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Re: How have you helped with stiffness
I find that emphasizing breathing and slowing things down helps a lot to overcome stiffness. We have/have had plenty of stiff people in our dojo (myself included), and slow practice with deep breathing works well given time.
E.g. breath out and relax when grasped katatedori and then breath in when going up with the technique such as ikkyo, and then out again as it descends. Make the breathing loud to emphasise the point.
I have had someone change within a few minutes doing this sort of thing. Note that it takes a while to bed in of course subsequently. Also, you then have to speed things up and raddress the issues etc.
We have someone who worked as a blacksmith and had a very rigid chest - felt like steel and his ribs didn't seem to move when he breathed. He has worked hard on various breathing exercises and awareness exercises to develop feeling in this area and is a lot softer now.
Robert
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