One of the things that’s different about my exercise system is that the exercise sets are joined and flow together to make one continuous routine.  You don’t stop and start, as you go from one set of repeated movements to the next set.  I call them my pass-through, or transitional movements, and consider them the reason my exercise system is so good at shifting weight concentrations from the stomach/ hip areas and proportioning the body as the exercises are developing a strong, healthy body.  It’s what gives you total body control of your muscle network.

People who watch such an exercise session frequently comment that it looks more like a dance routine than an exercise workout.  To which I reply, “You’re right, and it’s what makes it possible for me to say,  put a male ballet dancer next to a football player and you’ll see that the dancer could probably surpass the football player in flexible strength.”

If you’re familiar with my exercise system you can see and feel it as I start with the head/neck stretching that begins the upper body warm-up, adding the arm stretching to the side, then down, engaging the lower body and legs - all in a smooth, connected way without stopping between sets.

If you were in the military, doing a daily workout, your drill sergeant would be shouting out the instructions, and you’d be doing exercises of physical tension – not just to get you in shape, but to train your mind and body to react to commands.  You see the same cadence in many civilian exercise classes that concentrate on the sport conditioning of exercise science.

But you’re at home, and you’re not an automaton.  Turn on the music, engage the whole body, and maintain the movement transitions smoothly through the entire body.  It’s called joint articulation.  More specifically, call it developing flexible strength, which is going to serve you very well as you age, believe me.

One of my summer vacation experiences was to make the acquaintance of a lovely woman from Shanghai, China – a physics professor who, with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren living in the states, rented a house near mine on Lake Michigan.  She saw me working in the yard and walked over to get acquainted.   In perfect English, she introduced herself,  and we bonded immediately as mothers and grandmothers.   But there was also other common ground -  exercise.

When I explained what I do she told me she did Tai Chi every morning outside.  I asked if I could join her the next day.  She not only said yes, but asked if she could also exercise with me.  She had never done any American exercise nor exercised to classical music.  Ihad only had two Tai Chi experiences  – - the first one in the sixties with Sophia Delza, who introduced Tai Chi  to this country many years ago, and one class I took in California in the eighties.

The next morning she came to my house and exercised with me;  then we went to the front yard of her house, where I followed her in Tai Chi.  We talked, asked questions, and talked some more.  She confessed it was very hard for her to learn to move with the music and stretch up and out from the center of the body.  I confessed that I had a hard time containing the movement within the body, and wondered why, when Tai Chi seemed so smooth and relaxed, that it was also training the body to resist attack – “to protect its inner spirituality,” she explained.

In my daily, morning exercise routine I have only one exercise I do that comes close to a Tai Chi expression;  it’s a pass through movement that connects one exercise  to another – a reach out arm motion to the side (with a bent knee to allow for an extended reach) that cups the hand in an inward pull as I return to center.  Every morning now, when I come to that particular movement I think of the bridge of friendship we made between east and west through the art of exercise.

There are so many good reasons to exercise from the inside of the body instead of concentrating on the large muscle groups.  I keep finding new ways to get that across even though I also believe that there is value in any form of exercise people choose to do that works with individual lifestyle.

 For instance, if you want the body of an athlete and engage in competitive sport, go to the gym and work out; if you want the body of a dancer, go to a dance studio, and if you want peace and body harmony practice Yoga, Tai Chi etc. etc.  We’ve got so much power hidden inside our torsos that most people haven’t discovered.  That realization came to me a few weeks ago when that power came to my rescue.

I was at my summer cottage in northern Michigan, getting the place ready for the season.  There was a deep rooted tree that needed moving.  I had shoveled as much sandy earth away from the roots that I could, and with my hand gripping the small trunk, I was trying to pull the tree out when it surprised me and caused me to fall backward with full force on my lower back.

Luckily, I hadn’t broken anything, but the pain was so severe I had to devise a way to get around the pain so I could move, because I was alone without any help.  I maneuvered myself to the side and somehow got up with a boost from the intercostal muscles of the ribs without putting any weight on my lower spine.  It took two weeks for the pain to go away, but in all that time I used the upper, inner torso muscles, feet and calves to isolate the lower spine/hip area so it wouldn’t be stressed as it healed.

 This would be easier to show in a class than trying to explain it in a blog, but take my word for it – there are so many ways we can help ourselves if we’re in good shape, (which I am).  Looking back on it I realize that in the split second when I knew I’d lost control, I totally relaxed and let it happen, which probably kept me from serious injury.

With people living longer, we exercise experts are trying to find ways to help people avoid falls, which are a problem for older people.  Aside from my attempt to pull out a deeply rooted tree recently, I have plenty to say about avoiding falls, that really apply to people of all ages, and I will follow up on that subject soon.

Right now I’m on my way back to northern Michigan with my husband who’s bigger than I am and can dig deeper than I can.  I really need that tree to grow elsewhere.

Every once in a while I pick up something from a book that adds dimension to what I know in the subjects that interest me most – like the combination of music and movement (exercise).

Right now, I’m reading “Music Quickens Time” by Daniel Barenboim.  I was up to pages 21 and 22 before I read anything that grabbed me, and then he wrote, “We can close our eyes but not our ears.  Sound penetrates the human body.”  I closed the book immediately so I could think about that simple statement.  No wonder I believe in exercise to music every morning!  The penetration of the music through the body gives me twice as much value as exercise done without music.  Not only that, but it supplies enough energy to meet my needs for the whole day because of the penetration from full extensions with isometric control.

And Dr. Oliver Sachs, in his books, frequently says that music has the power to make a person move in ways he or she could not move without it.  I personally prefer classical music for movement because of the smooth articulations through the joints, but whatever you like should do it for you.

I have written about the power of music in exercise in previous blogs, and will continue to do so when I tell you other wondrous things that can be done with the combination of music and movement in physical therapy situations.

Now if I could only get people to talk more quietly when they’re walking down the streets of the city with those things in their ears, or talking into a cell phone in full voice.  When I realize they’re not talking to me, I feel like I’m listening in on their conversation because I can’t shut my ears.

It’s hard to get enough exercise in the winter.  Even if you’re a skier, skater or snowshoer, conditions for winter sports aren’t always good enough to count on them.  The weather can even prohibit daily walking.  You could join a gym or use an indoor swimming pool IF you have access to one, but few do, so here are some alternatives that anyone can do.

l.  Find a new interest, or start studying a subject you’ve always wanted to learn.  Mental stimulation and concentration speed the rate at which the body burns its calories, so you wouldn’t have to worry about putting on extra weight for lack of exercise.
I learned about intense mental concentration from The Amazing Kreskin in the seventies when I interviewed him for a book I did on celebrity exercise.  Others have told me the same thing. Working artists also told me that their involvement in making art every day was as healthy for them as regular exercise would be.

2.  Start singing every day.  It doesn’t matter whether you can carry a tune or not.  Most people have a natural urge to sing, and in your own home, no one cares how you sound when you give in to that urge.  Singing can be energizing and physically satisfying, but best of all it helps you lift your upper bodies and breathe deeply, which engages and exercises your inner torso.  The great opera star, Jan Peerce, told me that he marched in place every day before he sang, bringing his knees up as high as possible, because it kept his circulation in top form.  And what about jumping rope?

3.  Best of all, make up your own exercises to do every morning before you get dressed.  They don’t have to be anything special – whatever warms up your muscles and makes you feel good is what you should do, but do it every day.  

And if you need some help getting started try my “Rise and Shine” video, which is a series of seven different exercise segments, 2-4 minutes each, for each day of the week, done to delightful music.  I think you’ll like it.  

Enough people did when it first came out that it hit #l on the Amazon.com best selling exercise video in 200l.  

And it’s still available!   

Happy New Year to all my fans and faithful blog readers!

I don’t usually deviate from what I have to say about exercise, but the following email that one of my daughters sent the rest of the family (sister, brother, children, nieces, nephews and me) about Christmas gift spending is family humor and love that I’d like to share. It was a surprise to me to be thanked for nurturing creativity in the family while I’m still alive, and it sort of erased the concern we had for one in our group who lost a job just before Christmas.

It’s a bit of a stretch to say that I believe in peoples’ creativity to find a way to get exercise every day on their own without spending a lot of money (you don’t even have to buy my videos if you don’t have the $$ – you can borrow them from the library). I believe it’s possible to explore your creative instincts and come up with the solutions to most situations.

We had the best Christmas ever, and the one who lost a job has come up with the most creative website I’ve ever seen. Check it out and you should be able to activate your own creativity: www.constructivedisorder.com

Here’s what started it all:

We have all been the recipients of some “special” gifts from Grandma Ann. Those gifts, although we have often made fun of them and wondered just how she reached that “that’s just the thing for”….moment, have been the source for many great mom stories not to mention good heartfelt Christmas morning laughs.

In an effort to expand on and continue a long standing Grandma Ann Christmas tradition, I urge you all to take a moment and in these bleak economic times, look around your house and experience a ‘Grandma Ann, -that would be just perfect for ____ moment’ and experience the joy of re-gifting.

For those of you who have enjoyed summers in the Grandma Ann Making Room, I would suggest you draw inspiration from the many hours she has spent nurturing your creativity and artistic vision and, as “make something out of nothing artists”-in-training, I would like to invite you to enter our first annual Madame Pointsetta competition. (Madam Pointsetta was a doll I made for a granddaughter one Christmas that she cherishes to this day – a masterpiece if I do say so myself.)

Rules of the competition:

Make a gift for someone without spending any money other than the cost of mailing the item to the recipient. Drawings, paintings, artwork of any kind are acceptable. Gifts will be posted on the internet on Christmas Day.

A special thanks to Grandma Ann for the real gift she has continued to give all of us – teaching us to make something out of nothing.

So you guessed it. Grandma Ann grew up in the Great Depression. And my very successful exercise system is what I created in 1950 and perfected over the years when I realized my toes were too long to dance on pointe.

Emotions are expressed in posture – both sitting and standing - and they interact with breathing and circulation.  Here’s your chance to do some research on your own…

The next time you sit in a public place and watch people as they pass by, pretend you’re in your own private laboratory, privvy to observing who’s happy or sad, feeling good or not so good.  You should even be able to figure out how those imperfect postures you’re seeing could be adjusted to improve their carriage and lessen the fatigue that’s unknowingly accumulating in those bodies.  (I’m guessing you’ve unconsciously lifted and straightened your own sitting position, even though you really sat down to “take a load off your feet” and rest a bit.  I know because I’ve caught myself doingjust that.)

Good!  We can learn so much from each other.

As you’re sitting there observing the variations in human walking styles, visualize the spine – the inner, mechanical, bony infrastructureof the human body.  Even though the perfect outer body position looks like a capital T making a straight vertical line from top of head to the floor, and a straight horizontal line if arms are outstretched, look from the side with x-ray eyes and you’ll see the flexible spine balancing that perfect T through three slight curves – neck, rib cage and lower back, with the muscles doing their job of balancing the curves of the spinal column.

If tension, discouragement, unhappiness and other negative emotions are at work in the people walking by you’ll see a tightly held mouth, facial wrinkles and a slumped upper body – a self defeating, negatively cumulative body expression that’s easily corrected.      

It would be intrusive to walk over to that person and suggest that if they lifted their chin and upper body to correct the imbalance of their infrastructure they’d have a happier, healthier day.  They’d be offended. And if you walked over to that person and thanked him or her for making it possible for you to learn something, they’d think you were crazy.  

But you CAN learn from your observation of other people and apply it to yourself without them knowing. I’m not one to get tangled up in too much technical information, so think of posture, balanced gait and walking posture as basic body subjects, which advertise your mood.  Negative “advertisements” don’t send a positive message.   

Gravity is constantly trying to take us back down to wherever it is we came from. Maybe the people walking by who are looking at the ground and letting their shoulders slump have just given in to gravity.

Resist!  You’ll have a happier, healthier life.

Walking while balancing a book on your head used to be something parents would have their daughters do – supposedly to develop good posture. I don’t hear of that any more, but I do know that children, especially teenagers, will be told to “stand up straight,” which usually produces a momentary militaristic, ramrod straight, parade posture that’s difficult to maintain.

I get better results in the classes I teach by first telling people to visualize their bodies as the letter T, with the head balanced on top of the T – a perfect vertical/horizontal symbol that creates an even shoulder line (bi-lateral symmetry) with the vertical line of the T going straight through the body from head to floor, making perfect right angles from front to back.

That’s the visualization. But then I give them the instruction that can maintain that perfect T all day.

“Every morning, as you stand in front of your bathroom mirror brushing your teeth, take a few seconds to psyche yourself up for the day by assuming the mantel of a very important person (which you are).”

As you continue to stare at yourself, inhale and lift your chin about 2 or 3 inches, and you’ll notice you’ve lifted your upper body one to 2 inches, and you’re now staring at a better looking person than you thought you were.

Not only that, but you’ve also lifted any excess weight out of your waistline which, in turn, puts you in a position that makes it easier to resist the accumulation of excess weight in the future.

If you can learn to use your own resources you can self correct, control and improve many negative manifestations of your body. It’s simply a matter of self confidence, which is a lot easier than walking around with a book on your head.

Besides, during the day, when you feel you’re slipping into the “posture fatigue slump” you can silently, invisibly psyche yourself back up with your own reminder that you are, indeed, an important, living person who doesn’t need to walk around with a book on your head to show it.

How far we’ve come from what used to be!

My interest in exercise developed slowly over the first 20 years of my teaching modern dance and pre-ballet to children and the dancers’ stretch exercise to adults.  Initially it was the observation that classical dancers live long, healthy lives in good, proportionate bodies because of the style of their exercise preparation – beginning with the slow, continuous stretching from the inside that uses the entire body in positions of full extension.  It was the growing awareness that I was functioning in both internal and external body processes that I had taken for granted without realizing.

For instance, say the word exercise to someone, and there’s an immediate vision of movement with muscle flexion aimed at encouraging the development of visible body power.

But coming to the study of, and involvement with, exercise from the dancers’ base, I’m more in tune with Kinesthesia – the feeling of expression of body movement, which leads me to interpreting exercise as more of an internal/external endeavor than a development of the large muscle groups that are so necessary in sport conditioning.

The bridge between mind and body is in the viscera, and the way visible and invisible forces connect for unity through the emotional interaction of music and/or the natural need to express through movement – much like the group dancing done by primitive people.

Think about words like unity, balance and symmetry within the body, and how important it is to be aware of the equalization of muscular effort at the weight bearing points of our structures – shoulders, hips, and knees.  Bilateral Symmetry is the way it’s usually expressed.  Keep it in mind whether you are a walker, a runner, a gymnasium/machine exerciser or a recreational exerciser.

Am I losing you?

Well, just teach yourself to think of exercise as total body movement and try to mentally connect your inner and outer body before and during whatever you do for exercise, and you’ll get much more value out of the movement.  No need to become obsessed by it though; you really need to keep exercise (movement) in its proper place as a natural, daily body function equal to eating and sleeping.

For years I’ve had my own theory about osteoporosis but only voiced it to family and friends because I’m not a doctor – although, I did, during the period when women were being urged by the medical establishment to go on estrogen to avoid heart attacks, osteoporosis etc. etc., wonder why the doctors didn’t urge women to exercise and eat right instead.  (Pressure from the drug companies, fear of malpractice suits, or just plain acceptance of the fact that many people find it easier to rely on pills than healthy habits?)

There are girls who, in youth, grow tall early, before most of their peers, or they become shy about developing breasts and start slumping in their posture.  I can remember them as I was growing up, as well as other girls who started assuming various postural affectations that became habitual as they passed into adulthood.  Interesting though, that you don’t usually see girls, or boys, who’ve been involved in athletics and dance with those postural affectations.

Everybody – male and female – starts losing bone mass before midlife, just as we get grey hair and wrinkles.  Even people like me who’ve spent a life in dance and exercise, lose height through the spine.  So, technically, you could say that everyone over a certain age probably has some degree of osteoporosis.  Visualize, though, what happens to the people who grow up with poor posture, when THEY start losing bone mass.  Right.  They definitely have a problem.

Having been through grade school, high school, and maintained lifelong friendships with many of the same people, I can honestly say I only know of a few people who have “real” osteoporosis and suffer painful compression fractures, and they were all people who didn’t exercise and had bad posture.

These are just observations, but I think my theory has some merit.  Think about it.  Keep exercising and maintaining good posture.  You’ll be glad you did when you reach my age.

P.S. No, I never did take estrogen.  I just kept exercising.

P.S.S  A body with good posture has an invisible straight line from the top of the head down through the upper body and lower body to the floor with bilateral symmetry at the shoulders and hipline.