"Help yourself"
Stretching is fast becoming one of the best self-help preventative medicines. In the near future, it will be very hard to find anyone who does not stretch!
RESISTANCE FLEXIBILITY offers immediate, cumulative, and permanent increases in flexibility; takes the pain out of stretching, and protects you from injuring yourself by over-stretching.
THE FLEXIBILITY TRAINING OF BOB COOLEY provides stretches for 16 unique muscle groups with concomitant physiological and psychological benefits.
NEW AND ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ON FLEXIBILITY validates this 'revolutionary' flexibility system and is being used to create the upcoming new Genius of Flexibility™ Fitness Equipment.
The simplicity of how muscles truly stretch by using resistance is the power behind Resistance Flexibility Training. The discovery of this "new idea" about stretching appears too simple and too obvious not to have been discovered before. Resisting while stretching is natural. Most people start stretching for physical reasons, but they continue to stretch because they have learned that predictable upgrades in their physiological and psychological health can occur by doing specific stretches.
Most likely your parents never stretched. If they did, they probably gave up in short order. And who can blame them? The old way of stretching yanked their muscles apart, felt more like a chore than a pleasure and, to add insult to injury, usually produced few or no real benefits.
Resistance Stretching isn't like that tired piece of exercise equipment you retired to the basement or the garage because you got bored with it or it didn't give you the results you were looking for. Resistance Stretching is FUN. It feels good. And it takes minutes, not months, to see visible, positive changes. It's infectious and inspiriting. And soon it will become a life passion.
Anyone who has ever tried Resistance Stretching continues . . . they NEVER stop. They continue not only because they see immediate improvements in their flexibility, but also because as time goes on, they discover the other benefits that come from feeling, looking, and behaving like the person they were intended to be!
People who have stretched for a while know that changes from stretching are predictable and self-prescriptive — they can decide what they want to work on, do those stretches, and then reap the benefits they desire. The predictable changes and "self-actualizations" from stretching are the hallmark of The Meridian Flexibility System.
Resistance Stretching Benefits
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Physical
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Spiritual
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Emotional
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Psychological
These four dimensions of personal growth are consistent with many major philosophies. Discover the many possibilities for self-development, and then decide what you want to work on . . . change yourself in precisely the ways you desire most!
The Physical Benefits from Stretching
Astounding physical and physiological changes result from developing greater flexibility. Specific stretches create predictable improvements.
You'll experience more fluidity in your movements. Suddenly you'll be sitting up straighter, lighter, walking taller, becoming more youthful and child-like in your movements. Your power, strength and endurance will skyrocket. Chronic pain will magically disappear. Your diet will improve, future injuries won't have a chance, and your general health will be enhanced. You'll feel stronger, more resilient, and vigorous. You'll be mystified by your emerging physical prowess.
Flexibility turns your anger and angst into love.
As you engage in conflict with your own body while stretching, you are learning to transfer these skills into engaging into conflict with others and turning problems in relationships into deeper love. As the chronic discomfort in your body leaves, the angst about survival diminishes.
Flexibility wakes you up and shows you how to live in the present.
As you remove habitual patterns of discomfort in your body, you find yourself waking up as if from a deep sleep — like Rip van Winkle. By focusing your attention on stretching, you find yourself living more in the present. Your physical instincts improve — survival instincts come to the fore, and you find yourself better able to set boundaries and limits with people.
Flexibility teaches you to take action and dismantle laziness.
Your flexibility gets the ball rolling and keeps it rolling. You learn how to take the right action instead of avoiding things.
Flexibility determines how well you move and improves your posture.
Your flexibility absolutely determines what movements you are able to make and how fast, accurate, and powerful those movements can be. That box on the top shelf suddenly becomes more "reachable." Your posture naturally becomes upright without any need for "mental" reminders to "sit up straight," or "stop slouching." Your bio-mechanical efficiency has been upgraded.
Flexibility harnesses your strength, power, and endurance.
The ability of any muscle to shorten is directly controlled by its ability to lengthen! By increasing your flexibility, your muscles are then allowed to shorten and contract maximally — this translates into increase power, speed, and acceleration.
Flexibility relieves pain, prevents injuries, increases your comfortableness.
Many chronic as well as acute myofascial pains are the direct result of muscle shortness. Increase the length of your muscles, and watch your back, knee, elbow, etc. pain disappear forever. Increases in flexibility and strength also help to prevent future injuries.
Flexibility heals and overhauls your physiological health.
A flexibility "perk" is that your internal health improves ... and in very specific and predictable ways. You'll find that each of the 16 different types of stretches has been reported by thousands of people to cause specific health improvements. Individualize your own stretching program based on you specific needs.
Flexibility makes you more youthful and solid.
Everyone who stretches regularly gets younger and better looking. Not only will you move and feel like a person with a much younger body, but you'll have a new tool at your disposal to modify and adjust your body so those aches and pains from aging become less intrusive or are erased completely. People that don't stretch yet are prematurely aging.
Flexibility results in improved diet.
Regardless of what you think is the best diet for yourself, everyone who stretches regularly finds that their eating habits improve. Organic foods steal their way onto your plate and suddenly become MORE attractive than anything else. Nutrient rich foods replace empty foods.
Flexibility creates athletic prowess.
It should be no surprise to you from what you have already read about athletes who have won gold medals at the Olympics (and who credit a big part of their success to Resistance Flexibility Training), that flexibility is the foundation to all physical exercise. Strength, aerobic and skill performance are all dependent on flexibility.
Flexibility teaches you to rest and handle stress and distress.
When you know how to rest, you can build yourself because your body rebuilds itself during rest. Stretching teaches you how to embrace appropriate amounts of stress to challenge yourself and to remove undesirable stress and distress.
Flexibility teaches you how to protect yourself
There are many ways to defend yourself and to keep good boundaries- "stretching leads the way". Learn that there is also no need to defend yourself if you are not being attacked.
Spiritual Benefits from Stretching
Unbelievable spiritual changes result from developing greater flexibility.
Becoming more flexible connects you with positive life changes while it disconnects you from objectionable parts of your life. Changes in awareness and modifications in perspective become daily occurrences. The wonderful connection between your body and your life can be directly experienced from stretching. You will find yourself being more ethical and principled, showing greater integrity, and enjoying doing the things that are good for you. You will begin to live more and suffer less . . . experience everything about energy and spirit . . . living timelessly.
Flexibility augments moral attitudes — turning wrong into right.
Stretching pushes your values more towards humanitarian concerns. You find yourself becoming more ethical, forthright, principled, and empathetic.
Flexibility turns resistance into yielding.
You will find yourself becoming less resistant to positive life changes — learning to open yourself to embrace the good — and more resistance to negative influences and desires.
Flexibility is a reflection of your life.
Every tension in your body is a reflection of how you live your life. You will discover that the joys and problems of the world are also reflected in your body. Stretching allows you to experience the interconnections and the oneness to life and to powers greater than yourself.
Flexibility opens you to new awarenesses and perspectives.
Becoming more objective, viewing others and yourself from "above" are trademarks of stretching. Learn to view others and yourself from both inside and outside yourself — balance your perspective.
Flexibility teaches you about timelessness- simply living.
No rat race here, just days and days of your life. Becoming filled with life. Viewing everything with a relative time reference — the past, future and present are all happening now.
Flexibility shows you how to enjoy rather than suffer through life.
As you become more flexible, your spiritual energy is unleashed. You'll find yourself getting up early, stretching, eating well, exercising throughout the day, playing at work, and losing track of time because you are reveling in life, enjoying everything moment by moment. Flexibility teaches you to escape the bondage of the clock. It gets you out of your head, and turns off the internal noise.
Flexibility lets you be in your body and to enjoy being there.
Surprising that you can now feel specific parts of your physical body that you use to feel disconnected from. You learn how to stay connected with your physical body and become less depersonalized. You also learn to value everyone's individuality.
Flexibility teaches your friendship and equanimity.
Have more friends, incredible people from all walks of life, because your sense of fairness and skills of friendship are growing. Fairness as a principle begins to invade all aspects of your life- your relationships, business, politics and thinking.
Flexibility teaches you about being serene, calm, still and peaceful.
There's no place like home, and it begins within. Bring peace from within outward. People are on the same planet because they need each other.
Flexibility teaches you to resolve conflict and be objective.
Discord is inevitable, so everyone must learn to turn trouble into being better connected. Learn to replace defensively disconnecting from others with staying permanently connected.
Flexibility can connect you to a power greater than yourself.
Learn about spirituality from your body and the need for community. Embrace all world philosophies and religious wisdom.
Flexibility teaches you to be empathetic, compassionate, open, and universal in your viewpoint.
The community of people that is created in every stretching environment ends up supporting everyone's lives. Live spiritually.
Flexibility teaches you about your beliefs and faith.
Strengthen positive beliefs and dismantle false ones. Experience faith naturally through your body. Believe in others and yourself.
Flexibility turns everyone into seekers of illumination.
It happens almost unnoticed at first. But soon everything is about energy and light. Energy and imagination are linking you into the transcendental.
Flexibility results in sweeping changes and transformations in every aspect of oneself and one's life.
Changes need to occur easily and gradually. Critical mass occurs after a while and then things have to change. The whole world is currently going through the largest evolutionary shift ever. Be in on the changes.
Emotional Benefits from Stretching
Exciting emotional changes result from developing greater flexibility.
Dismantling the emotional armor we wrap about ourselves is a principle benefit of flexibility. You'll find yourself maturing emotionally — becoming more intimate, more attached, more sensitively engaged in other people's lives.
All sorts of things will begin to look and work better — your self-image, your confidence, and your appearance. The things you really like and need will suddenly be made clear to you. You'll free yourself from the traumas of the past, and learn how not to repeat the same mistakes. Despondency and anxiety will loosen their grip, and in their place will emerge a burgeoning and intensely exciting and fulfilling creativity and passion.
Flexibility turns anxiety into excitement.
Becoming more flexible instantly turns chronic dread, and anxieties into eager anticipations. Motivations soar and gratification increases.
Flexibility shows you how to be more conscious of what you truly desire.
Increasing your flexibility makes you more conscious of what you truly desire, shedding false illusions about attractions and attachments.
Flexibility shows you how to free yourself from the past — and learn from it.
Benefiting from the past mistakes of others and yourself, and finally getting the nurturing you need, is what stretching is all about.
Flexibility teaches you to respond retroactively.
You learn to process sometimes for days, previous events, as you move into clarity about yourself and others.
Flexibility matures you emotionally by showing how to be more accepting.
Everyone needs to mature different aspects of who they are. Through stretching you learn to identify what areas need refurbishing and growth.
Flexibility teaches you new ways to breathe.
Every stretch you do enters you into being in a new position in life. In every new situation, you'll be asked to breathe differently. New ways of breathing literally morph your physical body. Breathing elevates your mood and affects your feelings of self-worth and self-esteem.
Flexibility shows you how to relax naturally and to use tension appropriately.
As you learn to resist maximally when stretching, your body will naturally employ greater levels of tension while simultaneously relaxing you. It takes unimaginable levels of tension to perform skilled movements and only by being emotional can this happen.
Flexibility brings up your good looks, beauty, image and likeableness.
Everyone wants to put forth his or her best face and body. Because stretching centers you emotionally and helps you to understand who you are from the inside — your light up on the outside... glowing. Remove our tenseness and you'll find yourself liking yourself more.
Flexibility shows you how to be more free, caring, honest and creative.
Different stretches develop your ability to have more freedom, to better care for yourself and others, to risk the embarrassment of being more honest, and to allow yourself to access inner reservoirs of creativity.
Flexibility teaches you to be more social and enjoy yourself socially.
Social anxieties turn into social skills, as you move successfully through the social maze. Learn to return the attention that others give to you to be given back to them.
Flexibility increases positive self- affirmations.
Uplift yourself and others by affirming what is important. Hear yourself say the nicest things about yourself.
Flexibility increases your self-esteem, self-worth, and self-respect.
If you didn't have enough of any of these, you will develop enough and then have enough left over to give to others.
Flexibility teaches you team spirit at home, in business and in prayer.
Groups of people can do what individuals cannot. Teamwork reflects what the people want, and helps the groups to manifest the needs of many.
Flexibility teaches you how to be fulfilled sexually.
Only by being emotionally available can you have satisfying sexual relationships. Mature emotionally into relationships that bring ultimate satisfaction.
Psychological Benefits from Stretching
Cathartic psychological changes result from developing greater flexibility.
Stretching allows you to experience highly desirable personality or behavioral traits that quickly become integrated into your personality. It makes you more psychologically "fit" — better at decision-making, self-expressive, more trusting, etc. You'll think with greater clarity, become more focused and articulate, and have a perspective that is forward-looking and future-minded.
Flexibility turns fear into knowing.
Working on your body and learning how to overcome the fears you have associated with this, is a model for showing you how to handle other fears in life.
Flexibility shows you how to be clear and future minded.
Being flexible about your own areas of ignorance is your bridge to knowledge. Stretching helps you to aspire to greater levels of understanding, clarity and humor.
Flexibility develops 16 high personality traits.
16 of the best personality qualities known to man can be developed from stretching. Turn every negative trait into its opposite high trait.
Flexibility makes you more trusting, understanding, decisive, and expressive.
Develop these strong mental traits by stretching while simultaneously dismantling their opposites.
Flexibility teaches you mental prowess.
Flexibility shows you how to speculate, analyze, prove things, debate, research, and to seek understanding. Become a great problem solver.
Flexibility teaches you civility, manners and aristocratic ways.
Learn how to "live large," exhibiting qualities of tastefulness, diplomacy, and courtesy. Become a connoisseur.
Flexibility teaches you how to stay being your own authority
Learn from all the other brilliant people you encounter while keeping your own authority on yourself.
Flexibility teaches you how to better focus, prioritize, and concentrate.
Thinking is one thing, but holding the thought, keeping the focus, knowing where your attention is, and staying with what is important can all be learned from different stretches.
Flexibility teaches you how to be detached, sympathetic and to problem solve.
Being attached to others is essential, but that doesn't mean you can't also be detached, thoughtful and help to analyze their situations and help them to make good decisions for others and yourself.
Flexibility teaches you to be sober, self expressive, and forceful.
Being unafraid to be with people we like, and are attracted to; using the right words to say what we mean to say, and being able to stand behind what we say can all be learned from stretching — this is sobriety.
Soon you will echo the words of these committed stretchers
Removing the pain from your body, removes the pain from your life.
The benefits are so lasting.
I lost chronic pain and gained strength immediately.
I'm becoming more flexible and healthy than I had ever dreamed possible.
I've learned not to be afraid of anger because I've learned
if I go into conflict I can turn it into love.
I have gained perspective on how to be more alive.
I have some 'heavy duty' catching-up to do.
I've learned to do an Olympic dive in a month.
I've learned not to accept anything less than what I want.
A feeling of newness pervades me.
I speak in middle C.
Stretching removes my biases...opens me to everything.
Nothing has improved my athletic ability like stretching.
Stretching is great... it will always be part of my life.
I've learned to be present, past, future and timeless.
