Fitness Beyond Exercise

Our increasingly busy lives take a toll on our mental and physical health. We get ill more easily and frequently, heal more slowly, sleep too little and poorly, and generally lack the sort of vibrant energy we often complain is wastefully lavished only on the young. In response, many people are drawn to different kinds of physical or mental training that promise relief from our increasingly stressful daily lives. The problem, however, is to find a form of exercise suitable for one’s age and physical condition that develops both mind and body without emphasizing one at the expense of the other. Thus, while vigorous physical exercise can certainly help to counteract some of the physical effects of our modern lifestyles, many are finding it all too easy to injure oneself by trying to follow a training regimen tailored for someone already in superior physical condition. Long-term joint injuries – especially to hips, knees, and elbows --are common in this context. At the same time, those of us who turn to various forms of meditation in response to concerns about the harmful physical and psychological effects of job-and family-related stress find that such practices often leave us with less energy than when we started. If we are honest with ourselves, we realize at those moments that a twenty-minute nap is far more beneficial than forty minutes of fighting off sleepiness while trying to be mindful of our breathing. From a traditional Chinese perspective, our contemporary attempts to heal the body without healing the mind or to train the mind without strengthening the body are equally futile. Centuries ago, Chinese sages developed an approach to mental and physical health that develops the mind by training the body and trains the mind by developing the body that is appropriate for all individuals regardless of their age or overall condition at the outset. With proper instruction, anyone can learn in a short period of time how steadily to improve his or her mental and physical health by means of a simple and direct practice that requires no special equipment and that can be practiced anywhere and as often and for as long as one likes. The heart of this approach is what I am calling, “Standing Practice.”

With the assistance of a qualified teacher, the student of standing practice learns how to train body and mind together. To begin, a simple upright posture is taught: the student stands quietly with the knees slightly flexed and the arms and hands positioned as though holding a large ball. When positioned properly, one learns to carry the body’s weight down the front of the spine, thus taking all stress off the knees and lower back. Arms and shoulders are held relaxed in such a way as to relieve stress in the neck and allow the muscles of the torso to operate in concert with deep, natural breathing. This posture is both loosens the joints and awakens and strengthens the muscles of the legs. Because the arms, legs, head and neck are held stationary in a flexed position, the muscles remain active and working, and it is therefore easy to drive one’s pulse rate up to 130 bpm in a matter of minutes. This pulse can in turn be sustained as long as the position is held. Regular practice of just this simple posture ten minutes a day twice daily is guaranteed to

As training progresses, however, the demands made upon the mind as well as the body increase. As soon as the student has a basic familiarity with the fundamental posture and enough strength to maintain it for some time, the instructor will teach him or her how to work within it and within similar postures. For example, the student will be instructed to do the work of lifting a heavy ball. Lifting a heavy ball involves the whole body overcoming the resistance the ball’s weight provides. The heavier the ball, the more muscles are needed to move it. In standing practice, the student learns to supply that resistance him-or herself without the benefit of a real object. At the outset, learning in this way how to engage the muscles needed to move weight without the resistance provided by an actual object will involve noticeable movement of the limbs. With time, however, the student learns that the smaller his or her physical movements, the greater the demands on his or her mind and body. This sort of physical work is not possible without tremendous mental focus, and at the same time the mental focus in question is impossible without the accompanying physical work.

The “meditative” aspects of standing practice thus have nothing to do with either visualization or passive mindfulness. In this context, meditation is a vibrant form of mental and physical activity. The work the student is asked to do is always something with which he or she is already familiar from daily life: lifting a weight, drawing a bow, hugging a person, and so on. But it is real work one has to do. The premise of training, then, is that the student already knows how to do the work asked of him or her. There is nothing complicated or esoteric to imagine. The challenge is to learn to do the work one is asked to do without having the real thing – a ball, a bow, a fellow human being – physically available. Learning to work in this way strengthens the body as it strengthens the mind; the one is done by doing the other. The mental and physical benefits are enormous.

Making sense of these claims involves an unfamiliar understanding of the relationship between intention and action. Philosophers and psychologists in the West have tried at least since the 17^thcentury to understand how the mind can move the body: being immaterial, the mind, it seems to them, is not the right kind of thing to move a body. Only a body can move another body. And yet, intentions seem undeniably to issue in actions. The people who developed standing practice understood the relation of mind and body differently. As they saw it, bodily movement is an expression of mind. There is no gap of the sort that puzzles Western philosophers between intention and action. Thus, if you formulate a real intention, movement happens automatically as its natural expression. Standing practice relies upon and refines this understanding of the relation between mind and body. If I formulate a real intention to lift a weight, my body will automatically go to work; there is no choice involved. And this is why standing practice may be said to overcome our modern alienation of mind and body. The longer I can keep my intention active, the longer and harder my body must work. On the other hand, if I only imagine or visualize that I am lifting a weight, my body will do no work, and my mind will in fact be idle. Appreciating the difference between forming an intention and day dreaming or fantasy is essential to standing practice and helps to explain how, as I said above, this kind of training develops the mind by developing the body and vice versa.

Finally, I would like to point out that there are no age limitations to this sort of training. The demands placed upon mind and body can be met without fear of injury by anyone who is willing to train in this way. Accomplished athletes will find in standing practice a supremely useful complement to their present training regimen, learning proper body mechanics and increasing their mental and physical focus and stamina. Former athletes and those already in good physical condition will learn how to train in ways that are even more demanding than what they were used to when they were younger but without the danger of injuring themselves. Older students will learn a form of training that encourages healing as it charges up mental and physical energy that they feared were no longer available to them. Let me now say something in a bit more detail about how standing practice can benefit individuals of each sort.

Athletic training at the highest levels demands that the individual be able reliably to increase his (or her) coordination, flexibility, strength, endurance, and focus. Anyone wishing to be in peak physical and mental condition must learn to identify and push beyond his or her mental and physical limits in each of these dimensions. Moreover, every experienced athlete knows that none of these aspects of training should be developed at the expense of the others. Thus, long and frequently painful experience teaches one that flexibility and coordination without strength are mostly useless, just as strength without coordination and flexibility is almost certain to result in injury. Similarly, endurance without focus tends to produce tension, again making injury more likely. Because standing practice enhances one’s training in all of these dimensions simultaneously, it provides a supremely useful complement to whatever training regime one already pursues. While teaching one proper body mechanics so as to avoid costly, painful, and debilitating injury as one seeks to push one’s body to its limits, standing practice also develops one’s mental focus in such a way that one’s intelligence and responsiveness are at their peak even in moments of the most extreme physical stress.

Consider the mental and physical demands of even the most simple of standing exercises: lifting a heavy ball out in front of one. As I indicated above, the student of standing practice must understand at the outset that lifting a ball in this way involves real physical work, not an exercise of imagination. Suppose, then, that the student is asked to do the work of holding a ten-pound ball in front of his or her chest. Notice, to begin, that standing practice builds upon nothing more esoteric than one’s established mental and physical skills: everyone who comes to training already knows what lifting a ten-pound ball involves. No skill at visualization, for example, is required. Nevertheless, the teacher will in the beginning help the student maintain the most mechanically advantageous posture for doing this work and then insist that the student never stop lifting the ball. As training progresses, however, the student becomes more independent of his or her teacher as adopting the appropriate posture becomes second nature for the student. Similarly, one becomes more adept at reminding oneself to go to work in that posture. In this way, both one’s mental and physical focus and endurance will naturally increase. And one’s ability to training hard without injuring oneself is limitless. In any case, two things should be clear at the outset.

This would not be the case if one were simply to hold an actual weight before one; that sort of exercise efficiently develops physical strength, but it does little to challenge one psychologically in the kinds of ways we are considering here. Obviously, discipline and determination are required to lift real weight, and regular practice of working in this way can increase that determination: whence the weight lifter’s motto, “lift through pain.” But by eliminating the real ball and yet insisting that the student continue to do the work of lifting it, standing practice greatly increases these demands and adds further challenges as well. Greater determination is required in the context of standing practice, because although one is required to continue lifting the ball, one is not allowed to move one’s limbs. Consequently, one’s muscles are never permitted to rest, thus steadily increasing the demands made upon them. Indeed, as he or she tires, the student must recruit more and more muscle groups simply to keep up with those demands. Mental and physical endurance increase dramatically as a result. Nevertheless, because the exercise is done in the most physically advantageous posture and because there is no physical impact to the body, one can train oneself past one’s normal limits without fear of physical injury. The further mental challenges – unique to this kind of training --are a function of the student’s being forced to do the real work of lifting a heavy ball without the resistance provided by a real ball. In other words, the student must learn how to generate that resistance him-or herself and to maintain and increase it during practice. The ability to generate and control resistance in this way is clearly psychological, but it must translate immediately into real physical demands. The greater the resistance, the harder it is to maintain and increase it. Moreover, the student must learn to detect and eliminate the kind of useless physical and mental tension that inhibits his ability to continue working in the ways required, and he or she must refine this kind of sensibility as the physical demands and discomfort involved in lifting the ball increase. Standing practice is, in these respects, unique among the many forms of physical and mental training available today. And, as I said above, the form of training allows one to push beyond one’s current mental and physical limits without fear of injury.

The basic exercise of lifting a ball can be developed in a variety of ways: one can move the ball the left or to the right, pull it toward one or push it away, set it down as well as lift it up. Indeed, one can and should learn eventually to do all these things simultaneously, thus increasing the kinds of mental and physical demands we have discussed so far. For the moment, however, let us turn our attention now to a more advanced form of standing practice: doing a 100-yard dash. The real work of doing a 100-yard dash marshals every aspect of the athlete’s mind and body. The same is true of lifting a heavy ball, of course, but the point should be entirely obvious in the case of a 100-yard dash. In standing practice, one learns to stand still at precisely the moment one would lunge forward as fast as possible. As with the exercise of lifting a heavy ball, there is nothing esoteric about this picture: we all know what’s involved in doing a 100yard dash. The difficulty in standing practice is to maintain oneself in the mental and physical condition in which one finds oneself the split second before one lunges forward but without actually moving – not just one time, but continuously for as long as one engages in standing practice. This is a more demanding exercise than that of holding a ball – although the two exercises should eventually be combined into one – simply because just holding one’s arms out in front of one gradually become quite demanding physically without requiring any extra mental work in addition. By contrast, doing a 100yard dash while standing still is much more difficult, because it is almost impossible not to slip unawares into just daydreaming about it, at which point one either simply tenses up one’s muscles or just stands there doing nothing. In other words, the mental demands here are much greater than they are in the simple exercise of lifting a ball as I have described it so far. At each moment of dashing forward, for example, the resistance one provides oneself to doing so must increase gradually and steadily. It should be as though hundreds of hands are holding one back, first at each joint and then everywhere both on and within one’s body. The greater the resistance (the more hands at more places), the greater will be the work one must do. The greater that work, the harder it will be to sustain.

Finally, this sort of training greatly facilitates the development of speed and power. Suppose the student is doing the work of maintaining against increasing resistance his readiness to do a 100-yard dash. Suppose, further, that he does this work for ten to twenty minutes. At each moment of the exercise, the mind and body are ready to lunge forward as fast as possible. At each moment, therefore, the connection between the two is being both reinforced and strengthened. By “speed,” then, I mean the connection between, on the one hand, the mental command to lunge forward and, on the other hand, the body’s obedient response to that command. It’s all well and good to have powerful muscles, but that power will be of no real use unless the student can harness it at a moment’s notice. Standing practice is ideal for putting one’s power at one’s instantaneous disposal. In this way, because the mind is trained as the body is challenged, no strength is developed that is not immediately useful.

Although the baby boomers are rapidly aging, few of them are happy about it. Consequently, more and more of these individuals aggressively pursue good physical health through demanding physical exercise. No one is counting especially heavily upon our current health care system to look after one in one’s old age, and so the boomers endeavor to be as healthy as possible as they age. Many of these people were athletes in their youth and continue as they age to train in ways that are often more appropriate to their youthful former selves than to their current condition. As a result, exercise induced injuries are increasingly common among them, leading to prolonged and often painful periods of convalescence and healing. Indeed, we even hear of people early in their middle years having hips and knees replaced – only to have those replacements in turn wear out not too many years later. For many, though, the price of injury seems worth paying for the promise of continued good health. Few enthusiastic former athletes enjoy hearing that they must renounce their hard and demanding workouts for the far less physically rigorous challenges of t’ai chi and restorative yoga. Standing practice, however, offers the former athlete and already relatively fit person a way to push him-or herself to the limit mentally and physically without risk of further injury.

As a student of standing practice, one can train as hard as one likes without physical injury because of the attention one learns to pay first and foremost to proper skeletal alignment. One’s instructor will make sure that one achieves a maximally efficient and mechanically advantageous posture for whatever work one wishes to do. As one trains, one will learn how to adjust one’s own posture to meet the demands the work makes on one’s body. For example, one’s knees will flex and one will free his neck to extend the length of the spine as the weight one carries increases. With proper instruction and regular training, the student of standing practice will learn just how far his or her knees must bend to accommodate the increase in weight demanded by the work required (e.g., lifting the ball). Ultimately, however, the answer to the question, ‘how far should I bend my knees?’ is not something that can be calculated or imposed from the outside. Nor is it an arbitrary stipulation. Thus, as one learns to listen better to one’s body, one comes to understand the flexing of one’s knees as a response to the increase of weight, an answer to it, not a predetermined reaction. Nor will the answer remain constant: as the student’s strength increases, he or she will respond differently to the demands of work. It is this growing ability to listen carefully to the body that contributes most to helping the student of standing practice avoid injury during training.

Standing practice increase vitality in other ways as well. As everyone knows, proper breathing is a key to flourishing health. Standing practice teaches deep and natural breathing without resorting to artificial methods of holding, counting, or otherwise controlling the breath. As one learns to stand properly, the breath naturally deepens and lengthens. Moreover, the student’s body begins to use oxygen more efficiently. This is an important aspect of what is called “One Breath Training” in standing practice. The point is not to hold the breath, but rather to have the body use oxygen continuously – during exhalation as well as during inhalation – while working. This is why the student who learns to train this way breathes deep and hard while pushing his or her body to the limit but is never short of breath as a result. The gains in energy for responding to the demands of daily life are astonishing.

As well to learning how to avoid physical tension while working hard in the postures of standing practice, the student also learns how to let go of mental tension. For example, there is no way to maintain for a significant length of time the work of a 100yard dash that I described above without letting go of all mental tension. Indeed, as soon as one tightens one’s concentration, the work is over. At best, one will have uselessly tensed one’s muscles instead of putting them to work. Think again of the kind of alert and ready focus an athlete has waiting for the starting gun. This is the sort of mental attitude the student of standing practice learns to maintain for minutes at a time. Distinguishing between this sort of focus and mental tension is a large part of the training involved in standing practice. Unlike many forms of meditation, standing practice in this way builds and refines mental energy. No one has ever nodded off doing a 100-yard dash!

Finally, I would like to point out that standing meditation helps to uncover and to heal old injuries. Most athletes have injured themselves in their youth, sometimes severely and often repeatedly. Such injuries may pose no serious obstacle when the person is young. As one ages, however, such injuries tend to resurface and can do much to make further training painful or impossible. One of the greatest benefits of standing practice is that it helps both to identify and to heal long-term injuries. Many such injuries are the result of either improper skeletal alignment or muscular tension (or both!). Without correcting these problems, further training tends simply to compound the damage already done. As one’s skeletal and muscular structure is corrected, however, the impaired tissues are given a chance to recover because, by no longer being asked to do work they were not meant to do, they are not injured further and because, for the same reason, they now have time to heal. Moreover, working in physically and mentally advantageous circumstances increases circulation thereby helping to flush out toxins and to bring oxygen to parts of the body that may have been chronically deprived of adequate amounts, often for years.

Whether because of the necessities of making a living, the demands of family life, or simply habitual inattention, many people devote little or no time to their health when they are young, and begin to concern themselves with the well being of their minds and bodies only in old age as their health begins to fail. Good health at any age can never simply be purchased; it must always be worked for. And without good health, life can become impossible to enjoy. As one ages, however, it becomes more and more difficult to recover one’s health – especially if one has never trained in the past. Injuries brought on by inappropriate forms of exercise tend to heal very slowly, if at all, and every setback is increasingly debilitating. And rather than building an individual’s vitality, inappropriate forms of exercise actually drain his or her energy. Thus, instead of returning the person to the more vibrantly healthy condition he or she desires, many forms of exercise suitable for younger, healthier individuals in the end compound the health problems of more aged practitioners.

The older person who wishes to improve his or her health needs a form of exercise that will build up his or her strength and energy, heal old injuries without causing new ones, and not overtax joints and cardiovascular systems that may never before have had the demands of serious physical training made of them. Taught by a qualified teacher, standing practice is an ideal form of exercise for older persons, far better indeed than most of what passes for t’ai chi these days. Because of its attention to proper body mechanics and its lack of impact on joints standing practice is the best way to avoid injury and increase the health and physical performance of persons of any age and condition. And for the reasons we have considered so far in connection with this form of training more generally, standing practice helps to train the student’s mind as well as his body. Thus, one learns quickly that one’s mind is a good deal “smarter” than one may have believed, and with practice the mind and body learn to communicate in ways that may have no precedent in the lives of older students who have never trained before. Breathing becomes deeper and more efficient. Metabolism improves. Joints become more flexible. And one learns how to let go of both mental and physical tension.

Furthermore, as one ages, one finds not only that one’s body is not as strong or agile as it was before, but that it, so to speak, no longer “listens” to one. Where a younger person might not notice this kind of disconnect between mind and body, as one ages it can become especially troubling. One no longer feels “at home” in a body that doesn’t answer the demands made upon it. It is in this context, perhaps, that standing practice reveals its special benefits for older persons particularly. Whereas working with weights, for example, not only risks injury to joints weakened by age and misuse, it does little to train the mind. Consequently, learning – to stick with our earlier example – how to lift a heavy ball without actually using a ball will have immediately beneficial effects on both the practitioner’s body and mind. And the more one trains in this way, the less one’s sense of one’s body as not one’s own. The same is true of the mind. As one ages, one’s mental energy tends to dwindle. But by teaching one to work without the resistance provided by an external body such a real heavy ball, standing practice necessarily increases mental energy as well. And as both one’s physical and mental energy increases, one comes more and more to enjoy one’s training.

These benefits are almost immediate for people who have never trained. In China, many people begin standing practice well into their 50’s and 60’s and notice within a few months that they have recovered the mental and physical vitality they enjoyed at half their age. Even just a few minutes of standing at a time will have noticeable good effects on one’s energy and well being. Thus, one might begin with as little as ten minutes a day a couple of times a day. The student will usually see great improvement in mental and physical health with a few months. With good instruction and consistent practice, one’s confidence grows, and as one’s confidence grows, one learns to train better and smarter than before. One’s sense that good health is an achievable goal increases, and aging is no longer perceived as an obstacle to the enjoyment of life.