• barsoap@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Nah elbows correspond to knees. Shoulders correspond to the ball-and-socket part of the hip, humerus corresponds to femur, then ulna/radius correspond to fibia/tibula (yes you have two bones in your calves). There’s no real correspondence to the flexibility of the scapula/clavicle in the hip (though the muscle groups are still pretty much the same if you ask any internal martial artist, it’s just all fused and serves control of load distribution instead of “actual” movement).

    Side note: Did you know that the five-way split (roughly) at ankle and wrist is evolutionarily very new? When you send orders like “stretch the index, curl the middle finger” that’s not the orders travelling down the neural pathways, but “retract limb, index ignore that order” and “extend limb, middle (and others) ignore that order”. That’s kinda precisely the difference between gross and fine motor control and 99.9% of what you’re doing in Taiji and the like is freeing the former from the tyranny of the latter. Also (albeit in a less holistic scale) when you learn to knit without cramping up, watch a capable grandma they’re hardly moving their fingers at all.