Welcome to my second post this week!
Throughout this short series, I can’t stress enough that the fastest way to better health is through honesty. If you aren’t honest with yourself, you can’t be honest with anyone else which is the root of so many problems.
Last time, I talked about Dr. Happiness, the overarching umbrella that feeds and invigorates the rest of the 4 Doctors.
Today, I want to spend a few minutes exploring Dr. Movement, another important aspect of your inner life which fuels your ability to create and live your dream as a gift to the world.
There are four factors that define Dr. Movement…
Baseline health
How much movement and what kind of movement you need so your internal organs, glands, tissues, muscles, joints and bones are healthy and can support you in living well and creating your dreams are some of the components of baseline health.
There’s different opinions about whether you need 30 minutes to an hour a day of movement depending on who you listen to and the intensity and type of movement you want to do.
If you’re not getting at least 30 minutes of walking daily, you’re not likely to have good baseline health, without considering any additional activities you’re doing.
The challenges are very different for people on the other end of the spectrum, however, who can be too aggressive. These folks tend to skip some very important steps along the way and end up being someone’s patients, either by being uneducated, addicted to exercise or trying to impress others.
They like to start with sports-specific exercises or power training before they’ve developed baseline strength and adequate lifting technique, optimal stability or flexibility.
It’s also important to remember that your orthopedics should be aligned properly too. If not, when you start exercising, you’ll have length tension or muscle imbalances.
This means the muscles that are short and tight will become facilitated (they get excited too easily) which means doing too much work magnifies those imbalances producing compression, torsion and sheer on joints. That will wear them out and cause all sorts of tears as well as other common problems that can be easily avoided.
This is where working-in exercises that leave you with more life-force energy per unit of time come into play. Working out is like using a credit card. It causes an energy resource debt which is why you always need a recovery period.
If you don’t have adequate nutrition, recovery time, hydration and rest, you’ll cause many more problems for yourself and become a fit/sick person.
Dream-specific conditioning
For those of you who are into more hardcore or competitive athletics, dream-specific conditioning requires an assessment of your biomotor abilities, such as speed, agility, strength, power, endurance and coordination.
Take, for example, an American football player. His biomotor profile would be quite different from a competitive rower or skier. You just can’t throw some exercises together willy nilly and expect great results.
“Bio” means life and “motor” means movement. Based on your dream, biomotor exercises reflect what kind of strength and power you need and how important is speed, coordination, agility and flexibility to your goals.
If you’re not aware of your biomotor needs and abilities, your exercise program may not be optimal and could create the wrong profile and more problems for you.
For example, many golfers find their game gets worse after they’re involved in bodybuilding or weightlifting because these alter their biomotor profile.
Emotions
Dr. Movement works in the realm of emotions too. This is the point at which you’ll want to carefully and honestly look at where you are excessive or lacking in your emotional expression.
The best way to figure that out is to reach out to people who love you enough to be honest (most of us just cannot be honest enough with ourselves).
Actually, it isn’t so much about real honesty as it is that we’re unconscious of our behaviors. So, if you know you flare up with anger or can be judgmental or sarcastic and tell pointed jokes or you’re moody or depressive, those are indicators of excessive or deficient emotional flow.
Often, those states can reflect your own inner unhappiness or a lack of health and vitality.
Mind
Either you can be excessive or deficient in the use of your mind. An excessive use is someone who’s constantly seeking and analyzing new information but having a hard time making something happen in their lives.
You’ll see people spending their entire lives in school and earn advanced collegiate degrees, then become experts who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
I’m not criticizing people with advanced degrees here. I’m simply talking about the reality of thinking too much relative to applying and experiencing which is where wisdom comes into the picture.
You can’t gain wisdom without experience. If your thinking is outrunning your experience and cultivation of wisdom, that’s ineffective and why you need to remember conscious thinking complements feeling, sensation and intuition.
So, if you’re not using all four faculties of consciousness, you’ll be making mistakes with the 4 Doctors, and not creating your dreams optimally or properly.
Recommended resources
I hope you’ll enjoy looking into these variables and getting clearer about what you need with Dr. Movement while being honest with yourself.
If you need guidance, our CHEK Connect Directory will help you find a C.H.E.K Practitioner or a CHEK Holistic Lifestyle Coach (HLC) near you. Many have both skill sets and you can review their qualifications there.
Some more resources you’ll want to consider as you integrate Dr. Movement more fully into your life:
- How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy!
- The Last 4 Doctors You’ll Ever Need
- The Golf Biomechanic’s Manual
- The Tennis Biomechanic’s Manual
- Swiss Ball Exercises for Better Abs, Buns and Backs
- Scientific Core Conditioning
- Program Design
- Swiss Ball Exercises for Athletes
- Strong ‘n’ Stable
- Gym Instructor Video Series
- CHEK Institute Exercise Coach
Next time in part 4, we’ll look at Dr. Diet.
Love and chi,
Paul
