By Mark Jarret
On the weekend of Aug 3, I traveled from Atlanta to the Weaverville location of Systema Asheville. Bill Paravanno is the instructor there. Vladimir Vasiliev personally recognized him as someone who had fixed his knee problems after years of knee pain.
In January, I ran an obstacle course race, the Spartan Race, in Atlanta and enjoyed it enough that I signed up to race again in Asheville. Then, in April, while working with a pole saw, I injured my shoulder and have had continual shoulder pain.
The race in Ashville gave me an excellent reason to visit Systema Asheville. Bill and his wife, Christina, run a healing center known as Sovereignty Lab. In addition to training Systema, Bill uses a Pravilo Machine, massage, and other techniques to restore joint mobility.
When I arrived at Bill’s Weaverville home in the foothills just north of Asheville, we began walking and breathing to calm our psyches down before moving from a walk to pushups, squats, and situps and back to a walk. We then explored how to break structure and train our tendon and joint strength to resist someone’s attempts to off-balance us. After working for some time on this concept, we began the Russian health techniques portion of the seminar with a massage and a spiky mat that seemed to cleanse the body of tension. We then used the Pravilo machine. This machine uses weights to put the body into traction, and then you twist your core muscles to get an excellent stretch.
Bill advised me to find the areas of shoulder pain and to move through the pain. I did so for several minutes. When I finished, I felt amazing! My shoulder was no longer in pain. The next day, I completed the obstacle course and crushed the monkey bar obstacles, completing two very long monkey bar courses – something I’d never been able to do before! All in all, I have found that incorporating Systema principles into my workout routines gives me the best physical fitness of my life. I am very grateful for the time the Systema Asheville team spent working with me on my shoulder and providing other herbal remedies to improve my health.