There are 6 ways you can move your spine. One of them, circumduction, is a circular movement of the spine, either internally or externally. The idea of this exercise is that its an internal circumduction if your spine was twice as long.
A central part of the Wingmaster material are the 7 primal movements: push, rotation, pull, gait, hinge, squat and lunge. Gait, or stepping, is a very important primal movement to teach as people get older. As people age they often feel less stable when walking, stop using their ankles in their gate and start shuffling, taking more and smaller steps.More steps mean more changes to trip and fall and that’s bad.
There are 6 spinal ranges of motion. In our Activities of Daily Living, circumduction is the movement we most likely use the least. That doesn’t mean it has no value. This motion is excellent for the health of the intervertebral discs.
I named this group of exercises “tai chi” because if you take the Wingmaster away and visualize the movement it kind of looks like a movement you’d see in actual tai chi. It’s not an actual tai chi movement, but bicycles or dolphin from the Hamstring Series aren’t actually how to ride a bicycle or how a dolphin moves either. It’s metaphors, man.