If I Had To Do It Over Again
On Tuesday, November 14, 2006, at 7:00 PM, Understanding Conditioning, The Video, will be rebroadcast on Olelo (Hawaii) Channel 49. People who have seen it before ask if it is a new video -- even though they note that it seems to be a different video each time. That’s because even though the video has remained the same, they’ve changed -- which is the whole objective of understanding conditioning.
That is not necessarily the case with every instructional video -- and why I thought it was necessary to do it once. Every few years, my videographer and I view it again, and are impressed with its timeless freshness -- and think we can’t improve on that; we have to do something else.
The key was that the critical focus of exercise, movement, conditioning -- was the extremities rather than the heart, which is an autonomic (automatic) function, and what we really needed to address was the voluntary muscles that were not getting the proper stimulation to maintain optimal health and fitness. That is a function not of effort but of understanding -- and once one had the proper understanding of those functions, being in shape and condition, was virtually automatic. But not having that critical understanding, no amount of effort could be productive.
The conventional wisdom (saying) is that anything is better than nothing -- when in fact, efforts can be destructive and counterproductive -- which most previously designed exercises were, causing injuries and discouraging people from the proper movements. Those are not taught -- but the damaging ones are -- as physical education (conditioning) of the past, which has simply taken on more fancy names and titles since, while their pat explanations and justifications have been challenged and found to be no coherent understanding at all, but merely belief systems.
The alternative is self-evident truth -- which is why I presented this understanding “live,” as a discussion/exercise. As one is understanding intellectually, the movements test and verify that understanding -- for each individual, and that convergence, is the integration of mind and body.
The fusion of the mind and body is a very powerful force -- that makes most tasks easy, while being distracted in ten different preoccupations, makes even the simplest tasks difficult and catastrophic. People doing the latter, will often justify their poor results in pointing out that they were distracted by doing ten things at once -- rather than accepting the understanding that it is not wise to do ten things at once, but only one thing at a time, with all one’s faculties focused on that task, and done in that manner, is quickly done and one can move on to the next.
If not, one has the same old problems throughout life -- limiting them, restricting their choices, narrowing their options -- until finally, there are no choices. Yet many people think that a “healthy” life is to eliminate their choices -- rather than recognize all the possibilities.
posted by Mike Hu @ 12:13 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
People in the media and other lobbying groups like to ask incriminating questions like this, "If you knew then what you know now, how would you have acted differently?", which is totally nonsense, indicative of a person whose entire base of knowledge is academic and theoretical, rather than any kind of direct learning.
Those most susceptible to that kind of "learning" are those in the professional schools, as opposed to fields of academic rigor. Professional schools are not about the inquiry of truth -- but simply how the profession is done, as its ultimate truth.
The best training for determining truth and working with reality (especially for liberal arts students) is the curriculum of data processing and computer programming, one can obtain at most community colleges.
The unfortunate thing about a liberal arts curriculum is that it is almost entirely about an indoctrination on political correctness, or pseudo-knowledge parading as expertise.
The major media has devolved from pseudo-science to pseudo-knowledge and pseudo-news and information.
UNDERSTANDING CONDITIONING: Tuesday, November 14, 2006, 7 PM, Olelo Channel 49 (FOCUS), Hawaii
Now that the elections are over, I can resume my focus on that body of work I am largely known for -- as the premier writer/speaker on exercise and conditioning. I was raised in a “tradition” of exercise -- and so have always observed and studied it before I was aware of what I was doing -- but that has been an integral part of me, since it was my essential exposure and practice in the formative years.
Throughout my life, being around world champion athletes has just been a natural thing, and I’ve talked to more creators of their own disciplines, than most people realize is possible. But the great teachers must first be great students, and not just be teachers -- or students. Integral to any practice is that one eventually becomes their own greatest teacher.
These are the valuable lessons of the many disciplines before they became “professionalized,” which means done mostly for money, status and power. If there is no money, many are no longer interested; those who remain interested, whether there is money in it or not, are the great teachers and students of that field. Those are the people who do what they do because that is who/what they are, and so their very being is their doing. The most familiar of such people are the artists, and other creative types; many are entrepreneurs, creating their own way in life.
Yet the dominant types in contemporary society tend to be the institutional or organizational person -- who finds a place they can fit in and stays in it unless there is an extraordinary event that propels them on to some other path. They will rarely choose their own destiny -- and even think that there is something wrong and foolish about those who do. They are the many bureaucratic personalities -- for which money, status, and power, if they reach the top of the seniority pyramid, is the only reality.
To such people, any new or different idea is regarded as “wrong,” because they haven’t heard it before, and view their role in society as being to defend the status quo -- until they get orders to do otherwise.
Obviously, the most receptive people to new information are the creative types -- who can appreciate the better in the new and different, rather than reject it reflexively. These people are invariably the leaders in any society -- whether they have designations as such. Those who know, can recognize that in the others of whatever field they are the “masters” of -- because they inquire and challenge the very authority of what is known, familiar and established -- with greater confidence than the defenders of the old status quo can muster.
In the field of exercise, I placed the emphasis of importance at the extremities rather than the heart because it seemed to be the only way to exercise all the muscles as though they were one large, integrated muscle. But the further importance of this, which I did not make the central teaching in the video, is that the need and value of exercise is not in making the heart work harder and faster to pump blood (fluids) out to the extremities, but in creating at the extremities, a pumping effect back towards the heart -- because that is the weakness and breakdown in the circulatory system since sedentary lifestyles produce so few of these alternating contractions/relaxations -- that pump the fluids in the tissues back to the heart, thus resulting in the bloated look of people considered to be fat, disabled and diseased.
Most people are not aware of the movements possible at the extremities of the hands, feet and head and Understanding Conditioning, teaches that full articulation and possibility most have not seen before, or if they have, have not realized the essential importance of.
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