I wrote some time ago about my views of striving and grasping for things.

Those views were helped along by a few things, I’d been encouraged to push harder in the gym only to be met with pain and injury. I’d witnessed workplace politics handled in a way I completely disagreed with, this has happened more than once across a number of companies. I also found myself questioning with our national work ethic, is this the right way?

I asked myself a question, “Am I mad, or is there a better way?” In the gym I reminded myself of the 70% rule of moderation. It’s a great little rule I learned from Tai Chi, you only work at 70% of your max; energy and attention are kept back for working on a gradual improvement in your performance, also to make sure you don’t burn out on the way, it’s a long term game plan, but it offers greater potential than flogging yourself to death. I’m working at less than my max now, focusing on technique, I don’t doubt I’ll get back to the weights and performance I had, but when I do it’ll be with much better technique, I’ll be able to handle it much better than I did.

As far as the whole work thing goes, I find myself with less invested in the long hours culture we have here in the UK, as a result I don’t do overtime anymore unless it’s an emergency. Again, this comes back to moderation; whatever some might like to think, we don’t live to work.

I’ve seen the results of office politics and crackdowns on more than once occasion and in more than one company, striving for more results, more controls, a greater bottom line. I’ve seen it reach a point that employee goodwill was lost, people refused to work overtime, wouldn’t go out of their way for their employer; the workplace spirit was lost.

This is a way echoes comments in my previous post, crackdowns and tightening up have their place, but if you take it too far it hurts far more than it helps, you can wind up flogging the horse to death if you’re not careful.

This comes back to moderation, the middle way. Yes, you can keep driving people harder towards business goals, “Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes”, but in the end the human cost will be huge.  We already see this, lots of stress and work-life imbalances and not just in the UK, sooner or later we must settle into a steady state, not the greed driven relentless drive for better growth; for the sake of our own collective health and sanity.

I think that this excerpt from chapter 23 of the Tao Te Ching sums up my thoughts on this:

Sparse speech is natural
Thus strong wind does not last all morning
Sudden rain does not last all day
What makes this so? Heaven and Earth
Even Heaven and Earth cannot make it last
How can humans?

I was thinking today about the way we conduct ourselves generally.   Workplace politics with constant striving for advantage, clashing of egos.  In the gym, the subtle pressure that you should be working harder, lifting more, etc.

I asked myself; Why?  You can engage in all the politics you want in the office to “get ahead”, eventually you have to retire you have to hand you position to someone else.  Same with the gym, there is a limit to what you can lift, how fast you can run, etc.  This limit can only diminish with age, eventually you’ll have to back off.

Eventually we all die, we enter the world with nothing and guess what we take with us, so why on earth bother?  The more I look at it, the more I see the futility of all the striving for these goals that are as real as a puff of smoke.

We strive for things to try and make us happy, even Buddhist can strive for enlightenment, but that just makes it one more chain.  I wonder what would happen to society if everyone realised the futility of this?

An interesting thought exercise, yes?

I hit the gym the other night after a short abscence.  I could feel my knee starting to twinge, so I made a stitch in time and took a few sessions off.  I restarted my old Chi Kung practise up again, which has made me feel lots better in general.

When I started back in Bodypump, I reduced the weight and found that it was in fact more effective than before.  This sounds odd, until you remember the 70% rule from Tai Chi.  Put simply, you never try to push too hard, you don’t strain yourself and you’ll still find your performance will improve.  Because not all of your energy is spent on strain and pain, you can use it for improvement.  When you’re not straining, you can pay more attention to your technique, soon your 70% is equal to everyone else’s 101% and you’re still not straining.

I’ve always said, you learn more from getting it wrong.

Well, after a long absence I started back at my Tai Chi class last night.

It’s interesting to contrast Taijiquan and my usual Bodypump classes, as I do view them as different sides of the Taji symbol. I used to consider the internal exercise superior, an attitude that I picked up from an ex-colleague, I’ve reconsidered my approach these days.

While I appreciate the external exercise I get in the Gym, I found Tajiquan provides a missing part of the exercise picture, I appreciate that more now that I’m doing both than I did when I was just doing Tai Chi or Gym classes by themselves.

I have a feeling that the two are going to compliment each other quite nicely, does anyone else have any experience with this?

A post over at abarefootman started me thinking about our apparent inability to see what’s in front of us. This is true at any time, but more so in the field of exercise and the “body beautiful”, never did a term merit quotes so much!

We already have everything we need for fitness, we’re fully equipped. You have a body capable of exercising and, most importantly the willingness to do it. The fancy gyms are not really needed, they’re very nice to have, but not vital.

But going beyond that, I keep seeing new equipment, new supplements and nutrition bars, shakes and powders. It’s as if fitness has been turned from something to be enjoyed, into something chained down with a kind of performance anxiety, with the inference that you’re not doing it right unless you’re using this or that gadget or supplement. Part of my attitude stems from my old backstreet gym days, when it was just you and weight. But also from my time at Tai Chi, there can be no gimmickry there, it’s just you and the form.

Indulge me, try the following exercise with me. Close your eyes, allow yourself to breathe normally, be still for a few seconds and relax. Imagine your time in the gym, think of the machines, the supplement bars and drinks, the merchandising, all of it. Give yourself permission to let it go, one thing at a time, empty the gym in your mind.

Look at what’s left. Your motivation, the fact you enjoy it, your desire to improve yourself. Without these things, the rest of it is a lie.

I went back to the gym today, for the first time in over week. I’m not completely recovered from my cold, which combined with my absence, hampered my performance.

I would fail on certain reps, and thinking about it later, I was reminded of something in Lawrence Leamers’ bio of Schwarzenegger. The notion is that a body like Arnies’ is built one rep at a time. Fair play, but I think to bring a little Buddhism in here, it’s also built by being in the moment.

You have to be present during each rep, not just doing them mechanically, but almost like a form of meditation. The middle path is the best way to take, not total balls to the wall but a more moderated approach, don’t rush. When I felt a tendon in one of my forearms complain during an exercise, I backed off on the weight. Buddhism teaches us to try to take a wider view, thinking about it fitness is also built outside the gym, diet and rest are critical factors and we forget them to our ruin.

The observation that both exercise and Buddhism happen in the moment is an interesting thought, I look forward to seeing where this leads!

I’ve been off the gym with a heavy cold for the last week or so. I’d been planning to drop another workout or two into my routine, but after reading this article on the BBC, I’m not so sure.

So it looks like a lot of folks are addicted to exercise, with too much of it being very bad for you. Even from my earliest days, 15 years ago in back street gyms, I was always taught to take rest days. I know that a part of the early body building lore was training every day, but even back then there was dissent.

They’re right, too much exercise will pound you into the ground, you need to give your muscles time to recover and your energy reserves time to replenish. I feel I should add that this is an important consideration in any activity, not just exercise, if you check the dates on my blog entries, you’ll see that I occasionally take breaks from posting, for exactly this reason.

Coming back to philosophy, both Taoism and Buddhism consider moderation to be of top importance. I think this quote from the Tao Te Ching is relevant here, it’s usually held to go a lot further than just speech:

Sparse speech is natural
Thus strong wind does not last all morning
Sudden rain does not last all day
What makes this so? Heaven and Earth
Even Heaven and Earth cannot make it last
How can humans?

Chapter 23, translation by Derek Lin, provided courtesy of Truetao.org.

I keep coming back to that old comment of Arnold Schwarzeneggers’ “Everything I learned, I learned in the gym”. I’m starting to see how that works.

I did Bodypump on Sunday, for those of you who haven’t done it let me explain. You have a series of musical tracks lasting for 2 or 3 minutes each, you exercise one part of the body to each one. For example, you have a back track, a squat track, biceps track, etc. On Sunday I failed to complete the Biceps track, even though I knew I could do better, today I only missed 1 rep, which is my normal slowly improving performance.

What was the difference? On Sunday, my thoughts were running along the lines of “I can’t do this anymore, I have to stop”, I get that a lot as I find Biceps to be the hardest of all the muscle groups to work. On Sunday I listened to those thoughts, tonight I didn’t. It brings it home how much of what we do is in the mind, we often frustrate our own best efforts with a negative stance. It also brings out a good point I read in a Buddhist source recently, you and your thoughts aren’t the same thing. You are the part that observes your thoughts come and go, whether you listen or not is your choice to make.

Well, I’ve been hitting the gym again. Not the main gym, if I wanted to pay to see a creature running on the spot, I’d buy a Hamster. I’ve gone back to my old haunt, the Body Pump class.

Interesting, especially in light of my last post. It’s interesting the way the feeling that we should somehow be competing with others kicks in so readily. My focus in the workout was on my form, and my intended focus is on my own personal best, but I found myself comparing how I was doing next to everyone else. Later in the workout, I tried to simply accept what others were doing and make my focus my own form and the feelings in my own muscles.

I found that this freed me to enjoy the workout more, amazing how the competitive impulse simply got in the way of enjoying my workout. Compete less, live more. You know, that could be a good slogan!

I’ve been reading “Fantastic - The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger” by Laurence Leamer. I have to say, it is a very good book! Like a lot of worthwhile things in my possession, I picked it up on a whim, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by it.

The book makes the point that Arnold’s wisdom was learned from bodybuilding, he has said himself “Everything I learned I learned in the weight room.” I thought for a minute and then realised that that isn’t as odd a statement as you might think at first glance. I’m not a bodybuilder, but I’ve done enough sessions in weight rooms and talked to enough bodybuilders to have an idea where he’s coming from.

With bodybuilding, you have to have a clear idea of where you’re going, what you want to achieve. You work very methodically and in small steps, you build big muscles but you do so one rep at a time, paying attention to small details. A lot of it is mental attitude. Arnold’s success owes a lot to determination and a positive attitude, I think that’s admirable. I look forward to seeing what he acheives in the future.