Nsima Inyang

I started treating rope flow like I treated jujitsu, like I would watch videos, I would drill, I would practice.

And with any type of new practice, there's a level of frustration that comes with it because it doesn't look like the guys who are doing it well.

But after I start doing it more consistently, there was a morning I woke up where the back pain wasn't there on the right side of the back.

I got out of bed and it wasn't there.

And I was like, okay.

And then it happened again and again and again, and the pain didn't come back.

And I was like, okay, let me figure out why this happened.

The reason why it happened was because with practicing rope flow, inherently, this is gonna be a little bit confusing,

It's an asymmetrical practice that is symmetrical in practice.

What that means is one side of the body is doing one thing, right?

And the other side of the body is rotating in a different way.

When you bring the rope to the other side, this is contralateral movement, just like when you're walking through space.

One side of the body is rotated, the other side of the body is doing another thing.

You're learning to move the rope with something that people call the spinal engine.

um it's a theory that was popularized by Serge Grakovetsky he wrote a video he wrote a book on it i have a video on my channel that kind of explains the spinal engine um and it's it's this idea that good movement funnels through the spine right not just through your arms and your legs because people sometimes think to move through space you just swing the arms and the legs but good fluid movement is actually funneled through rotation a figure eight rotation of the spine

And what was happening was the rope flow was improving my ability to funnel energy through the tool of the rope, using my spine as the main lever.

So I was learning how to really get my spine rotating versus every practice that I was doing was typically keeping my spine perfectly neutral.

The second thing was that everybody has a dominant and a non-dominant side when it comes to their ability to move.

I'm right-handed.

In jujitsu, I tend to sweep people towards my right side.