REBOUNDING

Rebounding is unique as an aerobic exercise because it stimulates, strengthens and cleanses every cell in the body. This is because it uses vertical motion rather than the horizontal motion that is used in all other forms of exercise.

Simply explained, when you bounce up and down, your entire body goes through repetitive vertical acceleration and deceleration, working against gravity. At the bottom of every bounce, your entire body stops for a split second. At this moment, the force of gravity shoves down on every cell in your body. This is the deceleration working with gravity. Then your body shoots back upward, again stopping for just a split instant. This is your moment in space. The movement upward has exerted pressure on your body from the opposite direction of the downward movement. This is the acceleration working against gravity. Because of the repetitive pushing and pulling on all your cells, the tissues and fibers and muscles in your body all grow stronger. This includes your heart fibers and the muscle layers within the arterial walls, even if you don’t dramatically get your heart rate up.

THE SLANT BOARD

Our bodies have evolved in a way that they normally work, not too badly, with the law of gravity. For instance if we look at the construction of the intestinal tract, we see that through most of the journey, food follows a downward slope. When the food reaches the beginning of the colon, it is now mostly liquid, and thus responds easily to peristaltic movement. In the ascending colon, the appendix lies below, and this organ, usually thought of as useless, actually serves to act as an irritant to force the food material uphill. By the time the material reaches the descending colon, gravity is able to exert its force to pull the waste downward.

To find an occasional reprieve from gravity, the logical question is: since gravity is the force that keeps pulling everything down, why not change the direction of our bodies so that what was going down in us now goes up, and what was going up now goes down? In other words, since we can’t change gravity, we have to change ourselves. We can turn ourselves upside down. In this way, we are using the force of gravity for healing.

Yoga discovered the importance of upside-down eons ago. They invented the shoulder stand and the head stand. The slant board is, you might say, the short-cut version of these yoga postures.

When you are standing up, the pull of gravity, and thus the pull on the flow of blood and all other fluids in your body is five or six feet. When you lie on the slant board, with your head lower than your feet, the pull of blood to the upper part of your body is about 18 inches. It’s not a lot, but plenty enough to accomplish a considerable task.

Brain anemia may not be a medically recognized disease entity, but anyone suffering from chronic fatigue has it. If either muscle tone or circulation is not good enough, then the blood can’t travel uphill to the brain sufficiently to feed the brain. Without sufficient blood to the brain, virtually all of our functions will be weakened. The cerebellum, the back part of your brain, is where every physical organ is regenerated. You cannot breathe, you cannot hear, see or taste, you cannot think properly, nor move any part of your body without your back brain getting enough blood flow. This is, as well, the first part of the brain to be adversely affected by gravity.

Animals instinctively feed their brains the blood that is needed by how they sleep. Most animals are in a prone position during sleep, and its head falls lower than the rest of its body. In fact, if you hold an animal up by his front feet for long enough (for a dog, it’s four hours; for a rabbit, it’s three quarters of an hour), the animal will die because its heart and arteries cannot pump enough blood into its brain to keep it alive.

One of the conditions that we find the most responsive to the slant board is prolapsus of the internal organs. Any of us who have been on a traditional western diet, with refined foods, for any extended period of time, will have a prolapsed bowel. The transverse colon, which crosses over the abdomen, will dip in the middle, thus forcing the waste products in the colon to actually have to go upward, against gravity. This almost always proves too difficult, and a prolapsed colon then becomes a clogged colon. Bladder and prostate difficulties generally arise because the organs have fought against gravity for too many years, and the bladder is no longer in its proper place. Uterine fibroid tumors can be caused by the organs above bearing down, causing pressure on the uterus. The uterus, then, becomes malpositioned, thus rendering the uterus less capable of throwing off toxic material.

Lying on the slant board repositions all of the internal organs. Gravity pulls the organs upwards, thus creating space between the organs so that the oxygen can reach the organs more easily.

Simply lying on the slant board with your arms stretched out above your head is wonderful. You may have noticed that between 3 and 5 p.m., it gets harder to keep your energy level up. This is because at this time, the sun and moon change their configuration in relation to each other. The fluids in our bodies make a concomitant change in response. It’s best to find time to do the slant board around this time and you will find that you have renewed vigor for the rest of the day. In fact, 15-20 minutes on the slant board renews your body the same as an hour of sleep.

You can augment the effect of the board by doing simple exercises.

SLANT BOARD EXERCISES:

Exercise 1) To bring more blood into the abdomen, pull the stomach in and up, toward the shoulders.

Exercise 2) You can also pat the stomach, stretching your upper torso from side to side. This both increases circulation and breaks down pockets in the intestinal tract.

Exercise 3) Flex the knees, bringing them as close to your chest as you can get. This is a brain exercise.

Exercise 4) Bicycle on the board. This is good for the abdominal organs.

Exercise 5) Lift the legs and rotate them in large circles. This brings circulation into the pelvic area and stretches the muscles around the prostate. It also releases pressure on the bladder.

Exercise 6) Lift legs straight up to as close to a 90° angle to your body as you can get, then lower them slowly. This builds abdominal strength.