When you walk or run, your feet hit the ground and the blood is helped upwards towards the heart with each step.
Today many of us walk or run for only short periods of time, and few do this frequently on a daily basis. Most people either sit or stand for the larger part of their day.
To counteract the stall of blood flow that ensues from this, the Russian academician and space engineer Alexander Mikulin created, to help his heart, an easy exercise that aids blood flow in the legs.
Bouncing on the heels exercise
- Do this in bare feet.
- Lift your heels off the ground to about 1 cm, you don’t need to go higher.
- Drop your heels back to the floor without too much force.
- Now you can do double bounces, like a heartbeat pum-pum, pum-pum
- Make sure you take a brief pause after every two bounces. If you do it too fast the blood won’t have time to accumulate between valves.
- Find a comfortable rhythm that you feel is suitable for your body.
- Do these bounces whenever you feel like it during the day.
Blood loaded with fresh oxygen moves downward from the heart to the extremities of the hands and legs. However the blood that is returning to the heart carrying the waste substances and carbon dioxide needs to rise upward against gravity making this cleansing process the difficult phase of the cycle.
Unless this return of the blood to the heart is efficient it can create a dangerous stall of blood flow in the legs whenever you stand or do not move for a long time
To help the heart with this anti-gravity effort in pumping, nature has equipped the veins with valves. However the veins in your legs have valves which only let your blood flow in one direction – upwards.
The dynamics of bouncing is like hitting the bottom of a wine bottle and seeing the liquid jump upwards towards the cork.
The bouncing or tapping movement of this exercise which helps the heart and the circulation, is exactly what the bones need too. It gives the blood more power so it can really penetrate the envelope of the bones and deliver nourishment.
Each bounce accelerates the renewal of the body, giving the bones the stimulation to build new cells as well as stimulating bone strength.
The impact from the stomping foot moving along the vertical axis of the skeleton is exactly the action needed for nurturing the bone.
It is essential however to learn how to organize your posture so as not to collapse in the vulnerable joints at the moment of landing.
This ‘posture’ doesn’t have to be in a straight line, it can be naturally curved along the body provided it is streamlined.
The streamlined stacking of vertebrae and of larger bones as well produces a ‘domino effect’ Dominoes can be laid out in all kinds of curves, as long as the movement can transfer from one domino to the next, one end of the spine or arm or leg to the other.
If the deviations are too sharp somewhere, the movement will stop.
So think of your alignment as you bounce.
If you have problems with balance just hold on to a wall or a stable piece of furniture and bounce safely.
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