Understanding Conditioning 2024
The most important exercise, is to understand what one is doing — and why they are doing it. The way exercise is usually taught, is just to do this and do that, and if you don’t like it, then you have to do more of it. So this conditioning is coercion rather than understanding — which is like getting a new toy, and rather than first reading the instructions for proper assembly and operation, one forces the parts together and destroys it in quick order — no matter how much force is applied.
The proper understanding of the human body is to note that the features that distinguish a human specimen from all the others — is the large brain, tool-manipulating grip, and feet that enables an upright posture. All human movements emphasize those functioning and expressions — whether they realize it or not. Some forms, have made it a deliberate study and discipline — which is the forerunner of health and healing (medicine).
Contemporary health issues often manifest at the extremities — where the circulation is poorest — as the most distant from the heart. However, the problem is not that the heart is not strong enough to push the fluids out to the extremities, as it is the muscles at the extremities do not help the heart in the circulatory process (function) by contracting in exercise to pump the blood out of the tissues that makes it easier for the always working heart to pump blood into that vacuum — which is the principle of fluid dynamics, or how fluid moves. That's also how CPR works: you have to push the air out of the body, to allow atmospheric pressure (fresh air) to enter into that vacuum -- and simply blowing more air into an already filled lung, is not going to do much good.
The heart is only a one pound muscular organ — while the rest of the musculature is 40–50% of the total bodyweight in most people. So the purpose of any exercise should not be to work the heart harder and faster, but to make the rest of the musculature aid in more powerfully optimizing the circulation — particularly in inactive and poorly conditioned bodies in which the skeletal muscles are doing nothing especially useful or productive. In that case, an intelligent and insightful person would ask, one can I do to best enhance my health for all other purposes — and that would simply and obviously be, optimizing the circulation that rids the body of toxic waste products (inflammation) and in doing so, create space for new nutrients to enter and keep the body at its highest health.
Understanding that, one would further realize that the greatest priority for doing so, should be at the greatest assets at the head, hands, and feet — and that doing so, implies the circulation through the rest of the body to get there. But that is not the case, if the focus and objective is merely to make the heart work harder and faster, or to focus on the core muscles closest to the heart. That does not recognize that the weakness of the circulation is at the extremities that in time, becomes the dementia and atrophy of the neck muscles, the weakened grip, the unsteady gait and balance which are the characteristic markers of individuals in declining health.
Any and all amounts of making the heart work harder and faster, or developing the abdominals and glutes do not address those problems — directly and powerfully — and in all probability, diverts those resources from where they would do the most good. Unfortunately, that is the popular paradigm of exercise that naturally fails for most people — no matter how much time, energy and effort they put into it — because it is flawed not to do what is most urgent to do as the priority.
Those are the exercises generally not done — if favor of everything else, that makes much less sense to — and will predictably be abandoned when one could benefit from the proper understanding and exercise most urgently — and beyond that, assure their lifelong highest functioning as long as they live. But that understanding is usually jettisoned in favor of some product or service that is more commercially lucrative as the ticket to health.
For this reason, the ancients were closer to the truth than most modern advice and practices for lifelong health and functioning throughout — in their fragmentation and specialization of exercise equipment and practices that head in this wrong direction. What the ancient observers understood, was that the essential pathways and connections to the center of the body, was the health and functioning at the head, hands and feet — which evolved into reflexology, acupuncture, wing chun, dance, rhythm gymnastics, etc.
Those are the fine motor skills of life — rather than the gross. When individuals maintain those fine motor skills throughout life, they remain productive and capable throughout their lives — while those who only cultivate the gross motor skills, lose those fine motor abilities — and become less able to live independent and productive lives. That is the end-game — and not just the “15 minutes of fame” followed by a prolonged lifelong decline — as the familiar pattern of premature and largely unnecessary aging.
So when one observes that the neck muscles are atrophying, those are the muscles that muscle be engaged and activated specifically and directly — and not simply making the heart work harder and faster. That is also true for the deteriorating grip strength. One must activate and exercise those muscles specifically and directly — and not do more treadmilling or swimming — or anything else. The same is true for foot and balance problems. One must articulate the foot muscles — and not simply do more bench presses, deadlifts, squats or anything else — thinking to achieve the desired results.
The head, the hands, and the feet, are not simply stumps — used to punch, kick and head butt — but are the primary tools of human expression, functioning, and productivity — whether that be art, dance, writing, music, athletics, etc., but modern life has reduced much of those activities to simply watching television or a computer screen requiring very little movement — particularly of the head. Not surprisingly, the neck muscles atrophy — a sign that the circulation is very poor to those areas beyond that. The brain requires all the resources it can get — to take care of the rest of the body — autonomously (automatically) — just as the heart functions autonomously. That is not where the conscious effort should be applied to.
The conscious (voluntary) effort should be specifically and directly directed to where those movements and actions are not automatic and modern life has made unnecessary. That is where one makes the greatest difference in optimizing the circulation and ensures their greatest quality of life and functioning. Everything else is a diversion and distraction from that greatest purpose.
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