The Banquet

Sometime last year I was talking with George Xu and a few other people out in the park.  We were talking about making mistakes, ways of training, and the unique skills of various martial arts masters.  George filled his torso with qi and turned it to the side in the opposite direction of his chin, then he put one hand behind his back and with the other he made the "lan" movement, a horizontal clearing action like opening a sliding door.  All this was a simultaneous gesture to accompany the statement, "If anyone can show me a mistake I am making in my gongfu, any mistake at all, I will right away throw a banquet for that person!"

Now, being the person I am, with the agenda I have, I must point out to my readers the obvious theatricality of his gesture.  Despite the fact that he has generally focused only on the fighting aspects of martial arts, he has obviously acquired some theatrical skill.  But why a banquet?

The answer has to do with the importance banquets have in Chinese culture in creating, establishing, transforming, and re-making, patronage networks and alliances.

Many years ago, I showed up a little late to a modest banquet George Xu was putting on for a visiting martial arts master at a local restaurant.  The visiting master, about 10 of George's students, a translator and an official from the Chinese consulate, were all already seated when I arrived.  As I walked up to the table I made some unconscious sound, I don't know what it was.  But suddenly people at the table in front of me split apart and someone gave up a seat for me.  The seat they gave me was right next to the translator who was a woman probably in her 40's.  As I sat down, introductions were made, everyone took a second to  acknowledge me and then the woman translator leaned over and whispered something in Shanghai dialect in my ear.  I whispered back an apology in English saying that I really didn't understand any Chinese.  The conversation at the table was mostly focused on asking the visiting Master questions.  We were taking turns posing questions to be translated.  When it was my turn, I asked about the master's early training, how old he was when he started training and what style he studied first.  Before the question was translated George looked at me and said, "That is a stupid question, who cares? you waste time."  As we ran out of good questions to ask, conversations broke out around the table.  The translator and I started talking about this and that, and then she said, "You have a really good Chinese accent.  Excellent."  Again I told her that my Chinese was quite limited.  She ignored this and complemented me again.  It was so weird.  I asked her, and other Chinese speakers at the table what was going on.  Why didn't she believe me?  It turned out that whatever that sound was that I made as I walked up to the table was heard as some kind of entirely appropriate status commanding greeting.  No one seemed willing to believe that I could make such a sound by accident.

Here is a description of the basic ranking at a banquet.

George Xu told me recently that in China when people throw banquets for him, since he doesn't smoke, no one at the table smokes.  This is often appreciated by the guests because it means they get to save money on cigarettes.  Normally, if there is a higher status master at the banquet, George will sit next to the right of the other master and be forced to inhale all the second hand smoke.  The way it works is that there is a pecking order in which people are allowed to offer the master cigarettes.  As soon as he finishes one, the next person in the chain will offer, and so on.  I imagine that it would be a big deal, though invisible to an outsider, if the master accepted a cigarette out of order.

Banquets are places where people are often asked to tell stories, to play music, to sing songs, or to perform feats of martial prowess like forms, breaking bricks, sticking bowls to their abdomin that can not be pulled off, breaking chopsticks on their throat, circus stuff, or even accepting friendly challenge matches.  Lots of drinking happens too.

George tells me that in his travels around China he will often take martial arts masters out for lunch or dinner (a mini-preliminary-banquet).  The irrepressible George Xu will often explain to a given master what he thinks the masters problems are, what mistakes the master is making in his martial training or practice.  Most masters immediately try to push the table out of the way so they can test his theory with a full power fight.  It is rare that they actually want to entertain the question of their own failures, or regard his challenge as an opportunity to learn.  Most of the time he manages to calm them down, saying that fighting would be a waste.  After all, he would be forced to fight like a wild animal and there would be no art in it.  Kind of reminds me of the famous dueling scene from Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai:  "Ah, a tie."  "No, I won!" ....

Reading Chinese history, or any history for that matter, it becomes apparent that industrial commerce has created a world of food abundance which was unknown 160 years ago.  Hunger was common and most people lived with food "insecurity" on a daily basis.  Banquets were probably an important way of establishing confidence in the social networks which would provide food to everyone at the banquet. Each person attending a banquet represented not only themselves but lineages, ancestors, big families and many other types of social networks.  These networks necessarily involved men of marital prowess who fought both to gain food resources (like land, water, livestock, money, equipment, and safe roads) and to protect the network from bandits, rebels or other types of raiders.  The volatility of food resources was in constant play with wide spread violence and ever changing power dynamics.  Banquets were a way of establishing patronage alliances, or mending them when they went sour.

The large size of the Chinese empire, its cities, and its wealth, required the constant mobility of men at arms.  The diversity of mutually incomprehensible languages in China meant that communication was often a problem.  The banquet ritual was probably a way to make sure, as we like to say, everyone was on the same page.

So, my current theory is that martial arts were an extremely important part of the banquet ritual, and the banquet ritual was widespread even among the many non-Han Chinese ethnic groups.  The basic ritual involves two tables; a small one against the north wall with offerings for the ancestors, and a large table with offerings for the living.  We could venture now into the realm of rituals, food offerings to the gods and to ancestors, but the subject is to big and unwieldy.  Banquets are important rituals in Europe too.  It's possible to over play the importance of banquets in Chinese culture and it's possible to under play them.  It's also such a big subject I want to avoid saying something definitive.   Most likely there is a lot of variation in practice.

So rather than stick my foot in my mouth, here is a post I wrote for Rum Soaked Fist forum about the purpose of martial arts forms:

__________________________

Yes, forms can be used to train meditation, spacial awareness, integration, or to remember enormous amounts of kinesthetic information and...yes, a hundred other things, but it is a mistake to think those can't be trained some other way. Forms are just one way, not the only way.

The problem here is that we should be asking "How" and "When" questions more than "What" and "Why questions. The history of these arts has been intentionally corrupted and distorted. If we assume we already know "How" forms were used, then we prejudice the answers to "What" questions.

How were forms used historically? When were they performed? Given the traditional contexts in which they were used, how well did they function?

Here are some theories (yes, it's all conjecture...reality based conjecture):

1. Banquets and feasts are key Chinese religious and social institutions which were essential to creating alliances between powerful martial leaders, local officials, rebels, bandits, and other stake holders--especially in times of food insecurity. Because it was very often necessary to make alliances with people from different regions, language groups, or ethnic origins, martial arts forms (along with other demonstrations of martial prowess, singing, music, etc...) played a key roll in sealing agreements. A public exchange of forms showed a willingness to put-out and forms were thought to display "zheng," a righteous upright nature.  (Calligraphy was also thought to display "zheng.")

2. Troops were often stationed at one location for a few years, and then rotated out, back to their homes--but they were still, in a sense, "on-call." They would also gather periodically for training. It might be that having a form that you practiced with fellow troops when you were together, and then on your own, when you were at home, gave a strong sense of continuity and shared fate--essential elements of a "call-up" army. It was common for troops to be brought from disparate parts of the country where different languages were spoken--they couldn't converse as a way of bonding, so they did forms.

3. In the past, theater and exorcism were one subject. Da (hitting/fighting) is one of the five key components of theatrical training (the other four are singing, reciting history, acting, and dance). Jinghu, Chinese opera, like most if not all Chinese theater styles or jia (literally families), begins with stances (often held for an hour at a time, sometimes measured by an incense stick in the hand), the stances are then connected by transitional movements. The performer is also the conductor, unlike most western traditions, the music follows the movements (they did not need music to practice the forms). The individual aspects of the stances and movement are all taught in great detail, but every movement must be perfectly integrated into a single whole body movement with a seamless flow of qi. A theater performance is a form--identical in nearly every way to a martial arts form.
Forms are just a component of a type of theater which did not always need to be entertaining in the western sense of the word, often it was for the gods--or some other not-so-obvious purpose.

4. Whenever I go into a park early in the morning in a Chinese city, I find a spot and do my forms. If I see some people doing forms which are similar to forms I know, I do those first. If not I just keep going through my forms. Inevitably someone comes up to me and tries to figure out how I'm related to them through lineage, or if not them, someone else in the park. It's a ritual. Forms are like ID cards in China, they say...this guy is a human. It's deep stuff.

5. Forms are a good way of measuring time, before clocks they insured you were practicing a minimum amount of time.

Ice: It Works in Practice, But Does it Work in Theory

How does ice work on injuries?  Here are two contradictory opinions by experienced Sports Medicine MD's written this year within a month of each other:

Ask the Running Doc argues that ice works because it increases circulation.

Moji argues The Technical Benefits of Icing come from reducing circulation.

I'm cool with that, clinical experience should be enough to justify the ongoing medical experiment--as it is with acupuncture, homeopathy, many allopathic medications, surgical protocols and even prayer.  But remember, hypnosis works extremely well to reduce swelling and relieve pain for 10% of the population.  These people have an individual proclivity to being hypnotized.  If you are one of those 10% you should be using hypnosis, not ice!  (Check out this book for more details.)

I suppose we could rank different healing methods for how close they adhere to the gold standard of, "I don't know how it works."  Some are surely better than others?  Ice has been a favorite of physical therapists probably from the beginning of the profession, even before there was clinical evidence.  Physical therapists seem to be quite effective at getting people up and walking after surgery, but I have to wonder if they have ever done any broad based medical studies comparing ice, massage, and "exercises" to the old fashioned cattle prod.  (If there was such a study you'd have to pay $25 on-line to read it--an industry wide standard which really does wonders for the prevalence of the "I don't know" factor.)

In the late 1980's when I first got into thinking about Chinese medicine in relationship to martial arts, ice was thought to increase the likelihood of arthritis by creating "trapped cold" in the channels.  One metaphor I remember went like this:  Ice is like the Highway Patrol running a traffic break in order to clear an accident (slowing qi and blood flow).   On the other hand, Chinese herbs (both topical and internal) are like opening up extra lanes for traffic to go around the accident while it is being cleared up (increasing qi and blood flow).

Now-a-days most of the acupuncturists I know recommend icing at regular intervals during the first 24 hours after an injury.

I asked a muscle chemistry scientist the other day what he thought.  He agreed that the science is far from settled.  He thought that ice applied immediately to blunt trauma on a muscle would reduce the size of the bruise because the blood vessels which were "leaking" from damage would shrink, causing the body to lose less blood during the time it takes for clotting to take effect.  However in the case of overworked muscles--muscles which are in pain from fatigue-- heat would be better.  Fatigued muscles do not bruise and since the muscle cells are actually damaged but not dead, they are likely to regenerate more efficiently with heat.  (The cells also grow in size after being damaged so the muscles will get bigger, and I would argue they also become more single- minded.)

I asked a professional tennis coach what he thought about ice and he explained that after 4 hours of pounding on a tennis court the legs swell so much that it is necessary to take a bath in ice up to waist!  This reduces the swelling and stiffness that would otherwise make it too difficult and painful to continue training, especially over the next two days.

I suppose in thinking about this stuff we could start from the assumption that the human body is either super resilient or ultra fragile.  If you are working from the super resilient angle, as I did back in the days when I was doing rosho, push-hands, and sparring three nights a week, you've probably got lots of little injuries.  When I finally quit I realized how injured I was, it took about 3 months to heal at which point my practice started improving fast.  On the other hand, the fragile angle is the source of all whining, and I hate whining!  The fragile view of human nature is the source of all victimology and worrying.  When I remember that I'm not fragile, I suddenly remember that I don't need to put up with other peoples' nonsense, like boring meetings!  Down with meetings!

In offering my own experience I hope I don't sound fragile.  I'm cool with weakness, but wimpy is not my thing.  At one point I tried putting styrofoam cups filled with water in the freezer.  I would then rip off the rim so that I had a big hunk of ice with an insulated handle I could use for ice massage.  After a week of ice massaging my knee I started to feel cold channels all the way down to my foot that weren't going away from day to day.  So I stopped.  On the other hand, when I went to see a podiatrist he explained the hunter effect.  He told me it was named after a Dr. Hunter, but I have since learned that the hunter effect got its name from actual hunters.  You see hunters sometimes go hunting where it is so cold that their limbs can freeze and fall off.  However, when a limb gets cold for more than about 20 minutes, the size of the hunter's blood vessels increase allowing the limb to warm on the inside, even as it is getting colder on the outside.  My podiatrist claimed that ice works because when you are icing the blood vessels increase in diamiter and after about 20 minutes when you stop icing the amount of blood reaching the injury increases by as much as 4 fold.

I've heard that ice is getting used to prevent both brain and heart damage in a growing range of medical emergencies.  Freeze sprays are the major technological innovation that have made Mixed Martial Arts possible.  Without them there would be too much blood.

Bleeding aside, the thing most of these arguments seem to agree on is that ice reduces swelling.  While not everyone agrees that swelling is bad, it is natural after all, more and more sources are coming down on the swelling-is-bad side of the argument.  Prolonged swelling is thought to be really bad.

While I always recommend that if you go to an expert, you follow the doctor's instructions.  The jury is still out on ice, so I also recommend that you take charge of and perform your own experiments.

Insulting the Monkey King

This is a funny blog post about the outrage some Chinese people are feeling about the great Monkey literature of the past.  When you are reading it just remember that the Monkey King stories may have some roots in India, and that they began as theater and spoken word and only after centuries of improvisation did they finally get written down.

Girl Meets Bug

Just in case any of my readers are wondering if I have any friends...here is one of them!

From a Chinese medicine point of view I believe these "caterpillars" tonify spleen qi, which means they help you hold your head up high! I imagine they might give you goosebumps too, which would mean they support weiqi (qi on the surface of the body).   Please donate to her campaign.

Empty Like a Puppet

I have written elsewhere about martial arts forms being an inheritance from the ancestors of that art. That practicing a particular tradition is a process of reanimating the movement of the ancestors who created it.  I have also written about how practicing a form may correct the errors in the form you inherited, in effect healing those in the past.  And I have also written about how practicing a form can heal your parents, your genetic ancestors, through gongfu as a conduct correcting process.  Gongfu can be understood as a process of developing efficiency which rectifies the inappropriate, aggressive, and wasteful movement (jing) and breathing (qi) habits which we learned from our parents.

All of this is akin to a daily personal exorcism.  I have also argued that traditionally it was understood as an exorcism, which goes a long way toward explaining why, when itinerant beggar-monks and priests wanted to ask for money, they would perform martial arts-- demonstrating the merit-worth they had accumulated and shared through this process.*

A common criticism of Chinese Martial Arts is that it is full of empty forms.  Most schools make an effort to teach "applications" for each movement in a form.  Applications are demonstrations of how a conflict might transpire.  But applications themselves don’t really work.  Gongfu is what works.  Gongfu is a quality of movement which has efficacy regardless of the techniques employed.  If you have gongfu, you have it when you are taking out the trash or setting the table--or even when performing an exorcism.

Conceptualization of the underlying metaphors of Chinese art and culture is key to understanding the arts in greater depth. Because people generally bring their own concepts and metaphors to the arts they inherit, it is very easy to lose sight of the vision which created the art in the first place.  That loss of vision leads first to frustration and then to either radical modification or outright destruction of the arts.
But I'll come back to that later.  Here is a quote from History in Three Keys:

Some of the conclusions derived from the serious study of Chinese popular culture in the postwar decades are relevant to our understanding of the embeddedness of Boxer religious experience in... [Northern Chinese] culture.  One such conclusion is that, at the village level, the sharp boundaries between the "secular" and the "sacred," to which modern Westerners are accustomed, simply did not exist.  The gods of popular religion were everywhere and "ordinary people were in constant contact" with them.  These gods were powerful (some, to be sure, more than others), but they were also very close and accessible.  People depended on them for protection and assistance in time of need.  But when they failed to perform their responsibilities adequately, ordinary human beings could request that they be punished by their superiors.  Or they could punish them themselves.  "If the god does not show signs of appreciation of the need of rain," Arthur Smith wrote toward the end of the nineteenth century, "he may be taken out into the hot sun and left there to broil, as a hint to wake up and do his duty."  This "everydayness" of the gods of Chinese popular religion and the casual, matter-of-fact attitude Chinese typically displayed toward their deities doubtless contributed to the widespread view among Westerners, both in the late imperial period and after, that the Chinese were not an especially religious people.  It would be more accurate, I believe to describe the fabric of Chinese social and cultural life as being permeated through and through with religious beliefs and practices.

But not always with the same degree of intensity and certainly not with equal discernibleness in all settings.  This is another facet of Chinese popular religion that, because it does not entirely square with the expectations of Western observers, has occasioned a certain amount of confusion and perplexity.  Sometimes religion appears to recede into the shadows and to be largely, if not altogether, absent from individual Chinese consciousness.  But at other times it exercises dominion over virtually everything in sight.  Thus, the martial arts, healing practices, and the heroes of popular literature and opera often inhabit a space in Chinese culture that seems unambiguously "secular."  But it is not at all unusual, as clearly suggested in the accounts of Boxer spirit possession transcribed at the beginning of this chapter, for these selfsame phenomena to be incorporated into a fully religious framework of meaning.

Confucianism is founded on the idea that we inherit a great deal from our ancestors, including body, culture, and circumstance.  We also, to some extent, inherit our will, our intentions, and our goals.  The Confucian project is predicated on the idea that we have a duty to carryout and comprehend our ancestors' intentions in a way which is coherent with our own circumstance and experiences.  In practice, it is entirely possible that we have two ancestors who died with conflicting goals, or an ancestor who died with an unfulfilled desire, like unrequited love, or an ancestor who wished and plotted to kill us.  Our dead ancestors have become spirits whose intentions linger on in us to some extent in our habits and our reactions to stress.  It is the central purpose of Confucianism to resolve these conflicts and lingering feelings of distress through a continuous process of self-reflection and upright conduct--so that we may leave a better world for our descendants.  The metaphor is fundamentally one of exorcism.  We empty ourselves of our own agenda so that we might consider the true will of our ancestors (inviting the spirits), then we take that understanding and transform it into action (dispersion and resolution).  Finally we leave our descendants with open ended possibilities, support, and clarity of purpose (harmony, rectification, unity).

As gongfu practitioners we are emptying our practice of the inappropriate conduct of our ancestors and our teachers.  The forms should be empty.  That is part of the original vision of what they should be.

The theatrical exorcistic traditions (Nuo) which I have been reading about in Jo Riley’s book Chinese Theater and the Actor in Performance, begin with a ritual emptying of the performers/exorcists bodies.  They remove the three hun and 7 po (together ten spirits, which polarize in our bodies and which disperse at death, hun up, po down) and using protective talisman they put the hun and po in vessels for safe keeping.  They can then perform the exorcisms while possessed by martial deities, spirits or powerful allied demons, without fear of harming themselves.

Jo Riley explains that the physical training of jingju (Beijing Opera) begins with a process of emptying.  The movements of Northern Shaolin form the basis of jingju basic training.  She posits that the actors have a duel role as exorcists and as performers who must be empty in order to fully embody the theatrical and religious rolls they are playing.  My experience studying Noh dance/theater in Japan directly parallels this.  My Noh teacher taught us two forms and two songs to go along with them.  When we were performing we were instructed to be as empty as possible.  It was explained to me that a great performer is sometimes empty enough that the actual spirit of that particular dance will descend the tree painted at the back of the stage and enter the performer.

Daoist Meditation takes emptiness as it’s root.  All Daoist practices arise from this root of emptiness.  The main distinction between an orthodox Daoist exorcism and a less than orthodox exorcism is in fact the ability of the priests to remain empty while invoking and enlisting various potent unseen forces (gods/demons/spirits/ancestors) to preform the ritual on behalf of a living constituency, or the recently dead.

Calligraphy was historically understood in the same way.  To learn calligraphy was to copy the exact calligraphic movements of a righteous accomplished ancestor.  First one would empty themselves and meditate on the ink and the blank piece paper, then on the writing to be copied.  Through the brush, one would execute movements which would manifest on the page while simultaneously transforming (zaohua) or rectifying ones heart (zheng xin).  In the mature expression of Calligraphy both as an art and for talisman making, potency is a direct result of the artist or priests ability to first empty, and then manifest the characters internally as well as on paper.  That potency (qi) is then transmitted to those who see the writing; transforming, inspiring, protecting, purifying or healing them.

Music, medicine, and cooking can all be understood this way too.

Puppetry performances,--according to my informants in Taiwan, as well as the writings of Kristofer Schipper, and Jo Riley-- are sometimes considered the most potent of all forms of ritual exorcism.  This is because puppets are truly empty.

Emptiness is a key metaphor of Chinese culture.  A culture which favors actions over explanations.  Actions become polysemous, embedded with layers of meanings, meanings which can even seem contradictory.  There is rarely an orthodoxy of meaning.  The meaning of a particular action, in this case "emptiness,” can change as it traverses through strata of society, time, region, gender, family, or identity.  Emptiness is a key metaphor in a “realm of action” which is operative in a very wide and varied set of contexts.

In martial arts, particularly the internal martial arts, emptiness is the basis, the ground, the root of action.  We should expect the forms to be empty.  We should expect to feel nothing, taste blandness, see darkness, and hear silence.  When you do your forms and routines, be empty, like a puppet.

______________________

*It's probably also true that people would donate because they thought the monks were entertaining.  It's a lot less likely that they would donate because they thought the monks were ruffians.

Big Muscles

As someone whose job it is to translate ideas from one culture to another, the pressure to use more familiar language is always floating around in the background.

Many people would like me to describe the fine details of Chinese Internal Martial Arts using vocabulary from sports or physical therapy.  This is always problematic for two reasons.  First, one can only go so far describing kinesthetic experiences before one starts  sacrificing subtlety--language is an imperfect tool.  Second, by discarding Chinese concepts, one loses the primary organizing metaphors of Chinese culture, and what might be simple suddenly becomes complex.

Still, sometimes we give in to the pressure.  Today is one of those days.

There are three big muscles on our backs which are extremely powerful and efficient. Unfortunately, the problem with humans is; we don’t use these big muscles very well.  Our arms are just too smart. We habitually use our many smaller arm muscles to do complex and repetitive tasks.  This is the cause of a lot of stress and tends to shorten our lives.  For this reason advanced internal martial artists have developed ways to make use of the three big muscles.

We evolved these three big muscles as four legged creatures with our torsos parallel to the ground.  This is important because on a horizontal torso the three big muscles hang  in a relaxed way towards the front of the body (originally the underside).

• The diamond shaped Trapezius muscle hangs from the spine wrapping the ribcage towards the arms.


• The Latissimus dorsi muscle hangs from the spine around towards the belly and reaches around to the inside of the arms.


• The Gluteal Fascial muscle complex hangs off of the lower spine and pelvis onto the outsides of the legs.

If you naturally move from just these three muscles, you are probably a very strong and efficient cave man--because this is not how humans normally move.

To activate these three muscles is a fairly complex process.  Normal sports training doesn't do it.

First we have to get them to hang loosely.  Most of the time when we are moving around or working, the three big muscles are being used for stabilizing.  They stabilize the pelvis, the spine and the arms.  (This is an important function in the event that we get hit by a car or a buffalo, but it isn't necessary to walk around all the time using these muscles as stabilizers.)

Basic structure training in Internal Martial Arts gets us to stop using these three big muscles for stabilization by getting us to put our weight directly on our bones.  The other 400 or so smaller muscles in our bodies are then used to focus force along our bones through twisting, spiraling and wrapping.  In that sense, the early years of internal martial arts training teaches us to use our muscles like ligaments; or put another way, the primary function of the smaller muscles becomes ligament support.  (To develop this capacity in ones legs requires many years of training.)

Once the three big muscles are relaxed and loose and the rest of the muscles are being used for ligament support, a transition begins.

The transition is difficult because it requires turning off the active quality of the smaller muscles. The main function of the smaller muscles then becomes simply to transfer force or weight from outside the body (like from an opponent or gravity) to the three big muscles of the back.  The smaller muscles also have a minor secondary function of changing the direction of force coming out of the three big muscles.

This minor secondary function is not to be confused with active control.  To make this transition means practicing doing nothing with your arms for hours everyday and connecting the unengaged emptiness of your arms to an equivalent lack of active muscle engagement in your legs.  (In practice, this usually looks like loose flailing or slow spongy movement.)

The three big muscles are already so big they don’t need to be strengthened but they do need to be enlivened.  All three muscles should be like tiger skin or octopi, able to expand and condense and move in any direction.  They then can take over control of the four limbs in such a way that movement becomes effortless--even against a strongly resistant partner. If you accomplish this all of your smaller muscles will be doing the task of transferring force to the three big muscles---preventing an opponent from being able to effect your body through your limbs.  Yet whenever your limbs make contact with your opponent, he will be vulnerable to the force of your three big muscles.

In the Taijiquan Classics they call this, "I know my opponent, but my opponent does not know me!"

(Note: weightlifting/surgical ideas about anatomy are so dominant that the gluteal muscle fascial complex doesn't actually exist as a picture on the internet.)

Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

A while back I wrote a post called, why sit-ups make you fat.  Now from Time Magazine there is a nice article called Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin. It's written in a meandering first-person "why me" kind of voice-- like so many articles about health these days-- (ok, even I do that sometimes) still it's one of the best popular articles I've seen in a while.  Make sure you read the whole thing because this was from page 4:

Could pushing people to exercise more actually be contributing to our obesity problem? In some respects, yes. Because exercise depletes not just the body's muscles but the brain's self-control "muscle" as well, many of us will feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that lazy time after we get back from the gym. This explains why exercise could make you heavier — or at least why even my wretched four hours of exercise a week aren't eliminating all my fat. It's likely that I am more sedentary during my nonexercise hours than I would be if I didn't exercise with such Puritan fury. If I exercised less, I might feel like walking more instead of hopping into a cab; I might have enough energy to shop for food, cook and then clean instead of ordering a satisfyingly greasy burrito.

The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself but the way we've come to define it. Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. "You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles," says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. "The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don't have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day."

The article makes it clear that exercise is linked to appetite, and it even suggests that exercise is linked to rest.  It doesn't explain that exercise is linked to sleep or our appetite for stillness.  Chinese Martial Arts, Health, Daoism 101 tells us that exercise, food, rest and sleep function as four interacting appetites.  Change one, and you change the others.  The quickest, most effective way to stimulate hunger is to exercise.  So yeah, intense vigorous exercise is likely to make you want to eat more.  It's also likely to make you crave stillness and help you sleep. These four regulate each other!

The article talks about people forcing themselves to run or do short bursts of burn and sweat at the gym.  In my book, that's a sure sign of a problem.  Exercise should be something you have an appetite for.  If you're healthy, your body will tell you how much exercise you need and how vigorous it should be.  I pop out of bed in the morning with an appetite to stand still for an hour in the dark cool air, followed by a couple hours of qigong and baguazhang.  If that's not enough my body will tell me by giving me ants-in-my-pants later in the day.

Burning-out your muscles three or four days a week at the gym will de-regulate your appetites!  Similarly, if you stay up late and drinking beer, the next morning you'll want to move less.  I don't mean to make it sound simple or easy.  We humans have social appetites too!  And competitive appetites, and most of us have an occasional craving for the taste of risk and danger.  How we manage all of this stuff together, as a single subject, is the field of study.  Chinese Martial Arts is social, and sometimes dangerous.  It helps us find our natural appitite for stillness and it gives us a context for cultivating it.  It enlivens our sensitivity to how different foods make us feel, move, and sleep.

How intense should a workout be?  It's a tough question to answer because it has to match up with everything else you are doing.  From age 18 to 30 I worked out 8 hours a day:  Kungfu, dance and bicycle riding in between.  I did that much because I wanted to, because it felt like the right amount of movement.  But would it have been possible to focus all that energy into something more conventional like working the floor of the Stock Market?  Maybe.

The beauty of Internal Martial Arts is that as we get older, we can still get the intensity of circulation and whole body stimulation without sweating.  That's right, I try not to sweat three month out of the year.  Traditionally, Spring time is the only season internal martial artists break a sweat.  The muscles and sinews can all be moved around and animated without having to scrunch up your face with exertion, strain or pain.

I like that the author of the Time article mentions her tendency toward "Puritan fury."  We ignore our ideas about what we think we are at our own peril.  If you have an appetite for self-torture, for instance, it's a lot healthier to get that out of the way in a poorly aligned horse stance between 6 and 7 AM than it is to bring it with you to your job, or take it home to your kids.

Humiliation

I missed this article about Humiliation at China Beat last year but it seems even more relevant now that we've started a trade war with China.  Meanwhile China has said it will reduce CO2.  How? By switching to natural gas, which due to new technologies, is now abundant. Now, if we can just keep cap and trade out of the new energy bill, we can avoid a trade war with India while making the jump to natural gas ourselves.  Awesome.

Muscle Training Questions

Below I have answered some questions that were sent to me via email about the post I wrote last week, 5 Levels of Internal Muscle Training.   I love getting emails.  For reference the 5 levels are:

1. Moving and Coordinating


2. Static Structure


3. Continuous Structure with Movement


4. Empty and Full at the Same Time


5. Whole Body Becomes a Ball

Why do the steps laid out in the "5 steps of muscular training" post seem so rigid and schematic?

You are correct that the "5 Steps" are schematic and rigid.  They are part of a larger project in which I am developing ways to communicate with people who have some physical training background other than martial arts.  Martial artists rarely frame what they do entirely by the muscles;  However, weight-lifters, Pilates, and many athletes do frame their understanding of activity in terms of muscle development.
The whole truth is a much fuzzier type of logic.  I will stand by the notion that muscle training must follow the 5 level progression.  However, there are many other aspects of martial development which transcend and traverse these levels.  I tried to make that clear in the "notes."  Also, it's always possible to go back and fill in gaps in one's development later.

At which point does one start "grounding force?"

At level 2, you practice transferring your opponent's force directly into the ground.  This must be done for the entire surface of the body and with forces going in every direction.  It requires the aid of a teacher or partner.

At which point in the five level progression does a person touching you--give you the feeling that his/her force is directly going to the floor through your body?

Your opponent is not doing that, you are.  If I make my body very stiff and rigid, my opponent's force will move me like it would move a piece of heavy furniture.  If  I make my body very soft and mushy, my opponent's force will plow right through me.  If there are stiff places in a soft body, they will be broken--they will not transfer force to the ground.  The only way your opponent's force will go to the ground is if you direct it there (however, the process may be unconscious).

This is a common problem for students beginning level 3 training.  Level 3 is essentially level 2 in continuous motion.  In Aikido, for instance, this falls under "blending with the opponent."  At level 3 our body has superb structural integrity but we use sensitivity to avoid ever using that structure against any direct force.

If I try to push directly on someone who has good level 3 skills they will blend (or connect) with me, move out of the way of my force, and then "position" their structure so that I have no leverage or momentum for an attack.  If they are fighting they will use that "position" to injure, disarm, or throw me.

In Taijiquan, this is the continuous and spontaneous linking of the four jin: peng, ji, lu, & an.  If there is a break in the execution of jin-- a sensitive opponent and a strong opponent will both be able to "find it" and exploit it.

I'm totally losing my muscular strength, as well as my weight... in your training did you experience weight loss? I'm 12 pounds less than I used to be when I started training taiji one year ago, and this is not necessarily going to stop. Teacher said, oh, you'll replace that with taiji strength, don't worry?

Did I experience weight loss?  Yes, there was a period long ago where I lost some weight but not 12 lbs.  Weight gain or loss can vary a lot from person to person; however, the practice of internal martial arts will make your digestion more efficient and your appetite more sensitive! Ignore this at your own peril.  Many martial artists have gotten fat because they responded to improved digestion by eating more instead of less.

If you are paying attention to your appetite, you will simply want to eat less.  It's also a good idea to experiment with different types of food, and different styles of cooking.  I'll go even farther, if you are under 35 and having this experience, you need to learn how to cook.  It's not necessary to learn how to cook with Chinese herbs, but if you are in a place where that is easy, I do recommend it.  Learning how to cook any tranditional cuisine will include in-depth knowledge about ingredients and cooking methods.  Without this part of the practice all that appetite sensitivity training that the Daoist tradition infused in the martial arts will be wasted.

(Of course, make sure you are not losing weight because of some disease or parasite.)

While it isn't popular to say it, you are actually getting weaker and no, it will not be replaced by strength.  We don't need strength; humans are strong enough as we are.  That being said, if you have a big "appetite" for movement, if you like to practice a lot, you will develop superior integration, denser bones and sinew, more efficient dynamic muscles, new types of power, and the second of Laozi's treasures: Conservation.

Training with my Chinese "uncles" is at times pretty much not funny.  Sometimes I think their biggest goal is not losing face.  Their understanding of cooperative training seems quite different from mine.  I mean, I don't have to use muscular strength, but  this Chinese man in his 60's is stiff as hell, and strong too, so the natural reaction would be to use more strength than him. I see these gentleman (and ladies as well) who have been training for years but still rely on muscular, stiff strength, and I guess they are happy like that.  How should  the transition from muscular strength to a more song, tongtou, strength feel?  How does it work?

That's a tough one.  Your question is more about intimacy than method.  Intimacy and betrayal are kissing cousins.  My advice?  Make yourself more vulnerable.  Forget about trying to learn and just hang out.  The fruition of weakness is sensitivity.  The fruition of stillness is freedom of movement.  The fruition of not controlling the future is spontaneity.  The fruition of  trusting your body's "appetites" is that life no longer feels like a struggle.

My Chinese "uncles" seem to have only "success/fail" exercises.  I'm not getting "learn to feel" or "get more sensitive" exercises.  Am I just too un-sensitive or are they giving me inappropriate exercises for that type of development?

Another tough one.  Being un-sensitive is often just using a yard stick where a micrometer is called for.  Most of us have the "tools," it's just figuring out which one to use.  Chinese culture is big on "Hao, Bu hao," types of learning.  It's easy for someone from a Western culture to get frustrated.  Remember there is no moral content, failure says nothing what-so-ever about your character, you are just doing it wrong.  The more you enjoy your failures, the faster you will learn. Yes, learning methods can always be improved, sometimes you have to teach your teachers how to teach.

Yes, it is possible your "uncles" are teasing you, or patronizing you, or even intentionally screwing you up.  It's possible they themselves are confused and it is also possible that they are jealousy guarding what took them decades to learn.  None of that would be surprising.  But honestly I don't know.

Heart Health

I just want to say something simple about the heart.  The heart needs enough space to operate.
If the heart is competing for space with the lungs, it’s going to have problems.
Fortunately this rarely happens because the lungs can expand downward with the movement of the diaphragm muscle.  The diaphragm moves with the expansion of the belly, the expansion of the lower back, and the expansion of the diaphragm-like structure on the floor of the pelvis.  If the gates of the legs are open the experience of breathing will continue down into the feet.
Likewise if the lower back expands, the upper back will follow it, expanding the ribs out to the sides and, if the gates of the arms are open, the experience of breathing will continue out into the arms from the back.  It will also travel up the back of the neck over the top of the head.

This is a simple description of health.  It is an anatomical description of what is called “pre-natal breathing.”  It is probably what happens during sleep, and during rejuvenate rest.  It is also a common base practice for most types of qigong.  It is a description of the dynamic structural alignment which gives the heart the largest possible space to live in.  [It is not a description of neidan (elixir) practice.  It is not a power gathering method.  It is not some cosmic sexual orbit.]

Constricted Belly & Lower Back

The rib cage can expand and condense quite a lot. If the abdominal muscles are constricted the expansion of the lower back and pelvic floor will be restricted too, and the gates to the legs will surely be closed during activity.  The body easily makes up for this by lifting the front of the rib cage.  This works fine, it will create plenty of space for the heart and lungs to operate optimally.  However, it will create some compression between the shoulder blades where the ribs insert into the spine.
The rib cage is structured such that the largest expansion happens by lifting the ribs out to the sides, expanding under the armpits, which also expands the upper back.  The full expansion of the rib cage creates some expansion in the chest as well but not lifting.

Exercises which tighten the abdominal muscles, or the space between the shoulder blades don’t seem to cause any short term problems.  However, over the long term if other factors like stiffness in the chest, spine degeneration, or pour circulation appear--these sorts of exercises will simply give the heart less room.  And that is a serious problem.

The space between the shoulder blades should be loose and lively.  Feel the skin between a cat’s shoulder blades and you’ll see what I mean.  The area behind the heart should be loose-- tiger skin loose.

Update:  I've been looking around google images for a normal CT scan of the abdomin and you wouldn't believe how many images of really messed up people they have up there.  Yikes.