Body Mind Mastery, page 8
— Anonymous
If you had no voluntary muscle tissue, you would spend your brief life as a puddle of protoplasm — a heap of skin, organs, and bones. People with muscular disabilities appreciate that which we take for granted: the ability to move at will.
Any physiologist will tell you that if you stimulate enough muscle fiber for a given demand over a period of time, the body will build larger fiber to meet the demand. Muscular strength increases in proportion to the effort of training. That all seems straightforward. Yet there’s more to muscle than meets the eye.
We all appreciate that strength is one of the primary qualities that comprise physical talent. But many of us do not use strength most effectively. Strength involves more than the ability to contract muscle tissue; it also involves your ability to control movement.
Many athletes who train intensively for strength develop large, powerful muscles, but may nevertheless have diminished effective strength because they are generally tense and haven’t ‘‘educated’’ their appropriate muscle groups in complementary tension-relaxation. They therefore can’t hit or throw as hard, run as fast, leap as high, or react as quickly as they might.
Since effective strength is the ability to relax the proper muscle groups while consciously tensing others, it should come as no surprise that babies have this ability. Put your finger in a baby’s grasp, and try to pull away. Those little hands are surprisingly relaxed — and surprisingly powerful.
Greatness lies not in being strong but in the right use of strength.
— Anonymous
One study compared the movement abilities of six-month-old babies and some professional football players. The athletes tried to copy every movement and posture of these babies for ten full minutes without stopping. Not a single athlete could keep up; they all dropped out from exhaustion within a few minutes.
Bodybuilders may appear to be the strongest athletes in terms of weight they can lift, but in the economies of strength, women gymnasts, who have less muscle bulk, embody effective strength in action. And look at the cat! You don’t see any muscle-bound cats walking around, yet what athlete can match a cat’s movement? I’ve seen cats jump ten feet straight up from a sitting position. A cat can be soundly napping, then instantly spring after a mouse with blinding speed, then, just as suddenly, stop and clean its paws, totally relaxed. The cat carries very little tension. You can squeeze its muscle to the bone, and it will show no pain. Try squeezing your calf muscles to the bone, and feel the tension.
Various exercise systems emphasize relaxation-in-movement as a primary objective. One such system, called eurythmics, involves the gradual tensing and relaxing of different parts of the body to a regular rhythm, coordinated with the breath, while maintaining complete relaxation of the rest of the body. It’s possible to eventually master the conscious tensing of twelve different parts of the body independently.
To experience relaxed strength, try the following exercise from the martial art of Aikido. This exercise is done with a partner, who will gradually attempt to bend your arm twice — the first time against your resistance, the second time against your nonresistance. Whether your partner can bend your arm in both or neither of the attempts is unimportant. Instead, feel the difference between “relaxed strength” and “tense strength.”
UNBENDABLE ARM
Test 1. Hold your right arm out in front of you, first clenched, arm slightly bent, with your wrist on your partner’s shoulder. Your partner puts one hand on the crook of your elbow and gradually begins to push down, in order to bend your arm (in the direction it normally bends, of course). You resist, tensing your arm.
Shake your arm loose before Test 2.
Test 2. Standing balanced, place your wrist on your partner’s shoulder as before, this time with your fingers extended and spread.
Your partner will again begin pushing downward gradually, as if to bend your arm.
This time, however, you’ll remain free of tension. Let your arm be totally relaxed, yet strong — not like a wet noodle. You do this by imagining a powerful flow of energy, like water gushing through a hose, continually flowing through your arm and out the ends of your extended fingers, shooting right through the wall for a thousand miles.
Let your awareness flow with the energy, continuing past your partner’s arm. As your partner begins to push more, imagine an increase in the power of the flow balancing the pressure.
Experiment with this exercise, and see if you begin to feel a new kind of relaxed strength.
With a little practice, your arm becomes nearly unbendable when relaxed and actually weaker when tensed. It works because you are using your muscles more efficiently — tensing only those muscle-groups you need. This develops effective strength with greater ease.
This next exercise highlights the way your mind can influence effective strength.
TENSION PUSH-UPS
You will do two push-ups with more tension, and two with less tension.
1. Beginning from an up position, do two push-ups at a slow-to-moderate pace, with every muscle in your body tensed. This is what it’s like to try. Clench your teeth, tighten your thighs, buttocks, stomach, neck. It’s exhausting, and makes the push-ups seem difficult, right?
To a lesser extent, this is what most athletes do during training, because they haven’t practiced conscious relaxation-in-movement.
2. For the second two push-ups, imagine that you’re a puppet on a string, suspended from the arms of a giant standing directly over you. The giant will do the work for you. Starting from the same up position, just relax down effortlessly, and imagine the giant pulling you up on the strings. Let the push-up happen by itself.
By using the image of “energy flow” or “movement happening by itself” in these two exercises, you create the psychophysical effect of relaxed strength, and all three centers — physical, mental, and emotional — fall into a natural relationship.
Strength, then, works best in a state of dynamic relaxation. The height you can jump from a standing position is a result of both your ability to relax and your ability to then push and spring. Try standing up, crouching down, tensing your legs as hard as you can, and jumping — you can hardly move.
Dale was captain of the Stanford gymnastics team. He was a floor-exercise and tumbling specialist, and was one of the hardest workers on the team. Each day, Dale would begin with calisthenics, then squat jumps for leg strength; he ran about three miles every day; he practiced his tumbling sequences over and over and over. His legs were well-muscled and his diet excellent. He was slim, yet in his tumbling he looked like he weighed five hundred pounds; he just couldn’t seem to get up into the air. A few beginning tumblers with legs like toothpicks would run out and tumble higher than he could. It used to drive him crazy.
Dale had plenty of muscle but too much tension. Besides, muscle weighs more than fat; those who must move quickly and lightly need light, sinewy muscles rather than large, bulky ones. Training with lighter weights but more repetitions works best for gymnasts, martial artists, and dancers, for example.
Your muscles develop in response to demand. Balance the demand for sheer power with relaxation. The next summer, Dale spent time performing relaxation and quickness drills, and his tumbling showed dramatic improvement.
By practicing dynamic relaxation, your movements, too, will show more grace with less effort, leading to improved speed, coordination, balance, rhythm, timing, and reflex speed in sport and life.
Suppleness
Suppleness is the embodiment of nonresistance.
For most of us, developing suppleness requires stretching exercises. Yet a baby needs no special exercises because it carries no chronic tension; neither did you, long ago. As you grew, however, you began to unconsciously tense or hold muscles — in your neck, shoulders, back, thighs, and abdomen — in response to physical pain, psychological threat, or emotional upset.
Although thoughts and emotions come and go, they impose tensions on the body — tension that can become habitual or chronic over time. As the years pass, these holding patterns result in stiffness, aches and pains, and limited range of motion. That’s when stretching exercises become necessary.
The first step in releasing chronic tension is to become aware that it exists. Notice when you begin to tense; then shake loose and relax. Do this more and more, until relaxation and release become a new habit replacing the old.
Many athletes push and pull their bodies through various extended positions either casually or aggressively, gritting their teeth in pain. This kind of program is a “two steps forward, one step back” approach. It’s painful, and it sets up reactive tension (like those who struggle to diet, only to end up bingeing).
The best recipe I know for suppleness combines two parts relaxation with one part stretching. Without doing any stretching, you become more supple when you’re relaxed, on vacation, or free from your usual concerns.
If you ask your body to grow more supple, it will, but you must ask nicely. The following guidelines are polite ways to ask your body to stretch. Your body is like a young child — make courteous, gentle requests, and you’ll receive greater cooperation.
WHOLE BODY STRETCH
1. When it comes to your own body, you are the stretching expert. You know more about precisely where, and to what degree, you need to stretch than anyone else, for the body in question is yours.
Whenever you feel tight, move into a slightly more extended range of motion than you’re used to. That sounds almost too simple, but that’s what stretching entails. You don’t need to be an expert on anatomy — just feel where it’s tight and stretch there. Breathe deeply, and imagine the breath going directly to the tightness, and releasing it. Be gentle and patient.
2. Generally it’s best to stay relaxed when stretching, but you’ll make even more progress if you deliberately tense and work the muscles against the direction of the stretch as you stretch, and then follow it by relaxing once again.
3. There are two kinds of stretching: stretching like a cat waking from a nap and intense stretching to increase range of motion. Cat stretching should be pleasurable, while intense stretching will naturally involve some discomfort. The key is to balance between pleasure and pain.
4. Only stretch a little, but do it every day. It’s better to do three or four minutes of relaxed stretching every day than fifteen minutes of grinding it out, once or twice a week. Ask the body nicely, but ask it often.
5. Stretch when the body is warm. It’s easier, it feels better, and it does more good. Cold stretching hurts more — and you’re more likely to be tense.
6. Experiment and trust your instincts as to what style of stretch works best for you, and how long to hold a stretch.
Besides “The Peaceful Warrior Warm-up” you’ll soon learn, I offer no specific stretching exercises here; you can determine what your body needs for your own activities. What movements do you normally perform in training and daily life? Work on that range of motion.
The object of stretching is to open and free all joints, depending on the needs of your favorite activities. As you become supple beyond the actual point of need, you also extend your range of power, since the more supple you are, the less energy you need to expend in order to move.
If you would like to pursue greater flexibility in your body and your life you might enroll in a class in yoga, T’ai Chi, gymnastics, or dance. One of the best books on the subject is Stretching, by Bob Anderson.
Freedom from Lower Back Pain
Lower back pain, a complaint so common as to be nearly universal, may originate in mental, emotional, or situational stress related to business, relationships, or other concerns, but the five most common physical sources of lower back pain include:
1. Weak abdominal muscles
2. Stiff lower back
3. Weak lower back
4. Tight hamstrings (back of knees)
5. Tight quadriceps (front of thighs)
By strengthening and stretching these areas, you can reduce or eliminate most lower back pain. Chiropractic and deep-tissue massage can help relieve some of the tension and imbalances that cause pain but will not usually last without applied stretching and strength work in these key areas, which allow for proper postural alignment in the field of gravity.
Suppleness, strength, and relaxation are intimately related. To become natural, movement requires all three. No amount of strength will freely move a stiff joint. If you want to lift your leg high into the air to do a dance step, kick a football, or perform a gymnastics movement, you need both the strength to lift the leg and the suppleness to allow the full range of muscle motion. Effective movement always requires the integration and balance of suppleness and strength.
Suppleness developed through awareness of tension, conscious relaxation, and proper stretching will improve your game and decrease muscle pulls, sprains, and related injuries. It will increase the muscle’s responsiveness through increased circulation. You’ll feel more youthful, awake, and alive in daily life as your range of movement increases. You can become more supple at forty, fifty, or sixty than you were in high school.
As you remember to relax into life, moment to moment, you’ll become more supple. As you increase your suppleness, you’ll relax more easily. You’ll also notice another change: an increase in sensitivity, which we examine now.
Sensitivity
A master of T’ai Chi was so sensitive to the forces around him that if a fly landed on his shoulder, he would sway gently under its impact. Legend has it that a sparrow was unable to jump from his open palm and fly, because as it pushed away, his hand would sink beneath its legs. Such sensitivity reflects our own potential, refined through practice.
Sensitivity includes all our five senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. But balance and kinesthetic awareness are most relevant to athletes. Sensitivity to our inner and outer environments allows for greater coordination between mind and muscle, and between our various body parts.
Someone with excellent coordination also has superior timing and rhythm, along with refined balance and fast reflexes. Coordination, balance, timing, rhythm, and reflex speed are all interrelated forms of sensitivity, which allow faster learning and greater capacity.
If you concentrate on one aspect of sensitivity, such as balance, the other aspects will also develop. This is one reason it’s wise to expose yourself to a variety of movement activities. Wise golfers, tennis players, or other athletes take beginning gymnastics, dance, hatha yoga, or martial arts. All demand more refined balance, suppleness, and relaxation and will improve their chances of success both in sport and the dynamic challenges of everyday life.
Beyond what I’ve already outlined, you don’t have to do anything to achieve greater sensitivity, for it improves naturally as you remember to relax and pay attention.
Sensitivity enables more efficient learning because your body picks up cues faster — you feel errors and correct them more quickly. Your skill at imitating the experts improves, because you open the circuits between mind and movement. You free yourself from old patterns of tension as you become sensitive to them. But you have to recognize an error before you can correct it. Try this experiment to discover how relaxation enhances sensitivity:
RELAXATION AND SENSITIVITY
Test 1. Look around you and find two nearby objects of different weight, such as a paperweight and a pencil.
First tense your arm and hands — right out to your fingertips — as tense and tight as you can. In this state of tension, pick up one object and put it down, then pick up the other object and put it down. You’ll note that it is almost impossible to sense the different weights.
Test 2. Next, shake your arm loose and let it relax as much as possible. Then pick the objects up, one after the other. This time, notice how easy it is to sense the difference in weight.
Under normal conditions, you’ll probably never be as tense as in the first part of this test. But on more subtle levels, even a small amount of tension interferes with refined balance, timing, coordination, and reflex speed. The body mind master, like the cat, is a paragon of apparent contrasts — capable of unleashing awesome power, yet so soft, smooth, and sensitive that he or she can recognize the most subtle cues.
It takes more than running out and playing blindly to develop a foundation of natural physical talent. First, reestablish a natural order of training, beginning with relaxation, the master key to talent. Then develop strength without wasting energy. Free of unnecessary tension, you can then develop flowing suppleness. Combined strength and suppleness then form a foundation of sensitivity and you achieve excellence with greater ease.
Still, learning skills requires practice, and practice requires stamina. We now turn to stamina, the fourth key to physical talent.
Stamina
No athlete ever became an expert without investing time and energy. So stamina — or the ability to work over a period of time — is a cornerstone of talent.
Stamina mirrors the law of accommodation: that demand over time develops desired qualities. It takes stamina to perform any action over an extended period of time. Writing a book, for example, requires a kind of stamina different from running a marathon. Anyone caught in rush-hour traffic or long lines at the bank needs mental and emotional forms of stamina.
Stamina is a natural response to training. If you place a demand on your lungs and heart to bring oxygen to the tissues more rapidly, they’ll accommodate. If you make a demand on your muscles to work for longer periods of time, they’ll adapt to that demand.
Stamina is interrelated with relaxation, strength, and suppleness. As you release chronic tension and relax, you improve stamina. With greater effective strength, you can work more over a longer time. As you become supple, you move through greater range with less energy. It takes time to get into shape, but not as much time as some of us fear.
Lawrence Morehouse, a UCLA researcher, with other colleagues has found that in six weeks of inactivity, you can lose eighty percent of your conditioning. And in six more weeks of progressive training, you can also regain 80 percent of your peak condition.
If you had no voluntary muscle tissue, you would spend your brief life as a puddle of protoplasm — a heap of skin, organs, and bones. People with muscular disabilities appreciate that which we take for granted: the ability to move at will.
Any physiologist will tell you that if you stimulate enough muscle fiber for a given demand over a period of time, the body will build larger fiber to meet the demand. Muscular strength increases in proportion to the effort of training. That all seems straightforward. Yet there’s more to muscle than meets the eye.
We all appreciate that strength is one of the primary qualities that comprise physical talent. But many of us do not use strength most effectively. Strength involves more than the ability to contract muscle tissue; it also involves your ability to control movement.
Many athletes who train intensively for strength develop large, powerful muscles, but may nevertheless have diminished effective strength because they are generally tense and haven’t ‘‘educated’’ their appropriate muscle groups in complementary tension-relaxation. They therefore can’t hit or throw as hard, run as fast, leap as high, or react as quickly as they might.
Since effective strength is the ability to relax the proper muscle groups while consciously tensing others, it should come as no surprise that babies have this ability. Put your finger in a baby’s grasp, and try to pull away. Those little hands are surprisingly relaxed — and surprisingly powerful.
Greatness lies not in being strong but in the right use of strength.
— Anonymous
One study compared the movement abilities of six-month-old babies and some professional football players. The athletes tried to copy every movement and posture of these babies for ten full minutes without stopping. Not a single athlete could keep up; they all dropped out from exhaustion within a few minutes.
Bodybuilders may appear to be the strongest athletes in terms of weight they can lift, but in the economies of strength, women gymnasts, who have less muscle bulk, embody effective strength in action. And look at the cat! You don’t see any muscle-bound cats walking around, yet what athlete can match a cat’s movement? I’ve seen cats jump ten feet straight up from a sitting position. A cat can be soundly napping, then instantly spring after a mouse with blinding speed, then, just as suddenly, stop and clean its paws, totally relaxed. The cat carries very little tension. You can squeeze its muscle to the bone, and it will show no pain. Try squeezing your calf muscles to the bone, and feel the tension.
Various exercise systems emphasize relaxation-in-movement as a primary objective. One such system, called eurythmics, involves the gradual tensing and relaxing of different parts of the body to a regular rhythm, coordinated with the breath, while maintaining complete relaxation of the rest of the body. It’s possible to eventually master the conscious tensing of twelve different parts of the body independently.
To experience relaxed strength, try the following exercise from the martial art of Aikido. This exercise is done with a partner, who will gradually attempt to bend your arm twice — the first time against your resistance, the second time against your nonresistance. Whether your partner can bend your arm in both or neither of the attempts is unimportant. Instead, feel the difference between “relaxed strength” and “tense strength.”
UNBENDABLE ARM
Test 1. Hold your right arm out in front of you, first clenched, arm slightly bent, with your wrist on your partner’s shoulder. Your partner puts one hand on the crook of your elbow and gradually begins to push down, in order to bend your arm (in the direction it normally bends, of course). You resist, tensing your arm.
Shake your arm loose before Test 2.
Test 2. Standing balanced, place your wrist on your partner’s shoulder as before, this time with your fingers extended and spread.
Your partner will again begin pushing downward gradually, as if to bend your arm.
This time, however, you’ll remain free of tension. Let your arm be totally relaxed, yet strong — not like a wet noodle. You do this by imagining a powerful flow of energy, like water gushing through a hose, continually flowing through your arm and out the ends of your extended fingers, shooting right through the wall for a thousand miles.
Let your awareness flow with the energy, continuing past your partner’s arm. As your partner begins to push more, imagine an increase in the power of the flow balancing the pressure.
Experiment with this exercise, and see if you begin to feel a new kind of relaxed strength.
With a little practice, your arm becomes nearly unbendable when relaxed and actually weaker when tensed. It works because you are using your muscles more efficiently — tensing only those muscle-groups you need. This develops effective strength with greater ease.
This next exercise highlights the way your mind can influence effective strength.
TENSION PUSH-UPS
You will do two push-ups with more tension, and two with less tension.
1. Beginning from an up position, do two push-ups at a slow-to-moderate pace, with every muscle in your body tensed. This is what it’s like to try. Clench your teeth, tighten your thighs, buttocks, stomach, neck. It’s exhausting, and makes the push-ups seem difficult, right?
To a lesser extent, this is what most athletes do during training, because they haven’t practiced conscious relaxation-in-movement.
2. For the second two push-ups, imagine that you’re a puppet on a string, suspended from the arms of a giant standing directly over you. The giant will do the work for you. Starting from the same up position, just relax down effortlessly, and imagine the giant pulling you up on the strings. Let the push-up happen by itself.
By using the image of “energy flow” or “movement happening by itself” in these two exercises, you create the psychophysical effect of relaxed strength, and all three centers — physical, mental, and emotional — fall into a natural relationship.
Strength, then, works best in a state of dynamic relaxation. The height you can jump from a standing position is a result of both your ability to relax and your ability to then push and spring. Try standing up, crouching down, tensing your legs as hard as you can, and jumping — you can hardly move.
Dale was captain of the Stanford gymnastics team. He was a floor-exercise and tumbling specialist, and was one of the hardest workers on the team. Each day, Dale would begin with calisthenics, then squat jumps for leg strength; he ran about three miles every day; he practiced his tumbling sequences over and over and over. His legs were well-muscled and his diet excellent. He was slim, yet in his tumbling he looked like he weighed five hundred pounds; he just couldn’t seem to get up into the air. A few beginning tumblers with legs like toothpicks would run out and tumble higher than he could. It used to drive him crazy.
Dale had plenty of muscle but too much tension. Besides, muscle weighs more than fat; those who must move quickly and lightly need light, sinewy muscles rather than large, bulky ones. Training with lighter weights but more repetitions works best for gymnasts, martial artists, and dancers, for example.
Your muscles develop in response to demand. Balance the demand for sheer power with relaxation. The next summer, Dale spent time performing relaxation and quickness drills, and his tumbling showed dramatic improvement.
By practicing dynamic relaxation, your movements, too, will show more grace with less effort, leading to improved speed, coordination, balance, rhythm, timing, and reflex speed in sport and life.
Suppleness
Suppleness is the embodiment of nonresistance.
For most of us, developing suppleness requires stretching exercises. Yet a baby needs no special exercises because it carries no chronic tension; neither did you, long ago. As you grew, however, you began to unconsciously tense or hold muscles — in your neck, shoulders, back, thighs, and abdomen — in response to physical pain, psychological threat, or emotional upset.
Although thoughts and emotions come and go, they impose tensions on the body — tension that can become habitual or chronic over time. As the years pass, these holding patterns result in stiffness, aches and pains, and limited range of motion. That’s when stretching exercises become necessary.
The first step in releasing chronic tension is to become aware that it exists. Notice when you begin to tense; then shake loose and relax. Do this more and more, until relaxation and release become a new habit replacing the old.
Many athletes push and pull their bodies through various extended positions either casually or aggressively, gritting their teeth in pain. This kind of program is a “two steps forward, one step back” approach. It’s painful, and it sets up reactive tension (like those who struggle to diet, only to end up bingeing).
The best recipe I know for suppleness combines two parts relaxation with one part stretching. Without doing any stretching, you become more supple when you’re relaxed, on vacation, or free from your usual concerns.
If you ask your body to grow more supple, it will, but you must ask nicely. The following guidelines are polite ways to ask your body to stretch. Your body is like a young child — make courteous, gentle requests, and you’ll receive greater cooperation.
WHOLE BODY STRETCH
1. When it comes to your own body, you are the stretching expert. You know more about precisely where, and to what degree, you need to stretch than anyone else, for the body in question is yours.
Whenever you feel tight, move into a slightly more extended range of motion than you’re used to. That sounds almost too simple, but that’s what stretching entails. You don’t need to be an expert on anatomy — just feel where it’s tight and stretch there. Breathe deeply, and imagine the breath going directly to the tightness, and releasing it. Be gentle and patient.
2. Generally it’s best to stay relaxed when stretching, but you’ll make even more progress if you deliberately tense and work the muscles against the direction of the stretch as you stretch, and then follow it by relaxing once again.
3. There are two kinds of stretching: stretching like a cat waking from a nap and intense stretching to increase range of motion. Cat stretching should be pleasurable, while intense stretching will naturally involve some discomfort. The key is to balance between pleasure and pain.
4. Only stretch a little, but do it every day. It’s better to do three or four minutes of relaxed stretching every day than fifteen minutes of grinding it out, once or twice a week. Ask the body nicely, but ask it often.
5. Stretch when the body is warm. It’s easier, it feels better, and it does more good. Cold stretching hurts more — and you’re more likely to be tense.
6. Experiment and trust your instincts as to what style of stretch works best for you, and how long to hold a stretch.
Besides “The Peaceful Warrior Warm-up” you’ll soon learn, I offer no specific stretching exercises here; you can determine what your body needs for your own activities. What movements do you normally perform in training and daily life? Work on that range of motion.
The object of stretching is to open and free all joints, depending on the needs of your favorite activities. As you become supple beyond the actual point of need, you also extend your range of power, since the more supple you are, the less energy you need to expend in order to move.
If you would like to pursue greater flexibility in your body and your life you might enroll in a class in yoga, T’ai Chi, gymnastics, or dance. One of the best books on the subject is Stretching, by Bob Anderson.
Freedom from Lower Back Pain
Lower back pain, a complaint so common as to be nearly universal, may originate in mental, emotional, or situational stress related to business, relationships, or other concerns, but the five most common physical sources of lower back pain include:
1. Weak abdominal muscles
2. Stiff lower back
3. Weak lower back
4. Tight hamstrings (back of knees)
5. Tight quadriceps (front of thighs)
By strengthening and stretching these areas, you can reduce or eliminate most lower back pain. Chiropractic and deep-tissue massage can help relieve some of the tension and imbalances that cause pain but will not usually last without applied stretching and strength work in these key areas, which allow for proper postural alignment in the field of gravity.
Suppleness, strength, and relaxation are intimately related. To become natural, movement requires all three. No amount of strength will freely move a stiff joint. If you want to lift your leg high into the air to do a dance step, kick a football, or perform a gymnastics movement, you need both the strength to lift the leg and the suppleness to allow the full range of muscle motion. Effective movement always requires the integration and balance of suppleness and strength.
Suppleness developed through awareness of tension, conscious relaxation, and proper stretching will improve your game and decrease muscle pulls, sprains, and related injuries. It will increase the muscle’s responsiveness through increased circulation. You’ll feel more youthful, awake, and alive in daily life as your range of movement increases. You can become more supple at forty, fifty, or sixty than you were in high school.
As you remember to relax into life, moment to moment, you’ll become more supple. As you increase your suppleness, you’ll relax more easily. You’ll also notice another change: an increase in sensitivity, which we examine now.
Sensitivity
A master of T’ai Chi was so sensitive to the forces around him that if a fly landed on his shoulder, he would sway gently under its impact. Legend has it that a sparrow was unable to jump from his open palm and fly, because as it pushed away, his hand would sink beneath its legs. Such sensitivity reflects our own potential, refined through practice.
Sensitivity includes all our five senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. But balance and kinesthetic awareness are most relevant to athletes. Sensitivity to our inner and outer environments allows for greater coordination between mind and muscle, and between our various body parts.
Someone with excellent coordination also has superior timing and rhythm, along with refined balance and fast reflexes. Coordination, balance, timing, rhythm, and reflex speed are all interrelated forms of sensitivity, which allow faster learning and greater capacity.
If you concentrate on one aspect of sensitivity, such as balance, the other aspects will also develop. This is one reason it’s wise to expose yourself to a variety of movement activities. Wise golfers, tennis players, or other athletes take beginning gymnastics, dance, hatha yoga, or martial arts. All demand more refined balance, suppleness, and relaxation and will improve their chances of success both in sport and the dynamic challenges of everyday life.
Beyond what I’ve already outlined, you don’t have to do anything to achieve greater sensitivity, for it improves naturally as you remember to relax and pay attention.
Sensitivity enables more efficient learning because your body picks up cues faster — you feel errors and correct them more quickly. Your skill at imitating the experts improves, because you open the circuits between mind and movement. You free yourself from old patterns of tension as you become sensitive to them. But you have to recognize an error before you can correct it. Try this experiment to discover how relaxation enhances sensitivity:
RELAXATION AND SENSITIVITY
Test 1. Look around you and find two nearby objects of different weight, such as a paperweight and a pencil.
First tense your arm and hands — right out to your fingertips — as tense and tight as you can. In this state of tension, pick up one object and put it down, then pick up the other object and put it down. You’ll note that it is almost impossible to sense the different weights.
Test 2. Next, shake your arm loose and let it relax as much as possible. Then pick the objects up, one after the other. This time, notice how easy it is to sense the difference in weight.
Under normal conditions, you’ll probably never be as tense as in the first part of this test. But on more subtle levels, even a small amount of tension interferes with refined balance, timing, coordination, and reflex speed. The body mind master, like the cat, is a paragon of apparent contrasts — capable of unleashing awesome power, yet so soft, smooth, and sensitive that he or she can recognize the most subtle cues.
It takes more than running out and playing blindly to develop a foundation of natural physical talent. First, reestablish a natural order of training, beginning with relaxation, the master key to talent. Then develop strength without wasting energy. Free of unnecessary tension, you can then develop flowing suppleness. Combined strength and suppleness then form a foundation of sensitivity and you achieve excellence with greater ease.
Still, learning skills requires practice, and practice requires stamina. We now turn to stamina, the fourth key to physical talent.
Stamina
No athlete ever became an expert without investing time and energy. So stamina — or the ability to work over a period of time — is a cornerstone of talent.
Stamina mirrors the law of accommodation: that demand over time develops desired qualities. It takes stamina to perform any action over an extended period of time. Writing a book, for example, requires a kind of stamina different from running a marathon. Anyone caught in rush-hour traffic or long lines at the bank needs mental and emotional forms of stamina.
Stamina is a natural response to training. If you place a demand on your lungs and heart to bring oxygen to the tissues more rapidly, they’ll accommodate. If you make a demand on your muscles to work for longer periods of time, they’ll adapt to that demand.
Stamina is interrelated with relaxation, strength, and suppleness. As you release chronic tension and relax, you improve stamina. With greater effective strength, you can work more over a longer time. As you become supple, you move through greater range with less energy. It takes time to get into shape, but not as much time as some of us fear.
Lawrence Morehouse, a UCLA researcher, with other colleagues has found that in six weeks of inactivity, you can lose eighty percent of your conditioning. And in six more weeks of progressive training, you can also regain 80 percent of your peak condition.
