Wednesday, September 17, 2008

The Quantum Leap

Most of my personal friends and other great thinkers on the subject of exercise and conditioning, were led onto a fruitful path of thinking by Arthur Jones as to what truly caused “results” -- rather than unquestionably following the dictums of the the old PE instructors to, “Do as I say, or else” -- just cloaked in the language of pseudo-expertise. In this, they are no more guilty than the “professionals” of any other industry and interest -- a few really are worthy of that designation, but most merely repeat what they have been taught by their teachers and go no further.

What was especially pernicious was the co-extemporaneous referencing of “target heart rate” by others as though that conveyed everything there was to know about exercise -- rather than it was an arbitrary formula (age versus individual variations that are much greater) to prevent people from “overdoing” it as a risk to themselves -- and not the supposed gold standard, many have come to believe it is. No world class athlete talks about it as their objective -- because they have more important objectives to organize their conditioning around. It was for those to whom “fitness” as an abstraction and theory, was meaningful, never hoping to actualize that ideal at any time in their daily living -- but was always somewhere in the future.

What Jones had done was to create a machine that would “provide appropriately varying resistance throughout the full range of a muscle working in isolation.” The problem (or beauty) with that, is that one would have to produce a machine that would work each muscle in isolation, starting as he did, with the largest of the over 600 in the body).

That was a strategy that made sense, as long as one accepted the very premise that muscles could achieve their full range of movement -- in isolation -- as it became apparent to me, that no muscle could work in that manner, since they were all interconnected, and so the preposterous question to ask was, “Is there a movement that activates all the muscles as though they were just one?” -- and what would such a movement look like, if designed with no other consideration than that?

That was the paradox of the fully integrated movement -- by which everything working together rather than independently, and often against each other part, made extremely brief amounts of movement highly productive. Many were intrigued by this exciting new development except on invariably asking, “What new machine can we build to incorporate this great understanding?” and make millions for themselves, were disappointed when I told them, it doesn’t need to be created -- it already exists.

That is how the human body is designed to work, when it is simply, fully understood properly. And so like many things which formerly required great effort to achieve -- like mastering a slide rule to perform lengthy and complex equations (that merely eliminated most participation), a new understanding (technology) supplanted that field of effort (activity) to make such tasks, simple and universally accessible -- at any time one really needed it.

Next: Instant Fitness

2 Comments:

At September 30, 2008 7:05 AM, Blogger Ali Ambrosio said...

I loved reading this. Thank you for sharing. It's good to be back on here, getting caught up.

 
At September 30, 2008 12:08 PM, Blogger Mike Hu said...

Good to hear from you.

As I said, there is really hope for "instant transformation" -- with the right understanding of this process, which is obviously not what most "professionals" in the fitness field are selling -- which accounts for the plunge in adherents to those activities, in favor of looking for strategies that actually work -- immediately and obviously.

I've been perfecting this new understanding for 20 years now, because I know with the old ways of thinking about conditioning, participation drops off precipitously with age -- rather than increasingly adopted and utilized, when it would be most beneficial, and effective.

So the question is, "What will people do?", and that is a minute, and maybe five of deliberate, thoughtful awareness of their movement, first thing each day -- as their wake-up exercise, which is especially helpful for those who have a lifetime difficulty of getting up and ready for each day.

As it is, most never reach an optimal level of functioning at any point in their day -- but stumble and bumble throughout their lives in a semi-comatose state, wreaking havoc on society and their own lives.

We've been conditioned to think that the primary function of the brain is to produce thought, language, culture and other externalities,rather than it is the primary task to produce health in every individual, human or otherwise.

So what would enhance this functioning? It wouldn't be thought but simply increasing the circulation to the brain -- which is not automatic just in increasing the heart rate. The heart rate is not an adequate measure of circulatory efficiency -- because that would have to be measured at the extremity, and not the source.

That is the major flaw in the current thinking on exercise -- which is why it doesn't work. It's like building a car with a very powerful engine -- but neglecting to provide a power train (transmission) to turn the wheels.

Then logically people observe, it seems like no matter how hard and diligently I work, I don't seem to be getting anywhere. Whereupon their instructor proclaims, "It's because you're not working hard enough."

The understanding is incomplete -- to be effective, but when that connection is filled in, there is unmistakable movement signifying the right understanding.

For most intelligent people, merely spinning their wheels endlessly is not enough, no matter how much the experts say that that is all one can do.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home