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Rubber Band Theory

This is an excerpt from Hands-On Yoga Assists by Kiara Armstrong.

As both a student and an educator, I have always found analogies helpful to teach something new and complex; we can take something accessible that we are familiar with and liken it to something that is seemingly more complex and unfamiliar to us. In this case, I likened the tissues of the body and their response to stretch to that of a rubber band. From this, the Rubber Band Theory was born, and I started to use it as an approachable way for trainees to learn the somewhat complex task of listening to and reading the tissues of the body.

Being able to listen with your hands is central to offering Rubber Band Method^® (RBM) hands-on yoga assists. Although RBM offers a system of stances and techniques that can be repeated from person to person, every body is different, and the RBM teacher must know how to adapt their touch to each individual’s unique tissues. This is not a system of assisted stretching that we do to our students; it is a collaboration of our technique combined with the unique density of the student’s tissues, their individual range of motion, their inherent ability to stretch, their past injuries, and so on. When we know how to listen to the tissues and take the feedback to guide the assist, we are collaboratively offering an assist that is anatomically safe for each unique student.

After successfully training many teachers on how to offer assists from the viewpoint of the Rubber Band Theory, I came to realize that the Rubber Band Theory is at the heart of this system, and so it got its name based on its heart, the Rubber Band Method^®.

More Excerpts From Hands-On Yoga Assists

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