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Standing Exercises or Zhan Zhuang
Standing exercises have long been renowned as a highly effective way of improving posture and relaxation, strengthening the circulatory and immune systems and bringing the body and mind into a state of balance. They also develop physical strength and co-ordinated, integrated body movement. Such are their health giving properties that hospitals throughout China encourage patients to use them to speed rehabilitation, and almost all internal arts practitioners revere them for their value in developing internal power.
On the physical level, standing works directly on two main areas: The skeletal structure and the musculature. Beyond that, it can become an exercise in meditation.
Posture
When we begin standing practice, we must place our body in the correct position, with the correct skeletal alignments (or as close as we can manage). Throughout the practice session, old postural habits will come back into play. Through conscious effort and constant correction we can, over time, retrain old postural habits and improve them. As our posture gets closer to ideal (an ideal posture is one that can let the force of gravity fall down through the body and into the feet), less and less stress is placed on the musculature and the internal organs and a greater degree of relaxation can be achieved. This in turn allows an increased flow of blood and energy to all parts of the body.
The musculature of our bodies can, broadly speaking, be divided into two categories: Postural and phasic.
The postural muscles, as the name implies, deal with holding the skeleton in position, and they naturally have more strength and endurance than the phasic muscles. In standing exercises we are told to relax as much as possible. What we are really doing is trying to minimise the use of the phasic muscles and maximise the use of the postural muscles. The better we can become at doing this, the more we can maintain a strong structure and still remain reasonably relaxed. A strong structure is one that is able to receive force and still maintain it’s shape. From a health perspective the force we are concerned with is that which is exerted on our body by gravity—i.e.: It’s weight. Most people have difficulty in holding up the weight of their own body without holding tension. As previously mentioned, incorrect alignment plays a large part in this, as it creates a situation where extra muscle groups need to be engaged just to fight gravity. In a martial scenario, the forces that the body structure has to deal with are not only the practitioner’s own body weight, but also the force generated by the opponent. Just as we can learn to let the force of gravity drop through the body into the feet through correct alignment, so we can use body structure to allow us absorb force from an opponent and lead it into the ground. Standing exercises teach us how.
Movement
The phasic muscles are those that deal with moving the body. Standing exercises help us to gain the body awareness and control required to use only those phasic muscles that are needed to perform a specific task, and then only to the degree that is required. The net result is we seldom use more effort than is necessary. Most people are poor at this. They habitually use muscle groups that are actually antagonistic to the movement required, and the ones that are required are often over-tensed. Exercises such as weight training (in most cases) encourage the over-use of phasic muscles and discourage a high level of body awareness. This results in an inefficient use of the body. When people experience fatigue due to inefficient use of energy, they usually try to rectify the situation by trying to make themselves fitter or stronger, not realising that if they could just make themselves more efficient, they would find the same tasks much easier. Internal arts teacher Tim Cartmell uses the analogy of souping up a car engine but still driving the car with the handbrake on.
Standing exercises not only show us how use minimum effort for maximum effect, they can be used to develop what is commonly called ‘body connection’ or ‘whole body strength’. This means that to perform any given task we can bring muscle groups into play from all over the body in a co-ordinated way, thus greatly increasing our strength. This principle is the basis of developing ‘internal power’, often believed to be the result of the ability to manipulate some mystical or magical force, but in reality is no more than a high level of control over the body’s muscle groups and the ability to use tension and relaxation in a co-ordinated way.
The exercise is one of stillness because in stillness we are minimising the external, and indeed internal, distractions that can impair our ability to ‘listen’ to our body – that is, to gain an ever increasing awareness of it’s state. As we improve at this ’listening’ we can also use the stillness to ‘tune in’ to our mental state and to start to become aware of the nature of mind.
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