New Year’s Evolutions part deux
I’m happy to announce that I am now able to sit and blog rather than have to lay down and blog as I usually do. I paid a pretty penny today for an erogonic office chair. Really what I’m doing is kneeling with just ever so minimal butt support. It’s better than laying because when I laid, I had to have my head supported and the constant cervical and upper thoracic flexion was giving me poor posture. And that’s no good for nobody. That’s a nice intro to the next bit of evolving I decided to do this year:
I’ve decided that I can no longer train for bodybuilding purporses pretty much whatsoever until I take care of my back and shoulder problems completely-or at least damn close to completely. It was time to stop kidding myself. I know full well the importance of balance of the physique and maintaining proper length tension relationships(making sure everything is pulling on everything else just right) and continuing to train for hypertrophy, or even just increased strength, in muscle groups that are already way out of balance with others that are severely injured just doesn’t make sense. So, having made that decision, I’m happy to announce that I have come a good long ways in just a matter of a few weeks. I’m now able to sit on couches and even regular chairs for extended periods of time without a lot of pain and with much less radiation into my butt and calf-and I’ve even been able to maintain my neuromuscular connection to my calf pretty well despite all the sitting-something I was never able to do before(my calf would always ‘turn off’ after a lot of sitting before).
In rehabbing my back and whole core area, I’ve developed a real…well I wouldn’t say love, but interest in exercise and exercise theory again. If you’ve read this blog before, you know there’s been a lot of ups and downs in regards to that. The body is like a big puzzle and I love puzzles, I love seeing them come together, and I love figuring this out-that’s giving me a lot of strong positive connections to working out. I’ve come to a lot of conclusions about not only myself but also about the way almost all of us train today that I’m including in the book that I mentioned a while back. This is all very exciting for me. I’ve found kind of a lot of chinks in the armour of applied exercise science and biomechanics-not in the science itself as that is pretty sound, but in the way professionals(and definitely amateurs) are practicing it in the gym. I’m really looking forward to sharing it all.
The biggest problem I see thus far is the exercise selection as the result of a certain diagnosis. For instance, if we find that a person has weak glute medes, we often tell that person to do a lateral walk because it’s a common glute mede exercise. Unfortunately, despite that fact that we assessed and diagnosed the person, we’ve forgotten to assess the exercise. A lateral walk is often good enough, but it’s also a shortened version of the glute mede’s full range of motion, which will, beyond a shadow of a doubt, lead to poor length tension relationships with the rest of the lumbo-pelvic hip complex. So the science/the diagnosis is often correct but the exercise selection in relation to it is not, and that’s due to simple ignorance. Professionals are saying ‘oh, glute mede issue and then just pointing to a glute mede exercise.’ A proper glute mede movement would start in a fully adducted or internally rotated position-which isn’t possible with two legs, you have to do it one leg at a time either laying on your side on a bench or attaching your ankle to a cable and brings the leg over the other to begin the movement.
The second evolution, much like the very first from yesterday has to do with diet and me being on the outside what I am on the inside. I’ve been raw for coming on 5 years now and I still have junk food cravings every now and again. Not tons, but here and there. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not in my best interest to attempt to beat those cravings by abstinence alone-in fact, it’s consciously choosing the slow way of diong it.
As I said, we learn our way out of things and if we haven’t assessed the situation yet, it needs to come up again so we can assess it and break it down-so we can get a grip on it and understand it. Otherwise, instead of learning our way out of the behavior so it’s taken care of for good, we attempt to avoid it for good…which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, given the great deal of time and effort that takes and the discomfort it causes. I would much rather just have a better understanding of it and be done with it rather than have a poor understanding and fight it forever.
So what I’ve done now is what I’ve always told everyone else to do but never allowed myself(because of pride of who I was and the person I felt everyone thought and expected me to be) and that is act. I am acting on the last couple of feelings, so as to grind them out, to wittle them out…to narrow my options for action. If acting on one feeling produces an undesirable result and that result is clear and understood, the feeling is less likely to be used again as a way for the body to get itself out of discomfort.
It’s simply acting on old conditioning(I am a comfort eater you know) and then focusing on and picking apart and pedantically assessing the situation. How does it make me feel right then? How does it make me feel several minutes later? What feelings do I have several hours later-do I just crave more and more(which I do)? How do I sleep that evening? What do I notice in the morning and the next day on my skin? Is it broken out? Is it oily? Am I craving the same thing even more than usual now? Am I experiencing the sensation of hunger more or less intensely than usual?
And then I get information from the opposite stimulus. I eat clean, I ask myself the same questions. And everytime I do that, I get a better understanding, a better picture of the best path for me to take, and more conditioning towards that path. This is controlled learning rather than uncontrolled. Either way, you are going to learn your way, act your way to the best path. One way is fast, one is slow.
I’ve had some real good results from this. I’ve also come to some great conclusions about life in general. They go something like this: What I really crave is the feeling that the food gives me. The comfort. I realized that it wasn’t the taste I was addicted to because if I kept on eating the item, I eventually tired of it despite the fact that the taste was constant throughout. I also realized that it couldn’t be the food I was addicted to because the food actually isn’t good for me. The nature of the food, candy or sweets or whatever, is well understood and these things shouldn’t actually cause an inherintely positive response. If they do cause a positive response, it’s because of something else reacting to them-in this case, the brain releasing ‘feel good’ chemicals after having been slightly poisoned. I also noticed that the same sense comfort I am recieving from the food is also achievable through numerous different non-food pathways. This, too, led me to believe that it wasn’t the food at all that was giving me the comfort, rather the body that was giving me the comfort in response to the food that I ate.
Our senses and our whole bodies are information processors. That’s what senses are for-they interpret information and our senses are our inlets to the physical world. Everything in existance is information for them to process. The things we see are not even solid, they’re atoms and electrons vibrating at a certain frequency to give us that which we see in front of our faces. Only not exactly, what we see in front of our faces is a combination of what is actually there and everything we have percieved in the past-meaning everything is filtered through our understanding of life, our beliefs our consciousness.
Food is information which is assessed by our senses, taste and smell and sight specifically. It’s niether positive or negative. It goes in and is broken down, used, not used, it destroys, or nourishes, or both. Certain foods, depending on their qualities ellicit more visible or ‘feelable’ effects than others-especially particularly toxic foods. As I said, I noticed that numerous different foods can give me the same effect as well as numerous other things like doing something nice for someone or laughing long and hard for a while. So I got the idea that it’s real possible that the food isn’t giving me the feeling at all, rather the body is giving me the feeling after I eat the food. If I am ‘addicted to certain foods,’ it is not them that I am addicted to, it is the response they ellicit. The comfort. Certain foods give me a degree of comfort, sugar for example. But the food can’t give me comfort, it can’t do anything, it’s just a piece of information that the body is processing just like everything else; it doesn’t have any comfort giving ability. The body is what gives me the comfort after it realizes that this thing is good for me or bad or whatever. It’s the effect the food has on the body that gives me comfort, which I am addicted to-the chemicals released in my brain within moments of taking the first bite. Funny that these chemicals are released most intensely with the worst foods.
It’s a high level of comfort attained from one source that is the problem. This understanding makes things a whole lot easier to deal with because then, to achieve that same high level of comfort, I know I can just substitute the food for something else the has the same effect, or numerous things that have the same effect. The point isn’t to be less comfortable all of the time, but to be equally as comfortable in a healthier manner. Like I said, I noticed that I could achieve that effect with tons of things: talking to people, laughing really hard, doing something that was really difficult and uncomfortable to do, being of service to someone…etc. These are all options for action. And they are all better than junk food. The problem has always been the conditioning. When there was discomfort before there was a comfort via a path that was unsustainable. Of course many years later when there is discomfort, there is still a strong neural highway to comfort via that same unsustainable path because the problem was never focused on, rather just irgnored and feebly abstained from.
You have to create a new path to comfort. And that’s not nearly as hard as trying to go without comfort.
