What is Strength?
I had a very positive experience with a man named Dr. Ron Harwin the other day. He has been a chiropractor for over 30 years, practices Bagua (a form of internal martial arts, similar to that of Tai Chi), and has a gift for looking at, and identifying with, the human body at a very intrinsic level.
He has invented a device he calls “The Harwin Balancer” that one stands on to re-awaken their internal selves by exploring their body in relation to gravity. After going through the treatment myself, i came off of it with a very refreshing sense of alignment and “lightness” throughout my structure. I can’t say i full understand what it does or how it accomplishes it, but it really is something worth experiencing.
Dr. Harwin’s Balancer
Aside from his work with the balancer, he said something that really resonated with me as i continue my quest to understand how our deep intrinsic awareness and awakening our inner structure to align itself again relates to my passion for strength and performance.
“Strength is not about the size of a muscle or how many contractile fibers it has, it’s about teamwork and organization of the entire system” -Ron Harwin
I see it everyday in commercial gyms that i train in where we focus so much on the external musculature (abs, butt, arms, etc), with little awareness for our intrinsic musculature and our deep stabilizing system. Some luminaries in the field of somatic therapy have also suggested that over-emphasis on the external muscles actually weakens our intrinsic musculature.
Then, i realized after diving into my own understanding of my internal structure, that strength happens effortlessly when our entire body works together in a harmonious effort. I saw this play out beautifully after working at the Egoscue Method clinic in San Diego, taking 6 months off of weight training completely, only to come back to a competition and shatter my personal records. I believe it was because of my newly-found awareness of how my body works together as a unit, and how i was able to re-align my posture and re-awaken the inner structure that had gone dormant from years of mindless external training.
The body is over-engineered, however the connection from the mind to the body is never cultivated in most movement practices.
Some steps i’ve found useful for getting in touch with your intrinsic self:
1) put away your headphones and train in a quiet place. music distracts us from listening in.
2) pay attention to weight distribution in your feet, hands, and any other joint as you move through a range of motion. Are there blocks in any one? Awareness is the first step. Most trainees don’t realize that they are not squatting equally on both legs, as an example.
3) Find a mirror, a partner, or a video camera to film yourself as you move. This could be running, walking, lifting, etc. Visualizing yourself or getting feedback from another can help improve movement quality.
4) Stand still, close your eyes, and see if you are holding tension in any one area of your body (we hold patterns of tension from past injuries, guarding responses, vanity purposes, etc.). Try and relax those areas as you shift to center your body in gravity where the least amount of work keeps you upright.
5) Train barefoot. We interact and coordinate our movements in our world through our feet. If you jam your feet in squishy or rigid shoes, you blunt all the nerve endings in your feet that send signals about where your body is in space. Also, our feet tend to become weakened and amnesiac, causing postural distortions and balance issues the longer we keep wearing them.