Sweet Sweat

汗流浃背

Sweat streaming down and drenching one's back

二、周身發汗：體溫增高，熱能可通達全身，暢及四肢，周身皮膚毛孔開，透出微汗，出汗不宜過多，以汗透毛皮為度，初步可治療傷風感冒，經常煉功者能遍燒全身，汗流如雨，濕透衣褲，可永絕感冒

Second, the whole body perspire: the body heat increases, a heat that can go through the entire body, smoothly reaching the four limbs, all the body pores open, slight sweat passing through, but too much would be inadvisable, just allowing the sweat to penetrate the skin pores, which can in the beginning cure from a cold or the flu, and if often trained shall heat up the entire body, dripping with sweat, clothes fully drenched, keeping away flu for ever.*

In internal practices, sweat is a cornerstone of one's training, a way to check one's practice and general health. It is also quite a complex matter as nervousness or tiredness can often produce the same results as the ones looked for in training.

As far as sweat is concerned, the training is revolving around three main concerns, one's vitality, organs cleanliness and stages in the improvement of the flow.

Vitality and Sweat

The idea around it is very simple, the less vitality one has, the more one has to recoup. To do so, it is necessary to heat up one's body in order to create more vapours, since vitality is a matter of vapours according to internal practices (see 气 Where Is my Bowl of Rice?). Vapours being a matter of heating up the body, it brings sweat, another kind of vapour. Simply said, the more one is sweating during his/her training, the more he/she is producing vapours, the lesser vitality he/she was to begin with. Indeed, for internal arts, sweating a lot or very rapidly, and especially in the back, is generally a sign of a lack of vitality. Of course, the weather plays its part, but in case of heavy and rapid sweating, one would know that he/she should have to not train too intensively and too long.

The amount of sweat is not the only issue, its taste and odour are also important.

Organs, Taste and Odour

As it was described in previous posts, one of the aims of internal practices is to clean up one's organs from the toxins they contain, and the taste and smell of one's sweat is a way to determine one's organs cleanliness. Indeed, the strongest is one's smell when sweating, the heavier the toxins contained in one's body. Really clean organs would mean no smell at all when sweating. As far as the taste is concerned, salty, tasteless and sweet comes from still having toxins, being clean and being too clean. Nowadays, people hardly train regularly and intensively enough to have nothing else than salty sweat. In the old days, an intensive 24/7 training would enable students to fully clean their organs from any toxin contained in them. At this moment, one's sweat would lose its saltiness and become tasteless. This moment was actually crucial in the training, another example of the theory of the extremes**, where a virtuous circle could become vicious. Indeed, after becoming tasteless, one's sweat would gradually become sweet. Why? Having no more toxin to sweat out, the organs would go on sweating what was left in them, which were the nutrients, hence the sweet taste. This meant that a student performing a long and intensive training had to check his/her sweat in order to stop as soon as it became tasteless, and especially when training 透汗, the complete sweat, which will be described further on. Trainings like 透汗 being mainly done during the hottest month of the year, it was common to train next to a river, a lake or a big jar full of water, in order to be able to immediately cool down the body and avoid sweet sweat.

Training to clean the organs and improve vitality was also done by stages, reflected by the three sweats theory, 大汗, 透汗 and 微汗. It is, of course, necessary to mention that this type of training was meant for teenagers in good health, so people hardly sweating to begin with. For adults, one's general vitality and health state becomes an issue which seriously adds complexity to the matter since sweating too much because of a lack of vitality and/or over-exercising affects one's health. Furthermore, getting rid of toxins does not go without any problems. Teenagers in good health have much less toxins and can recover quickly from the problems that may arouse from forcing them out of the body, like getting weak or even sick, while adults face more toxins to get rid of with much less recovering capacities. If it remains interesting to describe this theory as an example on sweat in one's training, its concrete application for adults is impossible if not strictly supervised, and certainly not achievable while training as a hobby. 大汗, the big sweat, is mainly focusing on the capacity to sweat bullets from the forehead (see Improving the Flow below) and then the backbone. It is mainly, as it will be described below, a way to check out the ability to accelerate one's vapours/气 flow. Then, this skill mastered and the body used to a at least seven hours a day daily training and in perfect health, one would use the hottest month of the year to overheat in order to clean every part of one's body, and of course especially the organs, 透汗, the complete sweat. This is a tricky exercise which can easily lead into a vicious circle, if one is not super healthy enough, over-sweating and overheating will hurt the body, and if one's organs become too clean, it will lead to the loss of nutrients. Complete sweat, where any and every pore of one's body would sweat bullets, sometimes also called the internal shower, was a mean to clean thoroughly the body, meant to be done a first time over a period of around a hundred days and then only once a while depending on the richness of one's diet. The organs cleaned, one could, the extremes joining, start to train the slight sweat, 微汗. Since overheating and over-sweating exhaust the body, they were certainly not an everyday practice. As for anything else in internal practice, it was a question of saving, so of heating and sweating just the right amount to recoup vitality and clean already quite neat organs from everyday toxins. The idea was, then, that one would train until just sweating a very little from the pores. Hence the term to describe inhaling, 納, already introduced in Breathing, Complex and Evolving, and which originally meant something like moisten, moisten fabric. Indeed one had, through proper breathing, to slightly moisten his/her whole body.

But reaching the slight sweat had still to be reconciled with the necessity of sweating bullets from the forehead.

Improving the Flow

气, vapours, being not only about heat but also circulation, where and how one would sweat is also a way to check out if one's training goes in the right direction. The first thing an internal student is taught when training is to keep on exercising until his/her forehead start to sweat. No forehead sweat, no real training. Why? Simply because it is the place where after having to climb all the way up to head through the back, the vapours finally fall down. Since a part of training is aimed at improving the flow of vapours, a stronger and faster flow would bring more vapours, and quicker, to the forehead, making it sweat more. A bit like a waterfall, the stronger the river flow, the noisier the waterfall. After a while, one shall first sweat bullets on the forehead before anywhere else, even the armpits, the second sweating place being the backbone. Sweat in the forehead due to a quicker flow can also be witnessed in everyday life, excessive nervousness. That is also why sweating from the forehead is not always a good sign, one has to determine if it comes from a relaxed physical effort or stress, nervousness...

If the forehead sweat and sweating too much due to a lack of vitality can still be relevant in nowadays hobby trainings, most of the harder trainings remain out of reach. Still, it remains interesting to mention them as a mean to understand the logic behind internal practices.

*The Ten Characteristics and Effects of Holding the Pillars Asceticism Practices, 站樁修煉十大特點及功效

**物極必反