How Much is Enough?

The major reason most people do not take up a lifelong regimen of health (movement) conditioning activities is that they’ve been negatively conditioned not to. The “experts‘” requirements for proper exercise are precisely the reasons that people are resistive -- that it takes up too much time, energy and focus. But is the consumption of time and energy an actual requirement of maintaining health and optimal functioning, or is that just the faulty notions propagated by physical education teachers to justify their personal issues of control and discipline?

When the requirement is that it has to take one hour each day and consume enormous amounts of energy -- there are a lot fewer takers than the requirement that it could be done for five minutes each day, immediately upon waking, without requiring extraordinary conditions and equipment, inducing profuse sweating or labored breathing, and elevation of stress and duress levels that require considerable psychological preparation and discipline to undertake. Rather than that being the solution to the nation’s health condition, that is the cause of the problems. It is as though it has been designed to discourage and eliminate people from doing it.

That is the model upon which competitive athletics are premised. Their purpose is not to make the weak, strong; their purpose is to eliminate the weak from further participation. That would not be a helpful model on which to base a national health/fitness program on -- the notion that everyone has the same abilities, and that fitness is specifically one profile that we all compete to manifest. That is the presumption of erroneous fitness models -- that there is one universal standard -- and that is achieving maximum target heartbeats, lifting certain weight loads, running certain distances -- rather than just articulating one’s unique full range of movement, at the critical joints of the extremities, and with that minimal “conditioning,” one moves in that manner naturally throughout the regular and normal activities of one’s day -- reinforcing that pre-conditioning and predisposition.

There is little value in learning for learning’s sake. The reason we practice learning is so that we can learn in a real world application to solve the problems of our lives -- and not merely the theoretical ones of a long time ago, by a people far away. That has little meaning unless we can apply those lessons to our own lives -- and many can’t, because that link was never established, and so many do think the objective in learning is simply to get an “A,” whatever that means. In many cases, all that means is one’s ability to please the will and agenda of another -- which could be entirely exploitative and self-aggrandizing.

The greatest difference in the thinking between the 20th century and the 21st now unfolding, is the realization that simply more is not necessarily better. Quantity may not be the significant difference that quality is -- for it is the quality, that sets the range for all experiences -- rather than just being more of the same (limited experience), which has no similar transformative/transcending effect. The standard of the 20th century was that, “More is Better.” The further evolution of understanding is the realization that, “Better is More.”