Mental skills personal experiment (3): Interruption – sick days (other comments)
December 9th has been the first hot day in São Paulo. Quite a few people are sensitive to this sudden transition and I am one of them. Blurred vision, no appetite, extreme fatigue and mental confusion are only some of the symptoms. I only know I am hungry when my head feels heavy and I can’t move – some weird hypoglycemic reaction to heat. Have no idea why.
For this reason, except for meditating, nothing could be done – especially because I passed out trying to work out.
So let’s talk a little about general principles in this experiment.
1. The relevance of the qigong standing position.
Also called “zhang gong” (or zhan zhuang), it is one of qigong’s standing positions. Here is an illustration of one form of going it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhan_zhuang
It seems to me to have evident relations with the Horse Stance in Kung fu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_stance ). The Wikipedia text above mentions this relationship.
As a former fencing athlete, I learned that standing positions have more to it than just practicing stability and balance.
First of all, it is a meditation practice. Personally, I feel it is the most effective one. I usually use visualization with breathing during its practice.
I may be wrong, but when I succeeded in practicing zhan zhuang for more than seven or eight days, I noticed that my body adjusted to more sitted positions, approaching more and more the Horse Stance (unintentionally).
In the beginning, it is hard to stand for more than five or eight minutes. Physical discomfort starts interfering with the ability to concentrate and we just lose focus. I decided to time the extent to which my body remained standing each day, and it naturally increases.
The relevance of doing this alone, in undisturbed environments is, as Rob pointed out earlier, to be able to reproduce it in “real performance” environments. Another explanation, rendering on Eastern knowledge systems, is that this practice is designed to built the strength and stamina that will be used, or employed, in other situations. Just like the charging of a battery, that will later be used to perform work.
- The relevance of sitted meditation
Whole different ball game, but equally necessary. Makes a difference when focus has to be maintained under extreme stressful situations (when everybody else is stressed or trying to get even more stressed). It also seems to make the process of producing the “energy effect” (whatever that is) during strength tasks easier.
Tomorrow I must remember to speak about space – for example, the power cage or the platform as “consecrated ground” where rituals may legitimately be performed. Good occasion to discuss the ritual aspect of these practices.
OBS – Not only these have been exceedingly hot days, but I accidentally ingested a toxic plant. Not fun.
Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
Mental skills personal experiment (2): energy and abdomen (december 8)
- Meditation – about 10’
- Breathing – very little
- Weight training – pecs & triceps general strength, upper back postural
- Stretching
- Flexibility
Details
1. It’s been about one week or a little more since I haven’t practiced meditation. It makes a difference. It seems there’s a breakthrough after 5-7 days continuous practice and the curve of tolerance/body need for meditation enters a plateau
2. Zhan-gong – adapted its practice to this experiment. Works better than other martial qigong exercises I tried. Consists of keeping the traditional zhan-gong position combined with breathing and visualization. Inspiration = flow up from the Earth, up legs, following front part of lower abdomen; expiration = flow down from sky, throat, spine, sacral area, turning in and forward as it reaches lower abd. Breathing this way creates a white glowing ball at lower abdomen. Haven’t done it in a while – makes a great difference.
3. Weight training: almost impossible to apply qigong to any workout exercise yesterday. The gym was full and for some reason too many people decided they wanted to assist me. IMPORTANT: must develop ways to focus and apply energy techniques while under the care of others, since this is what actually happens at competitions. Yesterday I could only practice my “thing” on triceps-pulley and parallel bar exercises. Even without a lot of focus, it was quite effective: breathed in and out zhan-gong-like, visualized the glowing ball, contracted the abdomen and pumped about 10 abdominal expirations. Tried to visualized conducting strength to triceps and pecs, eyes closed. Opening the eyes still spoils the effect – I suddenly lose strength.
Observation: yesterday was the first exceedingly hot day of the year. I have low blood pressure and felt somewhat dizzy and weak. Even in this condition, “concentrated” exercises were quite different from “non-concentrated”. Was able to reach (very briefly) the state of disconnection with the environment. I suspect this is the key to it.
Questions:
- How important it is to contract abdomen
- Timing
- Team-work (in meets and training, how to deal with team-mates and helpers)
Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
Mental skills personal experiment (1): Eastern martial arts traditions and their application to strength sports
Strength sports are still a lot about pushing the athlete through the stress curve. I am a competitive powerlifter and a researcher and I have been looking at this subject from inside and out. From the inside, there are two distinct approaches to achieving the “special maximum strength” observed in certain meets: the extreme stress-driven performance, with a lot of screaming, hitting and other means of enhancing alertness and stress response, and the focused approach. The latter is less common.
With the help of a more experienced and accomplished lifter, I came to adopt the focused approach about a year and a half ago. We called it the “white chair thing”. Basically, I spent the moments preceding my turn to lift facing the back of an available white plastic chair, emptying my mind. It is hard to claim this is the one or chief reason why my performance leaped to another level, I broke a couple of national and continental records and visibly improved. There were other factors involved.
After this event, however, I started systematically searching for evidence in the literature. Besides a very old article from decades ago showing competent Olympic lifters performed mental rehearsal of their lifts in opposition to less competent ones, there was very little published material. The search brought me to martial arts techniques. That, however, is a whole different realm of encoded knowledge. I wanted to understand the concept and application of QIGONG training to strength tasks.
The only way to do it, it seemed to me, was to learn through practice. I spent one year (from November 2007 to October 2008) learning qigong in a tai-chi-chuan program. During this one year, I was frustrated. My performance was irregular, mediocre at competitions and my injuries were a real impediment.
About three weeks after I quit tai-chi-chuan, however, I started applying some qigong techniques in weight training. The results impressed me. I want to create a self-experiment on this and record my results. I haven’t been doing this the way I want.
I hope to get some feedback, encouragement and even a little scolding if needed to carry on this initiative. If I am right, this might be of great help to many athletes who still believe they need a lot of stress enhancing devices to achieve good marks.
Marilia
Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
