This post continues thoughts that started here.
The best qigong that I've ever practiced was swimming. Sound strange?
Start with the bottom of the pool. It's one large, white expanse. Sounds boring, right? It is. That's the point. As you do free style swimming, you look at the bottom of the pool almost constantly until you turn your head to breath. The large, white expanse gives you no visual stimulation. Your brain can rest because it doesn't have to process lots of visual imagery.
Next, you are partially submerged in the water so your hearing is not as acute. What isn't muffled by the water is the splashing of your arms as you swing them. Ever notice how often you hear water in new age music? Waves crashing, waterfalls, gentle bubbling brooks, etc. The sound of your arms splashing rythmically becomes hypnotic. You stop noticing it.
The motion that your body makes is simple: the arms swing forward in circles and you kick your feet. That's it. No worries about form, technique, or placement need be made. In fact, my swimming coach never once critiqued our stroke. She said the pool would teach us everything we needed to know. How "Mr. Miyagi" is that? She was right. We learned better stroke by doing it repeatedly and relaxing as we got used to it.
The motions were very simple so we got lost in them. One simple motion, over and over again, produced a rythym that the body fell into naturally. All you had to do was keep going.
Finally, the breathing was also rythmic. I turned my head to breath on every other stroke and then held my breath for the opposite stroke. Doing this type of breathing while exercising greatly expanded my lung capacity, allowing me to take deeper, longer, slower breaths outside of the pool.
The overall experience was very intense. Swimming became a type of meditation and qigong once I got used to it. And the benefits were enormous. My resting heart rate was around 43 beats a minute. My body fat was below 10%. My breathing was deeper and more relaxed than ever. In fact, when I went jogging at that time, I could often just breath through my nose. Long, slow breaths. The calmness that this type of breathing brought to my life was extraordinary.
All the health benefits that you've HEARD ABOUT from IMA practice but so rarely see may possibly be found at your nearest pool. Take the plunge and try it out.
5 responses so far ↓
Tom // June 20, 2006 at 7:54 am |
Swimming is fantastic exercise . . . for cardiovascular health, for building flexibility and torso strength with low-impact exercise (at 110 kg., my knees would rather swim a mile than run a mile, though I do both) . . . and for training the importance of breath and a relaxed mental focus.
Very interesting approach by your coach . . . that the pool would teach you everything you need to know. Very atypical, but true in a fundamental sense. You need to figure out the most efficient stroke in order to be able to last without wearing out. Very “Mr. Miyagi” . . . very Russian Systema too (had to get that comment in there). Oh hell . . . why not . . . very Zheng Manqing taiji as well (the solo form teaches us . . . LOL).
chessman71 // June 20, 2006 at 5:27 pm |
Something I didn’t add about my swimming coach was that she was involved in training the University of Florida swim team and had trained Olympic level athletes in the past. When someone pushed her about correcting our stroke, she commented that we weren’t going to be Olympic athletes so why not just enjoy swimming instead of creating pressure for ourselves. That sort of shut us up.
lifegivingsword // June 21, 2006 at 4:47 am |
dude. youre pretty pissed off lately.
chessman71 // June 21, 2006 at 6:52 am |
Sorry to come across that way.
I’m just fed up with many things recently. I’ve been doing CMA for a long time and I’m getting a bit tired of what i see as weaknesses of these styles. They are all good, but I think we need a little truth here. Things like being told I need to redefine my definition of health to make it suitable to account for the 300 pound men that the IMA produces is unaccpetable to me. No one on earth outside of IMA would agree to that definition of health. But the health thing isn’t the only thing I’m upset about lately.
Thanks for having the guts to just say that, though. I didn’t actually think that I was angry, but i guess you’re right. Off to practice!
Formosa Neijia - Exploring Taiwan’s Internal Martial Arts » Don Quixote and being “pissed” // October 16, 2006 at 10:09 am |
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