This is an important article. I'm a big proponent of yoga, but I agree with the author about the very real dangers of it.
How I prevent the dangers described in the article:
1. I always get really warmed up, soft, pliable (see shake and bake), for about 20 min. before I start doing some yoga and/or dynamic stretching.
2. And in between each pose or sequence, I do some 'shake and bake' to maintain body heat and pliability.
3. Most important: Each pose or stretch sequence I do, I don't just go into autopilot and pop into a fully extended version of the pose I know I can do. I always gently and slowly ease into the pose, never edging into the pain zone. At most, I play with the edge of mild to medium discomfort.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html
(excerpt from article)
How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body
By William J. Broad
Jan. 5, 2012
On a cold Saturday in early 2009, Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, was giving a master class at Sankalpah Yoga in Manhattan. Black is, in many ways, a classic yogi: he studied in Pune, India, at the institute founded by the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar, and spent years in solitude and meditation. He now lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and often teaches at the nearby Omega Institute, a New Age emporium spread over nearly 200 acres of woods and gardens. He is known for his rigor and his down-to-earth style. But this was not why I sought him out: Black, I’d been told, was the person to speak with if you wanted to know not about the virtues of yoga but rather about the damage it could do. Many of his regular clients came to him for bodywork or rehabilitation following yoga injuries. This was the situation I found myself in. In my 30s, I had somehow managed to rupture a disk in my lower back and found I could prevent bouts of pain with a selection of yoga postures and abdominal exercises. Then, in 2007, while doing the extended-side-angle pose, a posture hailed as a cure for many diseases, my back gave way. With it went my belief, naïve in retrospect, that yoga was a source only of healing and never harm.
At Sankalpah Yoga, the room was packed; roughly half the students were said to be teachers themselves. Black walked around the room, joking and talking. “Is this yoga?” he asked as we sweated through a pose that seemed to demand superhuman endurance. “It is if you’re paying attention.” His approach was almost free-form: he made us hold poses for a long time but taught no inversions and few classical postures. Throughout the class, he urged us to pay attention to the thresholds of pain. “I make it as hard as possible,” he told the group. “It’s up to you to make it easy on yourself.” He drove his point home with a cautionary tale. In India, he recalled, a yogi came to study at Iyengar’s school and threw himself into a spinal twist. Black said he watched in disbelief as three of the man’s ribs gave way — pop, pop, pop.
After class, I asked Black about his approach to teaching yoga — the emphasis on holding only a few simple poses, the absence of common inversions like headstands and shoulder stands. He gave me the kind of answer you’d expect from any yoga teacher: that awareness is more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you’d done them. But then he said something more radical. Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.
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Not just students but celebrated teachers too, Black said, injure themselves in droves because most have underlying physical weaknesses or problems that make serious injury all but inevitable. Instead of doing yoga, “they need to be doing a specific range of motions for articulation, for organ condition,” he said, to strengthen weak parts of the body. “Yoga is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class.”
Black seemingly reconciles the dangers of yoga with his own teaching of it by working hard at knowing when a student “shouldn’t do something — the shoulder stand, the headstand or putting any weight on the cervical vertebrae.” Though he studied with Shmuel Tatz, a legendary Manhattan-based physical therapist who devised a method of massage and alignment for actors and dancers, he acknowledges that he has no formal training for determining which poses are good for a student and which may be problematic. What he does have, he says, is “a ton of experience.”
“To come to New York and do a class with people who have many problems and say, ‘O.K., we’re going to do this sequence of poses today’ — it just doesn’t work.”
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Image<strong>Salazar:</strong> I would say I’m a 7 out of 10 on the flexibility scale.
Salazar: I would say I’m a 7 out of 10 on the flexibility scale.Credit...Danielle Levitt for The New York Times
According to Black, a number of factors have converged to heighten the risk of practicing yoga. The biggest is the demographic shift in those who study it. Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems. Many come to yoga as a gentle alternative to vigorous sports or for rehabilitation for injuries. But yoga’s exploding popularity — the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011 — means that there is now an abundance of studios where many teachers lack the deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury. “Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people,” Black said. “You can’t believe what’s going on — teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, ‘You should be able to do this by now.’ It has to do with their egos.”
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When yoga teachers come to him for bodywork after suffering major traumas, Black tells them, “Don’t do yoga.”
“They look at me like I’m crazy,” he goes on to say. “And I know if they continue, they won’t be able to take it.” I asked him about the worst injuries he’d seen. He spoke of well-known yoga teachers doing such basic poses as downward-facing dog, in which the body forms an inverted V, so strenuously that they tore Achilles tendons. “It’s ego,” he said. “The whole point of yoga is to get rid of ego.” He said he had seen some “pretty gruesome hips.” “One of the biggest teachers in America had zero movement in her hip joints,” Black told me. “The sockets had become so degenerated that she had to have hip replacements.” I asked if she still taught. “Oh, yeah,” Black replied. “There are other yoga teachers that have such bad backs they have to lie down to teach. I’d be so embarrassed.”
Among devotees, from gurus to acolytes forever carrying their rolled-up mats, yoga is described as a nearly miraculous agent of renewal and healing. They celebrate its abilities to calm, cure, energize and strengthen. And much of this appears to be true: yoga can lower your blood pressure, make chemicals that act as antidepressants, even improve your sex life. But the yoga community long remained silent about its potential to inflict blinding pain. Jagannath G. Gune, who helped revive yoga for the modern era, made no allusion to injuries in his journal Yoga Mimansa or his 1931 book “Asanas.” Indra Devi avoided the issue in her 1953 best seller “Forever Young, Forever Healthy,” as did B. K. S. Iyengar in his seminal “Light on Yoga,” published in 1965. Reassurances about yoga’s safety also make regular appearances in the how-to books of such yogis as Swami Sivananda, K. Pattabhi Jois and Bikram Choudhury. “Real yoga is as safe as mother’s milk,” declared Swami Gitananda, a guru who made 10 world tours and founded ashrams on several continents.
But a growing body of medical evidence supports Black’s contention that, for many people, a number of commonly taught yoga poses are inherently risky. The first reports of yoga injuries appeared decades ago, published in some of the world’s most respected journals — among them, Neurology, The British Medical Journal and The Journal of the American Medical Association. The problems ranged from relatively mild injuries to permanent disabilities. In one case, a male college student, after more than a year of doing yoga, decided to intensify his practice. He would sit upright on his heels in a kneeling position known as vajrasana for hours a day, chanting for world peace. Soon he was experiencing difficulty walking, running and climbing stairs.
Doctors traced the problem to an unresponsive nerve, a peripheral branch of the sciatic, which runs from the lower spine through the buttocks and down the legs. Sitting in vajrasana deprived the branch that runs below the knee of oxygen, deadening the nerve. Once the student gave up the pose, he improved rapidly. Clinicians recorded a number of similar cases and the condition even got its own name: “yoga foot drop.”
More troubling reports followed. In 1972 a prominent Oxford neurophysiologist, W. Ritchie Russell, published an article in The British Medical Journal arguing that, while rare, some yoga postures threatened to cause strokes even in relatively young, healthy people. Russell found that brain injuries arose not only from direct trauma to the head but also from quick movements or excessive extensions of the neck, such as occur in whiplash — or certain yoga poses. Normally, the neck can stretch backward 75 degrees, forward 40 degrees and sideways 45 degrees, and it can rotate on its axis about 50 degrees. Yoga practitioners typically move the vertebrae much farther. An intermediate student can easily turn his or her neck 90 degrees — nearly twice the normal rotation.
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Hyperflexion of the neck was encouraged by experienced practitioners. Iyengar emphasized that in cobra pose, the head should arch “as far back as possible” and insisted that in the shoulder stand, in which the chin is tucked deep in the chest, the trunk and head forming a right angle, “the body should be in one straight line, perpendicular to the floor.” He called the pose, said to stimulate the thyroid, “one of the greatest boons conferred on humanity by our ancient sages.”
Image
<strong>Aduba:</strong> You know when people jump up into those crazy positions, like they stand on their eyeballs or something, while you’re sitting there just trying to figure out which side of the mat you used the last time? I envy them.
Aduba: You know when people jump up into those crazy positions, like they stand on their eyeballs or something, while you’re sitting there just trying to figure out which side of the mat you used the last time? I envy them.Credit...Danielle Levitt for The New York Times
Extreme motions of the head and neck, Russell warned, could wound the vertebral arteries, producing clots, swelling and constriction, and eventually wreak havoc in the brain. The basilar artery, which arises from the union of the two vertebral arteries and forms a wide conduit at the base of the brain, was of particular concern. It feeds such structures as the pons (which plays a role in respiration), the cerebellum (which coordinates the muscles), the occipital lobe of the outer brain (which turns eye impulses into images) and the thalamus (which relays sensory messages to the outer brain). Reductions in blood flow to the basilar artery are known to produce a variety of strokes. These rarely affect language and conscious thinking (often said to be located in the frontal cortex) but can severely damage the body’s core machinery and sometimes be fatal. The majority of patients suffering such a stroke do recover most functions. But in some cases headaches, imbalance, dizziness and difficulty in making fine movements persist for years.
Russell also worried that when strokes hit yoga practitioners, doctors might fail to trace their cause. The cerebral damage, he wrote, “may be delayed, perhaps to appear during the night following, and this delay of some hours distracts attention from the earlier precipitating factor.”
In 1973, a year after Russell’s paper was published, Willibald Nagler, a renowned authority on spinal rehabilitation at Cornell University Medical College, published a paper on a strange case. A healthy woman of 28 suffered a stroke while doing a yoga position known as the wheel or upward bow, in which the practitioner lies on her back, then lifts her body into a semicircular arc, balancing on hands and feet. An intermediate stage often involves raising the trunk and resting the crown of the head on the floor. While balanced on her head, her neck bent far backward, the woman “suddenly felt a severe throbbing headache.” She had difficulty getting up, and when helped into a standing position, was unable to walk without assistance. The woman was rushed to the hospital. She had no sensation on the right side of her body; her left arm and leg responded poorly to her commands. Her eyes kept glancing involuntarily to the left. And the left side of her face showed a contracted pupil, a drooping upper eyelid and a rising lower lid — a cluster of symptoms known as Horner’s syndrome. Nagler reported that the woman also had a tendency to fall to the left.
Her doctors found that the woman’s left vertebral artery, which runs between the first two cervical vertebrae, had narrowed considerably and that the arteries feeding her cerebellum had undergone severe displacement. Given the lack of advanced imaging technologies at the time, an exploratory operation was conducted to get a clearer sense of her injuries. The surgeons who opened her skull found that the left hemisphere of her cerebellum suffered a major failure of blood supply that resulted in much dead tissue and that the site was seeped in secondary hemorrhages.
The patient began an intensive program of rehabilitation. Two years later, she was able to walk, Nagler reported, “with [a] broad-based gait.” But her left arm continued to wander and her left eye continued to show Horner’s syndrome. Nagler concluded that such injuries appeared to be rare but served as a warning about the hazards of “forceful hyperextension of the neck.” He urged caution in recommending such postures, particularly to individuals of middle age.
The experience of Nagler’s patient was not an isolated incident. A few years later, a 25-year-old man was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Chicago, complaining of blurred vision, difficulty swallowing and controlling the left side of his body. Steven H. Hanus, a medical student at the time, became interested in the case and worked with the chairman of the neurology department to determine the cause (he later published the results with several colleagues). The patient had been in excellent health, practicing yoga every morning for a year and a half. His routine included spinal twists in which he rotated his head far to the left and far to the right. Then he would do a shoulder stand with his neck “maximally flexed against the bare floor,” just as Iyengar had instructed, remaining in the inversion for about five minutes. A series of bruises ran down the man’s lower neck, which, the team wrote in The Archives of Neurology, “resulted from repeated contact with the hard floor surface on which he did yoga exercises.” These were a sign of neck trauma. Diagnostic tests revealed blockages of the left vertebral artery between the c2 and c3 vertebrae; the blood vessel there had suffered “total or nearly complete occlusion” — in other words, no blood could get through to the brain.
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Two months after his attack, and after much physical therapy, the man was able to walk with a cane. But, the team reported, he “continued to have pronounced difficulty performing fine movements with his left hand.” Hanus and his colleagues concluded that the young man’s condition represented a new kind of danger. Healthy individuals could seriously damage their vertebral arteries, they warned, “by neck movements that exceed physiological tolerance.” Yoga, they stressed, “should be considered as a possible precipitating event.” In its report, the Northwestern team cited not only Nagler’s account of his female patient but also Russell’s early warning. Concern about yoga’s safety began to ripple through the medical establishment.
These cases may seem exceedingly rare, but surveys by the Consumer Product Safety Commission showed that the number of emergency-room admissions related to yoga, after years of slow increases, was rising quickly. They went from 13 in 2000 to 20 in 2001. Then they more than doubled to 46 in 2002. These surveys rely on sampling rather than exhaustive reporting — they reveal trends rather than totals — but the spike was nonetheless statistically significant. Only a fraction of the injured visit hospital emergency rooms. Many of those suffering from less serious yoga injuries go to family doctors, chiropractors and various kinds of therapists.
Image
<strong>Blaemire:</strong> The plow was the easiest position of the day — though it is quite a strange feeling having your face that close to your knees.
Blaemire: The plow was the easiest position of the day — though it is quite a strange feeling having your face that close to your knees.Credit...Danielle Levitt for The New York Times
Around this time, stories of yoga-induced injuries began to appear in the media. The Times reported that health professionals found that the penetrating heat of Bikram yoga, for example, could raise the risk of overstretching, muscle damage and torn cartilage. One specialist noted that ligaments — the tough bands of fiber that connect bones or cartilage at a joint — failed to regain their shape once stretched out, raising the risk of strains, sprains and dislocations.
In 2009, a New York City team based at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons published an ambitious worldwide survey of yoga teachers, therapists and doctors. The answers to the survey’s central question — What were the most serious yoga-related injuries (disabling and/or of long duration) they had seen? — revealed that the largest number of injuries (231) centered on the lower back. The other main sites were, in declining order of prevalence: the shoulder (219), the knee (174) and the neck (110). Then came stroke. The respondents noted four cases in which yoga’s extreme bending and contortions resulted in some degree of brain damage. The numbers weren’t alarming but the acknowledgment of risk — nearly four decades after Russell first issued his warning — pointed to a decided shift in the perception of the dangers yoga posed.
In recent years, reformers in the yoga community have begun to address the issue of yoga-induced damage. In a 2003 article in Yoga Journal, Carol Krucoff — a yoga instructor and therapist who works at the Integrative Medicine center at Duke University in North Carolina — revealed her own struggles. She told of being filmed one day for national television and after being urged to do more, lifting one foot, grabbing her big toe and stretching her leg into the extended-hand-to-big-toe pose. As her leg straightened, she felt a sickening pop in her hamstring. The next day, she could barely walk. Krucoff needed physical therapy and a year of recovery before she could fully extend her leg again. The editor of Yoga Journal, Kaitlin Quistgaard, described reinjuring a torn rotator cuff in a yoga class. “I’ve experienced how yoga can heal,” she wrote. “But I’ve also experienced how yoga can hurt — and I’ve heard the same from plenty of other yogis.”
One of the most vocal reformers is Roger Cole, an Iyengar teacher with degrees in psychology from Stanford and the University of California, San Francisco. Cole has written extensively for Yoga Journal and speaks on yoga safety to the American College of Sports Medicine. In one column, Cole discussed the practice of reducing neck bending in a shoulder stand by lifting the shoulders on a stack of folded blankets and letting the head fall below it. The modification eases the angle between the head and the torso, from 90 degrees to perhaps 110 degrees. Cole ticked off the dangers of doing an unmodified shoulder stand: muscle strains, overstretched ligaments and cervical-disk injuries.
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But modifications are not always the solution. Timothy McCall, a physician who is the medical editor of Yoga Journal, called the headstand too dangerous for general yoga classes. His warning was based partly on his own experience. He found that doing the headstand led to thoracic outlet syndrome, a condition that arises from the compression of nerves passing from the neck into the arms, causing tingling in his right hand as well as sporadic numbness. McCall stopped doing the pose, and his symptoms went away. Later, he noted that the inversion could produce other injuries, including degenerative arthritis of the cervical spine and retinal tears (a result of the increased eye pressure caused by the pose). “Unfortunately,” McCall concluded, “the negative effects of headstand can be insidious.”
Almost a year after I first met Glenn Black at his master class in Manhattan, I received an e-mail from him telling me that he had undergone spinal surgery. “It was a success,” he wrote. “Recovery is slow and painful. Call if you like.”
The injury, Black said, had its origins in four decades of extreme backbends and twists. He had developed spinal stenosis — a serious condition in which the openings between vertebrae begin to narrow, compressing spinal nerves and causing excruciating pain. Black said that he felt the tenderness start 20 years ago when he was coming out of such poses as the plow and the shoulder stand. Two years ago, the pain became extreme. One surgeon said that without treatment, he would eventually be unable to walk. The surgery took five hours, fusing together several lumbar vertebrae. He would eventually be fine but was under surgeon’s orders to reduce strain on his lower back. His range of motion would never be the same.
Black is one of the most careful yoga practitioners I know. When I first spoke to him, he said he had never injured himself doing yoga or, as far as he knew, been responsible for harming any of his students. I asked him if his recent injury could have been congenital or related to aging. No, he said. It was yoga. “You have to get a different perspective to see if what you’re doing is going to eventually be bad for you.”
Black recently took that message to a conference at the Omega Institute, his feelings on the subject deepened by his recent operation. But his warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears. “I was a little more emphatic than usual,” he recalled. “My message was that ‘Asana is not a panacea or a cure-all. In fact, if you do it with ego or obsession, you’ll end up causing problems.’ A lot of people don’t like to hear that.”
This article is adapted from “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards,” by William J. Broad, to be published next month by Simon & Schuster. Broad is a senior science writer at The Times.
Editor: Sheila Glaser
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 8, 2012, Page 16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: All Bent Out Of Shape. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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shake and bake: heat up the body, aerobic, cardio
Range of application
'Shake and Bake' is the name of an exercise. If there is any single exercise that is a cure all, or the main part of a cure all, this would be it. It fixes common ailments, and really exotic meditation problems from force getting too strong hitting against blockages and tightness in qi merdian network.Didn't know about 'shake and bake' when I had carpal tunnel
I was a programmer, and my chronic pain issues (the actual pain part) were mostly wrist pain, carpal tunnel, cold numb hands. Western medicine's solution was wear a wrist brace and give that condition a name, "renaud's syndrome". Worthless. That's when I got into yoga and qigong seriously. Neck and shoulder tension of course is a leading cause of the problems. The whole body is connected.The exercise that I found the most helpful was the turtle neck/spine, doing that as much as every hour. I was in my early 30's when I started taking all this seriously, seeing the downward trend in health and deciding to reverse it. It took 10 years to make the renaud's syndrome, cold hands and weak nerves in the extremities get mostly fixed, but all along the way it was obvious the exercises were slowly fixing the body.
With what I know now, I probably could cut that recovery time to less than half, and that would involve a lot more cardio/aerobic exercises. Because of diet being vegetarian, more veganish, for more than half of my life, that contributed to having a body type getting cold easily.
The main exercise that would have accomplished this, cutting my recovery time by more than half, is what I call the "shake and bake". It's an easy aerobic cardio vascular exercise, takes only about 10 to 20% more energy than walking at a moderate to brisk pace.
Shake and Bake
Gorilla Mantra
always W.A.S.T.E. F.R.E.E.acronym explanation in brief
W.A.S = Warm And Soft. Like a healthy supple baby full of qi, life, vigor. Not cold, hard, brittle, close to death like an old sick man. "W.A.S." comes first in the "always WASTE FREE" because before any exercise can be effective, you need to first heat up make things warm, soft, pliable.T.E. = Tension eliminated. The process of achieving Passaddhi/Pacification, or Taiji's relaxation 'sung'. When you scan the whole physical body, while moving through any slow diagnostic movement, whatever feels hard, cold, brittle, pain, tight, uncomfortable, dense, massive, that's tension. And it can be eliminated by warming it up, melting the ice, going through "F.R.E.E" range of motion.
F.R.E.E. = Full range (of) expression, elastic. If you move through range of motion, you hear "snap, crackle, and pop" from your joints cracking, you have cumulative tension and sub-optimal circulation, you haven't achieved W.A.S state yet.
❤️ Gorilla Heart Sutra (8 lines)
1. always W.A.S.T.E. F.R.E.E.2. f.a.r.m.i.n.n.n.g.: finish diminish, assess to progress, ramp not amp, measure for pleasure, inject bottleneck, no pain to gain, no harm alarm, no need for greed, grit to the limit
3. aware but don't care: don't care if they stare, don't care what you wear, don't care about hair,
4. shake and bake, tap and slap, jiggle and wiggle, fiddle and twiddle, splice and dice
Shake and Bake
Normal jogging, jump roping, are good exercises if you do the form properly, totally relaxed, elastic, bouncy, and springy. Most people don't have good form, otherwise you wouldn't see so many low back, knee, joint chronic pain from doing this exercises as people get older.I experimented a number of years with slow jogging, and got some good ideas from that.
I also experimented some with jumping rope.
Being a taiji/qigong enthusiast, and jhana meditator, my natural instincts kicked in and discovered a way to do aerobic/cardio exercise in the absolute most efficient way.
That means using the least amount of input energy and getting the most output benefit, the most bang for the buck.
It looks like doing jump rope without a rope
So the pace and rhythm is somewhat like this, or picture a jogger waiting at an intersection jogging in place to stay warm and loose.Doing jump rope without a rope means you can relax way more, because there's no tension from the stress of needing to jump high enough to clear the rope, and coordinating hand, wrist, whole body movement to clear the rope on each jump.
If you're doing it right, the input energy should feel like just a little more, 10-20% more energy than walking at a moderate pace. That relaxed. You feel like you could do this for hours effortlessly, just like you could walk for hours. Yet, your breathing is deep, using far more range than shallow sedentary breathing, your heart rate is somewhat elevated, your body is getting warm and soft and a light mist of sweat is building. That's the baking. Melting the ice (cumulative pain, tight spots, energy blockages).
2nd level of refinement
Getting 5 exercises for the price of one. Instead of moving your arms in slow jogging form or coordinating jump rope form, completely let your arms and shoulders go, so they're just hanging freely getting yanked around by your lower body locomotion. If you're doing it right, you should be getting many kinds of micro stretches similar to old people doing those arm swinging exercises in a China town public park.3rd level of refinement
Let your neck, shoulders, upper back go. The neck you have to have momentary restabilizing moments to keep your head level enough to maintain your balance, but let the tension go in the neck the rest of the time. So it kind of looks like a funky chicken dance with the head bobbing. You're not aiming to look a certain way (that would just create tension), it's just how your lower body locomotion of the legs is going to affect your upper body in a completely relaxed state.
4th level of refinement
Maintain passadhi/pacification relaxation of jhana the whole time you're doing the exercise. The only tension you should feel is one of your feet pushing off the ground. The rest of the body is doing taiji, doing at least first jhana.
I could make a video of myself doing this exercise, but no matter what anyone's skill level is, it's going to look silly. You can't tell from looking at external appearance what someone's skill level and level of relaxation is. The only test would be you doing it for many hours effortlessly without getting tired.
This is similar to 80, 90 year old taoist masters (with highly developed 4th jhana and beyond level of samadhi) being able to hike for hours in the mountains in China, at a brisk pace, up mountains, looking spry like a goat and putting 20 and 30 year olds to shame and leaving them in the dust. It's a real thing. The higher the jhana, the lighter you feel, the more energy and degree of effortlessness is possible.
RDA: recommended daily amount
How much 'shake and bake' should I do everyday?(This is a private email I sent to some friends)
recommended daily amount:
1 session, perhaps first thing in the morning.
20min
in one session at moderate pace with slow deep breathing, light sweat,
feeling really warm, soft, pliable, relaxed, not tired.
another 30-60min total, in 5-10min sessions, as needed throughout the day.
anytime
parts of your body start feeling cold, or tight, uncomfortable, tired,
and before doing other exercises like stretching and resistive weight
training.
'shake and bake' is my way of getting
RDA of optimal aerobic. You might customize or find something better, more fun (swimming?), or
more suitable for you.
But if you do the proper amount of
daily cardio, you'll prevent so many problems, and gradually fix
existing ones. This can be done at any age.
By
doing this exercise religiously, I was able to fix some weird exotic qi
problems that famous monks and chinese doctors couldn't help me with. If
I live to be 80, 90, I'll be like one of those taoist immortals blazing
along on hiking trails up the mountain effortlessly. Don't ask me in
old age why I didn's share these wondrous simple secrets with you! I've
already told many of you about this, but you look at me with disbelief
and skepticism. So now it is in writing. Don't regret things later, take
care of your health now.
qigong gorilla's overview of optimal health
Basic model of the components of your body and good health
The purpose of this article is not to give an accurate and up to date understanding of science, but to illustrate how the fundamental workings of good health is actually pretty simple and intuitive.The numbers cited are rough estimates, science is always changing.
There are 37 trillion cells.
There about 100 trillion good bacteria living symbiotiacally, most living within your gut, and they manufacture essential things your cells can't produce on their own. You'd die without these outsider friendly bacteria helping out.
Each cell is like a miniature version of you.
1. it needs to eat food, air, oxygen,
2. it needs to crap, eliminate waste
3. it needs garbage pick up,
4. it needs food delivery,
5. it needs heating and air conditioning.
6. it needs repair service at times from the immune system, infracture, roads and highways for delivery and pickup of cargo.
Blood circulation by the heart reaches less than 30% of the cells.
How do the other 70% of cells get their services met?
Lymph fluid, which does not get circulated by the heart pumping.
Lymph requires muscular contraction and movement from sufficient physical exercise.
And also the workings of the jhana battery, which gets charged by noble silence, celibacy, sufficient food, sleep and rest.
A fully charged jhana battery acts like a powerful network of water towers and pressure tanks, and a high power electrical system that can service all 37 trillion cells.
If you drain your jhana battery by indulging in sensuality, too much thinking, not enough meditation and rest, then your community of cells and good bacteria, many of them are going to get starved, not get enough oxygen, get ill from their garbage not getting picked up and being too cold because their heater is broken from not enough electrial power, and not enough power and working infrastructure for the immune system to send out it's doctors and maintenance workers.
If you lead a sedentary life, 70% of your 37 trillion cells are going to get shortchanged on necessary services.
Each cell is like a mini you.
You need to eat, crap, get garbage picked up, etc. (same list of services stated earlier).
You wouldn't eat one week's worth of food and crap that out in one sitting once per week would you?
You can't, you're not designed to do that.
Every cell is like a mini you, it's not designed to do that either.
You need to eat and get necessary services not only once a day, but throughout the day.
So does each mini you.
So how do they get the goods they need?
Sufficient daily exercise.
Again, remember that blood only circulates to a small percentage of your body, the other 70% of the 37 trillion mini you's need physical exercise pumping that lymph fluid and circulating qi in invisible networks of qi channels to keep the whole system humming and working properly.
What is optimal exercise?
Normally you breathe shallow, using less than 20% of your lung capacity.If you over exercise, too intensely and/or too long, you incur injuries, you deplete your jhana battery which you need for more important spiritual pursuits.
If you under exercise, the 70% of the 37 trillion mini you's get starved and intoxicated with un-removed garbage, and cumulative damage from that compounds, making it harder to repair and rejuvenate your collective body.
optimal exercise is going to involve a full range of expression
(of motion, breathing, relaxation, muscle contraction, stretching, etc.)
Daily quota for optimal health is going to look something like this:1. minimum of 30-60 minutes of elevated aerobic cardiovascular: such as slow jogging, rope-less jump roping, enough to get full deep breathing, elevated heart rate, full body light mist of sweat, not exhausted sweat pouring, heart pounding.
1b. minimum of another 60 min. of easy walking, taiji, qigong, walking in the garden, hiking, standing and walking meditation.
2. stretching: Always do #1, at least 5 min. or however long needed to get the body warm and soft. This is to prevent injury, but also to make the strecthing effective and make long lasting impact. At least 30-60min a day total, better to have many small sessions throughout the day. Better to do dynamic forms of stretching that naturally keep the body warm, soft, elastic. People with cold body types doing yoga, and holding poses too long, body will get cold making the stretching far less effective and impactful, and risking injury.
3. getting full range of muscular movement: again, start with #1, get warm and soft. You don't need a gym membership. At least 30min a day of some combination of pushups, pull ups, light dumbell work (one dumbell between 5 to 10% of your body weight is good).
4. self accupressure, self massage, tapping and slapping, probing to sense what's going on in your body. Parts where blood, qi don't circulate well, that part will feel tender, painful, weird. Parts that are in excellent health, massaging won't feel good, it will feel neutral like you could take it or leave it and you wouldn't care. If you massage or work on a spot of the body and it feels really good, it's your body trying to tell you to keep going. Foam rollers are good.
How do you know you're doing each of the 4 categories correctly?
For optimal health, if you're doing it right, you should feel endorphins, pleasure chemicals of the brain that feels the same as a mild or moderate form of first jhana. That comes from the 70% of those 37 trillion cells giving you positive feedback thanking you for meeting their service needs.
What's the secret to success?
1. You need at least a low quality first jhana level of samadhi. This is not hard. 99% of people can do this.This gives you the sensitivity you need to do step 3 of 16aps breath meditation correctly, able to use the breath energy and tactile sensation of all 37 trillion cells of your body to probe what's going on, where it's healthy and where it has stagnant energy or blockages.
2. modulation: doing an efficient and necessary quantity of intensity of daily exercise that you need that day. Without #1, you won't know what's too little, too much, too intense, too lax, or just right.
3. if you're doing the whole daily routine right, it feels good, you look forward to it like a hungry person about to eat (that's the 70% of the 37 trillion cells talking to you, most people don't listen), you don't get tired physically or mentally while doing it. Over time you get stronger and your endurance increases, it becomes a habit as natural as breathing, eating, sleeping. And once it's ingrained as a good habit you'll have it for life. If after many months, it feels like a dreadful chore, then you're doing something wrong.
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