If you watch Lila for any length of time, and I have been known to do that, you realise one (of many) things. That little children are unbelievably flexible. They can just move their little bodies in any direction to the maximum extent that skeletons allow. Whereas adults are generally different. We move anywhere, bend by just 10 or 15 degrees or pick up a tea cup, and it hurts. Somewhere. We’re not ‘bendy’.

Thus, in between 2 (nearly 3) and 60, rigor mortis starts to set in. Which is why God invented Pilates. Yoga. Even tai chi. To cope. To fight off the inevitable. To prevent the stiffness. To… stretch!!! Oddly, working out muscles, which many are prepared to do very regularly, generally acts in opposition to flexibility. Tight muscles may look good in your Speedos but they inhibit normal joint flexure. Which is (one of a thousand reasons) why I never ‘work out’.

In the Times today is a big article about the merits of stretching. Like we didn’t know. Like we don’t watch our football teams spend an hour stretching out before every match and half an hour AFTERWARDS stretching down. Which is even more important. Which is why no-one, unless they’re getting paid 200k a week, ever does it.

Because along with bodies that stiffen, we are also blessed with minds that think. And get bored. Particularly doing laborious, sometimes uncomfortable and repetitive tasks. So we’d rather watch the coffin scene from Kill Bill 2 than spend that time more productively with our heels up on the window ledge, groaning.

Yet stretching definitely works. Even though Guru Larry won’t call it ‘stretching’ (a bad-sounding thing), but instead ‘loosening’. Which is both more accurate and sounds more beneficial than destructive. And we always loosen. We do it before we do the tai chi, which itself is a wonderfully thorough stretching exercise. But you can’t do it properly if you’re stiff as a board. And you certainly can’t spend an hour kicking and punching and swinging a sword around if you haven’t ‘loosened’ hips, shoulders, backs, hamstrings. Well, you can, then you go to hospital.

Mel now stretches every night. She takes these things on board in a way no man ever could. I hear her doing it. Whilst Uma is 2-inch punching her way out of the ground, just before Michael Madsen gets bitten by the snake.

So we know we should stretch. We even know pretty much how to do it. It requires no special equipment. No tools. Just the hardest things of all: time and motivation.

Happy bendy Tuesday

A xxxx