I have done shake and bake for a while now and I am not experiencing any pain from it at 18-20 minutes length.
Q: I wanted to know more about Gorilla Stick Therapy, I have a foam roller and no pvc pipe to go. What's the origin of this technique? and any new discovery with it? I honestly found soaking my feet in hot water to be a good thing so thank you for that <3
A: The origin of GST, beyond what I already wrote in the linked article above? Foam rolling has been around for a while. But if the foam you're using is too soft, it's not going to hit deep spots. PVC pipe will, and because of smaller diameter, you can hit some important areas you can't do with a regular sized foam rollers, such as the ankle and foot being especially important.
Remember the priority principle. The fingers, hands, toes, feet, lower limbs, generally get the least amount of qi circulation, and should get extra attention. I try to spend at least a few minutes rolling with a pvc pipe everyday, and ankles and feet are especially important, because long and frequent sitting meditation cuts off circulation there way more than fingers and hands.
Article today describing some of the limited scientific study of foam rolling
Foam rolling was once for professional athletes only. These days
it’s hard to walk into a gym without tripping over somebody rolling
around on a neoprene tube. Dedicated classes in hip New York gyms are frequented by
the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker and Shakira. Forget protein shakers,
resistance bands or Fit Bits: foam rollers are this season’s must-have
gym accessory.
The rise of foam rollers owes much to the Israeli engineer and physicist Moshé Feldenkrais,
whose pioneering work on body movements to improve muscle function
became popular in the 1950s. A black belt in judo, Feldenkrais
incorporated them into his system for physical improvement when he came
across them in the US a couple of decades later.
More recently, the American sports therapist Michael Clark
helped introduce these accessories to the general population with his
2001 book, Integrated Training for the New Millennium. The first US patent for a foam roller was filed as recently as 2004.
For the uninitiated, the practice involves applying your own
body weight to a foam cylinder, using small repetitive undulating
movements to exert pressure on the muscle. The internet is full of
guides on how to do this right: YouTube contains over 600,000 videos
that match the term; a quick hunt on a search engine returns around 40m
hits.
Q: I'd like to thank you for your recent Qigor posts. I for one will be taking notes on all of this stuff. This sort of information based on experience can be hard to find. Considering my situation (young and health issues) I've found the one blind spot for me in Early Buddhism seems to be a lack of focus on taking care of one's health. This is one thing I commend the ancient Chinese traditions for in particular. And on that note I was wondering if you might recommend any tangential materials worth reading ie. TCM, energy channels, basic healthcare and learning about the human body. I'm also interested in learning energy work/breath techniques ie. Daoist (imagining core Qi as a warm goey ball) and similar to the instructions laid out in Keeping the Breath in Mind.
I suppose the lack of focus on healthcare makes a certain degree of sense, as times were very different when the Buddha set out his Dhamma instructions for us. And of course core Dhamma was always the priority - however these days we are surrounded by health hazards, some of which we don't recognize as such due to lack of education on the matter. So knowledge about maintaining a good posture, not sitting too long, staying away from things like sugar and processed "foods", abstaining from pornography and media, are all very valuable and relevant to modern practice. After all, the longer one's healthspan and lifespan are, the longer one can practice on the path.
A: (lucid24-frankk)
Offhand, I can't think of something I can whole heartedly recommend, not because it lacks value, but because it can easily lead to spending too much time researching what is valuable and interesting methods from a certain perspective, but can easily make us lose focus on dukkha and liberation from it. This is the main reason I feel why the Buddha didn't talk about the benefits of yoga, stretching, and some cardio, it can lead to distraction. One thing I would recommend, if one is a total beginner with taiji, qigong, or yoga, is try out a few classes where its available to you just so you have some reference point of actual physical experience. It's hard to pick up many things from just reading about it or watching video. In the long term though, I'd recommend people practice yoga, taiji, etc. on their own.
Q: Alright thanks for the advice. The modern world is full of Mara’s lures beckoning us into distraction, and I’ve found if I’m not careful my mind is all too willing to rationalize why I need to do this thing or that as opposed to getting to work with meditation.
Anyhow I’ll look into possibly finding a teacher to learn a bit of Taiji or Qigong directly, sounds like a better idea than trying to start things up entirely by myself.
A: great thing about taiji, qigong, yoga, is that you can do it simultaneously with sati, jhana, samadhi. Say someone spends an average of 2-4 hours a day doing walking meditation. You can substitute in any of those 3 modalities for walking, and reap the benefits of all of that. The reason I'm really hesitant to recommend and books or specific teachers, is because if you learn those specific lineages in their natural environment with those teachers, they teach many time consuming nuanced details about those specific arts that are not important and completely irrelevant for jhana, optimal health. That is why I publish my notes on qigong gorilla, to extract the essence of what is useful and can be done simultaneously with jhana. But the limitation of qigong gorilla, is if you don't already have some personal experience with those arts, it's unlikely you'll fully grasp how much you can relax and how much tension you carry around until a good teacher can point it out in person.
Just as a precautionary note, some of the people who reported very quick and dramatic results, are long time meditators and/or already somewhat proficient in jhāna samādhi and similar practices such as taiji and qigong. So they were ripe to quickly harvest some of the benefits of doing 'shake and bake' for about 30 minutes or more daily, which taps into some movements that would not occur in their existing daily exercise routine.
You shouldn't experiment with any new practice with unrealistic expectations. Keep an open mind and always exercise critical thinking.
feedback: melted lower back energy blockage
2020-4-9
Wow, thanks!
I practiced and shake and bake, and I have to agree it is very potent since I had a weird melting-like energy blockage in my lower back and it eased it out and got rid of it.
Thank for this potent technique, my gratitude.
I will try to practice the kicking drills.
feedback: great aerobic exercise primer for samadhi
2020-4-21
Thank you for sharing the videos. The shake and bake video clarified the previous instructions. My hands were originally draped all the way down on my sides closer to the front. So far I did this exercise a few times and felt that it provides good cardio warm-up and mindfulness practice at the same time. I did a sit right after one of the sessions and it was very easy to get into concentration. The body was warm and loose with good chi flow. I will definitely incorporate all these in my daily routine going forward.
feedback: melted energy blockages in chest
2020-4-18
I only tried it consecutively for a few days, and I am getting some very obvious results. On the first day, my chest and abdomen was getting disproportionately warm comparing to my normal exercises, which is my weakest areas in the micro-cosmic orbit. I was skeptical at first and wonder if it was due to my increase mindfulness during the shake and bake making me aware of the warmth more acutely than my less mindful exercises. Afterwards in my meditations, I definitely felt numerous smaller energy channels freed up all over my chest area, resulting in high levels of pitti. In my mind, I was thinking, "Oh sh!t, this stuff works!!"
I will check in on a later date as I have only started this exercise for a short time.
(a few days later)
Okay, there is no doubt this is working extremely well for me. My energy channels are becoming more open. And it is alarming how easily the mind slips into meditative absorptions even when there was no intention to do so. I could be doing the most mundane daily chores, and the mind just keeps slipping right in. Loud music, disturbing neighbors have no affect on me. Long sits are feeling sooo easy. Thank you, Frank! Gratitudes! 🙏
Question: How fast/frequent are the steps?
2020-04
Q: I have been trying to do your "shake and bake" exercise, but found it
hard to do it for long period of time. What is the recommended frequency
of the "hopping motion" per minute?
A: Don't think in terms of target frequency. Tailor the pace and frequency to your needs. Walking meditation as people normally do it, wouldn't get you the cardio benefit we're aiming for, since you're only using 20% of your lung capacity, and you're not building up heat to melt ice in the body and make the body pliable. And jogging is too intense and tiring for most people. So what you're shooting for is:
1. using 80-100% of your lung capacity and range of breathing, instead of the sedentary 20%, in a taiji relaxed way.
2. enough leg locomotion to get some core/ab work, and enough frequency to build up some heat gently. but not so much leg locomotion to incur the problems with jogging. I don't put any more pressure on my knees and back doing shake and bake than when I walk.
3. not use more than 10-15% energy expenditure compared to walking.
If you're doing it right, it shouldn't be tiring you out, and after a few weeks you should be able to do it for hours effortlessly. If you get tired and want some rest, do some other stretches,pushups, pullups, etc, and then switch back to shake and bake. My typical routine is
1. 15-20min shake and bake to warm up,
2. and then mixing 1-2 min of pull ups, pushups, stretching, alternated with 1-2min of shake and bake to retain body heat for another 20-40 min total alternating back and forth.
Question: Do my heels come off the ground?
2020-04
Q: Do your heels come off the ground? If I do that then it's harder to sustain it.
A: Mine do, but if that's how you normally walk and jog (with heel touching ground) and it doesn't give you any problems, no reason to worry about it. Remember the qigong gorilla ethos: you adapt any useful health modality for your needs.
Question: I can't work up a light mist of sweat with shake and bake. Is that part important?
Q: I cannot work up a light mist of sweat with this workout even if I jump high. Is that part important? Or is there a tougher variation?
A: The 'light mist of sweat' is meant as a general rule of thumb for upper bound in body heat and intensity of exercise for the 30 minute session so people don't expend more energy than necessary. The main point of shake and bake, is that people in general, especially sedentary meditators who do too much sitting meditation (6-10 hours a day), don't get enough aerobic cardiovascular exercise (30min RDA) because it can be tiring and painful to do. Shake and bake should only require 10-20% more energy exertion than walking, and as long as your body is heated up to the point that you feel good, hands and feet warm and soft, cold parts that felt stiff before the exercise have thawed, you feel like a bag of water, elastic, pliable, lightweight compared to before the exercise, using your full lung capacity for 20-30min. (rather than normal sedentary shallow breathing only using 20% of your lungs), then mission accomplished, no need to get a full body light mist of sweat, unless you were specifically shooting for that goal. Remember gorilla (guerrilla) improvisation is about adapting any health modality to meet your current exercise needs or goals.
If you have other health objectives, for example looking to have some net weight loss, and need more intense exercise, the gorilla approach would be find something that you enjoy doing, and is energy efficient so it doesn't compromise your sitting meditation (drain your energy making you too tired to do a good long sit). Jumping rope is one idea, doing hikes on steep hills (go up and down several times if you only have one small hill), climbing stairs (up and down many times), swimming is a great whole body exercise, etc. If you can incorporate the same principles as with shake and bake, do it with taiji quan, jhana samadhi quality relaxed state of mind, then you can incorporate much of the shake and bake benefits even with a more intense exercise. Though in general, full jhana relaxation/pacification is at odds with intentional bodily energy exertion for quick intense exercise.
A friend and I years ago had researched a Japanese Professor's practice and teaching of 'slow jogging'. I caught up with him recently and found that the version of slow jogging he currently practices had evolved into something that shared many key characteristics with my
shake and bake 🏃👨🍳🥧 and qigong gorilla philosophy. This is not surprising since we had the same objective of optimizing cardiovascular aerobic exercise for a contemplative lifestyle involving lots of meditation.
I share the following, his brief description of what motivated him to develop that exercise, because it serves as a good case study of 500 of his students for the past two years practicing an aerobic exercise daily and getting great results.
"wujushu" ("unrestrained," "follow your honed muscular intuition"...) "無拘束" 禪修
I was very interested in issues like:
How do I maintain motivation to work out?
Can I minimize unnecessary discomfort so to maintain my motivation?
How to combat my "cold" constitution (apparently due to many years of vegetarianism and short stints of veganism/raw veganism/sedentary meditation style)?
I know how unreliable my "good" motivation is, and therefore my approach to workout and meditation emphasizes a lot on creating favorable environmental factors that makes giving rise to and maintaining certain intentions easier/natural (I'm very much into subjects like habit formation and habit changing).
For the minimizing discomfort part, I read about cortisol and other stress-induced hormones which apparently are partly responsible for the post-workout fatigue. Cortisol and so are secreted in copious amount when we over-exert ourselves, and a lot of that over-exertion doesn't translate to physical-mental benefits in an efficient manner. Our intuition picks up on that inefficiency and therefore finds workout "unjustifiable"--a theory I have on why I can be lazy when it comes to work out.
I want a workout routine that doesn't diminish a desire to meditate afterwards due to fatigue and discomfort. I want a routine that ideally combine elements of stretching, shaking, massaging, swinging, aerobic, something that would quickly warm up many parts of the body and gets the circulation going in a very specific way as to help jhanic bliss...
For about 2 years now I've been teaching my meditation group (@500 regular attendees) a style of workout called "wujushu" ("unrestrained," "follow your honed muscular intuition"...). This technique is explained in a few of my weekend teaching audios, and is practiced by retreatants at my place. It involves elements of:
adding a great variety of variations to routine yoga postures;
slow jogging in a way that combines
spontaneous waving of limbs,
"bobbing" of head,
stretching of spine,
relaxing and "swinging away" tension,
getting massages/reflexology sessions if one can afford them;
making sure that the intensity of your workout is such that you can smile/not-frown/chat easily during a session (an idea I borrow from the slow-jogging founder);
allow sitting meditation to become something you feel like doing and spend more time on exercising meditation (i.e. sit when you feel that your samadhi is about to culminate, or when you feel like wanting to enjoy bliss in a more settled, intense way)...
Especially as you get older, if your feet are cold and stiff, and you get foot pains and foot injuries easily, you got health problems.
Most meditators who do very long sits and many times daily, are regularly strangling circulation to their feet (and other parts of their legs). I've seen too many meditators (this includes me), where too much sitting meditation actually starts killing some of the nerves in the legs, affecting balance and walking. I've seen many monks and nuns stumbling and falling down while walking on flat ground. From sitting too much, I developed some knee problems that prevented me for sitting in my normal full lotus for 2 years while I waited for the nerves to regenerate and legs to heal from the injury. This is really insidious problem, because when your nerves start dying in your legs, you lose the feedback that would normally give you the pain feedback to let you know you need to stretch out your legs and switch to walking and other forms of moving meditation.
Below I quote in full a good article on daily soaking of feet in hot water.
Now TCM says don't do it one hour before or after meals.
I do daily soaks, and I found a safe way to do it 15 minutes after eating. The reason I do this, is for environmental and energy efficiency concerns. After I wash the dishes at breakfast, the pipes have hot water on tap ready to go. In the morning, my feet tend to be cold. So I fill a foot soaking tub with hot water, up to my ankles, not up to the calves. And I do it with the purpose of warming my feet, not to induce sweat and full cleanse as described below.
How I know I'm doing it safely, is the water is not too hot. Not enough to sweat, not enough to feel hot and to start having to peel off layers of clothes I'm wearing, but hot enough to warm up my feet and legs. I soak for about 10 minutes. If my feet are still feeling cold I go for a second round and dump the cold water and get some more hot water. If you soak too hot, then you'll start feeling messed up energetically, just as TCM warns. But if you soak just to warm up cold feet, no problem, at least from my experience. As always, full standard disclaimers apply.
I've been taking advantage of this foot soaking practice for several years now, doesn't take much time to use the hot water from after washing breakfast dishes. Fast, energy efficient, and great cumulative health benefits, and preventative health.
By Zhang Qian | January 21, 2016, Thursday | Print Edition
Foot baths were once a daily habit for many in China. Today though, this tradition has been largely washed down the drain.
However, adherents of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) still recommend this particular tradition to promote blood circulation and drive away “pathogenic energy,” especially during cold winters.
“The feet are very important in health maintenance. The ancient Chinese often compared the human body to a tree, with the torso as the trunk, the arms the branches and the feet the roots,” says Jiang Zaifeng, director of the Traditional Chinese Medicine Health Department at the Bao Zhi Di Culture and Arts Salon. “It is said that a dying tree withers first in its roots, and an aging person first feels their health recede from the feet.”
For this reason, Jiang and others say, foot care is an important part of overall health.
Massages, foot exercises, soaking in hot water and taking herbal soaks are all recommended. There’s also acupuncture, accupressure (reflexology) and application of herbal pastes to the feet.
Simple soaking can be surprisingly effective, say TCM practitioners. Six meridians (liver, gall bladder, kidney, spleen and stomach) reach the feet, each of which has more than 60 acupunture points. The feet have points that correspond to many parts and organs of the body.
Soaking in hot water activates blood and energy throughout the body. In herbal foot baths, the skin absorbs elements through the skin and these travel through energy channels to target points. Soaking until there’s a sweat can relieve symptoms of cold, flu and menstrual cramps.
Herbal soaks can be beneficial to those with chronic stomach inflammation, high blood pressure and stroke patients.
Ideally, the feet should be soaked once a day in a relatively deep basin, more than 15 centimeters deep so the calves can be soaked as well. Start with hot (about 40 degree Celsius) water but don’t fill up the basin. As the water cools, keep adding hot water to keep up the temperature.
When you start to break a sweat, remove your feet. A little sweating is a good sign of unblocked energy channels, yet too much sweating isn’t ideal as it consumes too much energy. Healthy people usually start to sweat after around 20 minutes of soaking; it may take longer for those with energy-flow problems. If you don’t sweat in 40 minutes, don’t soak any more. Try again the next day.
It’s best to soak feet before going to bed, especially in winter. This will help you stay warm and get a good night’s rest. Don’t soak an hour before or an hour after meals; don’t soak after consuming alcohol or when feeling fatigued.
If you feel dizzy when soaking your feet, add some cold water so the blood vessels contract. That should help relieve dizziness.
A daily hot water soak is enough for healthy people who sweat quickly. Adding herbs can help unblock energy channels and relieve problems. First boil the herbs in water and then add the mixture to the foot basin.
Most of foot-bath herbs are available at TCM pharmacies.
Herbal ingredients for feet baths:
Ginger and baijiu
Ingredients: Ginger slices (50g), baijiu (50ml)
Directions: Boil the ginger in water for a few minutes. Add ginger soup and baijiu to hot water in a basin. Soak for 15-30 minutes or until there’s a slight sweat.
Benefits: Helps unblock energy channels, dispels pathogenic yin (cold energy), reinforces yang (hot energy). Especially good for those with cold extremities in winter.
Ginger and dandelion
Ingredients: Ginger (50g), dandelion (50g)
Directions: Boil ingredients in water. Add soup to hot water in a basin. Soak feet in mixture for around 20 minutes or until there’s a slight sweat.
Benefits: Ginger helps dispel pathogenic cold. Dandelion helps dispel pathogenic heat and toxins. This mixture helps relieve symptoms of flu, fever or headache.
Mung beans and baizhi (angelica dahurica root)
Ingredients: Mung beans (100g), baizhi (15g)
Directions: Soak bean and baizhi in water for 20 minutes. Boil ingredients. Add soup to foot bath. Soak feet for 15-30 minutes.
Benefits: Mung beans help relieve swelling and nourish skin; baizhi is anti-bacterial, helps relieve inflammation and accelerates metabolism. This mixture can also prevent and relieve chilblains.
Ingredients: motherwort (30g), chrysanthemum (15g), huangqin (15g) and yejiaoteng (15g)
Directions: Boil ingredients together for 40 minutes. Filter the decoction and add it to hot water for a feet bath. Soak feet in it for no more than 30 minutes.
Benefits: Activates blood circulation, warms the uterus and relieves painful menustration.
Wuzhuyu (Fructus Evodiae) and vinegar
Ingredients: wuzhuyu (40g) and vinegar (30ml)
Directions: Boil wuzhuyu in water for 40 minutes. Put the filtered decoction in a basin together with hot water and vinegar. Soak feet in mixture for no more than 30 minutes.
Benefits: Helps dispel pathogenic coldness, relieves headache, vomiting and sleeplessness.
Danggui (Angelica) and longan
Ingredients: danggui (40g), longan (25g)
Directions: Boil the ingredients in water for 40 minutes. Pour filtered decoction in a basin. Add hot water. Soak feet for 15-20 minutes, or until there is a slight sweat.
Benefits: Helps nourish blood and benefits skin, relieves pigmentation in the skin.
"shake and bake" is also the signature move of Jamal Crawford, a professional basketball player who uses it to fake out and advance past the defender trying to impede his progress. It has nothing to do with gorilla qigong version of shake and bake, but just an example of how catchy and frequently that phrase is used.
My version of 'shake and bake' is ostensibly an aerobic, cardiovascular exercise, but it's power and extraordinary usefulness comes from reaping the benefits from several exercises simultaneously, drawing from many eastern and western health modalities. You get 5 different exercises for the price of one, so your time and input energy is getting exponential returns. You use only 1/5th the amount of time, and the same input energy has accomplished 5 tasks had you targeted each specific area individually.
The 'baking' from 'shake and bake' that I'm referring to, has an esoteric secret meaning.
1. at a physical level, the heat generated melts gross energetic tightness and tension that had you not done some warm up, would easily lead to injuries like pulling muscles, etc.
2. at an energetic level, the heat and samadhi of doing jhana simlutaneously (to the best of your ability), helps to melt the ice of some energetic blockages more easily and quickly than sitting, standing, static posture meditation.
3. doing jhana simultaneously, you charge your jhana battery, building up spiritual capital, and you're baking immortal PIE (precious internal energy) 👨🍳🥧. This is the highest level of 'shake and bake' we're aiming for.
Some other types of exercises that are done simultaneously with shake and bake
* shake and bake: "it's better than jogging": better than jogging which is high impact, hurts your knees and lower back, and expends way more energy than necessary to reap the benefit of doing an optimal form of the 30minute minimum of aerobic cardiovascular exercise daily recommended by experts.
Unless you have the great form, relaxed energy efficient mechanics of a Kenyan olympic distance runner running on soft grass, too much jogging is going to lead to knee, back, joint problems.
olympic runner in barefoot relaxed training mode, not slow at all, but good model to study for good mechanics and relaxed natural movement.
kenyans relaxed training jog
1.
2.
* incorporates some of the benefits of 'arm swinging' type of exercises, and then some, because the full release of the entire arm and shoulder means the individual joints within the arm are getting yanked, whipped, swung, stretched, due to the locomotion of the lowerbody causing arms to whip around in random directions. Normal arm swinging routines will not build up heat, will not challenge you aerobically, will not hit the joints at various angles like 'shake and bake'.
* incorporates some of the benefits and effects of 'tapping qigong': depending on how hard your feet strike the ground.
* most importantly, 'shake and bake' incorporates the benefits of charging your jhana battery, walking meditation, standing meditation, breath meditation. You can also practice contemplation of Dhamma, chanting suttas, etc., as an alternative to the noble silence of charging the jhana battery.
* shake and bake is evolutionary cousin of taoist brisk walking and various Buddhist fast walking meditation methods to counter drowsiness and gain some cardio aerobic benefit.
Video examples of some exercises mentioned above
30 minute arm swinging program that's typical of what you see Chinese Qigong people doing in China town parks in groups. This isn't the way I do arm swings, and I didn't watch the whole video. It's just to give you an idea that it's a wide spread practice with many different styles.
Tapping qigong 6min routine: I don't do it this way, it's just to show you it's a common qigong practice that people do. What I do is much more qigong gorilla improv style, tapping all over the body with various amounts of pressure.
A 10min. tapping routine:
The shaking he describes is similar to what I do as part of 'shake and bake'
I don't know this guy in the video, and he doesn't know me, but I watched his entire video (about 10min) and it's good stuff. I know because I do almost everything he does in here daily, slightly differently, but the basic principles are universal, and taught by many different qigong schools. I can tell he practices what he preaches because of the way he combines many techniques, the unorthodox names for the moves that he uses, and because he can feel how useful they are, and not simply going through a rigid set system like many qigong instructional videos that are rote, mechanical, and detailed (where often many of the details are arbitrary and not important). Also other details are telling. He wears loose clothing, is out in sunshine and nature, his kung fu shoes probably have cloth soles that can breathe through and exchange qi with the earth. He looks like he's about the qigong, and not about looking neat and professional to gain followers and 'likes'.
Tap and Slap document
I found a good description of what they called 'tapping and slapping', naming it independently almost exactly the same as what I call 'tap and slap', as part of the qigong gorilla heart sutra:
(lines 3&4)
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
Slow jogging (5min video)
A Japanese professor popularized this with a book, scientific study, and an international following of practitioners.
difference between 'slow jogging' and 'shake and bake':
While the distance travel pacing is similar, I have a much greater foot frequency (smaller distance step, much higher number of steps) to more easily modulate body heat generation, deep breathing, and 'tap and slap' benefits of gentle shock waves dissipating energy blockages through foot strikes.
shake and bake🏃👨🍳🥧
So you can see from the video below, I'm super relaxed, it doesn't even look like I get off the ground, but I am doing a mini-slow jog, and do get airborne with every step. My weight is on the balls of the feet all the time, the most strenuous part is towards the end where I demonstrate the legs kicking back in alternation, then kicking forward, and hopping on one continuously is the most strenuous.
This 2 minute sample, is about my usual pace. It takes about 15% more energy than it does to walk, and doesn't stress any joints, knees, spine, any more than walking does. I could do this hours nonstop easily. The difference between this and walking, is here I consciously do deep breathing (but relaxed, not forcing and stuffing my lungs beyond capacity), plus the gentle shock waves of the feet hitting the ground is a tap and slap, and the arms whipping around randomly give a much better stretch than the normal arm swinging exercises people do.
Bounce, lightbulb, arm swings
bounce:
What I'm doing with the bounces, there are lots of subtle things going on you can't really see unless I see you in person and show you. My arms are parallel to the ground, I'm bouncing with the whole body, so the ankles, knees, wrists, elbows, are not moving independently but bouncing in unison. You can see also I use 4 different angles on my wrist, to flex them in different directions. I'm not flexing the wrists independently, I'm letting the inertia of the whole body bounce flap the hands rotating about the wrist.
lightbulb:
The move where I'm rotating my hands as if I'm screwing in a light bulb, what you should notice that I do that's unusual, is I move my arms through all kind fo configurations. This is a great move not only to open up channels near your hands, one of the extremities where qi channels tend to get weak first, along with the feet, but it's a great diagnostic move to check how your qi is flowing in other parts of the body. For example, if the one configuration of lightbulb, say the one with your arms hanging down relaxed, feels a lot easier to do then the one where your arms are raised up in the sky, that shows weakness elsewhere in the body. If the lightbulb feels the same in any arm configuration, it means you got great qi flow. But if some configurations feel a lot harder to do, it means somwhere upstream the qi is getting choked off. So as you keep doing this move over the years, you'll notice it feels smoother, you can turn the lightbulb faster, and eventually it feels smooth in any configuration.
arm swings:
The key in getting the most out of arms swings, move with the whole body except for the arms. In other words pretend you can't move your arms independently. You can only propel them through the inertia of your feet, legs, core, pushing off the ground in unison.
The most subtle and hard to do properly version of the arm swing, is the last one, where I balance on one leg, let gravity inertia do the arm movement, the only arm muscle I'm exerting is the brief moment of pause between alternating between left and right side, and keeping the arc of the arm swing on a rail and not drifting off into wave cancelling random patterns.
Instead of pushups and planks, which are boring and limited in what angles and muscles get used,
you should do pushups and planks with many variations: various hand angles, width, distance between hand and feet, etc.
Especially good at hitting all angles, is what I call chappanaka. your hands are post for kayagatasati. You walk in a circle, revolving around the post your hands are 'tied' to. In the video, I walk about 180 about the post, alternating between crossing the leg under, or over the body. I do it about medium speed, usually I go slower, and sometimes faster.
At the end of the video, I do what I call 'flying cat cow', basically forward and backward bends alternating with each other, but hitting all kinds of angles people normally don't even attempt.
How do you know you're doing all of these shake and bake and related exercises correctly?
The ultimate test is this:
When you sit in jhana, you know how it feels, how a force pervades your entire body, like a water balloon being inflated.
In standing meditation, it feels about 90% the same force as sitting.
In walking meditation, walking slowly, about 70% of the forces you feel from sitting.
In doing shake and bake and similar classes of qigong gorilla exercises, you feel 50% - 70% of the jhanic forces as you do in sitting meditation.
I recommend shake and bake, as the optimal form of cardio. Only requires about 15% more energy expenditure from walking, so it's easy and safe to do for everyone, and no need to muster special willpower to do something as strenuous as jogging. You also don't need any space to do this exercise, you can even do it running in place.
