Detailed guides to painful problems, treatments & more

Slow-motion pandiculation

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Beautiful slow-motion kitty pandiculation, added to my stretching article just now. Pandiculation is: “A stretching and stiffening of the trunk and extremities, as when fatigued and drowsy or on waking, often accompanied by yawning.”

Strangely, despite writing about stretching for years, the word “pandiculation” has never appeared on PainScience.com before today. A million words, and not one of them is pandiculation! So there’s another item for the to-do list. (Update years later: I eventually wrote a whole article about pandiculation. See Does Pandiculation “Reset” Muscle Tone? It might, but it’s probably no more profound than resetting your thirst with a glass of water.)