Assisted Tractioning
Overview
Assisted Tractioning is a hands-on approach to opening, lengthening, tractioning, stretching, gentling, relaxing, a person’s body. As a technique, Assisted Tractioning can be practiced by everyone, from Pilates Instructors to Personal Trainers, Massage Therapists, and Movement Educators from all disciplines, backgrounds, and traditions.
The vocabulary of this technique derives from how Shen Tao, weight and cable apparatus can assist in challenging a client’s blockages and restrictions at the end of their range of motion. The counterbalancing properties of the equipment make it possible for practitioners to work with clients of any height, weight, or age.
Assisted Tractioning as a technique can also be combined with many complimentary disciplines such as Thai Massage, Deep Tissue Bodywork, and Feldenkrais techniques.
BIO-MECHANICS
The Bio-Mechanics Workshop offers hands-on mentoring in how to best organize one’s own body to practice Assisted Tractioning (or any other hands-on method, or technique).
This workshop provides guidelines for a practitioner’s alignment, skeletal and joint placement, techniques for how to use weight instead of muscle, how to minimize tension, utilize rhythm, gradate transitions,
transfer one’s weight, and much more.
One might describe this training as an opportunity to learn how to organize one’s self, to most gracefully dance with one’s partner.
Introduction
This Introduction to Assisted Tractioning workshop builds on the foundational principals, skills and techniques shared in the Bio-Mechanics workshop. This course covers the mechanics of how to utilize a weight and cable apparatus for tractioning, techniques for both floor, and table work, an introduction to the three primary sequences, and much more.
Other skills include the process of transferring weight, how to shift points of contact, sensing right timing, use of rhythm, transitions, breathing and other elements of musicality. This workshop provides practitioners with a foundational understanding of how to explore safely, and creatively, the practice of Assisted Tractioning.
Hip Series
The Hip Series Workshop builds on the technical foundation developed in the Introduction course and explores in greater depth how Assisted Tractioning can be used to open the hips, sacrum, and lumbar spine.
This workshop provides skills in expanding the range of motion of these joints in all three plains of motion,
forward and back, side to side, and internal and external rotation.
With the client’s leg floating weightless, suspended, and tractioned, practitioners learn how to apply hands-on techniques, three dimensionally surrounding the joints.
This workshop is literally the “core” of the Assisted Tractioning curriculum.
Spine Series
The Spine Series is a powerful tool for addressing tension and blockage throughout the torso, and spine.
This series was born from a curiosity about how weights and cables might be used to assist in suspending someone in rotation, literally wringing the tension out of them.
This workshop will present hands-on skills,
techniques, and methods for wringing, tractioning the spine, opening the rib cage, freeing the shoulder girdle, and in general, freeing the torso from blockage.
The mechanics of how to use one’s body weight, elbows, forearms, and hands to rock, rebound, pulse, stretch, twist, and wring the client will be covered.
A stated mission of this training is to support creativity, empower intuition, inspire confidence, and encourage exploration.
Shoulder Series
The Shoulder Series integrates the tractioning effects of weight and cable systems with hands on techniques, to free the bones of the shoulder girdle from the muscles of the rib cage and the spine.
This workshop will cover nine positions/relationships of the client to the equipment. Other subjects include safety, the use of gravity, weight transfers, momentum, pressure points, musicality, transitions, breathing, and much more.
Creativity
Creativity is not a magical ability gifted only to a select few. It is an intuitive process/state of mind that is available to us all.
This workshop seeks to contribute coaching, guidance, and mentoring in how to practice Assisted Tractioning from that state of mind.
There are only so many positions the human body can be placed in, even with the assistance of a weight,
and cable system. But how one transitions between those shapes, at which speed, with, or without momentum, with which timing, and/or quality, how long one lingers, are all up to the intuition, and creativity of the practitioner.
This Workshop offers improvisational structures, creative guidelines, and principals for exploration, and experimentation. Practitioners are encouraged to explore, discover, cultivate, develop their own unique style, their own voice, their own approach to their practice.
On Curves
Gravity is a powerful ally in the practice of Assisted Tractioning. To drape someone across a curved surface is to harness gravity in lengthening, stretching, pulling, tugging someone into greater length.
The On Curves workshop offers experiential training in how to use hands-on-techniques (with, and without weight and cable systems) to open even greater
length in someone who is suspended across a Pilates Barrel, Floor Barrel, or foam roller.
Utilizing the curved surfaces of these apparatus, the force of gravity, and the skilled application of hands-on-techniques provide a unique opportunity to traction a person’s joints, stretch their muscles, lengthen their soft tissue, and gently pull them limb from limb.
For Couples
Assisted Tractioning for Couples is a training for partners to gain practical skills in caring for each other’s body’s. Couples will expand their vocabulary of touch skills, learn how to harness their bodies weight (rather than strength), how to recognize one’s partners pain thresholds, and much more.
The training will also cover techniques for transitioning smoothly between movements,
using touch as a form of nonverbal communication, as well as guidelines for how to pace oneself and structure a session.
This training offers value to couples as an experience unto itself, and in the longer term adds a vocabulary of techniques to each person’s tool kit of how to take care of and contribute to the wellness of their partner.
Videos
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