Here is a tutorial for the practice of Zhan Zhuang, or standing still for long periods, and methods for undoing the asymmetrical muscular development caused by one sided activities.

Zhan Zhuang:

This practice is useful for evening out muscular imbalances caused by asymmetrical patterns of movement and standing. Standing still is an excellent companion exercise to walking digitigrade, as it develops the muscles along the outer edges of the body while walking digitigrade emphasizes development of the inner muscles.

In this exercise, you stand still for a while every day and due to the increased load, your joints and muscles become tired and begin to gradually assume their most functional positions to be able to continue holding you up. It takes 5 minutes or so before you begin to really sink into the pose and start to figure out where you should be alignment wise.

Start out this practice by paying close attention to the alignment instructions that follow and looking down at your body to reposition. After a while, stop looking down to check your posture and adjust it by feeling from within.

It is helpful to go for a walk before practicing, as this gives your joints a chance to move into their functional positions.

Warmup:

To begin, warm up by spending some time standing on each leg individually while you let the other fall limp, keeping the toes of the limp leg on the ground for balance. After a minute on one side, switch. Think about filling the standing leg and emptying the limp one. Then, shorten the time spent standing to a few seconds per leg and walk in place.


Full posture, Holding the ball:


Alignment Instructions:

Find a completely flat surface, with no tilt

Bring your feet hip width distance or a little wider

Sink weight into the ground. Drop your tailbone down as if you are going to sit in a chair, totally relaxing it, without rounding your back dramatically.

Lift your crown up towards the sky. Figure out where directly up is and extend towards it. Your head should be directly over hips, not leaning forward.

A good indication of when you have placed your feet correctly and are bending your knees and hips at their ideal lengths is that you won't feel as though your tailbone is twisting

Engage your pelvic floor, press your tongue against the roof of your mouth

Spread your feet energetically - feel them expanding out in every direction

Lengthen your arches. Plant your forefeet and gently step your heels out to engage the outer edges of your ankles.

Ask yourself which parts of your feet are avoiding touching the ground for long and seek to ground them.

Rest along the heel, outer edges, and forefeet

Press down into the ground with your forefeet as if you could spring up from the ground at any moment, still sinking into your heels. Pay attention to springing from/pressing into the base of the big toe, center pad, and base of the little toe to activate the inner and outer calf muscles.

If your big toes lift from the ground, root down through the inner edges of your thighs in a straight line down to the inner edges of your feet.

If one foot has trouble grounding, kick into it as though you are going to take a step forward with the opposite foot.

Yield weight into your knees as with digi walking to align your knee caps

Push your knees out to the sides gently, so that when you look down you can see your big toe and first toe. Most teachers cue this by only saying "push your knees out", but "knees sit back and out rather than aggresively twisting out" may make more sense after you have practiced for some time.

Track your knees - it feels awkward once you find the correct point where your thigh bones and shin bones line up perfectly, but eventually becomes comfortable.

Feel how the rotation of your thighs that takes your knees out comes from deep within your hip sockets. Engage your glutes.

As your knees push out, engage the muscles you would use to drag your heels in and forward, while keeping them in place.

You may note one knee wants to go out to an extreme while the other wants to go inwards. Aim to equalize them, even if that means standing for a while focusing on rotating one in and the other out.

Pelvic thrust into each hip equally

Relax your inner thighs to lengthen your adductors

Lengthen your calves and hamstrings

Kick to both sides equally to equalize side glute engagement

Equalize the levels of tension and weight distribution between your two legs.
*Some people have a visual aid for how they should engage, in that one of their legs is wider than the other. If you have this condition, it means that you relax this leg typically and allow it to fill with more blood than the opposite leg, which is tensed and squeezing blood back into the torso.

Relax your hip flexors and allow your hips and legs to sink down into the ground. Think dead weighting from the hips down with proper alignment set up beforehand. You are aiming to detach your hips from your ribs and let them fully sink down.

Lengthen your spine. Spinal muscle lengthening is similar in feeling to peering over a cliff. Your tail stays rooted so that you don't fall over while your spine elongates and tilts forward.

Pull your throat back and up, and hold your neck completely stable. Chin lifted yet tucked so that it is parallel to the ground. Lift your entire neck up from every side, as one tube

Lengthen the sides of your neck. You are aiming to pull the very top and sides of your spine up while you drop your tailbone down. Both ends of your spine move apart, as though it is consistently growing in both directions.

Gaze at one point like a dot on a wall, keeping still until the urge to turn arises. When this happens, note your tendency to want to turn or tilt in recurring ways.

Stay here with your arms down and shoulders back, or lift your arms as if you are holding a giant ball that is continually expanding.
*Hands are at shoulder height
*Fingers not touching
*Arms and shoulders drift away from the body to pull the two sides apart
*Armpits open, elbows hover, shoulders move down the back



And then the most important alignment instruction of all - Relax.



Additional notes on alignment:

Squatting down lower and making the pose more intense can help you to figure out the correct ways to engage your leg muscles, especially the quads and external hip rotators. Bend your knees and hips, set your posture, then return to standing with your knees bent less dramatically.

Like your body is a five pointed star expanding out in every direction, stretch all of your limbs away from your torso

Identify as your center and release both sides of your body to the ground equally

If you feel tension on one side of your body, allow the area to sink down towards the ground.

After a while of practicing ZZ it will become apparent what your asymmetries are and the way you need to stand (and walk) that feels asymmetrical yet draws you closer to symmetry.



Breathing and Awareness Instructions:

For the first three months of practice, focus on what the ground feels like underneath your feet and breathe as you usually would.

After that time, switch to these breathing instructions:

Breathe naturally, holding your attention on the point between your navel and your spine as you inhale and expand, and exhale and contract. Sink into your center of gravity in your lower belly.

*Your belly is pulled in, but don't compress it so much that it becomes tense like an abdominal crunch or expand it so much that it protrudes. Keep just enough tension.
*Be sure you are pulling in your lower belly/ compressing your pubic region
*Allow your ribcage to expand but don't fixate on it like in the yawning exercise
*On the inhale sink your tailbone as there is a tendency to hyperextend while inhaling
*Ribs relax down from all sides, as though you are exhaling even when you are inhaling
*Diaphragm presses downward towards your tail/root/engaged pelvic floor while inhaling
*It may be helpful to focus more on exhalations than inhalations, and the ribcage pressing directly down

When heat starts to build, maintain core awareness while ignoring the sensation of heat on the skin.

When energy rises to the head focus on your heartbeat in your chest momentarily to calm down, then return to your core breathing.

Work towards the experience of becoming headless, your entire sense of being sinking into your torso and focusing behind your navel.

*****
A persistent pattern of thinking about sensations below the waist all the way down to feeling the ground underneath you manifests physically as blood stagnation and bloating in the legs. When you devote time to making your practice about grounding, be careful not to go about your entire day after practice thinking of what the ground feels like.
*****

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Some tips for plantigrade walking:


Dropping the tailbone and lengthening the crown are crucial for spine health. Walk as though you are a tailed animal, identifying primarily as the spinal column and less as your limbs.

While walking plantigrade, aim to keep your heel grounded for longer to slow your walk and allow yourself more time to lengthen your back muscles. This lengthening happens easily while the heel is firmly planted.

Sink into your ankle joint and allow it to rotate around to find its ideal position, equalizing weight distribution throughout your entire foot.

When you lift your foot, lift and carry the big toes and inner edges, and pinky toes and outer edges

Equalize the length of your strides, which is the same as saying equalize the time spent on either foot

Straighten your knees to the same degree. Your knees should bend when you lift your foot and straighten as they pass directly underneath your hips. Hamstrings engage just enough to prevent full lockout of the knees, whiile holding as little tension as possible to lengthen the backs of the legs and ground through the heels

Squeeze your glutes and pull the inner edges of your thighs towards your tailbone to hug the centerline while you take steps
"Squeeze your inner glutes" may be a helpful cue for this

Stomp down into the ground through your heel and firm your glutes

As you stand on each leg, it should be slightly kicking out to the side to stabilize the other edges of your legs

Balance your spine between advancing (overly engaged abdominals) and retreating (standing up too straight, hyperextended spine)

Don't look at the ground or fear it

You are taking up space and pushing outwards from every direction, filling every crevice

Spend more time outside and less time sitting down. What time you do spend sitting, sit cross legged and avoid chairs as they undo your progress in relaxing away bodily tension with ZZ.

Switch the leg that you lean on for a while to develop grounding in the less used leg. Most people tend to lead with their left food and ignore their right foot, allowing it to turn out to the side. If this sounds like you, try walking for a while leading with your right foot and fully grounding through it like you would with your left.



Symmetry:


In all areas of your life, aim to move and accomplish things in a symmetrical manner. Find tasks that you do on only one side from day to day and train them the opposite way.

Begin to use your non dominant hand for more and more things. Anything you can safely do, work towards being able to do it with both sides equally. In the beginning this will mean a period of mostly strengthening your weak side, and once it is time to start switching off you will feel it.

There may be a tendency to hold your breath when doing habits on the opposite side, or to only perform the unfamiliar actions while inhaling. Feel for the differences between your engaged but relaxed dominant side and your non dominant side to see if you are holding unnecessary tension, or your breath. Remember to relax your tail down.



Here are some examples of tasks you can begin to do the opposite way you usually do to balance your muscular development:

Using your phone
Kneeling
Rolling out of bed
Standing up from chairs and springing off to one direction
Looking at books in libraries, tilting your head
Only making turns in one direction every day, setting your spine up to always be tilting in the direction of the turn
Tendency to only climb stairs while relying on one leg to lift yourself up


Even wearing jewelry or having your hair cut assymetrically can cause imbalance in the joints.


A note on eating: Your stomach is on the left side of your body, and so it is better to not use your left hand to eat or during digestion. Aim to do exercises and left handed activities before eating for the first time in the day, as after that point your left side will be slightly clenched due to digestion, your left rib's breathing will be restricted, and it will be more difficult to yield your left hip and ribs to the ground.


Spontaneous Movements:
Become aware of any imbalances in how you move or hold yourself. Many bodily pains can be resolved by simply figuring out what you are doing and doing the opposite. Though, you may not always need to perform the opposite action. Some of your spontaneous movements are actually corrective of your imbalances, while others reinforce bad postural habits. It's up to you to figure out which is which.


Monitor the ways in which you slouch and hold yourself up with your hands. A good way to find your underused muscles is to practice letting go of the hold to see which muscles you would be engaging if you weren't holding yourself up with your hands.

Monitor your movements when you are nervous

Monitor assymetries while you are doing involuntary actions like sneezing or yawning

Record yourself dancing spontaneously and mirror/reverse the actions

Make notes on the way you perform work and get around your house to figure out how to undo your personal imbalances and design new patterns of movement that maintain healthy joint function.