cadence when paddling. Breath, timing, pause, momentum. But remember, ‘momentum’ doesn’t mean continuously using the same muscles. As you rotate to the left, let go of your rotating-to-the-right muscles, and vice-versa.

Let me know how all that works for you! And thank you so much for your participation in this class.

This is a companion video to Fists Rolling (eventually) Opposite