How to Strengthen Ligaments?

Hello again everyone.

Yesterday, I got a very very minor sprain in my finger, and today I got to thinking. "My ligaments must be too weak to resist the force I'm putting on them. Surely, there's a way to strengthen them." I was doing 360 dive rolls and my middle finger was hyperextended.

Back on track, I want to know ways (in general, not specific body parts (but feel free to tell)) how to strengthen ligaments.

I understand strengthening tendons, but since ligaments are not directly involved with muscles, it makes no sense to me saying that lifting weights (or any other form of resistance training similar) will strengthen them. And of course, I have developed a theory on strengthening ligaments. Wouldn't putting light weight on a dangerous position for ligaments eventually cause them to strengthen? I understand how slow they heal. My primary example is how it is believed that hindu squats strengthen the anterior knee ligaments... By putting them in the most stretched position possible then applying weight to it in a comfortable manner. The problem with my idea is that if ligaments are anything like tendons, they may become stretched during the process, which I do not want at all.

In case modern science has nothing on this subject yet, then I can simply refer to Bodhidarma's Sinew and Tendon Changing Classic.

I have recently been wondering the same thing. It's really been the only thing on my mind for the last week. I have recently read Primal Blueprint, and Mark Sisson says that cardio between 50-75% of your maximum heart rate will strengthen tendons, build new capillaries, strengthen bone, and I believe he says it will also build ligament strength. I do not have the book next to me so I might be wrong on the ligament part. I will verify later, even though it is probably on his site, most of the book's content is. If this is true I will start dedicating large amounts of my time doing this for my upper body. I will first, however, need a heart rate monitor to guide me. I was thinking of things like splitting wood and canoeing. I would definitely love comments and inputs from higher ups on this topic.

It would seem there's not much information on this...

Tendons and ligaments respond best to extremely short duration, very high intensity loads. Basically, elastic stretch-and-release elements. Pitches, plyometric work, stuff like that. Of course you have to scale the work correctly, if you are working so hard that you cause strain instead of stress you will be headed right for tendonitis land!

You will need to make sure that the areas around your joints have excellent bloodflow, since tendons themselves have almost none. Galvanic stimulators like the ARPwave can be used to drastically enhance healing, but that is a very niche area of sports training/medicine and is not widely understood despite the fact that it is really simple. Basically they use DC electricity to enhance blood flow directly in the area, and you can actually sleep with them on. They are painless. You have to have a doctor's prescription to buy them.

Other methods like cryotherapy and hot-cold baths/showers work fairly well to promote healing, and so does high volume work with long TUT. The volume work, which is what we are doing on WODs like friday's where we did 15' cirque, 10 FL pulls and 5 Naners back to back, promotes vascularization, which means your body will literally grow new blood vessels in the trained areas! This does help the healing process and therefore tendon and ligament development and remodeling, but as far as training the tendons themselves you want very high rep, very high speed, very low intensity.

This is part of why your warm up should be full body even when you don't do work sets with your whole body. You NEED the blood to flow everywhere for proper healing. The more you move, the more you heal.

So then, how do rack pulls come up on this? I've heard that they're basically for tendons and ligaments, but they're extremely high intensity with short duration.

Funny enough... I can't use it, but we have an electric stimulation machine (that doubles as an ultrasound machine) at my school. I just know where it is and how to use it since I'm a student athletic trainer.

Also, in the care and prevention of athletic injuries class, I was looking through the book and it has little snippets of stories submitted to the publishers of real examples of whatever the topic is... one of them was a doctor who found using an electrical stimulation machine helped the healing of diabetes patients (because (i did not know) they tend to heal slowly).

Whoever told you rack pulls are for tendons and ligaments are lying. It's a lower back exercise (erector spinae). Obviously it will also strengthen tendons but you can't compare it to for example wrist pushups.

slizzardman said:

Tendons and ligaments respond best to extremely short duration, very high intensity loads. Basically, elastic stretch-and-release elements. Pitches, plyometric work, stuff like that. Of course you have to scale the work correctly, if you are working so hard that you cause strain instead of stress you will be headed right for tendonitis land!

You will need to make sure that the areas around your joints have excellent bloodflow, since tendons themselves have almost none. Galvanic stimulators like the ARPwave can be used to drastically enhance healing, but that is a very niche area of sports training/medicine and is not widely understood despite the fact that it is really simple. Basically they use DC electricity to enhance blood flow directly in the area, and you can actually sleep with them on. They are painless. You have to have a doctor's prescription to buy them.

Other methods like cryotherapy and hot-cold baths/showers work fairly well to promote healing, and so does high volume work with long TUT. The volume work, which is what we are doing on WODs like friday's where we did 15' cirque, 10 FL pulls and 5 Naners back to back, promotes vascularization, which means your body will literally grow new blood vessels in the trained areas! This does help the healing process and therefore tendon and ligament development and remodeling, but as far as training the tendons themselves you want very high rep, very high speed, very low intensity.

This is part of why your warm up should be full body even when you don't do work sets with your whole body. You NEED the blood to flow everywhere for proper healing. The more you move, the more you heal.

I think I need a little more help understanding. For joint health you want to first increase bloodflow by means of vascularization, and then move on towards plyometrics only after you have good recovery abilities? Is lactic acid the key component of vascularization? To promote vascularization while stressing tendons what is ideal? Would you want high/low reps, high/low intensity, high/low volume, and high/low speed. Also, what is ideal for vasculariztion without stressing tendons(if possible); high/low reps, high/low intensity, high/low volume, high/low speed? Sorry for so many questions. :oops: This particular subject is of great interest to me, and I would really like to thoroughly understand it. Thanks for the help Slizzardman.

I improved my ligament strength drastically with a product called "liga-strong." It's only like $10 and it lasts a while.

You can check it out here.

trianglechoke7 said:

I improved my ligament strength drastically with a product called "liga-strong." It's only like $10 and it lasts a while.

You can check it out

.

Fer shizzle?

trianglechoke7 said:

I improved my ligament strength drastically with a product called "liga-strong." It's only like $10 and it lasts a while.

You can check it out here.

Darn you

It's called liga-tend. I have actually found the chinese herbal pills that the martial arts people use for THEIR ligament and tendon supplementation. Pretty good prices, too.

http://www.chineseherbsdirect.com/yao-tong-pian-plum-flower-p-193.html

This is one of them. I can't quite find the super pill again, but there is something specific that they use to heal their bodies from trauma quickly.

That's not the same thing I used. I used liga-strong.

Actually, it's on that Chinese herbal site: http://www.chineseherbsdirect.com/yao-kai-ligament-health.html

slizzardman said:

Tendons and ligaments respond best to extremely short duration, very high intensity loads. Basically, elastic stretch-and-release elements. Pitches, plyometric work, stuff like that. Of course you have to scale the work correctly, if you are working so hard that you cause strain instead of stress you will be headed right for tendonitis land!

You will need to make sure that the areas around your joints have excellent bloodflow, since tendons themselves have almost none. Galvanic stimulators like the ARPwave can be used to drastically enhance healing, but that is a very niche area of sports training/medicine and is not widely understood despite the fact that it is really simple. Basically they use DC electricity to enhance blood flow directly in the area, and you can actually sleep with them on. They are painless. You have to have a doctor's prescription to buy them.

Other methods like cryotherapy and hot-cold baths/showers work fairly well to promote healing, and so does high volume work with long TUT. The volume work, which is what we are doing on WODs like friday's where we did 15' cirque, 10 FL pulls and 5 Naners back to back, promotes vascularization, which means your body will literally grow new blood vessels in the trained areas! This does help the healing process and therefore tendon and ligament development and remodeling, but as far as training the tendons themselves you want very high rep, very high speed, very low intensity.

This is part of why your warm up should be full body even when you don't do work sets with your whole body. You NEED the blood to flow everywhere for proper healing. The more you move, the more you heal.

********** Any experience with the ARP?

Brandon Green

http://www.chineseherbsdirect.com/great-mender-jin-gu-die-shang-wan-plum-flower-p-48.html

This is the Great Mender.

Please note that I have yet to try any of these and I have exactly zero knowledge of chinese medicine. Having said that, their system has an overall success rate equal to western medicine. They aren't idiots.

slizzardman said:

Having said that, their system has an overall success rate equal to western medicine. They aren't idiots.

How do you know that?

I'm going to have to go dig up the reference, I know.

There are statistics for all kinds of disease in china as well as the US, and these have been compared. As a system, whole and complete, it is comparable to ours. Some things they are much better at, and some things Western medicine is superior. I am not saying that they have the exact same success rates in each individual condition, but when it is all averaged out Chinese medicine is comparable with Western medicine. Acupuncture, for example, works. It works so well that there is now a US FDA approved acupressure device to be used on your hand that uses several hundred points to treat problems all over your body. FDA approved. That means it was deemed safe for use AND effective. Techniques like that can deliver pain relief that can not be duplicated by Western medicine. That is one small example. The funny thing is that while our drug companies will publicly say that traditional medicine is nonsense and that their products are what work, they spend tons of money to send head hunters out to these same "nonsensical" practitioners and learn what works from them so that the drug companies can reproduce the same compounds cheaply in a lab. That's cold, hard fact. It has been showcased on NPR, Discovery Channel and some news networks.

slizzardman said:

You will need to make sure that the areas around your joints have excellent bloodflow, since tendons themselves have almost none. Galvanic stimulators like the ARPwave can be used to drastically enhance healing, but that is a very niche area of sports training/medicine and is not widely understood despite the fact that it is really simple. Basically they use DC electricity to enhance blood flow directly in the area, and you can actually sleep with them on. They are painless. You have to have a doctor's prescription to buy them.

Other methods like cryotherapy and hot-cold baths/showers work fairly well to promote healing, and so does high volume work with long TUT. The volume work, which is what we are doing on WODs like friday's where we did 15' cirque, 10 FL pulls and 5 Naners back to back, promotes vascularization, which means your body will literally grow new blood vessels in the trained areas! This does help the healing process and therefore tendon and ligament development and remodeling, but as far as training the tendons themselves you want very high rep, very high speed, very low intensity.

This is part of why your warm up should be full body even when you don't do work sets with your whole body. You NEED the blood to flow everywhere for proper healing. The more you move, the more you heal.

Slizzardman,

I would be very happy if you could go into greater depth regarding this topic (improving blood flow, recovery, strengthening tendons et cetera)!

I have several questions:

Could one also use alternating current instead of direct current, like regular Electronic Muscle Stimulation? Or does it have to be galvanic stimulation? Do you think EMS/Galvanic stimulation works well for the rehabilitation of injuries?

What do you think about Epsom Salt baths for recovery?

You talked about German Volume Training in another topic as well. So that kind of high volume, low intensity work promotes vascularization?

How would you go about designing a full body warm up?

Thank you!

Donar said:

I would be very happy if you could go into greater depth regarding this topic (improving blood flow, recovery, strengthening tendons et cetera)!

I agree.

And I have one thing to say about Chinese medicine that I absolutely love. In China, you pay a doctor to keep you well. You don't go to a doctor as a last resort, you go to a doctor regularly and they help you stay well.

I, too, have heard the statistics that slizzardman points out - that from a "black box" approach, both systems are equally as viable. Whether this means both work or NEITHER work, I don't know.

Donar said:

slizzardman said:

You will need to make sure that the areas around your joints have excellent bloodflow, since tendons themselves have almost none. Galvanic stimulators like the ARPwave can be used to drastically enhance healing, but that is a very niche area of sports training/medicine and is not widely understood despite the fact that it is really simple. Basically they use DC electricity to enhance blood flow directly in the area, and you can actually sleep with them on. They are painless. You have to have a doctor's prescription to buy them.

Other methods like cryotherapy and hot-cold baths/showers work fairly well to promote healing, and so does high volume work with long TUT. The volume work, which is what we are doing on WODs like friday's where we did 15' cirque, 10 FL pulls and 5 Naners back to back, promotes vascularization, which means your body will literally grow new blood vessels in the trained areas! This does help the healing process and therefore tendon and ligament development and remodeling, but as far as training the tendons themselves you want very high rep, very high speed, very low intensity.

This is part of why your warm up should be full body even when you don't do work sets with your whole body. You NEED the blood to flow everywhere for proper healing. The more you move, the more you heal.

Slizzardman,

I would be very happy if you could go into greater depth regarding this topic (improving blood flow, recovery, strengthening tendons et cetera)!

I have several questions:

Could one also use alternating current instead of direct current, like regular Electronic Muscle Stimulation? Or does it have to be galvanic stimulation? Do you think EMS/Galvanic stimulation works well for the rehabilitation of injuries?

What do you think about Epsom Salt baths for recovery?

You talked about German Volume Training in another topic as well. So that kind of high volume, low intensity work promotes vascularization?

How would you go about designing a full body warm up?

Thank you!

We are going to tread on the very outside edge of my current knowledge here, so do not take this as gospel. Galvanic stimulators use pulsed DC instead of pulsed AC. The DC current actually creates a "hot" and "cold" zone because of the constant charge (positive and negative do not switch, there is a FLOW of electrons as opposed to AC which has a very high speed WIGGLE of electrons moving back and forth. Please, if anyone is tempted, do not start a physics conversation about how there may be only one electron in the universe! That is irrelevant to this conversation! ), which literally pumps blood through the area being stimulated. At high frequencies the DC current also can force the muscles to relax completely, which is why it works so well for healing and muscle re-education. By forcibly relaxing the muscles you can quickly get rid of compensation patterns. It's F-ing brilliant, whoever figured that out should have a Nobel prize. Maybe they do.

TENS/EMS units CAN be used for healing as well, but it works differently. You end up working the muscle at a low intensity and low contraction rate with very short contractions and pumping blood through the area that way. It is different, but works. I do not know how much of a difference there is in healing rate, quite honestly. That is a serious area of interest for me, but I have yet to learn about that.

BOTH modalities have been shown to reduce knee surgery healing time from months to weeks. I can only imagine that, properly applied, this could drastically speed up a gymnast's tendon adaptation process. Using electrical methods for sports performance is beyond cutting edge, it is something that Charlie Francis did with Ben Johnson but outside of him no one really knew what the heck they were doing. Jay Schroeder and his Ultrafit Evosport method use DC current to drastically enhance strength training by eliminating compensation patterns. I do not know his entire training modality, though at some point I hope to be able to learn from him. The device he uses is incredibly expensive, around 15000 bucks. It is essentially a much higher frequency galvanic stimulator. I am quite positive I can make my own, but I was also a licensed electrician in California so don't think it's easy or a good idea to try something like that on your own.

EMS units use AC and are best suited for short (2-3 week) training cycles 3-4 days per week during the cycle, with a tapered workload over the next few weeks. They work well because they directly stimulate muscle contraction, which eliminates CNS fatigue. Highly trained athletes are limited primarily by their nervous systems and not by physical healing rate. When this is the case EMS units can be used to make strength gains of up to 20% in a single 3 week cycle as they stimulate a high level of remodeling in the muscle. It takes the body 1-2 months to fully integrate the strength increase and be able to use it in athletic performance, from what little I have been able to dig up regarding Charlie Francis' training methods.

trianglechoke7 said:

That's not the same thing I used. I used liga-strong.

Actually, it's on that Chinese herbal site: http://www.chineseherbsdirect.com/yao-kai-ligament-health.html

Owned with the rick roll!

I searched for that formula and it does not appear to exist. I removed the hidden link in this quote and you will notice that the page does not come up, nor does a google search yield any results pertaining to a "Yao Kai" formula.

slizzardman said:

Donar said:

slizzardman said:

You will need to make sure that the areas around your joints have excellent bloodflow, since tendons themselves have almost none. Galvanic stimulators like the ARPwave can be used to drastically enhance healing, but that is a very niche area of sports training/medicine and is not widely understood despite the fact that it is really simple. Basically they use DC electricity to enhance blood flow directly in the area, and you can actually sleep with them on. They are painless. You have to have a doctor's prescription to buy them.

Other methods like cryotherapy and hot-cold baths/showers work fairly well to promote healing, and so does high volume work with long TUT. The volume work, which is what we are doing on WODs like friday's where we did 15' cirque, 10 FL pulls and 5 Naners back to back, promotes vascularization, which means your body will literally grow new blood vessels in the trained areas! This does help the healing process and therefore tendon and ligament development and remodeling, but as far as training the tendons themselves you want very high rep, very high speed, very low intensity.

This is part of why your warm up should be full body even when you don't do work sets with your whole body. You NEED the blood to flow everywhere for proper healing. The more you move, the more you heal.

Slizzardman,

I would be very happy if you could go into greater depth regarding this topic (improving blood flow, recovery, strengthening tendons et cetera)!

I have several questions:

Could one also use alternating current instead of direct current, like regular Electronic Muscle Stimulation? Or does it have to be galvanic stimulation? Do you think EMS/Galvanic stimulation works well for the rehabilitation of injuries?

What do you think about Epsom Salt baths for recovery?

You talked about German Volume Training in another topic as well. So that kind of high volume, low intensity work promotes vascularization?

How would you go about designing a full body warm up?

Thank you!

We are going to tread on the very outside edge of my current knowledge here, so do not take this as gospel. Galvanic stimulators use pulsed DC instead of pulsed AC. The DC current actually creates a "hot" and "cold" zone because of the constant charge (positive and negative do not switch, there is a FLOW of electrons as opposed to AC which has a very high speed WIGGLE of electrons moving back and forth. Please, if anyone is tempted, do not start a physics conversation about how there may be only one electron in the universe! That is irrelevant to this conversation! ), which literally pumps blood through the area being stimulated. At high frequencies the DC current also can force the muscles to relax completely, which is why it works so well for healing and muscle re-education. By forcibly relaxing the muscles you can quickly get rid of compensation patterns. It's F-ing brilliant, whoever figured that out should have a Nobel prize. Maybe they do.

TENS/EMS units CAN be used for healing as well, but it works differently. You end up working the muscle at a low intensity and low contraction rate with very short contractions and pumping blood through the area that way. It is different, but works. I do not know how much of a difference there is in healing rate, quite honestly. That is a serious area of interest for me, but I have yet to learn about that.

BOTH modalities have been shown to reduce knee surgery healing time from months to weeks. I can only imagine that, properly applied, this could drastically speed up a gymnast's tendon adaptation process. Using electrical methods for sports performance is beyond cutting edge, it is something that Charlie Francis did with Ben Johnson but outside of him no one really knew what the heck they were doing. Jay Schroeder and his Ultrafit Evosport method use DC current to drastically enhance strength training by eliminating compensation patterns. I do not know his entire training modality, though at some point I hope to be able to learn from him. The device he uses is incredibly expensive, around 15000 bucks. It is essentially a much higher frequency galvanic stimulator. I am quite positive I can make my own, but I was also a licensed electrician in California so don't think it's easy or a good idea to try something like that on your own.

EMS units use AC and are best suited for short (2-3 week) training cycles 3-4 days per week during the cycle, with a tapered workload over the next few weeks. They work well because they directly stimulate muscle contraction, which eliminates CNS fatigue. Highly trained athletes are limited primarily by their nervous systems and not by physical healing rate. When this is the case EMS units can be used to make strength gains of up to 20% in a single 3 week cycle as they stimulate a high level of remodeling in the muscle. It takes the body 1-2 months to fully integrate the strength increase and be able to use it in athletic performance, from what little I have been able to dig up regarding Charlie Francis' training methods.

************ Now in theory you believe that you have enough knowledge to actually build an ARP?

Brandon Green

Yes. I would need two 555 timers to create slightly different high frequency signals and one or two scr's for switching. We're talking about less than 10 bucks worth of equipment. No need for ultra high speed switching, we're talking about 30 pulses a second or less most likely as pulse width is typically 50ms and you can't do more than 20 of those in 1 second lol! SCR's can handle up to 15K switches per second! In fact, it is possible to JUST use two scr's, but that is a bit more complicated and less reliable in my opinion.

The big issue is protocols. I do not know how to use such a device correctly. I am considering getting a prescription for a galvanic stimulator just to have access to the protocols. The only difference between ARPwave and a standard galvanic stimulator is the carrier frequency.

What ARPwave does is called interferential frequency generation. If you notice, they advertise a 10khz "carrier wave." What the device does is it sends two signals on the same wire. One signal is at 10khz. The other is at 10-10.5khz, probably adjustable for use with varying protocols, as muscles respond to different frequencies in unique ways. What happens is that the 10khz's cancel each other out, and what is left is 1-500hz. Why does this matter? Resistance. The higher your resistance, the less comfortable a given voltage and current level will be. The higher the frequency, the lower electrical resistance is. With a 10khz signal you drop resistance so low that you can use max power from the device with little to no discomfort. This means you can stimulate muscles more powerfully, overcoming ANY voluntary signal from the CNS, without any discomfort. This is why it is so effective for muscle re-education and therefore such a valuable training tool. At 500hz you are signaling the muscles to release actin/myosin bonds faster than they can make them, which puts the muscle into a state of nearly 100% relaxation.

Outside of muscle re-education, this allows you to instantly relax all trigger points under the electrode and in the muscle belly, which allows you to instantly increase flexibility by very large margins. You can, more or less, instantly achieve current maximum flexibility. This can, over time, lead to much faster permanent flexibility gains and far fewer injuries. Quite intelligent. I would think this could be used to rapidly increase active flexibility without any danger of injury, but again that is outside my current knowledge.

This would be useful not just for eliminating compensation patterns after injury or increasing active flexibility, but for instantly releasing trigger points. You can "warm up" the entire body in minutes with a partner. Absolutely invaluable for competitive athletes.

You are now on my IED watchlist slizzard.

HAHAHAHAHA!!! Well, if you drop in unannounced I won't have much for anyone to eat besides curry/jerk chicken and kefir!

Seriously, that's pretty awesome.

After learning how so many things work and how various industries developed I actually get really upset at how we get sold such crap all the time. Most things can be made at home with fairly little effort for almost free. I mean... did you know everyone in Colonial times had hot water on demand? You know how they did it? Black iron water tanks on the roof. Yea, I'm serious. Why are we paying so much for electric/gas water heaters?!?!

Don't even get me started on the on-demand hot water heaters... prices are an outrage. I could make you one for about 100 dollars but they sell you these units for like 6000 bucks!!! It's a frikin' propane grill burner with an electrically controlled flow valve on the gas line and a temperature sensor a few feet upstream in the hot water line, if that. If you wanted to be cheap about it you could just vent your room and have a simple dial valve version right by your shower. How do I know? THEY HAVE THEM IN JAPAN!!!! OH MY GOD!!! They cost practically nothing and you get the water exactly how you like it instantly, like less than 10 seconds. American business makes me sick sometimes. Then there's small natural gas turbine generators. Did you know that businesses could save 30% or more on their electrical costs by generating on site with natural gas?!?! Cleaner than coal. That, all by itself, could completely offset 10-20% of total emissions from power plants in the US. I'm pretty close to being convinced that things are purposefully being kept as stupid as they are, because I'm pretty positive there are more people than just me that know about this stuff. We could get even SMARTER by putting a few small generators with parabolic mirrors and a closed turbine loop with a compressor, filled with coolant or ammonia. Both boil around 40 degrees, so even in winter this would work almost everywhere during the daytime, which is... YOU GUESSED IT!!! PRIME FRIKIN' CONSUMPTION TIME. ARGH. My head hurts when I think about this stuff. None of this is a crazy idea I came up with, it's being DONE!!! There's a hotel in Alaska that has 70+ individual suites, each a separate building. Know what they're made out of? ICE. How do they keep ice from melting in the summer, late spring, and early fall?! Ok, this is brilliant, so enjoy this: The owner is using geothermal power. But, instead of being an idiot and trying to boil water, which requires around 700 degrees of heat to generate power with, he used coolant. This meant he only needed to drill deep enough to get to around 200 degrees. Saved him 10's of thousands of dollars, he only spent like 2k on the "well." The pipe with the coolant goes down and back up. Then you know what it does? It goes into an expansion chamber with a turbine, where it instantly vaporizes and turns the turbine. FREE POWER. That one well powers three generating stations, and they provide power for the entire hotel complex. Lights, appliances, refridgeration. Each station fits in a small trailer and costs 10k. That, my friends, is genius. I'm just looking at what has been done and saying "HEY, WAKE UP!!! We can adapt this to our needs!!! You could make a small version of this that could fit in one of those outdoor sheds and make you hundreds per month from utility checks. They have to PAY YOU for power you generate that goes back into the grid. That meter works two ways. You use power, you pay. You MAKE power, they pay you. I just... don't understand. Believe me, once I have money I'm going to start promoting sale of these smaller units at a reasonable cost and my goal is to do such a good job that I get the power companies knocking on my door.

On topic, I will probably buy a regular galvanic stimulator, they're cheap. Under 200 for sure, I've looked and bookmarked a few favorites of mine. None compare to ARP wave because they essentially just rectify AC so the frequency is 120hz. Cheapos...

Slizz what a wonderful off topic rant. I totally agree with you. There have been rumors for years about how the big car companies would buy inventions that could revolutionize the industry and purposely shelf them. Look at LA where a tire company was able to keep LA from developing decent public transportation in order to sell more tires, the list goes on. Hell its the same in the yoga industry, so much worthless crap being hawked. Hell even yoga itself is now a branded labeled product, in some cases there have even been infringement suits against some teachers using a 'branded' set of poses. Its NUTS!

Anyway the device is intriguing, it sounds a little too much like a magic wand, totally melting TPs away, but that sure got my attention. If you do get one, please keep us posted as to it efficacy.