Saturday, February 11, 2023

All in One

 A better question is which one movement requires the activation and engagement of all the muscles of the body to achieve?

That would be rotating the head 360 degrees from left to right, and back again. A hundred years ago, a doctor recommended this movement he called ”The Giant Swing” — as the cure for all common ailments — because it enhanced the circulation throughout the body — beginning with the head.

One of the great afflictions of modern times is the problem of the dementias — which is the condition of the brain becoming disengaged (dysfunctional) from the rest of the body, so while the heart and lungs may continue to function (automatically), all the other cognitive and responsiveness of the body has ceased — increasingly for ten, twenty, thirty years or more — requiring many other lives to sustain that one. Of course that is not a sustainable course for the future because we can’t have increasingly many caring for the one — who is incapable of doing anything for themselves — or we’re back into the more primitive times in which everyone was a vassal sacrificing their life for the Pharoah or chief — who upon their death, took everybody with them to continue serving them in the next life.

Hopefully we live in more enlightened times — in which each individual is empowered to be all they can be — and not one part overruling every other — but integrating the whole as the summation of every action. That genius of evolution can also be noticed at the other extremities of the body where the critical faculties are. Those are the movements most advantageous and beneficial to do so — at the extremities of the head, hands and feet — which are ultimately the movements of articulation and expression — and not the six-pack or core muscles, whose main function is to support and stabilize the movements occurring at the hands, feet and head.

Anybody with any smattering of understanding of physiology knows that to produce a desired work, the insertion (distal) of a muscle must contract towards the origin (proximal), which in turn, is attached to insertion of the anchoring muscle — so that a contraction from the most distant (distal) point, triggers the contraction of every proximal muscle back towards the center of the body close to the heart, and thus even the ancients recognized it as the center of power. But that power can only be triggered from the most distal insertion back towards the origin — and never vice-versa.

Naturally, that is the only way to engage most of the muscles with an economy and efficiency of movement — or one has to work out each muscle in isolation individually (660+) which is a very laborious process resulting in the disproportionate development of so many exercisers — and most egregious among the many novice bodybuilders who develop their upper bodies to the complete neglect of their lower bodies, and then to every disproportion imaginable because they are not exercising with this balance and integration foremost in mind.

And thus in their older ages, may still have impressive six-packs and biceps, but are no longer capable of moving their heads — and all other head functioning as well, which of course, include one’s cognitive functioning. This is particularly striking if one ever has the opportunity to visit a place where all the people there are suffering from this lack of cognitive functioning — and every other expressions we’ve come to regard as distinctly and uniquely human — for lives we no longer recognize or are responsive.

The same goes for these people who shuffle along each day thinking the objective is to walk or run a certain amount with no discernible foot movement — when it is only the articulation of the foot that really matters. That’s why high jumpers can jump; they have to use their foot as levers to thrust them high — and no amount of shuffling their feet, is going to get them off the ground. In throwing or batting, one has to turn the wrist — for any meaningful result to occur. That is the construction of the human body and how it is designed to function, maintain, and optimize their abilities — and not to prematurely self-destruct and abuse by doing all the wrong things so that we need replacement parts — which again, can be endless.

So that is the question we really want to be asking — how to develop this greater whole — including the brain, touch, balance — to be firing on all cylinders, and not just be one more lop-sided developed person in the world thinking the part is the whole of the universe. That’s not how it works.

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