shake and bake 🏃👨‍🍳🥧: "it's better than jogging"

I borrowed the name "shake and bake" from a decades old, popular cooking product. 30 second video. If you're vegetarian, pretend she's baking tofu cutlets or mock chicken made of wheat gluten. Let's all pretend we don't know about the 40 day life cycle of where your fried chicken came from (5min video) or 2min video UK farm. 

"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.

1. olympic runner in barefoot relaxed training mode, not slow at all, but good model to study for good mechanics and relaxed natural movement.
2. 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.

Chappanaka exercise, named after SN 35.247

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.