TN50#161_Coffee’s Brewing Yoga_15 April_2024

Hi Team,

After 53 years of almost never missing an opportunity to land on the ground like a sack of potatoes; including almost 25 years of jumping out of airplanes in the US Army.  I figure it out, I’m allergic to gravity!  I mean it hasn’t killed me yet; but it’s definitely created some day-to-day skeletal issues that require a little extra care.  There’s nothing worse than having a hip out of alignment, sciatica shooting down one or both legs or a pinched intercostal muscle for days on end.  If you want to know one of my daily rituals that keeps all of this fairly manageable, please keep reading.

Happy Monday and Tax Day (for my fellow Americans) and welcome to The Next 50 #161. I like to think of personal performance in 3 components: physical, mental and emotional.  My frameworks focus on 4 Buckets: Eat, Sleep, Move and Think.  This blog is my sandbox for sharing information that you might find useful for your personal performance.

There was a time in my life when I had the absolute best job in the world, Operator, in the best Unit in the world.  AND My body was so jacked up (impingements and misalignments) that one of my legs measured about 2” shorter than the other and I regularly had a rib out of place and was in constant pain.  This was at a time in my life when I did a lot of things right regarding my personal performance and a lot of things wrong.

News Flash: No amount of being a bad ass commando is going to make significant impingement and misalignment issues magically go away.  

After many sessions with the Angel of Pain aka “T” (that’s right this lady is so cool she doesn’t even need a full name like Madonna, she just needed a single letter, T), I was finally able to maintain proper alignment with minimal impingements.  These sessions weren’t stand alone though, there was a decent amount of work I needed to do in between sessions to make the therapy work better.

After retiring from the Army in 2016 and joining the corporate executive world my day-to-day movement looked a lot different and, even though I worked out almost daily, I found myself sliding back into that constant misalignment, impingement and pain space, this was not the quality of life I was looking for and unfortunately T was back on the East Coast and I was in Colorado.

News Flash: No amount of being a bad ass retired commando now F500 Executive is going to make significant impingement and misalignment issues magically go away.

I knew from years of experience that my best opportunity to get joints in proper alignment, by myself, has always been first thing in the morning.  This is because the muscles, including the ones that were locked up around a misaligned joint or vertebra have relaxed over the 6 – 8 hours of time in bed. 

Fast forward a couple years to 2018 and this morning movement session was finally given a not so catchy name, “Coffee’s Brewing Yoga”

Coffee’s Brewing Yoga, has gone through a few improvements and often gets a couple additional movements added in based on the “acute issues of the day” but here’s the current baseline routine:

  • Cat/Cow
  • Child’s Pose/Cobra
  • Seated Twist
  • Supine Butterfly (I do this one before getting out of bed as well)
  • Supine Figure 4
  • Prone Hip Extension
  • Lateral Hip Extension
  • Bird Dog

When I am moving through and between these movements every joint and every muscle gets activated; and there are lots of auditory and tension related signals to let me know that things are getting into the right place to start the day.  And by the time I’m done with my Bird Dogs, you guessed it, my first cup of stemming hot coffee is ready to go!

Who do you know that could use this information?  I bet you can think of a couple of folks before you click the next email, so please share the post with your team and anyone who might find it useful and let me know what you think!

Have a good one, Alex

PS. If you’d like a list of video demo links to all the moves mentioned above as well as my rep scheme shoot me an email with the subject line, “coffee’s brewing yoga” or just CBY to: alex@fpp.llc

PPS.  If you’re new to First Principles Performance Coaching, here’s a one stop shop for my stuff.