Hi everyone, Kit here. Mr. Sheerer and Mike Chommage have asked me to present a stretch teacher workshop in their fabulous facility called The Foundry in Edmonton. And some of you know that I taught there last year and I've made a few videos which show the interior of this fantastic gym space. But they also asked me to try and do some selling of this workshop which is something that I normally don't do. But then when I thought about it I thought well rather than selling it perhaps I can just explain some of the things about what it is that we're going to do in this workshop that might make it attractive to you. But let me talk about the stretch therapy system first. Firstly it's a well proven system. We've had over 20,000 students come through the Australian and National University classes in the last 26 years. It's a phenomenal body of research evidence and in fact working with those people led to my two books over come neck and back pain and stretching and flexibility and another one as well. And also over come neck and back pain to be in rewritten four times. And we do have some insights into those problems and of course we share that with you too on this course. The other thing that I want to mention about the stretch teacher course is that it's suitable for everyone. And for that by that I mean I don't just mean for yoga teachers and massage therapists, dance teachers and Pilates teachers although of course it's suitable for them too. But rather if you want to get more into your own body if you really want to have the experience of working your body deeply there is no other workshop on the planet like this one. I absolutely guarantee that your experience of yourself will be transformed during the six days. And what you'll learn on a stretch teacher workshop is a perfect complement to any therapy you may happen to practice. For example it's a perfect complement to yoga, it's a perfect complement to massage therapy or body work of any kind or Pilates. In fact if you look at our YouTube clips you'll see that we've got our facilities set up inside many Pilates studios and conventional gyms around the world. You will leave this workshop with a deeper understanding of how your body works and you have presently that I promise you. So in order to give you a bit of a flavour of what just a single exercise would look like on one of these workshops I'm going to show you now our approach to the hamstring stretch. Now everyone wants to stretch their hamstrings but doing it the way I'm about to show you will feel quite different in the body from any conventional stretch you do. Now most people when they do this exercise here which is not a very well done straight legs forward bend out of yoga and many other systems what they feel is a very intense stretching sensation at the back of the leg here and if you pay attention to the sensations in your body when you're doing that the emotion that you feel if you stretch strongly enough is actually fear and the stretch reflex as well stops you from going further unless you're prepared to spend a very long time in the position. What I want to show you today is an approach that we use for stretching one hamstring at a time and which also uses the three neural reflexes in the body that have been written about for 60 or 70 years and combines them in a way that produces a very strong relaxation effect in the hamstring muscle. So let me show you what that looks like. Also too I've got a piece of plastic underneath this cushion here so that it will slide on the cotton so I'm going to put my back knee on that and I'm going to put what I'm going to call from now on my front knee on this cushion here and the first thing I'm going to do is to let myself come down onto my thigh like this and then breathe and relax. Something else that both Mike and Misty said is that the system itself comprises 10,000 tiny details and it's putting together all of the details that make the difference. So for example I said let yourself relax onto this leg here and then I said breathe. Now when I say breathe I mean put your awareness and your attention actually into the sensation of breathing at this very moment and when you do that you'll find that no matter how relaxed a person you are or not of course there is actually more relaxation to be had. So in this position here I would say take another breath in and apart from this support hand here which is holding me up let the whole body go limp and let's call that step one. Now what won't be obvious is that the brain knows exactly where this end of the hamstring equation is simply because my tummy is resting on my thigh and we call that reducing the apprehension reflex. I've written about this extensively but the best exposition is probably in the book Overcome Neck and Backpan and you may care to check that out. And the second reflex we're going to use is called the Reciprocal Inhibition Reflex. So this is how it works. I slide myself backwards like this by activating the quadricep muscle on my front leg and that's what I'm doing now. I'm pushing myself backwards using this muscle and the act of sliding myself backward using quadricep necessarily inhibits the hamstring muscle. So I actually get a better stretch than if I had just reached down and held my feet as I showed you before. So in this position here then another detail is this hip here I'm going to bring back behind me and bring the hip of the back leg forward and again that tightened up the pose and emphasizes biceps femoris the outer hamstring which everyone is that's their tightest hamstring for sure. Okay so that's the Reciprocal Inhibition Reflex and the third reflex I'm going to talk about today in brief is what we call the post contraction inhibition reflex and this is how that works. This heel here resting on the mat I'm going to try and pull it back to my bottom. Now when you pull back don't pull back too hard just pull back hard enough to feel which muscles are working and you might be surprised to find that that action activates the internal and the middle hamstring and if you pay attention you can feel that very clearly and directly. Now the next activation we're going to use is I'm going to press this heel straight down into the floor and that and if you again if you pay attention you'll find that this activates another hamstring muscle complete it's called biceps femoris and when I press down like this and count backwards five four three two one stop the intensity of the sensation is is localize here underneath the buttock and in the outer part of the hamstring and again you can feel that very very very clearly then again I tell myself to take in a breath and to let my trunk relax completely on the leg I might stay there for a moment or two until I feel that those hamstring muscles that I just activated have relaxed completely and that's about now for me so I take in another breath and on a breath out I slowly push myself back with using the same reflex we used before the reciprocal inhibition reflex by pushing back with quadricep on the front leg and that's the reason for having the slightly thing underneath the back knee and I breathe and I relax and I say to myself I'm going to let everything relax except the arm that's holding me up I can feel the comfort of my thigh against my chest and ribs I'm paying attention to my breathing I'm breathing slowly and rhythmically and I become aware that actually I'm relaxing a little bit more with each breath out I would normally stay in that position for a minute or two but that's not going to be particularly satisfying for you and one of the other aspects that's very different about our approach is the instruction set is extremely detailed and it's based solely and fairly on Western anatomy and physiology and what we specialize in teaching is functional anatomy so whilst it's the case that you know every little knob on every bone in the body has its own name that stuff's not important to us what is important for example is how to put the body into a certain position when and alignment that will guarantee that the hip flake is a stretch properly well I hope I see you at the workshop and if you want a bit more of an idea of the sorts of things that we do by all means look at my YouTube channel and we'll see you there