One OR the Other

 One OR the Other 

Both. I go to the gym and exercise with light weights once a week — as my heavy workout. But every day when I wake up, I exercise those same movements without weights by simulating those contractions by flexing/extending at the extremities of the wrist, ankles and neck — to aid in the recovery from those once a week higher intensity workouts. If you only work out at the gym once a week and do nothing else for the rest of the weeks, muscle soreness will increase for several days due to the inflammation not being pumped out of the muscles with those light contractions.

As most people are familiar with, when muscles contract, they release energy as well as break down into waste products — that remain in the tissues until the body slowly dissipates it — which can be sped up by effecting muscle contractions of lesser intensities. Those lighter contractions and relaxations are not nothing — but serve the primary purpose of enhancing the circulation to pump the waste products out — and in that manner, producing the space for new nutrients to enter — which is the principle of fluid dynamics, or how fluids flow. If the fluids are stagnant because of the accumulated waste products, and no pumping action of the local muscles, then the heart, which is only a one pound organ, is not strong enough to force the blood into that stagnation or resistance — but simply returns to the heart because that is the path of less resistance. It does not have to go to and through the most distant and smallest capillaries at the most distal ends of the body — and that is why people have that bloat and inflammation accumulating at their extremities — and then backing up towards the center of the body more obviously.

A trained eye can also see that happening throughout the body — as well as realizing the simple remedy of producing the muscle contractions at the wrist, ankles and neck, as the most productive movements one can do. However, most people have been told that the reason for their exercise is to work the heart harder and faster — and are dumbfounded with people exercising in that manner all die of some manner of heart failure — because you’re not going to get a one pound organ to power a 600 pound deadlift, squat or bench press! — and if you do it often enough, the failure of that organ is predictable and inevitable.

Meanwhile, the voluntary muscles of the body — and particularly at the extremities, remain unexercised or underexercised so that the bloat and inflammation builds up — destroying the nerves at these sites of poor circulation (neuropathies). If these muscles at the extremities are simply articulated to maximize the contraction alternated with the relaxation from these extremities of the wrists, ankles, neck, that will optimize the flow through those tissues — and that is the process by which one maintains its health, functioning, and allows for growth beyond present capabilities. It’s not that wanting bigger arms makes one grow bigger arms — but that one does all the right things that makes that growth possible — and inevitable.

It’s preposterous to think that one can exercise once a week at a gym and then do absolutely nothing else for an entire week — or just as likely, to do the same workload unvaryingly each day — without at some point placing/facing a greater demand requiring the body to adapt by providing a margin of reserve for those irregular extra-ordinary challenges. That’s what makes one fit right? Being able to do what one normally does regularly, but also having that extra gear and reserve for facing the extra-ordinary — because life is unpredictable in that way. Failing to meet that challenge, is frequently the way many go.

Because of the teaching that one thing is unrelated to any and every other thing — rather than in seeing the connection between things, they think all 600–800 muscles of the human body act unrelated to any other — than that the skeletal muscles of the body all connect to the center — starting at the extremities which are only three — the hands, feet and head — and so instead of developing these grossly disproportionate muscularities one sees so often in gyms — working them properly from those extremities back towards the center (heart), ensures the proper proportional development by exercising them in the way they were designed to work — and not just having a much of over- and under-developed body parts pasted together. That was the ideal the old-time bodybuilders strove for — and not today’s grossly disproportional developments that would be unrecognizable and offensive to the classical sculptors renowned for those figures of great proportions, symmetry, and integrity.

That was the point.