Leslie here.
You know that feeling when the reality of your limitations hits you smack across the face? When presented with a new challenge you can’t overcome (yet, or ever), I call that getting humbled. Getting humbled can offer us a lesson in acceptance and equanimity, and it can also motivate us to try harder.
When we stack up against others, sometimes we are humbled by our peers, or by those who retain the gifts of their youth, and sometimes… we get humbled by our elders.
And when I was the ripe young age of 22, an entire society of grandmas humbled me with nothing less than their commendable squat form.
I was living in South Korea, testing my teaching ambitions in an English-immersion kindergarten. Not only could my 5 year-old students drop down into and hang out in easeful and cozy squats like their little toddler siblings, but so could their parents, and even their grandparents.
Ajummas – Korean grandmas – could be found casually squatting to rest, socialize, gather herbs, connect with their grandkids, do house chores, and simply move in response to their own desires and demands of daily life.
As someone with aspirations towards physical health and freedom of movement, I was both mystified by my own incapacity to squat as well as they could, and motivated to get on their level.
There is some evidence showing that the typical bone structure of folks of East Asian descent supports the deep joint positions required for a squat. This fact, combined with not having grown up in a squat-normative culture, makes me unsure that I’ll ever quite match their ease, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying! Now at 38, my squat is more comfortable and closer to a resting position than ever.
Part of what makes squatting doable is hip mobility. My days as a foreign English teacher in Korea were formative in many ways, but one is that I will never take hip mobility for granted again – it really is a use-it-or-lose-it game.
To that end, if your hips are feeling stiff and sore, or you realize that your hips don’t move as well as you’d like them to, I highly recommend our series Hip Mobility May. It’s got all my best ideas on how to directly improve your experience of your hip joints – both the feeling and the function.
Try it! And I’ll see you in a squat sometime soon 🙂
—
Hip Mobility May can be found inside Branches On Demand, our streaming service. You can join for FREE for your first 7 days, then it’s $25/month after that, with no minimum commitment. All the content from Hip Mobility May will be live from May 1 – June 15. Each month, BOD subscribers get access to a new series. Check it out!
The Branches 