Ithaca but when I read one(?) of your deleted posts
My apologies. I wanted to be more clear myself before posting prematurely as I did, and am giving it a try now. Let me know if this makes sense.
For reference, I've made a screenshot where Kobb shows the thing we do NOT want - this flaring out of the elbows, with the idea of "leading with the elbows". This is what I want to start with.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/yni7k6wzix1njn7xygh3g/Kobb-demo.jpg?rlkey=47xjp8hj1jvrn94sz7u38vfit&st=3xwf3ads&dl=0
By chance I've been working heavily in related areas, and ended up working with what I linked to in the post that is still up. Here is the idea:
When you stand in decent relaxed posture with arms hanging and then raise your forearms at the elbow as if sitting at the dinner table, the pinky side of your hand will be on the table - your hands are not flat-horizontal to the floor or table / keyboard. We have to turn or rotate the hand for it to become parallel horizontally. The question comes how we do that.
- to turn the hand, you can raise your elbows. Many people do that. This also gives the type of posture that Kobb is showing. It also contributes to rounding the shoulders, and per my source, creates strain in the body.
- to turn the hand, instead of this, you can rotate your forearm at the elbow joint. This way the elbows are not raised, the upper arms stay hanging relaxed.
My source says that many people do the first way of turning the hand and that it's a source of tension. In my own experiments, I found that it also tends to round the shoulders. At this point it became chicken and egg: did a person start with rounded shoulders, or did a person end up with rounded shoulders by the way they turned their hands to be horizontal with the keyboard? That's when I deleted my 2nd post to check a bit more.
When I experimented with this, because I was indeed doing the wrong first thing, there was suddenly also a lot of new freedom of movement in my arms, because this raising of the elbows affected other things.
The things that bothered me primarily was the idea of restriction. If you stop yourself from doing things, then you are restricting yourself, putting on the brakes, which creates tension, and I had some bad experiences with that before knowing more and finding alternatives. There seemed to be the idea of stopping your arms from going out, stopping your elbows from going out: an idea of restriction. If by chance instead of this there is a thing TO DO, instead of things "not to do", which will give the same results, I'd prefer that.
Maybe this part I managed to get out with some clarity. Does it make any sense?
