At the massage therapist

In aikido we are supposed to be relaxed when training. It is much healthier if the muscles are not stiff and the body is flexible. Unfortunately, for some type of people, including me, to achieve relaxation can be very demanding. Sometimes I focus on relaxing so much that, as a result, I lose all my flexibility without noticing in time. If the body is not relaxed, it is much easier for the training partner to throw you (which can be uncomfortable when you are tori and not uke ). More importantly, if our muscles are not relaxed, the possibility of getting injured while a technique is applied on us is more real. As I felt that my muscles were becoming stiffer over months - due to stress not (always :)) related to aikido trainings - I decided to visit a massage therapist. A couple of things I learned are coming in the next paragraphs.

From time to time, I had been feeling some muscle pain somewhere near to my shoulder-blade (aka scapula). I knew that it was from my bad posture of always keeping my shoulders raised when under stress (and sitting in front of the monitor all day). There was a week when I could hardly roll during trainings because it was so bad. When I went to the massage therapist the last time (around a year ago), he managed to loosen the affected muscles and I felt very well for at least half a year. Same expectations this time, but now I knew more about what to expect.

One of the reasons for having to know what to expect was that last time I learned that the therapist was a chiropractor as well. It can be pretty scary if you don't know whether your neck or spine will break or not when he 'massages the bones'. So one thing I learned from him that cracking your neck and other parts of the body was good (he actually said this). Obviously, I'm not talking about cracking a bone into half but producing the cracking noise by, for example, fiddling with your fingers, turning your head, etc. I used to have a classmate who was always cracking his fingers and everyone used to tell him to stop that because it was not healthy. (Apart from this reason, more or less everyone hated the noise itself but that's another story.) Now it turns out that cracking IS healthy. It's naturally not really good if your joints become too stiff and you have to crack your fingers 5 times a day, but cracking actually seems to fix things for a while. A different story for the neck and spine: if you are able to crack your own neck by relatively suddenly tilting or turning your head to each side (and smile happily afterwards) it shows that your neck muscles are relaxed at least to a good level. If these muscles are not relaxed you simply won't be able to move your head enough to produce the cracking noise. So if you feel that your neck is stiff but you can't help yourself this way, go to a therapist who will probably help you out. The same applies to the spine at waist height. I find that much harder to loosen up. I'm also aware that I don't use my hips and centre well enough in aikido trainings, so not being able to relax these muscles shows up in a training as well.

There is a second reason for why it was good to know what to expect from the massage therapist: he's also an expert pathologist of almost 20 years! He must know the human body inside-outside (mostly, inside :)). Last time he told me this when we were in the middle of the massage session. He hesitated to do so as he expected a bit of a shock reaction. I didn't care much as long as he was massaging my muscles and bones from the outside :). At this first time, I didn't know that the session would end with the above mentioned bone cracking. I only had a slight fear of breaking my bones when he started telling a story about how he had learned how hard bones could be pushed and bulled before cracking irreversibly: breaking. The story goes that he and his chiropractor teacher (!) had gone to the morgue and started breaking bones and joints to find out what's best for the living (I became a bit panicky, however, when my hips were suddenly turned one side and my upper body to the other). Whether the learning story is true or not I'm not 100% sure but having known his in depth knowledge of the human body, I asked him about the anatomy of tegatana and the unbendable arm. He hadn't heard about the concept before and couldn't explain it by describing exactly how it might work physically and anatomically. Nevertheless, he told me that the human bones and joints can bear a lot of stress when held properly. So, unfortunately, this is all about the anatomy of tegatana but I won't give up the hope to find an exact explanation (and some simulated demonstration) of how the unbendable arm might work.