Flat Stomach Improved Vitality, The Method Behind It, Changes

窮則變，變則通，通則久 

At the extreme change comes, changing then accessible, accessible then enduring¹.

物極必反

Things turn into their opposite when they reach their extreme

三伏練筋, 三九練骨

Training the fascias in the hottest summer days, training the bones in the coldest winter days.

If obviously you can’t escape changes when deeply modifying one’s body, this also remains a truth for each and everyone. Indeed, every day, if not every second, our body changes. It evolves, grows or decays according to our age and reacts to our environment and our intake habits. Even our emotions, when heightened, can have a visible impact, white hairs being the most noticeable one. Old practices recognised such phenomenon and devised the principle of adaptive training. Indeed, following seasons (the third quote being an example), our shape, our body structure, our age … training was different. In the old days, one would often change his/her routine, even putting aside some exercises for years if not forsaking them totally when not needed anymore. Repeating over and over the same thing the same way was, for the least, scarce.

Old practices had a profound understanding of the changes through time and adulthood, adapting their training accordingly to curb the slow decay ageing brought. Furthermore, they recognised that deeply altering the body by training also meant to drastically changing one’s training from time to time.

I. From Dust to Dust

To rise to the challenge, the losing fight against old age, two methods were applied, improving drastically one’s body before it reached adulthood, then maintaining it after. If those two periods and their methods were clearly separated before, training has become in nowadays leisurely practice a less than successful mix of improvement and maintenance for any and every age.

1.1 A Time to Build

Pre-adulthood, as far as training was concerned, was divided into childhood and puberty.

Childhood would take advantage of naivety and impose to the student, often without his/her knowledge, exercises which would be deemed impossible by adults. From the legendary bucket training at the Shaolin temple to the so-called light skills, popular culture is still full of references of what is all but lost nowadays.

Puberty was actually the most crucial times, especially for internal practices, because one could ride on the swift and setting for life drastic changes happening to the body. Even more, from the so-often misunderstood virgin skills to the toad/tortoise ones are also all but lost training.

If there still were room to improve the body and internal alchemy after puberty, it wasn’t as essential and the stress, as one would get older and older, was more and more put on maintaining.

1.2 Ageing and Gravity

It was a habit to watch the signs of ageing closely, because of what they revealed concerning the decay of the body structure and the organs. 髮，舌，齒，指 (hair, tongue, teeth and fingers/toes) or the ‘four extremities’ was one of the methods used to check one’s general defacement for example, each indicating a precise phenomenon.

Furthermore, the unbalanced relation we have with gravity was, of course, considered. Until the end of puberty, if growth makes the body defy gravity, after it morphs into a victim. Hence, the more one would age, the more training meant to repair the damages of gravity became important. In our modern times, one would ponder over the loss of power of our antigravity muscles (though the issue is dealt differently in internal practices) and how our posture is affected eventually.

1.3 The Modern Mix

Because nobody trains 24/7 from a young age, this old two-steps method has become obsolete. Nowadays, one can only try to figure what used to belong to the building and what to the maintaining phases. Still, according to the age, the capacities, the needs and the stage in one’s practice, it may be interesting to identify what exercise may be more relevant.

Furthermore, since old practices meant to deeply transform from what is called ‘internal alchemy’ to one’s structure, it’s also important to realise that a new body implies news rules.

II. The Stick, The Rope and The Monk

Training changes mean understanding how and when they shall occur and what happens when they do.

2.1 A Kind of Magic

Contrary to the title, the system devised by old practices isn’t about just doing exercises, routines, postures … until a miracle happens. Therefore, it’s always important to be aware of the transformation sought as well as the environment it requires. For example, if one is aiming at controlling his/her emotive side and reach the empty mind state, a monastic life is considered the best option. Hence, it used to be quite common for martial artists to ‘retire from the world’ for some years to achieve such desired state. After they would come back and confront the stillness of their heart to the pitfalls of a normal social life. Trying to still one’s heart while living among people, having a job and a family is just impossible. You can’t learn to handle the heavy cold while being naked in a snow storm. You need first prior progressive training until you can face it.

2.2 Adapting to Changes

This is the hardest part of the training because sometimes changes implies to use opposite principles. Furthermore, at some stages, before reaching calm out of chaos, one has to face constant changes, which can be quite troubling. 

"New body, new rules" is actually, with the image of the stick and the rope, quite easy to understand. A body powered by muscle contraction and one by fascia elasticity don’t follow the same kind of training, the same motion requirements … as it has been described in length in this blog. Furthermore some exercises may be detrimental to one, like static stretching for muscle contraction or muscle group weight lifting for fascia elasticity, while important to the other.

Even more unsettling is the time before a major transformation in internal practices where it becomes so chaotic one can’t rely on an already set solution and has to discover the new one applying almost at every training. This is even more true to what is often referred as internal breathing, a large part of the flat stomach vitality improved vitality issue.

If understanding changes and how they work is critical, one also has to realise that they lead to something more perennial at some point, as the first quote implies. Hence, it’s equally valuable to grasp that internal practices target endurance. 

1. 周易·繫辭下 . Zhou Yi (Book of Changes) – Appendice