by Nick Bradley

I had my first cigarette at the tender age of eight, and by the time I reached fourteen I had saved enough cigarette coupons to send away for a complete set of hardwood patio furniture and a lawnmower. By fifteen I had developed the healthy (not) stooped posture and scowl of a confirmed smoker, a natural born cynic whose congested lungs had learned to jeer phlegmatic insults at non-smokers. When my friends played football I stood hunched on the sidelines thinking they were fools and convincing myself that the tube of poison curled in my mitt was all the comfort and recreation that I needed.

In retrospect I am convinced the bitter kernel of my deep rooted cynicism lies in all those years of imbibing deadly poison and pretending that I loved every minute.Even today, after quitting smoking and going through a lifestyle overhaul, I approach everything with a hearty spoonful of cynicism, and mostly I’m glad for it.

I had given up smoking just after my son’s first birthday. The way he would screw up his little face to the smell of me after I came indoors from a smoke on the balcony, had convinced me that it was time to stop, and stop I did, with relative ease. I had done it, after more than twenty-five years I was free. Those first few weeks were uncharted ground for me, and at times I felt almost too optimistic for my cynical soul to bear, so I burned out the extra energy and gnawed away at the small anxieties of nicotine withdrawal with a daily routine of swimming, and enough almonds to choke a rhino.

The smell faded from my clothes, wrinkles disappeared from my skin, and my pockets and home were free of the debris left by my nicotine habit. But I still had the rounded shoulders and the bar-rail hunch associated with a lifetime of the weed, assisted into a well worn stoop by bad ergonomics. But on the whole I felt great, although my teeth ached from being permanently gritted with nicotine withdrawals.

It was around this time that I started noticing things changing around me, the ashtrays disappeared and were replaced by ceramic oil burners giving off the soothing-intoxicating-invigorating-aphrodisiac-life-enhancing vapours of natural essential oils. Biscuits and bacon were replaced by fruit and muesli, and I began to re-learn my long forgotten breathing exercises, remembering the serene face of my South Indian Yoga instructor telling me that a smoker performing advanced Yoga techniques was like someone who can’t swim trying scuba diving.

I felt different, I had more energy, more optimism, more time on my hands, but my back and shoulders would still have sat snugly against the inside of a gothic arch, I still had The Stoop. Years of bending for breath and bad office furniture gave my actual height of Six feet exactly, the appearance of something more like 5’ 10”. Although my bad posture had bothered me for years, I never thought to do anything about it, like so many other things in my nicotine stained existence I felt it was beyond change and had to be accepted. Then fate lent a hand. A stressful week then falling asleep in a chair left me with a neck ache and a strangely elevated shoulder that no amount of hot baths or tiger balm could even touch.

I had known Chris Watts for a couple of years, we had been neighbours once, and had met serendipitously in the middle of the night in Dubai airport. I had known about StretchAsia from its earliest days, and had been interested but somehow until that neck and shoulder issue emerged, I couldn’t bring myself to go in for a health treatment that couldn’t be claimed back on the insurance.

So I made an appointment, cynically but optimistically, feeling confident that Stretch would ease the pain, and I may even get straightened out into the bargain.

Going up in the lift to the StretchAsia studio I was curious as to how I would feel on the return journey, and so paid extra attention to my pain levels and posture. The smiling interior of the place, where the quest for well-being floats on the oxygen enhanced air, withered my cynical soul, and I was greeted by Joe Pallo, a man with the build and physique of Schwarzenegger, but the demeanour of a kindly nurse.

Over the course of the next hour or so all my imaginings of a gentle, relaxing massage were eroded as I actively participated in the re-alignment of my body. Section by section it was pulled, rolled and stretched beyond the imaginings of an ambitious contortionist, as though being disassembled and made into something completely different. “So this is Active Isolated Stretching.” I thought as my pelvis was brought into line with a feeling of something approaching internal hydrolics. The session was far from relaxing but at the end of it the pain in my shoulder had been squeezed out like the dregs from a toothpaste tube, and I arose from the table feeling different, lighter somehow more buoyant. But the shocks from the treatment were yet to unfold.

I walked across the room in three rubber-legged strides, and changed back into my clothes. I looked different, I seemed taller, less drawn and hung, somehow more balanced and poised, but definitely straighter and taller. I sat down to pull on my shoes and did a double take as what should have felt like old comfortable friends of my feet felt like someone else’s cast aside footwear. I was now standing on different points on my feet, the weight of my body evenly distributed rather than on the outsides of my feet where my shoes had traditionally shown the first signs of wear. The new sense of balance enabled me to carry myself with ease, and considering that I had hobbled and hauled my carcass into the building just a couple of hours earlier, it was an incredible feeling.

The journey home was a strange one, my gait was effortless and powerful, and I sat relaxed and upright on the moulded plastic ferry seats which for all but the most determined force a dreadful slouch.

But the biggest surprise came when I showered and prepared to shave in the small mirror on the medicine cabinet above the washbasin. The previous day I had shaved with my face just inches away from the mirror, now I had to stand three feet away or stoop unnaturally to get my whole face in the mirror, I had finally risen to my full height. It’s not that Active Isolated Stretching (AIS) makes you taller, that would be a claim bordering on that the fabled snake-oil vendor, but it is a system that helps set you up how you’re supposed to be, which in turn helps you to re-educate yourself not to slouch and fall into those bad postural habits.

Usually when I get spam emails offering treatments to “add extra inches”, they go straight into the trash, but if StretchAsia sent me one with a similar heading I’d know that there was a germ of truth in it.