Category: Fitness

Expanding my movement practice: Push hands

I haven’t written much yet about adding push hands to my movement practice, mainly because I don’t feel competent to describe it well.

Push hands is a taiji training technique—a way to learn how to accept and redirect force. I view it as falling roughly at the midpoint between taiji as moving meditation and taiji as a martial art.

My taiji teacher wasn’t really interested in push hands, I think because he wasn’t really interested in the martial aspects of taiji. He did give us the barest exposure to pushing, so I wasn’t a complete novice, but nearly so.

I am interested in the martial aspects of taiji, so I was delighted last year when I met a couple of people who were interested in pushing. We got together several times last fall, then let our training fall by the wayside over the winter, but started meeting again once the weather turned nice in late spring.

One of the friends I push with describes push hands as a test or diagnostic for your form practice: If your form practice is sound, you will be good at push hands.

Already my push hands practice is informing my form practice, as I learn to shift my weight to move, but simply to turn my waist to accept and redirect energy. I’m trying to learn to keep my shoulders down (a work in progress), and I’m trying to learn to keep my arms and shoulders connected to my core (same, but with less progress).

Great fun.

Free group tai chi practice

Free tai chi group practice: Monday/Wednesday/Friday at 8:30 AM in Morrissey Park!

A bunch of my students from the Savoy Rec Center (and a few other people) meet in Morrissey Park over the summer for free group practice sessions. There’s no teacher, but plenty of folks are willing to demonstrate moves—we’ve had several people learn most of the 48-movement form just by coming all summer and asking people, “How does that next move go?”

A typical hour includes 30 minutes of moving qi gong, 10 minutes of standing meditation, one or a few short forms, and then the Chen 48-movement form.

We meet Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 8:30 AM to 9:30 AM in Morrissey Park. We generally gather south and west of the tennis courts.

This year we’re starting Monday, June 5th.

Because there’s no teacher there’s no one to make an official determination that it’s too rainy for class—just decide for yourself.

Off all meds

For years I took drugs for high blood pressure, and for almost as long for allergy symptoms. This post is just to mention that going low-carb has gotten me off all of them.

I got off the allergy meds first. I got on them gradually. For years I said I didn’t have allergies. Then for years after that I said, “Well, for a couple of weeks in the spring and a couple of weeks in the fall, I get a little snuffly.” Then I started being snuffly all spring and all fall. At some point I started taking antihistamines (Claritin seemed to provide the most symptom relief with the least amount of drowsiness), and then at some point I started taking Nasacort as well, to manage congestion that otherwise made it impossible to breathe through my nose.

I initially went low-carb specifically to get off the allergy meds. Without the Nasacort I often had to breathe through my mouth—unpleasant, but also a genuine safety hazard while eating.

It worked, and it worked very quickly—in about three days I was off the allergy meds.

Getting off the blood pressure meds (lisinopril) took a while longer, although I saw improvement almost as quickly. Just a few weeks after going low-carb, prompted by some postural hypotension, I cut the dose I was taking first by half, and then by half again.

I remained on that one-quarter dose for about a year. But two months ago the postural hypotension returned. So, in consultation with my doctor, went ahead and stopped taking the bp meds altogether.

I’m especially glad to be off the Nasacort, which although supposedly a topical steroid is known to have systemic effects in at least some people. Claritin is probably not associated with Alzheimer’s (because it is non-drowsy), but people haven’t been taking it long enough to be sure. I’m sure glad I took the lisinopril—I don’t want to think about the shape my heart and kidneys would be in now if I’d had uncontrolled high blood pressure for the past 25 years—but I’m glad to be off it now.

I no longer have to deal with the common side effects (or worry about the rare side effects). I no longer need to make the monthly trip to the pharmacy. It’s going to make things like traveling easier—not to have to carefully pack up the necessary doses for each day of travel, not to have to worry about getting separated from my meds.

It’s a really nice feeling.

 

Humor just for me, by Holly Theisen-Jones

There’s a certain category of joke called a “three-percenter,” the sort of joke that’s only going to appeal to 3% of your audience, but that will really, really appeal to them. (Part of the appeal is knowing they’re in the select group that gets it.) You have to be careful using them: At the first sign that a piece is full of inside jokes that they’re missing, the remaining 97% of your audience is gone.

Still, it’s worth embedding the occasional three-percenter in your humor, because for its select audience a three-percenter can really make a piece. What’s best, though—what’s comedy gold when you can pull it off—is a joke that feels like a three-percenter, but that feels that way to the whole audience.

With that in mind, let me say that My Fully Optimized Life Allows Me Ample Time to Optimize Yours by Holly Theisen-Jones is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time. Sitting alone in my study, still tired after cranking out three sets of twenty kettlebell swings, I laughed so hard I could barely breath. The whole thing read like one three-percenter after another, with me being in the 3% the whole time. Gloriously, hilariously funny. Even the lists of trendy superfoods in the smoothies were funny.

So now, the question is: Is this a humor story with six dozen three-percenters and I just happen to be in the 3% for all of them? This is possible. Perhaps even likely. But maybe the audience is a bit bigger than that.

At 3 pm, it’s time to hit the gym. After years of research, I have engineered the most efficient possible workout, which is a single, 100-pound kettlebell swing, followed by four and a half minutes of foam rolling. (See my e-book for step-step instructions)

Source: My Fully Optimized Life Allows Me Ample Time to Optimize Yours – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Let me know if you’re in the 3%.

Lift by Daniel Kunitz

My brother shared this comic with me a while back. I think it captures something—something about CrossFit, but also about how people react to anyone who’s “really into” anything.I’m not a crossfitter, but my expanding interests in fitness and movement have produced similarly horrified reactions to the prospect of having to engage with me on the topic—less frantic only because people are not literally trapped in an elevator with me.

I bring this up because the recent book Lift, by Daniel Kunitz, can be read as a love song to CrossFit (although he has done a pretty good job of discreetly tucking away most of the CrossFit stuff near the end of the book).

The book is more than just one thing, and even more than a love song to CrossFit it’s a fascinating cultural history of fitness.

Kunitz uses the term New Frontier Fitness to refer to the whole emerging cluster of practices centered around the idea of “functional” fitness: CrossFit, MovNat, Parkour, AcroYoga, obstacle course racing, and any number of gymnastic and calisthenic exercise practices. Kunitz doesn’t mention Katy Bowman’s work, but it obviously fits in as well.

Doryphoros MAN Napoli Inv6011-2A key thesis of the book is that the motivating genius of New Frontier Fitness is not without precedent: It springs directly from ancient Greek ideals of fitness, and he references both ancient Greek representations of a fit body (such as the Doryphoros sculpture) and statements by ancient Greeks not unlike Georges Hébert’s admonition “Be strong to be useful.”

This cluster of ideas—in particular that fitness was a moral and social obligation, but also that functional fitness produces a beautiful body as a side-effect (rather than as a goal)—largely disappeared after the Greeks, except in tiny subcultures such as the military. It has only reemerged in the past few years as the various things that Kunitz refers to as New Frontier Fitness.

In between—and the 2000-year history of this makes up of the center of Kunitz’s book—there were many things that were not this particular tradition of functional fitness, but instead were aimed at producing a particular type of body (body-building, aerobics, etc.)

It’s impossible for me to talk about Daniel Kunitz’s Lift without comparing it to another book—Christopher McDougall’s Natural Born Heroes. They are similar in at least two ways. First, they both compare modern fitness culture to that of the ancient Greeks. Second, they both appear to have been written just for me.

A third book that I read recently but haven’t written about is Spark, by John J. Ratey, which overlaps in the sense that all talk about intensity as a key aspect of exercise to produce functional fitness. (If all you’re interested in is appearance and body composition, you can get most of the way there with a diligent application of low-intensity exercise, but some amount of intensity is highly beneficial for functionality and brain health.)

All three books are worth reading.

Image credits: CrossFit Elevator comic by Ryan Kramer from ToonHole. Doryphoros photo by Ricardo André Frantz.

Writing and moving

I still struggle with the tension between time spent moving and time spent writing, even as I come to recognize that the tension may not even exist. So I love this post by Katy Bowman, on being A Writer Who Moves, A Mover Who Writes.

Culturally, we still hold the belief that the relationship between time and productivity is direct. As if writing consists solely of the output of words, your typing speed being the indicator of how long it would take to write a thousand-word word article (ten minutes) or a novel (one week). But of course, time spent coming up with ideas and themes, and organizing and reorganizing these threads in our minds, is also “writing.” The trouble is, we’ve come to see sitting at a desk as an integral part of the writing process. We imagine the mulling, the idea-forming, the organizing, the process—the creativity—can occur only when the butt–chair circuit is closed. I (and researchers) have found the opposite to be true: movement can be a conduit for creativity.

Today I will live this truth: I will move and I will write.