Contortionism: Bend It Like Gumby

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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here to do, which makes this this off. You should know. I'm going to try it.

Oh, I'd love you. I had a good title on this one. Did you like it? Go ahead. Uh, well, this is about proportionists. And Olivia Tidal, uh, what she sent us, bend it like gumby. That's right.

I think it's good. It is good.

Um, yeah, Olivia always comes up with the best type.

Yeah, and now we know that she listens to some of these, because she heard you, uh, take a dig at her. About explaining what a socket and electrical plug does. Yeah. Yeah, she's a good sport though.

Uh, let's see, what else, Chuck? I guess you already spoiled what this episode's about. It's about contortionism, which I guess we were going to have to get into eventually. Yeah, I mean, obviously we're talking about, uh, bending your body. Right.

And ways that are, yeah, like gumby, bending your bodies in ways that are, uh, extraordinary. And as we have learned, it's something that, uh, maybe you're kind of born with. And definitely something you can work toward and maybe you're at both. Yeah, I always assumed it was just a born thing.

And that, like, one out of every 15 million people were born as a contortionist essentially. And I figured yes, of course, they have to train and everything. And, you know, choreograph, there's a lot of types of contortionism that are essentially contortionist ballet, especially like the ones you see at Cirque du Soleil. Um, which if you say that funny, it's a hilarious thing to say.

It's a good joke. Yeah. Um, but, uh, I guess I just didn't realize that it is something you can, like, you or I could go train to be a contortionist. We would fail, utterly.

But we could at least go train in our 50s and still do a lot better than we can right now. Because it is something you can adapt your body to. Yeah, for sure.

“Uh, and it's also something has been around a long, long time, right?”

Yeah, it has one more thing. Um, it will help you a lot while we're going through some of this stuff to just, if you can, look it up, watch videos, but even, like, just photos, sometimes can kind of get the point across. It's just one of those things while we were studying this.

I was like, this is kind of kind of be tough to describe in some cases, but we'll do our best. Yeah, oh, I don't think it's going to be that hard to follow. People know what we're talking about. Okay. So we are talking about contortionism and you did say that it is very, very old.

The oldest thing we've found that is pretty much a certainty that they're depicting a contortionist was an image that was found in Syria, an old old Polaroid, from 2300 BCE. And there's some contortionists in their holding swords, and the best that historians can come up with is that it's possible that so there's some hithite writings that describe a performance

where contortionists basically jump through hoops of swords as basically, uh, well,

that followed, uh, of course, we have to talk about all the usual suspects. Of course, China will come in. Don't worry. But ancient Egypt, they found pottery fragments that date to 1200 BCE that definitely show women dancing in back bins, like, you know,

“contorting themselves. Sure. And the Greeks also did this later on as well, right?”

Yeah, the Greeks were finally starting to get to unambiguous descriptions of contortionism.

I think as far back as, well, the, like, about 1,500 years ago, something like that. Contortionists had become like an actual thing, like, they were part of troops or performers that performed in Greece. Like, if you went to say a public festival, let's say Dionysus was being celebrated that day, there's a chance that you might find somebody doing a contortionist act as just kind of part of the festivities. Yeah, for sure. Uh, and, you know, I mentioned China,

and this is one of those cases where we don't know if it, uh, if people in China, and, and this was, like, 221 BCE to 220 CE, if they were influenced by people from other parts of the world

or not or whether it developed independently when people over there realized that they were bindi.

But when they look at, like, some of the clothes that contortionists were wearing in China, it seems like it maybe was influenced by, uh, people in Europe, but also could have been maybe that's just, uh, the guard. They're all wearing benetons. Yeah, exactly. Stretchy stuff. So, uh, yeah, that's very interesting because usually something came out of China in it influenced Europe rather than going the other way around, especially that far back. So,

I'm, yeah, as a person of European ancestry, I'm quite proud of that. Uh, of course, you know, you would think, uh, India is probably a pretty obvious spot for

contortionism. And you would be right because there are sculptures and temples from India.

Uh, these dates to 10th century CE, uh, that also show women in contorted poses. Uh, this time,

“it got a little sexier, though. Yeah, I think a lot of times you think about something like”

the commasutra and there are definitely contortionist poses in the commasutra. Yeah. But there's, the, to just think of it as, like, oh, this is just, you know, like you said, just sexy. There's a spiritual aspect to that whole thing, too. It's like a tantric yoga, um, practice. But it is also sexy just admittedly. But there's this, that may be kind of wonder chuckle like did like yoga and Buddhism and Hinduism and the incorporation of all these physical movements

that include contortionism. Did that kind of come out of, um, this contortionist, um, I guess heritage or whatever that dates back to at least the hit tights, um, or was what the hit tights were doing essentially the foundation for what would later become, you know, Buddhism and Hinduism. Yeah. And to be clear, when we say sexy, we mean their depictions of actual intercourse. Uh, because. Oh, yeah. Thank you. One of the things that's really annoying to me about

all of this and living it picks us up sort of at the end of the article, but I'm going to go ahead and address it now is that if you get, you know, 100 people in a room and there's a contortionist, there's probably going to be some dim-witted man making some stupid sexual reference about somebody being bindi, about a woman being bindi. And that's just dumb. So that's not what we were talking about. We were talking about like, you know, actual pictures of sexual positions in this case.

I think that was great because I, you could interpret it away where we sounded like 30 old men essentially. Yeah. Yeah. The guys who like kind of elbow on another like, huh? Check it out. I mean, come on. So some people have further way to come than other people, you know? Yeah. That's true. So back to India itself, there's a clear, like comparison between contortionism and yoga today and actually it's kind of neat because if you go online and you look

up like contortionism training or something like that, it's essentially people who are into yoga and they're trying to figure out how to go even further. Yeah. So they're following ancient practices that have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years, that are contortionist and by nature. Yeah, for sure. England might not be the most obvious place to think about men doing contortionist poses. But that's exactly what happened in 17th and 18th century there

in the form of posture master masters, posture masters is what there sounds like a mattress.

“A posture master. But that's what was going on. It's a little odd to think about now, but”

there, you know, it might be like an actual performance, maybe sometimes it was something that they would do on the street to raise money like busking or maybe to trying instead of like holding

to try and get people in there. But it was kind of a big deal and they kind of became sort of

“famous in England at the time. Yeah. I mean, this was before TV, radio, internet, even newspapers”

in a lot of cases. And you could, as a male contortionist in particular, because it was a male

dominated field at this time, at least in Europe. And it seems like basically throughout the world

that you could become distinctly famous, like a guy named Joseph Clark, who apparently in the late 17th century was a very, very famous contortionist in England, so much so that his last name was shorthand for contortion in England. And then eventually would morph into shorthand for giving somebody something that they want. That's right. The circus is obviously going to come into play and that is when the circus came into play. And that was, and we, you know,

we've done quite a few episodes on the circus back in the day, but as a reminder, this was late 18th century when Philip and Patty Asley, they had a, you know, a lot of the early

“circuses were like horse riding tricks, like a question stuff. And there's definitely formed”

out of that out of their Asley's riding school in London. And, you know, once the circus started

spreading around, it came to the United States. And within that circus world, contortionists started kind of performing on the regular, but, you know, it started to get, and which is like it is today, it gets kind of mixed in with other sort of acrobatics. Yeah, and just stepping back a couple of paces, once it reached Europe in England in the 17th and 18th century, there was no spirituality associated with it. Once it reached Western Europe, it was performance from that point on, you know.

And yeah, once it hit the circus, it's really started to morph into what we understand as contortionism today. There was one trick I have to say that Patty Asley did on her horse in the

very beginning of circuses. She would ride her horse really fast and her arms would be covered in bees.

“Yeah, that's a wild ride for, that's a wild ride for everybody involved. Yeah, but, you know,”

maybe she was a beekeeper. It doesn't matter what she was doing, Chuck, she was riding full throttle on a horse with bees all over her arms. I mean, I'm assuming like they changed like the shape of her arms because there were so many bees, that kind of thing, that like two or three bees on each arm. Yeah, yeah, that wouldn't have much impact, I don't think. That impressed me quite a bit. Yeah, it's pretty good trick. So the actual word contortionist that came around in 1860 before then,

you know, it's just called other stuff depending on what culture it was coming from. But if you were in the U.S., or if you were in England performing as a contortionist, you probably said that you were either Chinese or Turkish or German or French or maybe you were, you might have just claimed to be one of those things because at such a rich tradition and being bindi like that. But at this point, it was started to be mainly women who are hired by

male circus owners and a lot of times performing exclusively for male audiences. Right. And so yeah, it kind of evolves even further. And luckily, that went from like the point of a contortionist act, eventually evolving to, you know, a couple of dudes in the audience like elbowing one another, where most people are like getting what the point is. But that said, there are contortionist acts today that are very much geared toward the sexual nature of the whole thing.

And you know, they're performed by women who are doing that on purpose. So you, you know, whatever, more power to them, there is like a thread of that. Like you can't just be like, nope, that doesn't exist. Stop, stop saying that. But the point of most contortionist performance is it seems like it's not that. That's a very niche thing these days. Yeah, for sure. There was one, you know, kind of notable early contortionist we got to mention here,

name, well, her real name was Beatrice Mary Claxton, but Beatrice Claxton isn't the best name for contortionist. So she went by Anna Bertoldy, which is much more of a sort of a circusy name. And starting at like age eight years old, she was touring around and as we'll see, you know, contortionism is mainly a sport of the young. You can age out of it like ballet in a lot of cases. But she was a kid doing it and she performed all over Great Britain and then eventually traveled

to the US in 1891. And one of the reasons we mentioned hers, because she was very famously one of the early people that Thomas Edison filmed with his Connecticut. Yeah. It's just pretty cool.

in one of the earliest film strips is definitely going to help your fame later on in history as a contortionist I would think. Yeah, for sure. So you want to take a little bit of a break and come

“back and talk about the epicenter, ground zero of contortionism. Mm-hmm. Where could that be?”

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Okay, so we're back, and I talked about the epicenter of consortia, and I'm just going to reveal it now. It's Mongolia, everybody. That's right. It has long been that sort of epicenter. It still is that epicenter, and we're going to tell you why, because one of the reasons it started as a big deal there is, at least we think, that it had to do with sort of meditative practices, and also like a dance, a Buddhist dance, known as the som,

which is also, it's very religious, obviously tied to Buddhism, but has to do with training your

body and mind to work together to do incredible things. I also saw that has secret meetings that

“you have to be a very highly advanced Buddhist monk to basically be led in on, which is pretty neat.”

Oh, cool. There's also a folk dance in Mongolia, that's indigenous to Mongolia from what I understand. BLG, B-I-Y-E-L-G-E-E, and as far as folk dances go, I'm not usually a huge fan of folk dance, like I wouldn't go to a community center to see a folk dance performance, but this is a pretty

contortionism, including full backbends to where the dancers' back is like flat on the ground, while they're on their knees, but also just the incredibly colorful costumes that they wear

“too, it's really neat. What is a folk dance performance? Like, what are you avoiding?”

I don't even know what that means. It's kind of like when people from different cultures perform traditional dances. Oh, okay. That's a folk dance. I got you. I mean, would you think like square dancing? I guess it's probably a type of folk dance? Yeah, no, it's just, you know,

any kind of cultural dancing, for some reason, it's never floated my boat, but I got you.

I'm not yucking anyone, John, because I couldn't do a single step of any folk dance, and I usually impress with anybody who can dance in any way, shape or form. Yeah, meet you. So 12th century is when it starts to become a really sort of mainstream thing in Mongolian culture, basically, at festivals, court appearances, obviously. And then 17th century is when there was a Buddhist leader named Andor Gigeen Xenzivar who inspired these contortionists with these,

I guess there were, was it like just art sculptures basically, the people like in all sorts of kind of contorted positions? Yeah, he was like, do that position? I dare you. Yeah, he would make sculptures of them. Yeah, that was, yeah, and the guy was so, I guess, popular that like he actually advanced contortionism by pushing them to their limits, I guess. As a sculptor, you know, you can

“been clay in ways you can't bend a body. That's right. That's why you can bend it like”

gumpy, man. That's right. So Mongolia is, and I thought this is pretty interesting too. There's like contortionism evolving in different places around the world, you know, kind of simultaneously,

but Mongolia basically took the mantle, and one of the reasons why is because they became

a Soviet state in the forties. And as part of the USSR, the government bankrolled the Mongolia and state circus, which became world renowned, traveled the world. That's one of the ways that became world renowned, but also because they were really, really good. And one of the center pieces of the Mongolian state circus was contortionism. And from that, they grew in popularity very, very quickly, because there was a lot of funding for it, there was a lot of publicity for it,

but that created a mushrooming of contortionist schools in Mongolia, some of which are still around today. Oh, yeah, for sure. The first one, and the first sort of, you know, super star of that circus

was a contortionist name, "Sin Diyosh." And that was the first school, but like you said, there's

a lot of them still there, and it's not just like, hey, if you're from Mongolia and you're a young girl and your parents think you're like pretty flexible early on, they may say new to this, like that certainly happens, but people from all over the world, like gymnast will go in train, like anyone who wants to sort of increase your flexibility in an extreme way. There's no better place in the world to go than contortionist school in Mongolia. No, they know what they're doing

in other words. Yeah, for sure. Their circus isn't nearly as big ever since they peeled away from the Soviet Union in the early 90s, but it's still like a big kind of rich

“tradition in that country. Oh, yeah, big time. Right now, the biggest school I think the oldest”

school is owned by a former sumo wrestler, and he is Mongolia's most famous most revered sumo wrestler. He got out of the sumo game and bought the school for contortionism. The thing is it's kind of in this decline so much so that Mongolia has been trying to get UNESCO heritage protection for Mongolian contortionism because it's just not quite as widespread even though there's more schools than ever, it's just become much more diluted. I think there's a lower barrier to entry for

being like say a teacher or school owner or something like that. And then simultaneous to that, a lot of Mongolian contortionist trainers are going abroad. And so they're taking it with them, but at the same time someone and say like England, who sees an English contortionist, they're not regarding the idea that that person was trained by a Mongolian contortionist teacher. They are looking at the English contortionist. And so in that way, it's becoming less and less

identified with Mongolia. Yeah, and it's kind of, I was kind of disappointed that UNESCO turned them down. They try to get, you know, it added as a list of intangible heritage,

They said that advocates didn't make a strong enough case for its significance in Mongolian culture and society, which just, I don't know, I'm not on that board obviously, but it seems pretty obvious to me as an outsider that it's like super tied to Mongolian culture. Sure. Well, you will be heartened that the Mongolian folk dance BLG is protected under UNESCO heritage. I don't just take it one step further UNESCO. That's right. One is also in the big deal.

I don't know. I was trying to think about that. I'm sure that they have a kind of mentality that's like, we don't want to open the floodgates or else to know. But I mean, there's plenty of stuff that I'm sure deserves protecting that they're turning down. And you know what? I'd be interested to know about that. I'm going to look into that and we'll do a short step on all the

“stuff UNESCO's turn down for heritage protection. Well, if you want to learn about the mechanics,”

now is your time to listen closely. This is the point where you were probably talking about maybe looking at pictures and stuff, but you know, I think a lot of people have seen a lot of this stuff

if you've ever watched. When we were kids, that's incredible or America's got talent these days.

They'll have acts like this or certainly if you've ever been to like Cirque de Soleil or something. But backbending, there's like kind of six main sort of overall things you can learn. And then within that, you can do all sorts of stuff to incorporate little side tricks and then, you know, mix these together for, you know, performative purposes. But backbending, that's sort of the classic place that you start, the classic backbend. Yeah. One of the things is the chest stand.

And essentially it's where you're on your chest, say, so I'm going to, I get everybody getting this position. I'm going to walk you through it. You're on your chest flat. I guess it's prone on the floor. And you bend yourself at the waist and you bring your hips back, back, back, back, back, and then you have your feet on either side of your head. You can do this everybody's just hanging there. And then your feet are flat on the floor on either side of your head. Remember,

you're still on your chest. But now your legs are completely over you and your feet are on either side of your head flat on the floor. That's the chest stand. That's the most basic one. Anybody can basically do that just jumping into it. Well, my only note with that description is when you said your waist went back back back. Technically, I think your waist is going forward forward. So that might

“have confused people. Okay. Yeah. I think maybe that's why I was like, this is hard to describe because”

I knew I was going to screw it up just royally. Well, you've also got the front bend. If someone has got a little humor to their performance, you're probably going to use a front bend. Because that is when you're sort of doing the opposite in which you fold your head and chest all the way between your legs to where you're sort of looking at your own, but so obviously insert joke right there. Yes. These are the ones that really get to me. Like the, there's like some sort of

preter natural, like zap that that contortionist poses can do to you or to me at least. And like the human pretzel one or the human not, those are the ones that they just zap me. It's a very thrilling way, but at the same time, like there's some part of my loser brain that like, that ain't right. Body's not supposed to do that. Yeah. I mean, we go to Cirque du Soleil every year when it comes to Atlanta and the fall. That's kind of one of our little family traditions.

And there's always some kind of contortionist I feel like, but yeah, this last one and I can't

remember which one it was called, but they had a guy and it was, he was the best I had ever seen. It was, it wasn't quite sure what I was watching at certain points where you can't even tell which arm was which or you know, it was definitely one of those brain-breaking sort of performances.

“It was incredible. Yeah, for sure. Those are, I think one of the other things too that I've”

noted, especially with Cirque du Soleil performances, is it's not just like a, hey, look, I'm in this pose and I'm holding this pose and now I'm just going to get into the next pose like the transition from one pose to another is incredibly important. That's kind of what makes it like a very ballet, like, performance, you know. I think that's just, that makes the whole thing like

even more amazing, but at the same time more, it zaps me less than just like a, here's a pose,

check it out, let it really sink in what I'm doing right now. Yeah. It's like, I like it when, when it's the way that you describe where you like, can't even tell what's what? Yeah, I mean, I think definitely the next part balancing is when that comes into play. That's, I think a lot of like the feats of strength combined with, you know, I said they kind of mix

when you're contorted in a pose and maybe you're like, lifting yourself off the ground in a

little ball that you can't even figure out with just like your fingertips or something like that. Yeah, very famous one of these is the Marin Alley Bend and that is essentially kind of like, it's like a chest stand, it's very similar to a chest stand except that rather than having your weight on your chest, you have all of the weight in your entire body on your teeth and you're probably

“biting a pole and that's what's holding you up while you're doing your chest stand in the”

middle of the air. Yeah, it's quite impressive and I looked it up, there is a Mongolian contortionist named Satsural Erdena Bollig and she holds the record for holding a Marin Alley Bend for four minutes and 17 seconds. That's a long time with her teeth. Yeah, dislocation, that's another one that probably might trigger some folks. That is kind of one of those deals where your, it looks like you're popping your shoulder or your arm out of joint or something like that

to achieve the sort of performative effect. The shoulder pass through was sort of a classic move. That's where you hold a stick with both hands and you move the stick all the way in front of your body and then over your head into your back but you're not changing your grip so your arms are twisting and contorting in ways that look like they've been dislocated. Yeah, the splits too. I was thinking the splits is kind of like a cheer, yeah, it's classic, it's like a cheerleader thing or, you know,

your friend and the neighborhood can do it. Have you ever done a split? Now, I'm that splitty. I mean, I used to be very flexible like I could put my ankle, like my foot behind my head. Wow, when I was young and stuff like that. And when I was one, close now in Ruby the other day was

just laughing at me because I was actually fairly close, but I was never a splitter. All right,

“fair enough, I wasn't either. But one of the basic things that you have to learn is the splits because”

so many of the the other kind of movements and poses are based on being able to do a split. That's a basic one, but if you really want to be impressed, go look up over splits which is doing a split, but say one foot is on a chair in front of you and the other foot is on a chair behind you and your foot or so off of the ground, almost making up just the beginnings of a you with your legs. Yeah, I like that standing split where you're on one leg and you have

reached behind you and grabbed that foot and brought it all the way over. That's always because that's also incorporates balance obviously. I don't remember who did that, but one of the, I think the one of the American skaters and the winner Olympics did that while they were doing like a spin. Yeah, yeah. But it was like perfectly 90 degrees perpendicular to to the ice. It was really

amazing. Oh, you got to, or you'll get that half-point deduction. And then twisting too,

this kind of twisting is not necessarily in and of itself a pose, although it will be impressive, but it's kind of like a fundamental part of a bunch of other poses, right? Where if you're twisting yourself around or if you're moving yourself so that you can't tell what arm is what you're twisting to some degree and what's really fascinating to me about this is that each individual vertebra is rotating and it's rotating to a degree that the average person can't do, obviously,

but just the idea of your spine, I would think of it as moving in one thing, but it's just like

“think, think, think, think, think each vertebra is moving itself. I think that's an amazing”

skill, just that. Like if somebody walked up to me and said, I can twist all of my individual vertebra. Can you, I would say, I don't think I can. Yeah. And I would know if I'm am. Exactly. I know somebody's gonna write it and be like, don't be stupid, Josh, everyone's vertebra twisted individually. I get that. I guess I'm trying to get across that I'm impressed by contortionist. Okay. For sure. Should we take another break? I think we should. All right,

we're going to come back and talk about sort of the dark side of this right after this. What if mind control is real? If you can control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave you some suggestions to be sexually roast. Can you get someone to join your

is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a

“user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP.”

It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age common and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work. This is more real. Listen to mind games on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I went and sat on the little ottoman and front of him and I said, "Hi, Dad!" And just when I said that, my mom

comes out of the kitchen and she says, "I haven't cooked these in milk. There's a bad ass convict." Right, just minutes five years. I don't have cooked these in milk at all. Yeah. On the Steena Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw unfiltered conversations

“about recovery, resilience, and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor,”

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, I promise, talk of the dark side, and that is to say, there are some syndromes and some disorders that could lend itself to this. So I guess that's the dark side. The first thing we should clear up is that double jointed is not a thing. I know that's something that everyone can learn on the playground, like look, I'm double

jointed. But what people or people don't have extra joints, what people are really talking about, there's what's called hypermobility. And that is something that obviously, if you were hypermobile, then you have a pretty good leg up to being a contortionist, and they would diagnose that, or I guess rather, rate your hypermobility on what's called the baton scale. And nine is the highest on that scale. And if you're a contortionist, you're probably a nine.

Yeah, but also to jerk if you make a scale, and you just leave it at nine rather than 10. I just I feel like they're had to be a reason for that, but I didn't ask. Well, are you at a point for each thing that somebody can do? So it's things like, can you touch your thumb to your forearm? And I can do that very easily. I'm doing it right now over and over again. But you want to be able to do that with each hand. There's like, can you, does your

knee go back a certain degree behind itself? There's just a bunch of different ones, and you add one point for each limb that can do that. And I guess it just adds up to nine. He wasn't being a jerk. I was just kidding. Yeah. So I mentioned early on that genetics could play a part, and that's certainly true. You know, if you're parents or a contortionist or your mom is a contortionist, you may be born more flexible, you may be born with hypermobility. But sometimes it does correlate

like I said with the genetic conditions. The first one is EDS, Ella's Danlos Syndrome. There's really 13 of those syndromes. So it means that, you know, if you're a contortionist, you may have one of these

not, not always, but it's possible. Yeah. I think it's sometimes called Cirque du Soleil Disease.

they affect your connective tissue. So you can have one that makes you very hypermobile, very

“extendable, hyper extendable, because the connected tissue in your joints is not as safe as somebody”

else is. So you can go way beyond the normal range of motion. But then there's also other ones that keep you from being able to control your, your own breathing or your teeth fall out of your head because your gums are not connective enough to hold them in there. So there's a whole bunch of different ways that this can affect you. It just happens that a couple of the forms of EDS are a couple of the symptoms of some types of EDS make you much more hypermobile and hyper extensive.

Yeah, for sure. Sometimes if you are hypermobile and you have the EDS and that's one of, I guess, sort of the pluses, it can have some harmful traits, like, although it can also help with skin hyper extensibility, like having really stretchy skin, or maybe joint instability, is obviously a bad one, because that can lead to injury and dislocations and stuff like that. But we should point out that there doesn't seem to be any like weird high rate of injury

for people who are involved in contortionism and definitely not, does it mean you're like, you're going to die younger, that's sort of a old-wives tale that contortionists die young, but that may have to do with the fact that it could be go along with some of these syndromes. Yeah, I also wonder if it has to do with just going out of the public eye at a very young age,

“because in Mongolia, I think the average career of a contortionist goes from about age 6 to age 13.”

So I wonder if that's just kind of helped develop that old-wives tale over the years? Oh, like people think they died and just aged out. Yeah, exactly.

Interesting. One of the things that was always kind of obvious to me is that women are more flexible

than men on the whole. There are actually distinct physiological reasons for this. One of which, I mean body structure obviously, but hormones apparently affect your connective tissue and it's, I guess, strength or degree of flexibility. And so when women take progestin, progestin only birth control pills, they're more hypermobile than when they aren't on birth control pills.

Isn't that fascinating? Yeah, for sure. And then jumping back to the syndromes. The second one is something called Marfan syndrome, which I feel like we've talked about at some point. I know I've heard of it, but that's another genetic condition that makes that connective tissue super flexible. Right. And in this case, it's about sort of like EDS. It's about one in 4,000 each of them are. And you know, this one, you can call shortness of breath, heart palpitations,

eye pain sometimes. Yeah. And you know, those are the two main ones, but outside of this, there's an umbrella term called hypermobility spectrum disorder that kind of covers other things that lend itself to extreme flexibility. Yes. And like you said, do you have advantages to this? So if you're a woman on a high level of hormones who has Marfan syndrome and maybe a hypermobility spectrum disorder, you are probably like what I

thought all contortionists were essentially a born contortionist. There's challenges for all the advantages that it offers. And then obviously the drawbacks and other ways that it affects your health, but as far as contortionism goes, it has just a suite of advantages for you, but there's also like drawbacks in that like you will have to probably do more strength training than the average person because again, your connective tissue is weaker than other people's which makes you

easier to flex or more flexible. And then also you might be more prone to injury like you are saying, you can dislocate way easier than other people. Yeah. But they've, you know, they've done studies and it's, they haven't found it's any different than any other sort of, you know, professional athleticism. Yeah. They've even put people in the the Wonder Machine and have been

contored in MRI and didn't see anything odd going on. So basically said, it's all good.

Keep doing what you're doing. Okay. Nothing odd going on here. Yeah. So if you wanted to get in the contorting chuck, where would you start? That's the question I pose to you now. Let's start stretching

“immediately. Hey, I think it's a good plan. Yeah, but you should probably start as a small kid. Like”

some people get into this as adults, but much, much, much more often. Like I would say 95% of the time you're starting out as a kid because you have a lot more, you know, you're flexible as a kid. You got more collagen fibers going on. Your muscles and joints don't have as much calcium at that point. So kids are just bindi. They are super bindi. You also want to do a lot of

contortionist, you're basically going to need to dedicate your life to it. You have to train every day for hours and hours a day. And that whole stretching thing is not just like what you do to warm up. It's actually part of your training is a stretch because there's a really interesting reflex called the myotatic reflex. Be myostatic. But essentially, when you flex a muscle or when you press on a muscle, the reflex is that your muscle automatically contracts.

It's how your body keeps you from falling down. Essentially is this this automatic reflex.

The problem is that keeps your muscles from expanding or stretching further. So if you just stretch

like normal, like if you do a hamstring stretch, your muscles are no longer than they were before you did that hamstring stretch. It feels better in their looser, but they're not actually longer

“which is really important in contortionism. So they've figured out that there are certain ways”

that you can do stretching. They're called proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation stretches. And essentially, this is how you train your body to actually elongate the muscle fibers. Yeah. And you are well on your way at that point. You obviously got to be drinking plenty of water too because that's going to keep that spinal support. Keep those discs nice and cushiony. And that's just a good, obviously, when they tell you to drink water every day. There's lots of

reasons for that, but that's one of them just as a regular old person walking around, not twisting themselves into shapes. True that. And you know, they have found that it gets, obviously, it gets better with time. Like when you when you start training, your muscles aren't going to change

that much in the first few weeks. But your neurons actually shift in their behavior and your pain

tolerance is going to increase and your range of motion is going to extend. And again, this is just, you know, for contortionism, but flexibility and stretching is kind of one of the keys to aging well, you know. So this advice is for a lot of people. Yeah. When I was looking up a lot of this stuff for contortionism, I ran into tons of videos that were just like for that, like just to become a more flexible average person. And it is a super important ingredient. Yeah.

“Okay. So if you want to go see a contortionist, there are videos on the web, but it's”

much, much different to see it in person. So, you know, yeah. Maybe like you said, make an annual pilgrimage to Cirque du Soleil, like your family, Chuck. Yeah, worth it. I think it's fun. Well, since Chuck said he thinks it's fun, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail. Guys are going to call this no corrections, just compliments. That was in the subject line.

So I'm always prone to read one of those. It was a nudge listening to Jane Stanford,

episode was a nudge to finally write in and thank you guys for what you do. And so what Sarah has done here was wrote a top sort of a stuff you should know, top 10, which means it's four things long. Five things long. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. No, there's ten. But maybe I'll read like six of them and choose to go stop. Yeah. So here we go with number 10. Thank you for your friendly banter at the beginning of the episode. Number nine, thank you for the witty episode names.

Number eight, we always try to make the episode titles kind of fun. Most of the time, yeah, sometimes straightforward. You can't, you know, mock something like, oh, I don't know, anything serious or sad. Number eight, thank you for the movie book cocktail, barbecue, rice, recipe recommendations that you share. Sometimes topics specific and sometimes not number seven, thank you for your obvious desire to not show just kindness to different groups of people, but

or be politically correct, but to actually be kind people. All right, that's nice. Yeah. Number six, thank you for your openness to about your own lives, pets, and relationships, which makes us feel like we can relate to you. It's good one. Yeah, for sure. Number five, thank you for being surprisingly informative on unique topics, but also admitting that some of them

“are not as tantalizing, uh, parentheses. I'm looking at you hard sciences. That's what Sarah said.”

And can we all admit that the true crime in holiday extravagances are the best? That's a serious end to those. Okay. Number four, thank you for coordinating the intro outro jingle to the overall style of the episode. Uh, we need to think one person and another whole set of people for that. Obviously, Jerry is the one who's picking those out. Sure. So she's doing the coordination, but stuff you should know listeners are the people who

perform and those to begin with, and record. Yes. Yeah. And Dave and Ben pick them out to Jerry's all-time goat. Yeah, for sure. She's the all-time greatest of all time. That's right. Uh, number three, thank you for the mispronunciations, uh, and the accents, especially in the Halloween

something we can, uh, usually safely listen to with kids in the car, uh, and still be entertained, or just have on in the background, so we feel surrounded by friends. Number one, uh, thanks to

you both for coming to Madison, Wisconsin and April, the next second row seats. So Sarah, I guess

we'll be seeing you on the second row there, and if you haven't got tickets for Madison yet,

“or Akron or Chicago, uh, they're still tickets available. Yeah, it's stuff you should know.”

.com on the tour button. That's right. That was really nice. Sarah, that was a great email. I'm glad you selected that one, Chuck. Yeah. Um, thank you very much for all that, Sarah,

and thanks for listening as much as you obviously do. And if you want to be like Sarah and send us a

clever, cool, neat email, we love those. You can send it off to stuff podcast at I Heart Radio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my Heart Radio visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What if mine control is real? If you can control the behavior of anybody around you,

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