Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Fighting the cold
It's interesting that when we become cold, we tend to tense up our shoulders, clench our fists and generally hunch up. It's automatic and we often don't know we're doing it. We're still cold however. But hunching and generally tightening and fixing our muscles actually works against us by putting pressure on the veins and arteries and reducing the blood circulation, so we get colder still. Try standing on the garden hose pipe and see what happens to the water flow.
General exertion will help increase our breathing, heart beat and circulation to feed the muscle activity, and with vigorous movement, we're not fixing our musculature at all, indeed the varied tensions involved in moving helps to send the blood around our body. Shivering for example is a natural bodiliy response to cold as the quick muscle spasms involved help to speed up blood circulation to warm us up. Blood is warmed in the depth of our torso but can quickly cool by the time it gets to the extremeties of fingers and toes unless it's pumping fast enough and encouraged to flow by exertion. It mustn't be impeded.
So it makes sense when we're cold, not to hunch and tense up, but to free up. Get loose in all your joints and get moving.
