Becoming a Supple Leopard

I have had Becoming a Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance by Kelly Starrett on preorder for a long time and I guess it has finally  been released as I got my copy delivered today. It is big oversized book (400 pages) and is chock full of illustrations. Is you are fans of his Mobility WOD (Mobility Workout of the Day) you already know Kelly has a lot of interesting ideas and techniques for all sorts of movement and injury problems. I have watched tons of his videos, so this will be fun to have his work all organized in one handy book for reference and insight. If you are inquisitive here is a 50 page sample PDF of the book.

Maybe I am not a leopard,
 but I became Maasai

My Maasai club

My favorite observation while checking out the book so far is the illustration that Kelly uses when describing the hip joint. He uses an African Shillelagh (club) to portray the femur and then uses some cloth to demonstrate the hip joint capsule and the effects of a slack capsule joint compared to a tight capsule joint (pages 50-51). This has helped me understand some of the things that can go wrong in the hip joint. Strangely enough just weeks before my arthroscopic hip surgery to fix a labral tear in my own hip joint, I traveled to Kenya and met with some Masai people on the Masa Mara. I did some Masai jumping and bought one of those clubs from them. Despite all my focus on my hip at the time, it never registered to my mind that the club I bought looked just like the head of my femur.

And now that I am fully off topic...here is a video I made of the Masai, just because that was a really cool experience.