Greetings from Chicago.
I’m at the end of a 6 week strategy sprint, which means I have spent a lot of time at the computer conducting stakeholder interviews and making slides.
Yesterday, I barely moved. I walked the 10 minutes from the hotel to the meeting, I rolled my chair from one side of the board room to the other, and walked back.
Being a dedicated health-seeking, executive athlete includes days like this. To me, this isn’t slipping up, this is reality.
In the last edition, I shared some details about the lymphatic system. It’s one way our body takes out the trash. And the most interesting thing that I was surprised I didn’t learn in school was that lymph, once cleaned by the nodes, pours back into the heart, refreshing the blood.
It also travels through the body past gates. It’s almost like little toothpaste tubes, squeezing the fluid from the farthest reaches of the body back into the nodes and then the heart.
And I believe it is extremely important to think about keeping this system moving. There is no one pump to push that lymph through each toothpaste tube, like the heart pumps the blood. Instead, lymph moves when we move - our calf muscles for example, squeeze the fluid up the legs as we walk.
With the amount of toxicants in our environment today, the average lymphatic system is overwhelmed or will become so over a lifetime. Evolution hasn’t had a chance to upgrade us to this level, and therefore, we are living in an era where, as just one example, 25% of people are diagnosed with cancer.
Do you expect that figure to go up or down in your lifetime?
I predict it will go up.
And walking alone won’t get to all the nooks and crannies of the body. Deep breaths are helpful, but not sufficient either. We need more tools.
I have four for you.
The first one applies to all other tools, as we need to “activate the terminus” so the end station is prepared to receive the fluid.
Before You Start
Anytime you intend to move your lymph, use your finger pads to gently stimulate just above and below the collar bones. There, deeper than the skin and bones, is where the terminus sits in the body.
If you were to go and receive a lymphatic drainage massage (a really good idea if you ever have a surgery), the therapist will start the session with their hands on the upper chest, making contact above and below the collar bones. While keeping contact, they will slowly pump toward the heart.
We can do the same thing. We make contact with our finger pads and gently press into the skin in a rhythmic way for a few minutes. A great practice to add as something to do whenever you notice you’re waiting and have a moment.
Rebounding
With our terminus ready to receive the lymph, the first tool is rebounding.
These aren’t the janky, metal spring mini-trampolines I grew up with. These are extremely bouncy because instead of springs, these use bungee cords.
I found a barely used JumpSport one on Facebook marketplace for $50. Brand new, there are options from $80-200. Mine has a handle that attaches to the frame.
To move your lymph, you don’t even need your feet to leave the surface. You just need to bounce, like the woman on the left in the gif.
This little boost of weightlessness helps that lymph travel up the legs, torso and arms and down out of your head.
Plus it’s hella fun. I try to do it a couple of times per day.
Gua Sha
The next tool comes to us from Traditional Chinese Medicine and is a tool for scraping the skin and deeper tissues.
I mostly see gua sha of the face shared by beauty influencers. It really does make a huge difference in your appearance and de-puffs the face.
But it’s not just for faces.
Gua sha tools come in many shapes and sizes. Larger tools are much more effective for the legs, arms, and torso - I have one that looks like a boomerang and one that looks like an oversized butter knife. For the face, there is a brand called Wilding that makes gua sha tools from stone that feel really nice in the hand. You don’t have to buy a special tool, though; you could use a spoon or your knuckles like below.
While the word scraping sounds harsh, when on the face we just slide the tool over the skin with barely any pressure. You do get to more scraping movements when you are looking to break up fascial restrictions in bigger muscle bellies, like the quads, but for moving lymph, gentle is what works.
Here’s the best order for the head: activate the terminus at the collar bones, then work the neck. Next, the jawline toward the ear, followed by down the neck. Now work down the masseter (jaw muscle that attaches the jaw bone to the rest of the skull), then the jawline and neck.
See how this gate system works?
You’re up to below the eyes like our friend in the gif: under eyes, masseter, jawline, neck. Last is the forehead, from the center to the sides, under eyes, masseter, jawline, neck.
I like to do 4 or 8 passes on each place as I work, moving through the gates over and over, and 3 to 5 minutes will be sufficient to get results.
Dry Brushing
Similar in principle to gua sha, a dry brush passes over the skin lightly. A brush makes the legs and back easier to work on yourself.
This is one where I have a much stronger preference of tool. Most body brushes have very stiff bristles in my experience. By contrast, the brand Esker makes a really nice hand brush. It comes with a hemp twine wrapped around the handle. Mine unwrapped almost immediately, but I still like how the naked brush feels in the hand.
I think that’s important if we’re actually going to get ourselves to use these things.
The system is similar, remember to stimulate the terminus then start brushing the chest toward the heart. The upper torso, then chest. The lower torso, upper torso, chest. The thighs, lower torso, upper torso, chest. The lymph is directed back to the heart by the bristles.
Let me know if these practices are something you already do - what convinced you?If you give any of these tools a try for the first time, we’d all love to hear your reflections.