How Muscle Action Keeps Us Healthy

 Most people are familiar with the action of the heart — as the quintessential muscle of the body — that works by the action of alternating full contractions with full relaxations, and can work no other way because it is solely dedicated to that task. It doesn’t directly cause one to jump higher, run faster, or lift more weights — as many naively think. It’s primary function is to provide for that constancy of pressure that will cause blood to flow outward towards the rest of the body — depending on the action of the voluntary (skeletal) muscles to produce varying pressure differences through their own contractions and relaxations. That is why muscles that are “exercised” in that way, grow larger and healthier that are not exercised in that manner — rather than being equally developed because the heart is pumping blood equally everywhere.

The design of the musculature is that when it contacts, the insertion (distal/distant) moves towards the origin (proximal/center), while the venous blood flow also allows movement in this same direction back towards the center — with its many valves that prevent backflow. So the important concept that most people get wrong, is that the primary function of exercise is not to pull ump more blood into an already full muscle, but by contracting reduce the volume of the muscle to accelerate this flow out of those tissues, and upon relaxation, there is now a vacuum or void to draw fresh nutrients into that space with the constant activity of the heart and arterial blood vessels.

That is the health-giving process that was noted centuries early as the “vital life-force” — which the Chinese called “chi” and the Indians called “prana.” The important aspect was the recognition of “flow” — that could be enhanced by deliberate “practices” — long before they “discovered “ oxygen and circulation.

Flow is the principle by which things move and is interconnected, rather than the old concept of static categories in which nothing is related to anything else, and can never be changed or effected. As understanding increased, effort could be decreased — and one could achieve greater productivity and effectiveness by eliminating the extraneous (noise) and focus only on the significant — to greater effect. Rather than jumping higher, running faster, lifting more weight, etc., the essential could be reduced to the muscle state itself — as the difference between full contractions and full relaxation optimizing the flow by contracting (compressing) the waste products and inducing new nutrients by creating the void (space) for the new due to the constant (autonomous) action of the heart.

That change is entirely within the realm of the voluntary muscles to direct — especially when it is properly understood as the default action in the body rather than increasing the resistance to it. In fact, one wishes to decrease the resistance in going from one state to the other — because it is the difference in states, that makes the difference. People get no visible results from their efforts because they do not intentionally, deliberately, and dramatically change those muscular states — that optimize the flow. Their exercises consist of little to no movement at the furthest extremities at the axes of the neck, wrists, and ankles — where the retention is the problem. It doesn’t matter how much harder and faster the heart is working. The is virtually no movement and change of muscular states at the axes of extremities leading them to conclude that those are the most difficult body parts to develop — when the fact of the matter, is that they are not moving there specifically — and that changes the body.