MAT Session

For Valentine’s Day I got a MAT session from Chie. Today it was time to cash in on it. I went to Ebisu Synergy Center after gym today to have my first session.

MAT is an acronym for Muscle Activation Techniques and the theory is that you may have a lot of mechanical malfunctioning in your body over time. This may prevent your muscles from working fully in harmony (everything is connected) with each other and some may deactivate making the other muscles work harder. Which leads to imbalance, stiff muscles etc.

MAT is addressing this my pressure and using your muscles in different “exercises” depending on your problem. It sounds really interesting I think, and the first session was good.

Do you feel as after a massage session. No. But I felt lighter in the lower part of my legs than I have done in a while. I have another session on Thursday and I have got some homework to do. I get back to this subject later with a report on the progress 🙂

Another thing that I feel is interesting here is the relationship between MAT and Brainwave Entrainment (BWE). The Synergy Center has a holistic view on mechanical problems in your body that makes you not performing 100%, and it is not far fetched that part of not performing 100% is also your brain.

As an example from the session Kazu-sensei (my “trainer”) explained for me what muscles to use and how to visualize them in my mind in order to activate them correctly. Then he asked me to prevent him from moving my leg in a certain direction to check if the muscle had been activate. It was quite amazing to see the difference after just some pressure and some movement compared to when the session started.

Kool & the Gang

Chie and I decided a while back to watch Kool & the Gang when they had a show at Billboard Live. Today was the day.



We had so so expectations on them. We have heard quite a few songs and they are kind of funky and groovy. But wow, what a surprise they were. So much better live than on the records. They were fun, seemed to enjoy playing as much as the audience enjoyed listening to them. In short a great show 😀

Chie and I were really happy we decided watch Kool & the Gang. It was a very impulsive decision based more on it would be kind of fun rather than us expecting this kind of show. And for all of you that did miss out on this opportunity, well too bad for you 😉



Devi Corner

This week we have had visitors from Lund and Beijing in the office. Tonight was their last night and we went our for dinner together.

Indian food at Devi Corner not far from the Shinagawa station. Really nice food and I ate a lot 😛

Summary of Shiga Kogen

The wonderful days of Shiga Kogen is over for this year and I just want to make a summary of it here. So if you are not interested in snowboarding you had better skip to the next blog post.

1st day. Snowing but quite good snowboarding. The visibility was still OK even though it was snowing.



2nd day. Blue sky. 15 cm new and powdery snow. I snowboarded in back country area most of the morning until the snow became a bit wet and heavy in the sunshine. Wonderful!



I went riding in three different back country areas. You can see two of them in the pictures below. The red arrows is where I was riding. In the area in the picture to the left I went maybe 10-15 times. Up in the lift and down on the board… With a big smile on my face 😀 It was replaced quit fast by sweat and strain on my face once I finished the ride in the picture to the right as I had to walk in deep snow for about 25 minutes to get back to the slopes 😛



The final day was very clear. You could see the minami-alps (sout alps) in the background. It was really beautiful. And if we did not have to go back to Tokyo already before noon I think I would have just found a nice spot in the warm sun and relaxed there the whole afternoon, viewing the mountains.



Finally a word on what keeps the energy levels up during a trip like this… Chocolate and nuts and any other sweets that you can find. The picture below just shows the leftovers after 7 people had been eating what I brought. I think half my bag was full of sweets on the way there 🙂



Ohhh, and a fun part of the trip was that we could see some monkeys on the way back. It was nice and only the second time I’ve seen monkeys in Japan, if you exclude those in the office 😉

Il Lupone

After returning from Shiga Kogen I went straight back home. Just waiting for Chie to return so we could go out for dinner.

We went to Il Lupone not far from home and had a delicious Italian dinner 😛