If You Do Nothing Else
I don’t know what the most extreme level of sedentary behavior is these days that can produce bodies of human bean bags -- but I’m pretty certain that if one does nothing else but this simple exercise/movement, they already have exceeded the movement of 90% of those who think they are physically active -- except for these movements. And they are the critical ones, that if performed, pretty nearly require one to be at unprecedentedly higher levels of vitality than most people exhibit.
Far from having to lift up the sofa or desk for 10 repetitions, to demonstrate to others how “fit” one is, most astute observers of such things, rely on more subtle indicators of well-being, if not robustness, which seems to be so important among unfamiliar people in assessing the pecking order (dominance) -- which is the total exercise in many forums -- and nothing else! That seems to be true no matter what the cause for the gathering -- for many people, if not the dominant activity of contemporary life (contests -- imagined or actual).
The ability of greatest indication of physical range is that of bringing one’s knees up to one’s chest in the tightest configuration -- which of course the more mass one has in the way -- makes problematical, if not difficult or impossible. Getting to the position in which one’s knees can touch one’s chest or shoulders, requires one to have minimal excess mass in the way of achieving that. It doesn’t matter how one gets into that position: they can be lying on their back, seated, or kneeling and bending forward so that gravity aids this effort rather than provides resistance to it.
The only thing that matters is the distance of the knees from the chest and shoulders -- and if there is no intervening space, then one has achieved as great a range of torso movement as is indicative of good health. Any other range of movement -- is not as universally beneficial and can bring and pain and injury. Pain, as we hope everybody has been educated properly, is the body’s signal to stop what one is doing or risk injury -- as in the case that one moved in precisely the opposite direction of this recommended range -- in producing a back arch with the objective of moving the shoulders towards the buttocks as far as possible -- as in many age-old yoga movements, and even more contemporary attempts to experience the pain and burn.
The mind has no limit to what it can conceive as desirable for the human body to do -- and how it can measure that proficiency, but most of the things one can become good at, may actually be counterproductive than beneficial. Usually, the one good answer -- is the distinctive one among the unlimited bad ones. That is what makes it the right answer -- and not that anything is better than nothing, unconditionally and indiscriminately -- as is the mantra of mass marketing, propaganda and overconsumption.
One must be particularly careful in accepting the recommendations of the experts these days, because their expertise is usually having an inordinate amount of confidence in what they think they know, while the layman usually has a healthier amount of uncertainty that doesn’t make them as vulnerable to being so grossly wrong.
posted by Mike Hu @ 10:05 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
A little bit of the right thing, achieves the results that a lot of the wrong thing cannot.
But those selling you the wrong thing, will tell you that the problem is not that they sell the wrong thing, but that you don't have "enough" of it -- which for their purposes, is infinitely and insatiably "more."
At that rate, the more one does, the more one falls further behind. That is the major problem of most people experiencing difficulties -- in virtually everything that they do, in all facets of their lives -- and these people are disproportionately found among those informing others on the many variations of dealing with these problems indefinitely and inescapably (co-dependence).
That is a vision of a future society that doesn't work -- that the purpose of every human being, is to help every other human being but themselves. Eventually, one person has to help themselves -- and that is the model for the revolution to come.
One doesn't need a study to know this to be true.
http://msnbc.msn.com:80/id/16810983/
Most diabetics refuse to exercise
Study finds high-risk patients ignore doctors' advice to be active
Updated: 5:49 a.m. HT Jan 26, 2007
DENVER - Bad news when it comes to diabetics and exercise: Most people with Type 2 diabetes or at risk for it apparently ignore their doctors’ advice to be active.
Fewer than 40 percent get exercise, a new study found, and the more in danger the patients are, the less likely they are to be active.
That’s despite an earlier study that found nearly three-quarters of diabetics said their doctors had advised them to exercise. The patients who got the strongest warnings to get moving were the least likely to listen, according to research being released Friday.
“People should exercise more, that story is out,” said Dr. Elaine Morrato, who led both studies. “What we’re saying is, ‘Here’s a high-risk population that can benefit from exercise, and they’re even less likely to exercise.”’
Without exercise, Type 2 diabetics face complications ranging from nerve damage to high blood pressure.
Morrato, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver with a doctorate in public health and epidemiology, said researchers surveyed more than 22,000 patients for the new survey. Results of the study appear in the February edition of the American Diabetes Association’s journal Diabetes Care.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates more than 20 million Americans have diabetes, about 90 percent of them Type 2, which is linked with obesity.
Don't 'blame the victims'
Dr. Larry Deeb, president of medicine and science at the American Diabetes Association, said by the time patients have Type 2 diabetes or are at risk of getting it, the deck is stacked against them. They may already have problems with mobility as a result of obesity or foot and circulatory disorders that make exercise difficult.
“We have to be careful not to blame the victims,” he said. “There’s a difference between being unable and being unwilling.”
Even for the most disabled, there’s hope, said author and fitness expert Charlotte Hayes, but health professionals must do more.
Hayes, who wrote “The I Hate to Exercise Book For People With Diabetes,” said telling patients to exercise is different from telling them how.
Every step of exercise is important, she said. For those who can walk, a few steps a day helps. For those who can’t, there are alternatives.
“We take a small-steps approach,” she said.
Finding the time
The American Diabetes Association recommends people get at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, such as brisk walking, five times a week. But the association says for those who can’t, there are benefits from even five minutes a day, along with everyday activities such as gardening or walking to work.
Morrato said she doesn’t know the answer, only that the results of her study are disappointing.
“It is difficult to be optimistic about addressing the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes without success in increasing physical activity in the population,” her study concludes. “The results of this study provide very pessimistic data.”
Deeb, who specializes in pediatrics, said the next generation is off to a better start. Children, he said, are taught nutrition and the benefits of physical activity. Now, families, local governments and school boards need to take action, while doctors need to follow up and find out if at-risk patients know where to get help.
“When you ask a family what they’re doing, the answer is all about time. They know what’s good for their families, but both parents are working, and sometimes the only time they have is to pick up fast food,” he said. “They have to understand, your health depends on it.
“We will not give up,” he said. “We can’t give up.”
The problem of exercise is that it has been equated with "hard," and what people don't want to do.
When I used to work with the terminally senior and disabled, my thought was not to force them to do what they didn't want to do, but to create movements they wanted to do, were easy for them to do, and made sense to do it -- which is everything traditional exercise thinking isn't.
Effective exercise requires none of the things most people find objectionable about exercise -- but think it is an absolute requirement because the physical educators, fitness professionals and especially the writers (reporters) on these things adamantly demand that's what makes them the "experts" in this field.
The thing about experts, is that they want to make the simple and uncomplicated, as difficult and complex as possible -- to keep others out of their field of expertise and competition -- to establish and maintain a hierarchy and status, as the coach, teacher, master, or master writer. They create and use jargon to do so -- much as the teachers of anything do, which obscures the knowledge of the jargon from actual knowing personally.
Otherwise, effective conditioning is not only entirely possible but easy -- because I have pioneered those concepts myself, in a lifetime of observation and involvement. However, I get a lot of resistance from the professionals of every stripe who regard a challenge to this status quo, as a challenge to every status quo, which as professionals, they feel compelled to defend.
However, among every group of people, there are a few who can recognize the truth as the truth -- without somebody else telling them what it is, and they will recognize the truth of any matter.
The proper metaphor for understanding this new concept of exercise (conditioning) is that instead of consuming (burning) energy, what one wants to do is to build energy (reserves), stored in the form of muscles -- in which it becomes immediately accessible.
Fat is also the storage of energy -- but not in a form readily available to produce action (change). The agent of change is the muscle.
The objective in conditioning is to increase one's capability for future actions (responses) -- rather than exhausting them. The reserve of energy is available for the body to build itself -- or what is known as recovery ability.
Certain processes will produce a surplus while others will drain those reserves -- in the recognizable deterioration, dysfunction, often called the "natural aging" process.
However, we now see many more people highly resistive to that "natural, inevitable" aging -- and a few are even beginning to show greater growth and vitality that hasn't been observed before as people live unprecedentedly longer.
People can grow healthier -- rather than begin the inevitable decline as soon as they graduate from high school. A large part of it is due to the increasing visibility of everyone -- so that the gene pool shows much more range than ever before.
It used to be that only a few people were highly visible. Now, anybody who wants to be, can be the star of their own program -- but few are compelling to watch, or look at. Hopefully, there is a niche audience for everyone.
Unfortunately, the criteria often is the desire for attention rather than merit -- that those who get the most attention are those willing to do anything for it, including saying the most outrageous things and violating the greatest sensibilities.
Beneath the radar and the noise, lies the simple truth of the self-evident.
"There he is again."
Understanding Conditioning (repeat) Channel 49 (FOCUS) Honolulu, Hawaii 1/30/2007 (Tuesday) 10:30:00 PM A revolutionary new way of looking at exercise. Environmental/Health
When Understanding Conditioning begins to be rebroadcast fairly frequently (by popular request), people come up to me at stores and say, "I know you don't I?"
I ask them if they ever watch public access television -- which they often deny that they do. Then I suggest maybe it was because I ran for public office. No, that's not it, but the more we talk, the more they are convinced that we know each other -- and have had a long conversation before.
The unthinkable was to question that exercise needed to be hard in order to be effective; that's what everybody (the experts) said, and that's what everybody accepted as the unquestionable truth. Most teaching was done that way -- to make it harder for the students, and for them to work harder -- instead of once again thinking that the key to an explosion in understanding, was to make everything easier, and particularly, easier to understand.
The first people to really get that, were the people who promoted the personal computers -- realizing that the key to its pervasiveness was in making it so easy a child could do it -- or as a commercial now claims, "a caveman" could do it -- much to their chagrin.
For most of human history, the strategy has been to exclude people -- from the elite circle. Only recently have people thought to include everybody -- as the social value. The last vestiges of that way of thinking -- are the remaining "liberals," who believe it is their destiny to do the thinking for everybody else -- as its most enlightened citizens.
They determine "political correctness," or "conventional wisdom," as their idols before them did -- in an age that no longer finds that need for them. People really can think for themselves -- but a remaining few won't let them, and insist they must do the thinking for them -- in the old style political machine, or assembly line society and culture. Work then, is viewed very differently than it is now.
Work used to be defined as force exerted on an external object -- rather than the work occurring within the body itself. So it is thought in the former that lifting a weight ten times -- will have something to do with providing a desirable and beneficial effect within the body -- but how that miraculously happens is not observed. Only the external action is -- as in throwing the shot put, hitting a golf ball, etc.
But it is the movement of the body itself -- that is the productive aspect, and not the ball flying 300 feet on contact. The body is the cause of the effect -- and not vice versa. Power is not the ability to move somebody else; it is the power to move oneself -- and doing so, moves others.
In the academic world of the liberal -- cause and effect have no precedence, but are regarded as co-equal, leading them to say such ridiculous things as, "If you knew then what you know now, would you have acted differently?" -- as though one could just arbitrarily change the factors that produce any event. There's a reason things happen; it is not arbitrary -- just because one wants to think it so, or make others think it so.
That was the trend in thinking in the 20th century, that even towards the middle of that century began to be reversed -- by such people as Ayn Rand, George Orwell, Krishnamurti more than any other, maybe in the history of mankind.
Yet this person was virtually unknown and unrecognized by the popular media though he influenced virtually all the other thinking in the 20th century. He would have be honored to realize that his greatest contribution was in this concept of awareness by which the truth is revealed -- and not handed down, from one generation to the next.
Even such diverse people as Bruce Lee said, "This is my Teacher, this is my Master."
There is no separation between the observer and the observed.
Many of the things Krishnamurti talked about, was slightly ahead of his time -- but made possible this peculiar notion of the "cosmic consciousness" we know today as the Internet, or World Wide Web -- in which each individual has access to the total content of information in the world -- if he doesn't separate themselves from it.
That is what ego does -- create the self apart from the rest of reality. That was the meaning of being One With the Universe -- rather than the old notion of competing against everybody else in society for preeminence and dominance, as a few people still do.
But if one can let everybody's information be his own -- instead of cultivating only his "own," which is the earlier concept of "intelligence," the former individual has so much more power than the isolated and alienated person of the 20th century did. That was a huge problem of the latter half of the 20th century -- for which the computer (digital) revolution, was the overwhelming response.
Children and caveman learn it so much faster and easier than those filled with the old way of knowing restricted only to what was in their own heads -- and being opposed by every other, in a competition for the dominant position in society. Some people think they are competing against the President -- and everybody else, every day of their lives.
Disproportionate many of them have high visibility because they demand that attention. But there's only so much attention to go around -- for the truly worthy.
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