Right Understanding

The key to better circulation, health, appearance and functioning, is the understanding that optimizing the circulatory effect, enables its highest (peak) performance -- but at that point, most people get lost -- in the wrong understanding of what would best effect and achieve that.

The popular notion is that one simply needs to make the heart beat faster and harder -- but that is not the whole story of circulation and its effects, and is actually that part which is least effective to address.

The far greater return-benefit, is accomplished in pumping blood back to the heart from the farthest extremities of the body, which is the unacknowledged benefit of voluntary muscle contractions -- alternated by muscle relaxations in a rhythmic pattern, performed like the heart, which causes the flow through any particular muscle (area).

When it is realized that such contractions pump blood back to the heart, what is particularly efficient then, is effecting that pumping effect from the furthest extremes of the body -- which are the head, hands and feet, which not coincidentally, are the areas in which circulation is noticeably poorer than throughout the rest of the body because they are furthest from the heart. However, rather than requiring that the heart needs to pump harder and faster to increase that circulation to those areas, the much more effective and powerful strategy, is to create a pumping contraction in the head, hands and feet evacuating the blood from those areas and creating the space (vacuum), which allows fresh blood in -- rather than to remain backed up, and providing resistance to that flow, when there is no pumping effect -- back to the heart (the circulatory design).

Without this enhanced pumping effect from the extremities of the body, fluid buildup and retention starts to clog the body and gives it that bloated look that in time, becomes fixed in the body as a more or less permanent state -- because the range of its full expression is unarticulated -- or never effected. Thus in many people who look obviously out of shape, what is particularly notable, is either the bloated hands, feet and face -- or a greatly atrophied look to that development indicative of a constricted flow to that area -- often accompanied with pain and inflammation (arthritis).

As such, they become markers for the general health and well-being of that individual because they are so readily visible -- to those who know to look for such indications, but is apparent even to the most casual observers even if they are not consciously aware of those fact(or)s.

What people are aware of, is not just what they say they know, or can put into words and thoughts. The far greater knowledge and intelligence, is in the very DNA and embodiment of every individual -- beyond most observers ability to detail or consciously describe it. For a few though, such appearances and indicators are glaring and obvious -- as it is for everyone when it is pointed out to them

Fortunately, the remedies, are very simple and fast-acting, and obvious to those who see the obvious beyond -- and are not blinded by their own knowledge.

The Ideal Fitness Regimen

Except for the barriers arbitrarily designed by those who wish to ensure their own job security and “professional” monopoly, the ideal exercise (fitness) program is also the easiest to implement -- which would be to incorporate a five minute conditioning program to effect optimal alertness, awareness and peak functioning for that ensuing task/lesson.

But somewhere along the line, such preconditioning was not thought to be necessary, desirable or even possible -- in the course of doing anything else, except in athletics -- but widely believed instead, that optimal physical functioning, is totally unrelated to optimal performance in anything else -- including thinking and learning. But it is at the height of this alertness, that learning and doing anything, is at its peak of effectiveness.

This error is largely due to the widely repeated belief that the purpose of exercise and conditioning, is to get the heart pumping -- as though it was actually necessary to do so, rather than the given that it should properly be regarded -- so that one is free to focus on those functions that are consciously voluntary.

The proper functioning of the heart is not what most lay persons need to give any attention to -- because that functioning is automatic (autonomic) to what it has to be for the appropriate situation. It adjusts to all the voluntary movements one makes -- and in that way, is already hardwired to be perfect. It is not what needs to be trained (conditioned) to function optimally.

It is the properly functioning of everything else that is paramount and significant. However, such a major detour onto wrong thinking and the wrong track, set this arena of human activity and pursuits back into retardation and de-evolution for the mass majority except those in athletics -- who have to know better to disregard such expertise because they know it has no relevance to what they are doing. In no event or competition, is a sustained average performance desirable. It is attaining a peak performance even for a second, that makes the difference.

Although it is sometimes not obvious, the objective of any attempt, is not to make as many of them as possible, but to do as few as possible -- while obtaining the maximum result -- and if one can do that, many attempts are not necessary to achieve that one best. But it is only that one best -- or peak, that differentiates -- and not length or duration of average, or mediocre effort -- which would be useful to what purpose?

Actually, there are a lot of activities in which one can be rewarded for nothing in particular but to “look busy.” Such people of course, come to think that merely looking busy, is enough to achieve any result -- instead of merely fooling those who don’t know better, that something is being done -- when it effectively isn’t.

But one has to be indoctrinated into not being able to tell the difference -- and even preferring, the opposite to the reality.

The Lesson of the Olympics

More than ever, it is important to find out the person one is -- so that one can feel, that they are truly the best in the world, at who they are and what they do. In an increasingly competitive world, one has to be competing at what one has a huge natural advantage at doing, because those who are born, bred and naturally gifted specifically for that event, will not only win the event, but be fully recovered by the next day and want to do it again -- while those not naturally inclined, will feel that they have done something once in their lifetime that they intend never to do again, no way.

That’s why it is very important to find out what those skills are that one has that natural aptitude for -- rather than the old thinking that one can simply do anything one wants to, if he simply puts his mind to it and works hard enough. Everybody competing at a top level works very hard -- but some are (child) prodigies, or genetic freaks, while some merely gifted, and most, doing something they’re not suited for.

The profile of competitors in each event are so similar that it is as though they were cloned out of the same mold -- with basketball players going in one arena and gymnasts in another, and usually no mistaking one for the other. Even in events of different weight classes, the similarities are much greater than the differences -- between those competitors of the same event at different weights, and those of any other event, at the same weights.

Midway through the last century, a few countries caught onto this and sent their most gifted coaches into rooms full of likely talented individuals and they could identify those most gifted out of the pack just on the way they looked and behaved. Such individuals were likely to be superior to mediocre athletes (performers) even without any training or familiarity to the event they were already the best in the world at.

That was the beginning of the era of modern competition in athletics. In some places, it is done more subtly and imprecisely -- because there are a lot of resources and choices people can make with their lives -- but in some other countries and societies, there are no resources and time to waste, and so this efficiency of utilization is much more necessary and urgent.

But most achieve that same result in their uniquely different ways -- eventually coming to the same conclusions. Less noticeable is how that same selection process is going on in the other arenas of activity and life -- but it undoubtedly is. It’s just that athletics is much more organized, approved and decorated, than the many others that might just be the difference between death and survival -- that nobody else is around to witness. It matters nevertheless, and may be the only thing that matters.

The Power of Change

Most people don’t realize that they could look or “be” like anything other than they presently are -- and see themselves, because that very important lesson is not what is taught in the schools -- which one would think would be its greatest value. Instead, education (schools) have become more about reinforcing the status quo in which students are expected to learn and uphold -- rather than change, personally, individually and collectively.

That is the eternal paradox of institutions -- which is the inertia to change everything else but themselves, and forcing everybody to fit into that mold and social order -- always starting at the bottom, rather than conceiving that they can begin that process at the top. And so a slow, arduous journey from the bottom (novice) to the top (master) is what is taught as the whole process of life -- rather than instantaneous and immediate change -- at any time in one’s life when one realizes such a change is possible, and desired.

If one knew better, of course one would choose differently, to be differently -- but that is not what people are conditioned to think, and reinforce, but its counterproductive, self-defeating opposite -- that change is what is difficult, arduous, unnatural and time-consuming, while staying the same, conforming, is highly desirable and socially-approved and sanctioned as the proper way to be(have).

So when one suggests that change is the proper way to be, many defenders of the status quo are quick to chime in that that cannot be, or happen, when it is in fact, happening all the time, at those leading edges defining those possibilities in our time. That is the art of living, and not the art of merely revering dead things and relics of the past -- which many come to believe, is the only time change could ever happen -- in the past, and not more powerfully, in the present moment.

Those are the realizations of the really great lives and lessons of the past -- but not that it could only happen in the past. The value of those lessons is that they can happen at any moment in the present -- and that it is possible to be changing all the time, rather than simply maintaining a status quo as an indication of health and well-being.

That is to say, that the healthy individual is the one who is changing all the time, transforming, exploring new possibilities, rather than confirming that the way they are, is the only way they must be -- and so should everybody else be (think) that way also.