NEW WHEELS FOR MIND & BODY
Imagine your whole body outfitted with wheels. Just think of the total body workout you could get, maneuvering your body to negotiate hairpin turns as you body-skate down a lovely mountain, or perhaps down the Grande Corniche?
Photo: Courtesy of Buggy Rollin
Ladies, you’d look fly for sure if you were wearing this new workout gear.
Jean-Yves Blondeau, stuntman and inventor of the Buggy Rollin suit, has unveiled a new design to better fit and accommodate the curves and configurations of women’s bodies.
Photo: Courtesy of Buggy Rollin
This new design features an updated chest with a carbon-Kevlar insert that enables more precise, faster, more efficient, and easier control of the woman’s wheel chest. It was recently tested at the Chambery Roller Club in the French Alps and in a park in Aix les Bains, receiving rave reviews.
Photo: Courtesy of Tagroom
This past year, Blondeau achieved more feats of greatness when he reached speeds of over 50 mph racing down Tianmen Mountain, in China, in a rolling suit.
Photo: Courtesy of Tagroom
A 6.5 mile run, including 99 bends, took Blondeau, in his 31-wheeled suit, just under 20 minutes to complete.
Photo: Courtesy of Duracell UK
Olympic gold medalist, James Cracknell, recently turned the EDF Energy London Eye into a sort of giant hamster-wheel, when he took the iconic ferris wheel to task during a three hour rotating endurance challenge. Powering through six endurance feats, one per full revolution of the fairly slow-moving wheel.
Video: Courtesy OfficialDuracellUK
The Wheel of Endurance, part of the Duracell Power Me campaign, was meant to inspire people to follow Cracknell’s lead and achieve their own lifelong goals. Cracknell, so far achieved some whoppers: he’s rowed the Atlantic, cycled across the Arctic, and run across the Sahara Desert.
Photo: Courtesy Shen Wei Dance Arts
Traditional ballroom dancing is getting a new spin with the fusion Gyrotonics, a contemporary fitness technology. MacArthur fellow, Shen Wei, one of New York's most avant-garde choreographers, kicked off the Empire Dance Championships, a three-day ballroom competition, featuring 7,000 performances, this past week. His oeuvre, a short work for eight dancers set to Tibetan Buddhist chants and music by British religious-music composer John Taverner, is a marvel in particular, for the balance of motion and stillness, owed in large part to Gyrotonic training.
Photo: Courtesy of Boston Magazine / Lumos Studio
Gyrotonics is a low-impact exercise methodology, favored by ballet dancers, that uses gliding circular motions to optimize body movement and fitness. It releases your body and gives you a new way to move your joints. It produces long, lean bodies.
While ballroom dancing can seem stiff, especially compared to today’s more body-focused dance styles, Shen Wei Dance Art’s renditions are elevated with the added freedom and flexibility that Gyrotonics training imparts.
Gyrotonics are remarkably therapeutic as well. They are gaining popularity as part of physical therapy programs, valued for their ability to improve flexibility, strengthen spines, and repair joints. It’s a boon to patients with disk injuries, scoliosis, hip issues, and the like.
In a recent study published by the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that this kind of physical therapy is just as effective for a torn meniscus as surgery.
Read more about how wheels are making life more beautiful in this week’s posts on BeautifulNow, including New Rolling Works of Art, Beautiful Wheel Reinventions, Cool New Wheels Change Worlds, and The Most Beautiful Wheels Now, and Beautiful Food on Wheels. And enter this week’s BN Competition with photos and artwork focused on our current theme: Beautiful Wheels.
