HI! Thank you for such a sweet message. It’s really nice to get these kinds of messages 🙂
I want to mention I’m not a health professional by any means. I’m not a fitness professional. I’m just a robot that loves rope and pushing myself. That being said…
…The first thing I like to tell people when it comes to flexibility is that, it is NOT A COMPETITION with other people. I used to really get down on myself because I would look at picture after picture of armbinder/strappado and be so upset that my elbows don’t touch. It took me long time to ever get out of that mindset and it really robbed me of the joy of bondage for a long time. I get that sometimes a little healthy competition is good, but be mindful of it. The only person you are looking to become more flexible is yourself and the best thing to do is monitor your own progress, not compare to anyone else’s!
I noticed that most people tend to have more flexibility in one around than another. My back and lower body are more flexible than my upper body. I decided to take advantage of that and work on even more lower body flexibility. I think that it’s a great self esteem booster. Some people want to work on something that’s super difficult right away, and that’s okay, too. You can choose whatever makes you happiest 🙂
A great deal of flexibility comes down to being patient. I used to want things to happen overnight and be upset when I didn’t notice a difference after 2 weeks and stop. and viola! I never got any better. The trick is to work on it 4-5 times a week, with sufficient break and rest in between. I take pictures of progress. Maybe once a week. Maybe once a month. Maybe only when I notice a big change, but photographic evidence is super helpful.
Yoga is a great source for a lot of rope-related things: learning to breathe and process weird positions, and increasing flexibility. I usually recommend the un-fun, long, boring yoga if you want to increase flexibility. If you are new to yoga, youtube.com has tons of free yoga clips.
Lots of kink events nowadays even feature a yoga for rope/yoga for all body types/yoga for kinksters classes. I highly recommend this option! Not only will you have an instructor to help, you’ll be with tons of like minded friends 🙂
I also like to do a lot of rope assisted stretches. Sometimes I tie a single column around my ankle and use that to stretch my hamstrings, or I might grab both ends of the rope and pull it behind my head to stretch my back and shoulders. I never go straight into these stretches- I usually warm up with some pole work (I have a pole at my house) or some other form of exercise. Stretching cold muscles via static stretches can be really hard on the body.
Hydration is key for me. If I’m not well hydrated, I ain’t bending. Period.
I’m sure there are millions of other things to help, but I can’t think of anything at the moment. If anyone out there would like to add anything, please do!
yeah tumblr hoe culture is cute and fun and whatever but nobody wants to talk about the emotional crux of having casual sex with a lot of people who don’t care about you
tumblr meme culture is really just a form of neo dadaism
I’d like to clarify:
dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain.
dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense – in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making – well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place – it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)
so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame – this site has some nice examples.
but from my perspective – there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing
in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement.
so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.
related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this
tl;dr: my generation is fed up with this bullshit, and the best way that we can express that is by shitposting. alternatively, dada was an early precursor to modern shitposting and we should all thank duchamp for signing a fucking urinal
a dear friend has given a perfect update to some of my phrasing, courtesy of their word replace extension:
you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:
shitposting is the deconstruction of hegemonic discourse through the use of the absurd and surrealism.
I’d also say that while Dadaism was obsessed with the technological aspects of Modernity, of newspapers, of industrial mechanics and factory made clocks, neo-dadaism (of which shitposting but also the increasingly broad reach of the New Aesthetic and net aesthetics) is obsessed with the technological aspects of our time, or at the beginning of our time.
As just a comparison, the Clock in Absurdist and Dadaist art is both a symbol of the uplifting beginning of industrial relations (as one of the first complicated machines made by manufacturers, as the symbol of mankind’s ability to triumph and analyze nature and better ourselves) and as the deified symbol of horrific modernity (of demarcated time, labor hours, the oppression of the working class via managerial time), Neo-Dadaism/Absurdism has a similar relationship with early computers, which both symbolizes the utopian attitudes which we entered the digital age with, and the horrifying period we live in now, where the Digital is ever present and semi-deified.
My favorite dada satire is probably from Georges Grosz who takes the kind of robotic modernist tube people of folks like Leger:
and turns them into these mindlessly patriotic broken automatons chanting rote phrases:
And it’s so so funny to me that there’s all kinds of Gen X artists out there creating art about the millennials on their damn cellumar phones who think they’re the inheritors of this aesthetic but really it’s people who use the Madden gif generator to shitpost because they’re taking the technology meant for a coherent purpose for a particular narrative and they’re breaking it and turning it back on itself.
