Luther Bryan Cowden

Luther Bryan Cowden is a pioneer of flexibility and strength training techniques that use leverage, tension, and resistance to develop and sustain holistic health.

Luther teaches solo and assisted exercises that are custom tailored to the individual, performed without any need of equipment, and targeted to all phases of movement (eccentric, concentric, and isometric). He uses principles from traditional Chinese medicine and toroidal geometry to improve physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual health.

Luther’s hands-on work removes accumulated dense fascia and scar tissue from the body by supramaximally loading the eccentric/negative phase of movement through all ranges of motion while targeting the pathways of greatest resistance. This is the neglected but fundamental exercise that is key to rehabilitation, developing peak performance, and achieving unprecedented results. Luther provides the body with a level of feel, sophistication, and customized movement that goes beyond traditional exercise equipment and personal training.

For over twenty years, Luther has worked to develop and disseminate knowledge, techniques, tools, structures, and machines that allow people around the world to have the mechanical advantage needed to eccentrically train at the highest levels of accuracy, efficiency, and frequency. He has worked in Austin, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Boston, and internationally offering private training, workshops, internship programs, retreats, online courses, and physical training centers.

Being at the forefront of a new modality in the field of physical training and rehabilitative health has allowed Luther to work internationally with broad audiences including renowned artistic performers, athletes, world leaders, and business magnates; severely injured and ill individuals; and of course people just looking to get in shape.

Luther empowers individuals to be the authority of their health by sharing simple leverage based exercises. He empowers groups of people by sharing assisted exercises that not only provide greater results for all involved, but also facilitate cooperative exchange and mutual health development.

Luther creates geometric artistic expressions of the body that provide a visual representation for identifying, tracking, and systematically upgrading the body’s positions, movements, relationships, and tissue health. These polarity and visual expressions aid in postural/biomechanical analysis and identification of vector load. Luther teaches with kinesthetic and visual tools to reveal how accumulated dense fascia and scar tissue warps a person’s toroidal field, stresses associated organs, and causes substituted movements. Luther has created a digitally interactive geometric torus to visually identify default positions, excessive/deficient polarity states of charge, and position/movement potential. He teaches how four unique aspects of the torus may symbolize the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual aspects of one's self.

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Hi, I'm Luther. Welcome to my digital space.

I'm excited to share with you. I'll start with a bit of my background. My primary interests are health, nature, community, creative expression, and technology.

Growing up, my favorite activities were being outdoors, acting in musical theatre, singing in choir, and exploring technology. I taught myself how to use computers and develop websites at a young age. I've always been fascinated and involved with online communities, open source projects, and the use of technology as a tool for global communication and education.

Around age 16, I began to experience problems with my digestive system which spurred me to learn more about health. A few years later in late 2002, I was fortunate to discover the work of Bob Cooley and began learning how to problem-solve the body and develop optimal health through cutting edge flexibility and strength training techniques. My desire for physiological health upgrades and to know myself advanced me into the study of how the body, mind, emotions, and spirit interconnect. Out of nowhere, I was thrust into the vast fields of biomechanics, physical rehabilitation, yoga, traditional Chinese medicine, nutrition, psychology, personality theory, and much more.

My initial interest was not to become a professional trainer, but to simply to feel good and be healthy while also developing a skill that I could share with friends. At that point, I was attending the University of Texas and living in a 100 person housing co-op, discovering the power and benefits of cooperatively owning one's habitat. I grew tremendously in this radical democratic decision-making organization and soon became deeply involved in coordinating and promoting cooperative living and intentional community.

My interest in community bridged from creating intentional living environments to cultivating intentional healthy environments, both externally and internally. I began leading groups for my friends to "trade" assisted stretching with each other. Before long, I realized that my resistance to becoming a teacher was futile, as I was already serving as one for my friends. So I gave in and opened a studio in Austin to offer my services professionally, educating people about the crucial and missing link in physical training: how to actively use the negative (eccentric) phase of movement to develop immediate flexibility, reduce the accumulation of dense fascia and scar tissue, and drastically renovate tissue health. I later moved back to my home state of California and began working there and around the world.

And so what started off as a passion and personal practice ultimately bridged into my professional life. It's been quite a journey of personal growth and development for myself and those that I've worked with. Over the years, I've worked with many people from different backgrounds: professional artists and performers; Olympic and professional athletes; world leaders; business magnates; severely injured/ill individuals; people with desire to develop physiologically, psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually; and of course people just looking to get in shape. It has been an honor to introduce so many people to a unique approach to rehabilitating and developing health. I appreciate all that I've learned from the people that I've worked with. The dynamic connection and exchange that can take place through eccentric assisted stretching never ceases to amaze me.

For many years now, all day every day has been: stretch, get stretched, and stretch others through private sessions, teaching classes/workshops, opening studios, managing and teaching certification programs, developing online trainings, and trading with a community of health enthusiasts. I am beyond fortunate to have greatly benefited from being immersed in unique healing environments where I've received direct hands-on contributions to the development of my health from many people, advancing me in all ways.

In 2006, I decided to take a leave of absence from my first studio to travel in Central America. I wanted the people I was working with to keep stretching while I was gone, so I photographed many exercises to share with them. I realized soon thereafter that the best way to organize the photos was to present them all on my website. This marked the birth of the Flexibility Training Archive, my online training platform. I began filming complimentary videos and eventually launched an online streaming video training service to educate the world about the flexibility and strength training techniques that had become my life work. This greatly advanced my computer skills by increasing my knowledge of programming, graphic design, video production, and much more. I did my best over the years to continue to create new content and code at night while still spending most of everyday in hands-on practice, but the challenge of doing too much eventually became unsustainable. I've recently taken time to appreciate the organic life that has sprouted from me simply following my interests, and I have also reevaluated how I can be more effective in achieving my desired goals. So now I've launched my new website in an effort to propagate all of the obscure knowledge that I've been steeped in.

Aside from sharing basic and essential flexibility training principles, I will also be sharing some ideas and research that I've been working on lately. Several years ago, I started putting my geek interests to use by creating graphics that visually depict physical movements and the relationships between each position and movement. This created a visual representation for a phenomenon that I otherwise only had a kinesthetic feel for when stretching and allowed me to more easily identify patterns that I was previously oblivious to. This turned into creating physical structures that provide variable biomechanical positioning and orientation which support the body such that any given muscle group may be targeted with optimal leverage in all phases of movement. This reorientation with gravity may serve to ease the physical demand on the assisters, allowing gravity to be an ally in the monumental task of exceeding the tensile strength of dense fascia and scar tissue, while also allowing the person getting stretched to generate maximal tension/resistance as necessary. Before long, I realized that I was learning about spatial positioning and XYZ coordinates. I was discovering math, a subject I've never been fond of, through my body, as opposed to learning from a text book. This led me down a rabbit hole of geometry, physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, Euclidean vectors, I Ching, Shri Yantra, and other subjects I know very little about. I discovered spin-½ and yin yang as a geometric torus within myself and created expressions for movements and positions through -+= polarity sequencing. This led to me to create a digitally interactive torus which revealed four aspects of the torus that may be representations of the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual aspects of one's self. Aside from the precious self knowledge I've gained by going through this, this same tool also serves as a geometric art generator, toroidal musical instrument, puzzle game, and more that I'm very excited to explore, create, and share.

Feel free to check out these resources to learn more about me and my approach:

I appreciate our being in this journey together. I welcome you to become a member to get started on developing your health. Below are basic concepts that I look forward to teaching and imparting as your guide and committed community leader:

Basic principles of flexibility and strength training
Problem solving the body with free attention
Physical and intentional approach to proactive and preventative health

These features and more are available to help you along the way:

Practice classes and curated exercise sequences addressing a wide variety of concerns
Track your progress to profile the weak/strong and tight/flexible areas of your body
Customize exercise sequences based on your needs and desires

Stretching is just the beginning. I'll also be sharing more in-depth material for those wishing to dive in:

Exercise that can be performed anytime and anywhere without equipment as a self-empowerment practice to aid in challenging life circumstances
Activation through physical movement and community games to facilitate cooperative exchange with self and fellow health advocates
Arm wrestling and other exercises to identify how to "win" while "losing" and cooperatively transition through conscious and unconscious perspectives
Creating physical structures that provide variable biomechanical positioning and orientation which support the body such that any given muscle group may be targeted with optimal leverage in all phases of movement through full range of motion
Connecting with the balance of concentric strength and eccentric stretch, isometric strength and isometric stretch
Identifying strength training as addition and flexibility training as subtraction
Rectifying the additional force in the negative
Identifying default state of charge and propensity for excessive addition and deficient subtraction
Identifying how dense fascia and scar tissue create substitution and masquerade as internal gravity
Uniting with the earth's gravitational pull to balance the gravity within self
Polarity and visual expressions for positions/movements to aid in postural/biomechanical analysis and identification of vector load
Positive and negative symbols as a fundamental language for biomechanics and anatomy
Knowing self and body through the torus, XYZ positioning, vector polarity sequencing, and gravitational orientation
XYZ -+=
Physical movements as equations to balance with zero point
Positions/activations/movements to physically experience direct and alternating current
Two hands and two feet as four poles, each anchored/constant or moving/variable to facilitate positive/negative activation in all areas of the body and self
Floor, walls, and ceiling used interchangeably as props/anchors when exercising to target all areas of body through multiple perspectives, resetting default identifications, broadening one's perception to view all objects/obstacles as powerful allies cooperatively aligning, exchanging, and counter-balancing
Mapping the layers of vector polarities from proximal to distal and the physical movement transitions there within
Mapping the physical location of vector leverage points and correlation to TCM acupressure/acupuncture points
Mapping toroidal flows and TCM meridians
Geometric torus as tool to visually identify default positions, position/movement potential, vector relationships, and excessive/deficient polarity states of charge
1D / 2D / 3D / 4D and physical / psychological / emotional / spiritual and ring / point / filter / space torus representations
Toroidal views of reality: physical / psychological / emotional / spiritual and outer-inside / inner-inside / inner-outside / outer-outside
Clifford torus four view convergence
Internally and externally embodying the multi-dimensional and fractal nature of yin yang and spin-½ through toroidal movement
Yin yang and 720 degree principle
8 vector polarities and 8 I Ching trigrams
Inside, outside, and upside down with 6 physical degrees of freedom and 12 universal degrees of freedom
Knowing self through geometric art
3D printed geometric figures as visual and kinesthetic tools to know physical body
Stereographic projection and dancing with one's sun/moon shadow to facilitate multi-dimensional awareness of body and self
Physically experiencing and correlating universal mathematical and geometric principles
Exploring into the works of Buckminster Fuller, Taoism, I Ching, Shri Yantra, and much more

I have so much that I'm excited to share after two decades of being immersed in cutting edge health. I appreciate your support as I work to continuously develop new ways for what I've learned to be available to everyone.

Thank you and please contact me if you feel so called and subscribe to my newsletter to stay updated. I wish you the greatest of health.

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