My good friend Whitney (who has a hilarious website you should check out here) has this contraption. It’s for hanging upside down. Or maybe upsidown, depending on your education level. I had heard of these contraptions and heard they were good for you before, but I had not experienced it for myself.
Well thanks to Whitney, I got to experience it for myself. I got to hang upside down like a bat. It was kinda awesome. And very intense.
Whitney helped me flip over slowly. And truth be told, I didn’t go all the way upside down my first try. That’s pretty intense for anyone and I wanted to take ‘er easy. But my second try I did. For a total of 20 seconds. Then I got the giggles and had to come back up to catch my breath (thanks a lot to my hilarious soul buddy who got me giggling while I was hanging). But even just angled mostly upside down is very intense. The blood rushes to all sorts of places it’s not used to going and your body gets jiggly in ways you didn’t know it could jiggle.
If you’ll recall my last post, I had a minor back issue for a week or so. I tried this hanging thing to help it out. I didn’t feel anything at first except a good (and odd) stretch all over. Then as I was coming back up, there was a very specific point when I could feel my vertebrae screaming at me. We isolated the pain! I found the exact angle I needed to stretch it out a little on this terrifying medieval torture contraption. And I worked it out. And cried a little. But as a creative-type, most of my friends are used to randomly crying at any given moment, so everybody stayed cool.
And the next couple days I really felt great. I’m actually considering getting one of these contraptions myself sometime. It seems to work wonders and Whitney swears by it.
Plus, if people ask what you’re up to, you can say “Just hangin’ out” and then laugh uncontrollably at your own cleverness.
Briana Hansen 