Qigong Joint Oiling for Balance & Mobility

Free up the body with this brief joint mobility practice covering ankles, knees, hips, spine, shoulders, elbows, and wrists. When our joints are stiff, movement becomes rigid and our ability to flow easily from one task to the next is impaired. Drawing on practices from Qi gong and yoga, learn how these spiraling movements used by martial artists can energize you in everyday life.

Transcript

Greetings. Today we'll be looking at joint mobility. In Chinese medicine, The joints are considered one of the areas where stagnation can occur, And so a lot of attention is paid to keeping mobility in these particular areas. So there's a practice that is a term that's used called joint oiling, And it makes me think of the tin man in the film The Wizard of Oz who needed an oil can so he was able to speak at the beginning of it because he had gone so stiff from rust from not moving his joints. So let's get up and move. We're going to start from the bottom up, Starting with the ankles, And we'll be lifting the heel up and circling, Coming up onto the ball of the foot and circling around. Then release that. We'll do the other side. Release the heel back down, And then bring your hands to the knees, And you can decide how far you want the knees to be apart, But we're going to do circles with the knees. They can be big circles or they could be smaller circles. Out to the sides, Back to the front, Bending down, Out to the sides, Straightening up without locking, Back to the midline, Out to the sides, To the back, To the center, To the front, And feel that circling. Let the warmth from the palms of your hands help support the mobility in the knees, And then we can bring the knees together and do another version of this where we circle the knees, Where the knees stay together, And you can feel how that works with the mobility of the ankles as well as the knees. Circle in one direction and then change direction, And from the side, And let that go, And come up to the hips, And we'll come into circling the hips, Bringing the seat back, The hips off to the side, Forward, And coming into just a slight back bend as you come forward in your hip circles, And really feel that ball and socket joint at the top of the hip, And how you can just create this motion all the way around that hip joint, And now let's go the opposite direction. Bring yourself back to the center, And now when we do a little movement here, Let's work with, At the same time, Supporting the muscles on the sides of the spine, So when we come into our circle, And your hips come forward, Push your hands into the area on either side of the spine, And then move up a little higher, Up a little higher, And then back down, Allowing yourself to come all the way down to the sacrum, Toward the tailbone. There's lots and lots of acupressure points here, And then we can work with that sense of mobility in the hips after doing our circles. You might want to bring a chair for stability on this one. We're going to do quite a strong movement, Kick the hip in one direction, And then open and up at a 90-degree angle, Supporting that mobility within the leg. Great one for soccer players. Release that, And then lift, Kick open, And you can experiment without using anything at all to support, And just work on your balance a little bit, But no worries, You're still getting, Whether you hang on to the wall or hang on to a chair, You're still getting a good workout, You're still doing the joint oiling for that area, So feel free to use support. So from here, You might begin to feel some heat growing within the legs, A little more warmth, A little more sense of tingling or aliveness in the legs from the movements we've done, And then we'll start to move up, Coming up to the shoulders, And let's just start with one shoulder up toward the ear, And then the other, Making circles with the shoulders. You might feel a little creaking in there, Like there's a little sand or grit between the joint, And that's okay, You're loosening it up, And you may think about doing a backstroke for this, Like you bring one arm up and rotate, And then the other arm doing the entire arm. So from here, We can move to other areas of the arms, Since we worked with the shoulders, Let's place one hand flat at the crease of the elbow, Sometimes if you have a short-sleeved shirt on, It's a little easier to do this, Hand right at the crease, And then you're going to let that hand flow over the forearm, Circling up over and across. It just feels like a smooth little massage that you're giving to that area below the elbow on the forearm, But notice the mobility, You can feel running up into the shoulder joint, The support in the elbow joint, And then let's change and come into the opposite arm, You might hear a little creaking again, Somewhere in the length of the arm, The wrist, The shoulder, The elbow, As you do this rotation. Just feel like you're giving a soft massage as your palm strokes over the top of the forearm at the base of the elbow crease. Then we'll move into the wrists themselves, Let's start to loosen into the wrists by circling the hands, And when you circle the hands, You can open into the fingers, And we can create that hand circling into a beautiful dance, Bringing the arms up overhead and then back down, Keeping the circle going as we move forward, And just let the arms hang and feel like you're creating a circle, Space between the joints of the spine as you let yourself hang. Imagine warmth running down from the shoulders through the arms, Down from the hips, Relaxing the muscles in the legs, The hamstrings, The quads, The calf muscle, Feel a deep relaxation, Bend your knees deeply, Bring your hands out to either side, Let the palms come together, We'll close with this circling motion of the wrists, Just allowing this to be a little pick me up, To mobilize your joints, Thank you for practicing, Have a flexible and beautiful day.