Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here tis Zoo, which makes this is uh you should know?
That's right? Ohod Lvia had a good title on this one.
Did you like it? Go ahead?
Well, this is about contortionists, and sure Lvia titled what she sent us bend it like Gumby.
That's right.
I think it's good. It is good.
Yeah, Olivia always comes up with the best.
Yeah, and now we know that she listens to some of these because she heard you take a dig at her.
About explaining what a socket and electrical plug does.
Yeah.
Yeah, she's a good sport. Though. Let's see what else, Chuck, I guess you already spoiled what this episode is about. It's about contor, which I guess we were going to have to get into eventually.
Yeah. I mean, obviously we're talking about bending your body right in ways Gumby that are yeah, like gummy, bending your bodies in ways that are extraordinary, And as we have learned, it's something that maybe you're kind of born with and definitely something you can work toward and maybe a bit of both.
Yeah. I always assumed it was just a born thing and that like one out of every fifteen million people were born as a contortionist essentially, and I figured, yes, of course they have to train and everything, and you know, choreograph. There's a lot of types of contortionism that are essentially contortionist ballets, especially like the ones you see at Circasla, which if you say that funny, Yeah, it's a hilarious
thing to say, it's a good joke. But I guess I just didn't realize that it is something you can Like you or I could go train to be a contortious We would fail utterly, but we could at least go train in our fifties and still do a lot better than we can right now, because it is something you can adapt your body.
To, yeah, for sure. And it's also something that's been around a long long time, right.
Yeah, it has one more thing. It will help you a lot while we're going through some of this stuff to just if you can look it up, watch videos, but even like just photos sometimes can kind of get the point across. It's just one of those things. While we were studying this, I was like, this is gonna kind of be tough to describe in some cases, but we'll do our best.
Yeah, well, I don't think it's going to be the hard to follow. People know what we're talking about.
Okay, So we are talking about contortionism, and you did say that it is very, very old. The oldest thing we've found that is pretty much a certainty that they're depicting a contortionist was an image that was found in Syria, an old old polaroid from twenty three hundred BCE, and there's some contortionists and they're holding swords, and the best that historians can come up with is that it's possible that.
So there's some Hittite writings that describe a performance where contortionists basically jump through hoops of swords as basically a well performance essentially basically say can you do this? No you can't?
Yeah, and you know that followed, of course, we have to talk about all the usual sets backs. Of course, China will come in, don't worry. But ancient Egypt they found pottery fragments that date to twelve hundred BCE that definitely show women dancing in backbinds, like you know, contorting themselves. Sure, and the Greeks also did this later on as well.
Right, Yeah, the Greeks is where we finally start to get to unambiguous descriptions of contortionism. I think as far back as well the twenty five hundred years ago, something like that contortionists had become like an actual thing, like they were part of troops or performers that performed in Greece.
Like if you went to say a public festival, let's say Dionysus was being celebrated that day, there's a chance that you might find somebody doing a contortionist act as just kind of part of the festivities.
Yeah, for sure. And you know, I mentioned China, and this is one of those cases where we don't know if it if people in China and this was like two twenty one BCE to two twenty CE, if they were influenced by people from other parts of the world or not, or whether it developed independently when people over
there realized that they were bindi. But when they look at like some of the clothes that contortionists were wearing in China, it seems like it maybe was influenced by people in Europe, but also could have been Maybe that's just the garb.
They were all wearing Benatton, Yeah, exactly, stretchy stuff. So, yeah, that's very interesting because usually something came out of China and it influenced Europe rather than going the other way around, especially that far back. So I'm yeah, as a person of European ancestry, I'm quite proud of that.
Of course, you know, you would think India is probably a pretty obvious spot for contortionism, and you would be right, because there are sculptures in temples from India these date to tenth century CE that also show women in contorted poses. This time it got a little sexier though.
Yeah. I think a lot of times you think about something like the Kamasutra, and there are definitely contortionist poses in the Kamasutra. Yeah, but there's the to just think of it as like, oh, this is just, you know, like you said, just sexy. There's a spiritual aspect to that whole thing too. It's like a tantric yoga practice, but it is also sexy, just admittedly. But there's this that maybe kind of wonder Chuck like did, like yoga and Buddhism and Hinduism and the incorporation of all these
physical movements that include contortionism. Did that kind of come out of this contortionist? I guess heritage or whatever that dates back to at least the hit Tights, or was what the hit Tights were doing essentially the foundation for what would later become, you know, Buddhism and Hinduism.
Yeah, and to be clear, when we say sexy, we mean they're depictions of actual intercourse because oh yeah, thanks. One of the things that's really annoying to me about all of this, and Lyvia picks us up sort of at the end of the article, but I'm going to go ahead and address it now, is that if you get you know, one hundred people in a room and there's a contortionist, there's probably going to be some dim witted man making some stupid sexual reference about somebody being bindy,
about a woman being bindy, and that's just dumb. So that's not what we were talking about. We were talking about, like, you know, actual pictures of sexual positions. In this case.
I think that was great because you could interpret it away where we sounded like thirty old men essentially. Yeah, yeah, the guys who like kind of elbow on another like huh, check it out. I mean come on, so some people have further way to come than other people. You know, yeah, that's true. So back to India itself, there's a clear
like comparison between contortionism and yoga today. And actually it's kind of neat because if you go online and you look up like contortionism or training or something like that, it's essentially people who are into yoga and they're trying to figure out how to go even further. So they're following ancient practices that have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years, that are contortionists by nature.
Yeah, for sure. England might not be the most obvious place to think about men doing contortionist poses, but that's exactly what happened in seventeenth and eighteenth century there in the form of posture master masters. Posture master is what they were.
That sounds like a mattress, a posture master, but that's.
What was going on. It's a little odd to think about now, but there, you know, it might be like an actual performance. Maybe sometimes it was something that they would do on the street to raise money, like busking or maybe to trying instead of like holding a sign outside your business. There might be a male posture master sitting outside your tavern to try and get people in there. But it was kind of a big deal and they kind of became sort of famous in England at the time.
Yeah, I mean this was before TV, radio, internet, even newspapers in a lot of cases, and there you could as a male contortionist in particular because it was a male dominated field at this time, at least in Europe, and it seems like basically throughout the world that you could become distinctly famous, like a guy named Joseph Clark who apparently in the late seventeenth century was a very very famous contortionist in England, so much so that his
last name was Shorthand for contortion in England and then eventually would morph into Shorthand for giving somebody something that they want.
That's right, the circus is obviously going to come into play, and that is when the circus came into play. And that was and you know, we've done quite a few episodes on the circus back in the day, but as a reminder, this was late eighteenth century when Philip and Patty Astley they had a you know, a lot of the early circuses were like horse riding tricks like equestrian stuff. Yeah, and there's definitely formed out of that, out of their
Astley's riding school in London. And you know, once the circus started spreading around, it came to the United States, and within that circus world contortionists started kind of performing on the regular. But you know, it started to get and which is like it is today. It gets kind of mixed in with other sort of acrobatics.
Yeah, just something back a couple of paces. Once it reached Europe in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, there was no spirituality associated with it. Once it reached western Europe, it was performance from that point on, you know. And yeah, once it hit the circus, it's really started to morph into what we understand is contortionism today. There was one trick I have to say that Patty Astley did on her horse in the very beginning of circuses.
She would ride her horse really fast and her arms would be covered in bees.
Yeah.
That's a wild ride for that's a wild ride for everybody involved.
Yeah. But you know, maybe she was a beatkeeper.
It doesn't matter what she was doing, Chuck. She was riding full throttle on a horse with bees all over her arms. I mean, I'm assuming like they changed like the shape of her arms because there were so many bees that kind of thing, not like two or three bees on each arm.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that wouldn't have much impact. I don't think that impressed me quite a bit. It's pretty good trick. So the actual word contortionists that came around in eighteen sixty. Before then, you know, it was just called other stuff
depending on what culture it was coming from. But if you were in the US or if you were in England performing as a contortionist, you probably said that you were either Chinese or Turkish, or German or French, or maybe you were you might have just claimed to be one of those things because it had such a rich tradition in being BINDI like that. But at this point it started to be mainly women who were hired by male circus owners and a lot of times performing exclusively for male audiences, right.
And so yeah, it kind of evolves even further. And luckily that went from like the point of a contortionist act eventually evolving to you know, a couple of dudes in the audience like elbowing one another, where most people are like getting what the point is. But that said, there are contortionist acts today that are very much geared toward the sexual nature of the whole thing, and you know, they're performed by women who are doing that on purpose,
so you you know, whatever, more power to them. There is like a thread of that. Like you can't just be like, no, that doesn't exist. Stop stop saying that. But the point of most contortionist performances, it seems like, is not that that's a very niche thing these days.
Yeah, for sure, there was one, you know, kind of notable early contortionist. We got to mention here a name. Well, her real name was Beatrice Mary Claxton, but Beatrice Claxton isn't the best name for a contortionist, so she went by Nna Bertoldi, which is much more of a sort of a circusy name. And starting at like age eight years old, she was touring around and as we'll see, you know, contortionism is is mainly a sport of the young. You can age out of it like ballet in a
lot of cases. But she was a kid doing it and she performed all over Great Britain and then eventually traveled to the US in eighteen ninety one. And one of the reasons we mentioned hers because she was very famously one of the early people that Thomas Edison filmed with his kinetoscope.
Yeah, which is pretty cool. I mean, you have to be pretty famous in and of yourself to do that, but to be memorialized in one of the earliest film strips is definitely going to help your fame later on in history. As a contortionist, I would think, yeah, for sure. So you want to take a little bit of a break and come back and talk about the epicenter ground zero of contortionism.
M where could that be?
Okay, So we're back and I talked about the epicenter of contortions and I'm just gonna reveal it now. It's Mongolia, everybody.
That's right. It is has long been that sort of epicenter. It still is that epicenter. And we're going to tell
you why. Because one of the reasons it started as a big deal there is, or at least we think that it, you know, had to do with sort of meditative practices and also like a dance, a Buddhist dance known as the somme, which is you know, also you know, it's very religious, obviously tied to Buddhism, but has to do with, you know, training your body and mind to work together to do incredible things.
I also saw that has secret meaning meanings that you have to be a very high, highly advanced Buddhist monk to you basically be let in on, which is pretty neat.
Oh cool.
There's also a folk dance in Mongolia that's indigenous to Mongolia from what I understand b LG b I y e l G e E. And as far as folk dances go, I'm not usually a huge fan of folk dance, Like I wouldn't go to a community center to see a folk dance performance, but this is a pretty cool folk dance to just check out on video, in part because of the movements, which include contortionism, including full back bends to where the dancer's back is like flat on
the ground while they're on their knees, but also just the incredibly colorful costumes that they wear too. It's really neat.
What is a folk dance performance? Like, what are you avoiding? I don't even know what that means.
It's kind of like when when people from different cultures perform traditional dances. Oh okay, it's a folk dance. I got you, Okay, I mean, what do you think like square dancing? I guess probably a type of float dance. Yeah. No, it's just you know, any kind of cultural dancing. For some reason, it's never floated my boat.
But I gotcha.
I'm not yucking anyone's yum because I couldn't do a single step of any folk dance. And I'm usually impressed with anybody who can dance in any way, shape or form.
Yeah, me too. So twelfth century is when it starts to become a really sort of mainstream thing in Mongolian culture, basically at you know, festival's court appearances obviously. And then seventeenth century is when there was a Buddhist leader named Ondoor Gigeen's and Zavar who inspired these contortionists with these I guess there were was it like just art sculptures basically the people like in Ul sorts of kind of contorted positions.
Yeah, he was like do that position, I dare you. Yeah, he would make sculptures of him. Yeah, that was yeah. And the guy was so I guess popular that like he actually advanced contortionism by pushing them to their limits. I guess as a sculptor. Yeah, you know.
I mean you can bend clay in ways you can't bend the body.
That's right. That's why I can bend it like gumby man.
That's right.
So Mongolia is and I thought this was pretty interesting too. There's like contortionism evolving in different places around the world, you know, kind of simultaneously, but Mongolia basically took the mantle. And one of the reasons why is because they became a Soviet state in the forties and as part of the USSR, the government bankrolled the Mongolian State Circus, which became world renowned traveled the world. That's one of the
ways it became world renowned. But also because they were really really good and one of the center pieces of the Mongolian State Circus was contortionism, and from that it grew in popularity very very quickly because there's a lot of funding for it, a lot of publicity for it. But that created a mushrooming of contortionist schools in Mongolia, some of which are still around today.
Oh yeah, for sure. The first one and the first sort of you know, superstar of that circus was a contortions name Sendayosh and that was the first school. But like you said, there's a lot of them still there. And it's not just like, hey, if you're from Mongolia and you're a young girl and your parents think you're like pretty flexible early on, they may send you to this like that certainly happens, but people from all over
the world, like gymnasts, will go and train. Like anyone who wants to sort of increase your flexibility in an extreme way, there's no better place in the world to go than contortionist school in Mongolia.
No, they know what they're they're doing.
In other words, yeah, for sure, their circus isn't nearly as big ever since they peeled away from the Soviet Union in the early nineties, but it's still like a big kind of rich tradition in that country.
Oh yeah, big time. Right now. The biggest school, I think the oldest school is owned by a former sumo wrestler, and he is Mongolia's most famous, most revered sumo wrestler. He got out of the sumo game and bought the school for contortionism. The thing is, it's kind of in this decline, so much so that Mongolia has been trying to get UNESCO heritage protection for Mongolian contortionism because it's just not quite as widespread, even though there's more schools
than ever, it's just become much more diluted. I think there's a lower barrier to entry for being like say a teacher or a school owner or something like that. And then simultaneous to that, a lot of Mongolian contortionist trainers are going abroad and so they're taking it with them. But at the same time, someone in say like England who sees an English contor, they don't are They're not regarding the idea that that person was trained by a
Mongolian contortionist teacher. They are looking at the English contortionists, and so in that way, it's becoming less and less identified with Mongolia.
Yeah, and it's kind of a I was kind of disappointed that UNESCO turned them down. They try to get you know, it added as a list of intangible heritage, which it seems very clear that that's the case, but they rejected the proposal. This was in twenty eleven, and they said that advocates didn't make a strong enough case for its significance in Mongolian culture and society, which just
I don't know. I'm not on that board obviously, but it seems pretty obvious to me as an outsider that it's like super tied to Mongolian culture.
Sure, well, you will be heartened that the Mongolian folk dance Bilg is protected under UNESCO heritage.
I'll just take it one step further UNESCO.
That's right. One is also, what's the big deal? I don't know. I was trying to think about that. I'm sure that they have a kind of mentality that's like we don't want to open the floodgates or else, you know. But I mean, there's plenty of stuff that I'm sure deserves protecting that they're turning down. And you know what, I'd be interested to know about that. I'm going to look into that and we'll do short stuff on all the stuff you neesco's turned down for heritage protection.
Well, if you want to learn about the mechanics, now is your time to listen closely. This is the point where you were probably talking about maybe looking up pictures and stuff. But you know, I think a lot of people have seen a lot of this stuff. If you've ever watched when we were kids, that's incredible or America's got talent these days, they'll have acts like this or
certainly if you've ever been to like Circsole or something. Yeah, but backbending, there's like kind of six main sort of overall things you can learn, and then within that you can do all sorts of stuff to incorporate little side tricks and then you know mix these together for you know, performative purposes. But back bending, that's sort of the classic place that you start the classic back bend. Yeah.
One of the things is the chest stand, and essentially it's where you're on your chest. See, so I'm gonna like everybody get in this position. I'm gonna walk you through it. You're on your chest flat I guess it's prone on the floor, and you bend yourself at the waist and you bring your hips back back, back, back back, and then you have your feet on either side of your head. You can do this everybody just hanging there. And then your feet are fat flat on the floor
on either side of your head. Remember you're still on your chest, but now your legs are completely over you and your feet are on either side of your head, flat on the floor. That's the chest stand. That's the most basic one. Anybody can basically do that just jumping into it.
Well, my only note with that description is when you said your waist went back back back, Technically I think your waist is going forward forward, forward, So that might have confused people.
Okay, yeah, I think maybe that's why I was like, this is this is hard to describe because I knew I was going to screw it up just royally.
Well, you've also got the front bend. If someone has got a little humor to their performance, you're probably going to use a front bend because that is when you're sort of doing the opposite in which you fold your head and chest all the way between your legs to where you're sort of looking at your own butt. So obviously insert joke right there.
Yes, these are the ones that really get to me, Like the there's like some sort of preternatural like zap that contortionist poses can do to you, or to me at least, and the like the human pretzel one or the human knot. Those are the ones that they just zap me. It's a very thrilling way. But at the same time, I like there's some part of my lizard brain that like that ain't right. Body's not supposed to do that.
Yeah, I mean, we go to Circula every year when it comes to Atlanta in the fall. That's kind of one of our little family traditions, and there's always some kind of contortionists, I feel like. But yeah, this last one, and I can't remember which one it was called, but they had a guy and it was he was the
best I had ever seen. It was. I wasn't quite sure what I was watching it at certain points where you can't even tell which arm was which or you know, it was definitely one of those brain breaking sort of performances. It was incredible.
Yeah, for sure, those are. I think one of the other things too that I've noted, especially with Search to Sola performances, is it's not just like a hey, look I'm in this pose and I'm holding this pose and now I'm just going to get into the next post. Like the transition from one post to another is incredibly important, and that's kind of what makes it like a very
ballet like performance, you know. I think that's just that makes the whole thing like even more amazing, but at the same time time more exapts me less than just like a here's a pose. Check it out. Let. It really sink in what I'm doing right now. Yeah, it's like I like it when it's the way that you describe it where you can't even tell what's what.
Yeah, I mean, I think definitely the next part balancing is when that comes into play. That's I think a lot of like the feats of strength combined with you know, I said, they kind of mix things up in circuses, and the feats of strength is definitely when balancing comes in because that's when you're contorted in a pose and maybe you're like lifting yourself off the ground in a little ball that you can't even figure out with just like your fingertips or something like that.
Yeah. Very famous. One of these is the Marinelli bend, and that is essentially kind of like it's like a chest stand. It's very similar to a chest stand, except that rather than having your weight on your chest, you have all of the weight in your entire body on your teeth and you're probably biting a pole and that's what's holding you up while you're doing your chest stay in the middle of the air. It's quite impressive and
I looked it up. There is a Mongolian contortionist named sastral Ordenablig and she holds the record for holding a Marinelli bend for four minutes and seventeen seconds.
That's a long time with her teeth. Yeah, dislocation, that's another one that probably might trigger some folks. That is kind of one of those deals where it looks like you're popping your shoulder or your arm out of joint or something like that to achieve the sort of performative effect. The shoulder passed through with sort of a classic move.
That's where you hold a stick with both hands and you move the stick all the way, you know, in front of your body and then over your head into your back, but you're not changing your grip, so your arms are twisting and contorting in ways that look like they've been dislocated.
Yeah. The splits too. I always thinking the splits is kind of like a cheer Yeah, it's classic. It's like a cheerleader thing, or you know your friend in the neighborhood can do it. Have you ever done a split?
Now, I'm not splitty. I mean I used to be very flexible, like I could put my ankle, like my foot behind my head.
Wow.
When I was young and stuff like that, and when I was one come close now in Ruby the other day was just laughing at me because I was actually fairly close.
But I was never a splitter, all right, fair enough, I wasn't either. But one of the basic things that you have to learn is the splits, because so many of the other kind of movements and poses are based on being able to do a split. It's a basic one. But if you really want to be impressed, go look
up over splits, which is doing a split. But say one foot is on a chair in front of you and the other foot is on a chair behind you, and you're a foot or so off of the ground, almost making a just the beginnings of a U with your legs.
Yeah, I like that standing split where you're on one leg and you have reached behind you and grabbed that foot and brought it all the way over. That's always because that's also incorporates balance. Obviously.
I don't remember who did that, but one of the I think that one of the American skaters in the Winter Olympics did that while they were doing like a spin. Yeah yeah, but it was like perfectly ninety degrees perpendicular to the ice. It was really amazing.
Well you got to are you get that half point deduction.
And then twisting too. This kind of twisting is not necessarily in and of itself a pose, although it will be impressive, but it's kind of like a fundamental part of a bunch of other poses, right where if you're twisting yourself around, or if you're moving yourself so that you can't tell what arm is, what you're twisting to
some degree. And what's really fascinating to me about this is that each individual vertebra is rotating, and it's rotating to a degree that the average person can't do obviously, but just the idea of your spine, I would think of it as moving in one thing. But it's just like think, think, think, think, think. Each vertebra is moving itself. I think that's an amazing skill.
Just that.
Like if somebody walked up to me and said I can twist all of my individual vertebra, can you? I would say I don't think I can.
Yeah, and I wouldn't know if I am exactly.
I know somebody's getting right in and be like, don't be stupid, Josh. Everyone's vertebra twist individually I get that. I guess I'm trying to get across that I'm impressed by contortionists. Okay, for sure.
Should we take another break?
I think we should.
All right, We're going to come back and talk about sort of the dark side of this right after this.
Stop stop stop, all right, I promise talk of the talk of the dark side, and that is to say there are.
Some some syndromes and some disorders that could lend itself to this. Uh So, I guess that's the dark side. The first thing we should clear up is that double jointed is not a thing. Uh. I know, that's something that everyone kind of learned on the playground, like, look, I'm double jointed. But what people or people don't have extra joints. What people are really talking about there is
what's called hypermobility. Yeah, and that is something that obviously if you are hyper mobile, then you are have a pretty good leg up to being a contortionist. And they would diagnose that or I guess, rather rate your high mobility on what's called the Baiton scale, and nine is the highest on that scale. And if you're a contortionist, you're probably a nine.
Yeah, But also aren't you a jerk if you make a scale and you just leave it at nine rather than ten.
I just I feel like there had to be a reason for that, but I didn't ask.
Well, you at a point for each thing that somebody can do. So it's things like can you touch your thumb to your forearm? And I can do that very easily. I'm doing now over and over again. But you want to be able to do that with each hand. There's like can you does your nee go back a certain degree behind itself. There's just a bunch of different ones, and you add one point for each limb that can do that, and I guess it just adds up to nine. He wasn't being a jerk. I was just kidding.
Yeah. So I mentioned early on that genetics could play a part, and that's certainly true. You know, if your parents were controls or your mom is a contortionist, you may be born more flexible, you may be born with hypermobility. But sometimes it does correlate, like I said, with the genetic conditions. The first one is eds Ler's dan Low syndrome. There's really thirteen of those syndromes. So it means that you know, if you're a contortionist. You may have one
of these, not always, but it's possible. Yeah.
I think it's sometimes called circosolate disease, and there are, like you said, thirteen of them. They because the one thing they have in common is that they affect your connective tissue. So you can have one that makes you very hyper mobile, very extendable. Hyper extendable because the connective tissue in your joints is not as say, stiff as somebody else's, so you can go way beyond the normal
range of motion. But then there's also other ones that keep you from being able to control your own breathing, or your teeth fall out of your head because your gums are not kind of active enough to hold them in there. So there's a whole bunch of different ways that this can affect you. It just happens that a couple of the forms of EDS, or a couple of the symptoms of some types of EDS make you much more hyper mobile and hyper extensive.
Yeah, for sure. Sometimes if you are hyper mobile and you have the EDS, and that's one of I guess sort of the pluses. It can have some harmful traits, like although it can also help with the skin hyper extensibility like having really stretchy skin, or maybe joint instability is obviously a bad one because that can lead to
injury and dislocations and stuff like that. But we should point out that there doesn't seem to be any like weird high rate of injury for people who are involved in contortionism, and definitely not does it mean like you're going to die younger. That's sort of a old wives tale that contortionists die young, But that may have to do with the fact that it could be go along with some of these syndromes.
Yeah. I also wonder if it has to do with just going out of the public eye at a very young age, because in Mongoli, I think the average career of a contortionist goes from about age six to age thirteen. So I wonder if that just kind of helped develop that old wives tale over the years.
Oh, like people think they died and just aged out exactly. Oh interesting.
One of the things that was always kind of obvious to me is that women are more flexible than men on the whole. There are actually distinct physiological reasons for this, one of which I mean body structure obviously, but hormones apparently affect your connective tissue and it's I guess strength or degree of flexibility. And so when women take progestin progestin only birth control pills, they're more hyper mobile than when they aren't on birth control pills. Isn't that fascinating?
Yeah? For sure. And then you know, jumping back to the syndromes, the second one is something called marphan syndrome, which I feel like we've talked about at some point. I know I've heard of it. But that's another genetic condition that makes that connective tissue like super flexible. Right in this case, it's about sort of like EDS, it's
about one in four thousand each of them are. And you know this one you can cause shortness of breath, heart palpitations, ie pain sometimes, and you know those are the two main ones. But outside of this, there's an umbrella term called hypermobility spectrum disorder that kind of covers, you know, other things that lend itself to extreme flexibility.
Yes, and like like you said, you do have advantages to this. So if you're a woman on a high level of hormones who has Marphin syndrome and maybe a high hypermobility spectrum disorder. You are probably a like what I thought all contortions were, essentially a born contortionist. There's challenges for all the advantages that offers, and then obviously the drawbacks in other ways that it affects your health. But as far as contortionism goes, it has just a
suite of advantages for you. But there's also like drawbacks in that, like you will have to probably do more strength training than the average person because again your connective tissue is weaker than other people's, which makes you easier to flex or more flexible, and then also you might be more prone to injury, like you were saying, because you can dislocate way easier than other people.
Yeah, but they've you know, they've done studies and it's they haven't found it any different than any other sort of you know, professional athleticism. They've even put people in the Wonder Machine and have been contort in an MRI and didn't see anything odd going on. So they basically said, it's all good, keep doing what you're doing.
Nothing odd going on here. Yeah, So if you wanted to get in the contorting chuck, where would you start? That's the question.
I put to you, now, let's start stretching immediately.
I think I think that's a good, good plan.
Yeah, but you should probably start as a small kid, like some people get into this as adults, but much much, much more often, like I would say ninety five percent of the time, you're starting out as a kid because you have a lot more you know, you're flexible as a kid, you got more collagen fibers going on, your muscles and joints don't have as much calcium at that point.
So kids are just bendy, they are super bendy. You also want to do a lot of strengths training too, and you're gonna, like, if you want to be an actual professional contortionist, you're basically gonna need to dedicate your life to it. You have to train every day for hours and hours a day. And that whole stretching thing is not just like what you do to warm up.
There's it's actually part of your training is to stretch because there's a really interesting reflex called the myotatic reflex, the myostatic but essentially, when you flex a muscle or when you press on a muscle, the reflex is that your muscle automatically contracts. It's how your body keeps you from falling down. Essentially, is this automatic reflex. The problem is that keeps your muscles from expanding or stretching further.
So if you just stretch like normal, like if you do a hamstring stretch, your muscles are no longer than they were before you did that hamstring stretch. It feels better and they're looser, but they're not actually longer, which is really important in contortionism. So they've figured out that there are certain ways that you can do stretching. They're called proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation stretches, and essentially this is how you train your body to actually elongate the muscle fibers.
Yeah, and you are well on your way at that point. You obviously got to be drinking plenty of water too, because that's going to keep that spinal support, keep those disks nice and cushiony, and that's just a good Obviously, when they tell you to drink water every day, there's lots of reasons for that, but that's one of them. Just as a regular old person walking around not twisting themselves into shapes, and you know, they have found that
it gets Obviously it gets better with time. Like when you start training, your muscles aren't going to change that much in the first few weeks, but your neurons actually shipped in their behavior, and your pain tolerance is going to increase, and your range of motion is going to extend. And again this is just you know, for contortionism, but flexibility and stretching is kind of one of the keys to aging. Well, you know, so this advice is for a lot of people.
Yeah, when I was looking up a lot of this stuff for contortionism, I ran into tons of videos that were just like for that, like just to become a more flexible average person. It is a super important agreed. Yeah, okay, so if you want to go see a contortionist, there are big is on the web, but it's much much different to see it in person. So you know, yeah, maybe, like you said, make an annual pilgrimage to sirch to so lay like your family. Chuck.
Yeah, Fourth, I think it's fun.
Well, since Chuck said he thinks it's fun, everybody, that means it's time for listener.
May guys are gonna call this no corrections, just compliments. Nice That was in the subject line, so I'm always prone to read one of those. It was a nudge listening to Jane Stanford episode was a nudge to finally write in and thank you guys for what you do. And so what Sarah has done here was wrote a top sort of a stuff you should know top ten, which means it's four things long, five things long, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. No, there's ten, but maybe i'll read like six of them
in truth you shouldow style. Yeah, so here we go with number ten. Thank you for your friendly banter at the beginning of the episode. Number nine. Thank you for the witty episode names. Number eight. We always try to make the episode titles.
Kind of fun most of the time.
Yeah, sometimes it's straightforward. You can't, you know, mock something like, oh I don't know anything serious or sad. Number eight. Thank you for the movie book cocktail, barbecue rice recipe recommendations that you share, sometimes topics specific and sometimes not. Number seven. Thank you for your obvious desire to not show just kindness to different groups of people, but or be politically correct, but to actually be kind people. All right,
that's nice. Yeah. Number six, Thank you for your openness about your own lives, pets, and relationships, which makes us feel like we can relate to you. It's a good one, yeah for sure. Number five, Thank you for being surprisingly informative on unique topics, but also admitting that some of them are not as tantalizing parentheses. I'm looking at you, hard sciences, That's what Sarah said. And can we all admit that the true crime and holiday extravagances are the best,
so serious into those. Number four, Thank you for coordinating the intro outro jingle to the overall style of the episode. We need to thank one person in another whole set of people for that. Obviously, Jerry is the one who's picking those out. Sure, so she's doing the coordination, but stuff you should know listeners of the people who perform and those to begin with and recording.
Yes, yeah, and Dave and Ben pick them out to Jerry's the all time goat. Yeah for sure, she's the all time greatest of all time.
That's right. Number three, Thank you for the mispronunciations and the accents, especially in the Halloween episodes. Sarah really gets what we're trying to do here. Number two, Thank you for creating something we can usually safely listen to with kids in the car and still be entertained, or just have on in the background so we feel surrounded by friends. Number one, thanks to you both for coming to Madison,
Wisconsin in April. Stay second row seats, so, Sarah, I guess we'll be seeing you on the second row there. And if you haven't got tickets for Madison yet or Akron or Chicago, there are still tickets available.
Yeah, it's stuff youshould Know dot com on the tour button.
That's right.
That was really nice, Sarah. That was a great email. I'm glad you selected that one. Chuck. Yeah, thank you very much for all that, Sarah, and thanks for listening as much as you obviously do. And if you want to be like Sarah and send us a clever, cool neat email, we love those. You can send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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