The Two Lumberjacks

The Two Lumberjacks

A crew was dispatched on a project to harvest trees from a local forest. One day, a young lumberjack challenged an elder to a contest. Who could cut more wood in a day? The rules were simple. They would work through the day. They were allowed a short break every hour. Both agreed.

They began in different areas of the forest. Around the end of the first hour, the young man heard the challenger rest his axe. He worked through the break with ease. Every hour, the young man heard the challenger rest his axe. He used his limitless stamina to gain the lead every time. The young man worked straight through the workday without rest until the end.

When the contest was over, the crew saw that the old man clearly won. In disbelief, the youth asked, “How could you have won? I worked faster and longer than you did!” The old man laughed, “While you worked the whole day through, every hour that I rested I was sharpening my axe.”

It doesn’t do anybody any good for you to try and chop down a tree with a metal stick.

Many of us are responsible in giving ourselves the green light to get stuff done. However, many of us are not as aware that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to come to a complete stop on our own.

Regular bodywork therapy is a great way to train yourself to rest and relax. It forces our nervous system to adapt to lower and lower levels of tension. Decades of research shows we’re more clear and efficient with regular rest and recuperation.

Eventually, the body relearns its way back to your baseline level of stress. This is known as treatment.

What is Stress?

What is stress and how does massage help with that?

Well, if you’ve ever had to defragment a computer – it happens automatically now but some of us remember when you still had to do it manually – parts of the hard drive get scattered overtime with use and loose parcels are left strewn all over and out of order. Defragmentation is the process of taking those loose parcels – fragments – and putting them all back where they go so the computer can operate at optimum capacity. See the image below for a visual illustration. 

Our nervous system is the same way. Stress looms larger in our mind than we know it should, and unresolved loose ends take up our mental bandwidth like the loose parcels out of place in a hard drive. Massage helps ground us and remind ourselves of the values we already know.

Location

Waco Tennis & Fitness
900 Lake Shore Dr
Waco, TX 76708

Ridgewood Country Club
7301 Fish Pond
Waco, TX 76710