For the past several weeks, I told myself that anytime my dog Medax does a stretch, I too will stretch. Sometimes I will mimic her: She often does downward dog (or more accurately, puppy dog pose). She does it quite actively, too.
Or she will lay on the back and extend her arms and legs away from each other. And I’ll do exactly that while standing and reaching my arms up as high up as I could while getting on my tippy-toes.
Or she will lay on her side and extend her limbs apart and essentially do a back-bend. (She’ll even try to accentuate it and go deeper into it by trying to grip the floor with her nails so she could bend her spine backwards even more. How scrumptious!)
I discovered very quickly that my dog stretches SO often that I often cannot even keep up with her! She will get up and stretch and I’ll still be sitting at my computer and realizing I need to get up and stretch with her! I ended up doing 8 downward dog stretches in a day if I mimic her. I eventually did it so often I started doing other stretches to take its place, like stretches that MY body specifically needed, like shoulder rolls in downward dog, anyone? (The beauty of being human is that we could do extremely complex things if we put our minds to it.)
This all started when someone said, “How come we need to warm up when a lion doesn’t before chasing down a gazelle?” And the reply was “Actually, animals are always stretching.” And now, I totally believe it! We are just so used to seeing them stretch and move with grace that we don’t probably don’t really notice it as anything unusual.