Flat Stomach Improved Vitality, Anti-Gravitational Reconnection, The Basics

 

低頭彎腰，傳授不高

Lowering the head and bending the waist, not a great teaching.

 

腰與胯合，腰催胯

Waist and hips join, the waist propels the hips

圓襠鬆胯最為良

A round crotch and relaxed hips are desirable

吸胯提襠

Sucking in the hips and lifting the crotch

There are a lot of sayings, from a martial style to another, which insist on the importance of the middle section of the body, from the hips to the waist. They are often, if not totally forgotten (who talks about the crotch, if not just as a joke?), not really a key part of training any more, hips apart. Unfortunately, crotch, hips and waist are all essential parts where the connection between the upper and lower sections of the body is made and the vitality/heat is, or isn't, insulated. Furthermore, the first quote does not actually only refers to training, it is also a hint about what happens when one is getting older and gravity takes its toll. Finally, one is justified to ask what this has to do with a flat stomach. As it was explained in the previous post, the flat stomach is just the result, the proof of a correct alignment. In other words, the more one's tummy bulges, the less connected are the upper and lower parts of the body, the more heat and vitality are dispersed.

It seems necessary to first describe what gravity does to the body posture with time and introducing how to counter it.

I. From Ally to Foe

One never has a balanced relation with gravity. Indeed, when we grow up we dominate it, always reaching a bit more to the sky. As we are becoming old, on the contrary, it pressures us to slowly go back to the ground. Therefore, to tackle the issue of gravity, it is impossible not to take into consideration the building/maintaining method used by old practices. Surely, when one builds the body before adulthood, gravity is definitively a tool which can enhance one's practice. After, it turns into a problem, its negative effects being signs of our body decay.

1.1 Growing Robuster

Old practices are full of exercises, especially the ones with weights, where gravity helps to develop an Herculean body.

To do so, weights and suspension (pull-up bars...) were probably the most used kind of training. The idea was basically to trick the body into believing it would spend the rest of its life facing much bigger challenges. To make it simple, it was as if building it up while confronted to a stronger gravity.

Of course, those were only improvements, one would still be limited to what genes imposed. Any training had to be very progressive, it was more tens of grams or even just grams added regularly every day on a child or teenager, certainly not kilo(s) suddenly on an adult. Another method was to use the innocence of young kids, tricking them into doing things grown-ups would deem/feel impossible.

Two typical exercices, more legends nowadays, would be the iron body and the 'Shaolin buckets'. In the first one, the student was wearing a full suit covering the whole body. It had a multitude of small pockets where a few grams of iron dust would be added daily. It embodied the principle of progressive endurance training. The second made the disciple carry two buckets of water from a well up to the temple grounds. Those buckets had a double bottom he was not aware of. The monks added, little by little, weight to it. This was a way to separate students with a high spirit, who would try to keep the same rhythm even when they felt heavier, to the less enthusiastic ones adapting their pace to the felt weight.

Up to the end of puberty, our body actively fighting against gravity, such exercices would reap great benefit. After much less, if not actually detrimental. It was time to learn how to counteract the effects of gravity.

1.2 Keeping Straight

Gravity works in simple ways, what is not vertically aligned and protrude will be relentlessly pulled towards the ground. When our body stops growing, it takes over and nothing anymore can annihilate its effects. Therefore, the first issue one would pay attention to, after reaching adulthood, was to keep the body alignments as vertical as possible whenever feasible. Still, since we are not just made of bones, but of flesh too, sagging was also something one had to consider because it meant a loss of elasticity, hence connectivity. 

Straightening and holding postures is one of the main training to keep one body as straight as possible. In modern life, those who spent their days sitting behind a desk face an even more challenging task maintaining the correct angles. Needless to say, in the old days martists were trained to sit on a stool without resting their butt on it...

Anti-sagging exercises are definitely less known. They are partly linked to tensing the whole body in practices such as the iron training and the empty breathing techniques.

II. Bulging and Sagging

Mentioned just earlier, they are the two main things one shall look for as far as the decay linked to gravity is concerned. First, one has to understand it is a losing fight against tipping points, most of them pointing to tiny parts invisible to the naked eye (like the perineum), one can only slow the decay certainly not revert it. Only then, it may be fruitful to look for its external visible signs.

2.1 Inexorably Back to Earth

Gravity effects are like rust, so small when they start that one can hardly notice them, slow but continuous and already a difficult problem to solve when they have become obvious.

What makes it even worst is that it does not only concern alignements and skin or other visible sagging, but also internal parts such as the perineum or fascia lines inside the body, for example. The issue is actually very similar to fat and visceral fat, invisible to the eye, where in extreme cases one can keep a flat stomach even with fat saturated organs. As far as internal arts are concerned, but also for health, the organs issue is much direr and to be avoided at all costs.

A losing fight with hard to notice, when not almost totally invisible effects, is indeed quite a challenge. Still, one can pay attention to the state of body parts to reduce the speed of our decay.

2.2 Firmly Vertically Aligned

Sagging is a simple issue where whatever has become loose is a sign of disconnection of the fascias, often due to an insufficient use of the related part of the body.

To fight against gravity, one has to be as vertically aligned as possible, which means:

- The butt will be tucked in to avoid the stomach bulging downwards.

- The pelvis area shall be sucked inside to abstain from having the chest protruding upwards

- The abdomen also, to keep the butt from sticking out upwards.

- The front of the chest is contained (slightly pushed inside) and the upper back is rounded to centre the upper part of the torso.

- The chin shall also be lightly tucked inside and the occiput upwards to straighten the cervical spine.

- Finally, the shinbone and the femur obviously should be as vertical as possible. This not only means to be perpendicular to the feet so that the torso won't lean forward or backwards, but also to be centred with the ankles to avoid any tension in the knees.

Not checked, even a little, all those will put pressure on various parts of the backbone, diminishing its capacity, if not damaging some vertebrae. Then, if not leading to disk injury, it will reduce its health and, by extension, our reflexes.

It is necessary to point out that old practices did not work in absolute (good/bad) but opportunist tendencies (better/worse in a precise instance). Hence, some of the basic rules just described for verticality are not some Tablets of the Law written in stone and to be religiously observed. First, they are part of the maintaining. For this, building in some cases, like the bamboo training, may follow other, when not opposite, principles. Second, wherever the body has a capacity, especially if it is linked to mobility, it should be, if not improved, at least upheld. Therefore, even if one tucks the butt and contains the chest most of the time, he/she should also train the lumbar curves and the opening (as opposed to contained) of the chest. Not doing so means the loss of an important part of the already limited flexibility of the pelvic and chest areas.

The next post will deal more in detail with the basics just described in this one.