How Do You Listen to Your Body?

It is common these days to hear health and exercise gurus telling you to "listen to your body".  Some of them are quacks, pushing pseudo-science remedies for everyday ailments, but others have advice backed by good research and years of medical practice.  It's usually easy to tell who is good.

What I want to talk about in brief is what it means to listen to your body, and how you can do it relatively reliably.

What is listening to your body?

In short, it is the practice of self-awareness where you take note of how you feel (output) when doing certain things or changing the fuel/stimulus of your body (input).

The inputs can be things like experimenting with different diets, e.g. slow-carb, low-carb, zone, paleo, etc. and the outputs, how you listen to your body, could be noticing responses like less aches and pains, more energy to perform activities, weight loss, different thought patterns, better sporting performance, etc.

A parkour example, to illustrate a slightly different approach, is when warming up for a solo training session.  The practitioner will assess her body and how muscles, joints, and mental aspects are operating.  Am I sore anywhere?  Do I feel up for a challenge or is there a lazy kind of feeling about myself?  Then using this information, she will likely decide to train in a way which rests those areas of her body that are sore and allows her to receive the mental stimulus appropriate to the day.

How can you do it?

It's quite easy to copy this approach in a general way.  I think most people do unconsciously.  However, to add more value to the approach, getting better results from your self-experimentation, it is useful to be a little more rigorous in your method.

One way is to record your inputs and outputs with a journal.  A simple spreadsheet with three columns would suffice.  One for the input - what are you trying?  One for the output - what effect(s) did you notice?  And one for any comments or recommendations to yourself for further reflection and action.  

It is important to note that some trials should take place over a number of days, weeks, or years.  Careful research is also necessary so that you know what to expect with your trials.  And finally, it is a great idea to find others who have experimented in a similar way so that you can discuss and collaborate for further added value.  Getting others involved, sharing anything learned, that makes all the difference sometimes - that's why I write a lot of what I write, to share the joy!

A final note is that you don't have to wait to experiment with inputs and outputs.  You are already immersed in a lifestyle which is producing outputs.  See if you can list all of the aches, pains, and annoying things about your body.  These are your default outputs and the goal is to improve on these.  Sometimes our bodies have been screaming at us for years and we have not noticed!

So there it is, I hope this has cleared up a bit of confusion or brought some clarity to your thinking.  Now go forth into the world and listen to your body!

Trust and Truth in Science and Religion

Some trust in Science, some trust in God, some trust in both.  There are truth gaps in both Science and Religion that force us to trust if we are to continue to live by it.  It is our past experiences within that realm that will inform us whether we can safely place our trust  there or not.  The same principle applies to human relationships, favourite authors, Internet providers, and a host of other fields with unknowns that we commit to based on what we already know about them.  For now, we will look at trust and truth in Science and Religion.


Is there enough truth for us to trust in what we trust in?
This is not so much a difficulty in the Science realm, because the scientific method is formed to be able to make rational sense of observation of the universe.  Any theory or hypothesis that does not square with experimental data is replaced with an updated one that does work.  It’s a clear and simple, common sense process of human exploration of the natural world.  It doesn’t always work though, as it relies on fallible people to spot the inconsistencies in a theory, and even then it might take a while for people to be willing to let that theory go, especially if they have been making good use of it for a long time.  This gives rise to the question, “How much truth has to be compromised before the trust is compromised?”

Take the case of the dinosaur bones found with blood cells preserved inside.  Actual dinosaur blood.  Read the journal article for yourself here (or here for one of the articles at www.creation.com)  It seems that any rational scientist would have to make a choice, assuming he or she holds to dinosaurs existing over 60 million years ago along with a much shorter decomposition rate for organic material.  The choice would be between which theory is wrong.  Either dinosaurs didn’t live that long ago, or blood cells decay at an impossibly slow rate under particular conditions.  Trust in that portion of science must drop away, otherwise enough trust has already been built up that the scientist would safely assume that more evidence will come to light to explain how both can work.

When it comes to the bible, people are not so willing to trust.  
If we start on the same grounds that we might start from with science, we can see that there is no difference in how we can apply our trust to the bible.  There are truth claims, some of which are obvious and easily believed and it is a wonderful resource of accurate wisdom about human nature and life principles that work.  

However, there are gaps and contradictions that don’t seem to make sense and there are claims that we can’t know anything about through “natural” means of knowing.  Yet the parts that we can believe should convince us that it is worth looking a little deeper before throwing the baby out with the bath water.  Some contradictions readily dissolve with the right context or understanding of how God is working through history.  Others are not so easy to deal with, much like the science situation above, and require a re-think of past ideas; yet there is no reason to think we should dismiss the lot.

God of the gaps
Scientists are quick to accuse believers of “invoking the god of the gaps” .  When things in the universe don’t stand up to the claims of the religion (a gap in knowledge) then a miracle or mysterious action of god is used to cover the gap.  God of the gaps can be seen as a faith that the gap is a part of god’s plan or something that we can trust Him about despite not understanding how it fits in with the rest of reality.

What many scientists don’t realise is that they use science itself as a god of their gaps.  Scientists will come across something such as the dinosaur blood cells discovery and then say that “science will discover something that explains this, it’s just a matter of time.”  This is essentially putting faith in science to cover a gap in knowledge (or a contradiction in current knowledge).

Both rely on faith/trust but for different reasons
Science builds our trust with accurate accounts of physical reality.  The bible builds our trust with accurate accounts (primarily, but not exclusively) of moral/philosophical reality.  These two different reasons make it hard to compare the trust that we place in each, but that does not mean that either is totally wrong.  When each encounters a truth that stretches the bounds of belief, the adherents to that field (science or a particular religion) must decide if that claim is too far out for that system to adopt.

As a final note, I have focused on the bible, and by implication Christianity.  This is because I am a Christian and have explored the claims of Christianity more than other religions.  After looking at the other major world religions (and some minor ones also) I decided that they didn’t match with reality enough to bother trusting.  In short, where a religion makes their god lower in stature than man or who requires sub-standard payment for mans sin, I don’t think it can be true.  That is another discussion for another time though.

Some useful links

http://carm.org/introduction-bible-difficulties-and-bible-contradictions

Reasons to trust the bible

13 Things that do not make sense (New Scientist)

Willingly Trapped

We are all willingly trapped within our own view of the world.  That doesn't mean that we can't see another's point of view, though we are quite likely to think them foolish.

Faith void of reason is foolish.  God is reasonable and gives us reason enough to trust Him.  See what He has to say in His word before arrogantly judging Him as unreasonable.


It is where faith intersects with reason that we find truth and reality.

Sport Science and the Learning Process

I have a huge interest in sport science.  This has come about through participation in parkour which is primarily a utilitarian discipline for overcoming obstacles.  Because of the utilitarian aspect of parkour, training focuses on developing functional (useful) physical capabilities.  This is embodied in the saying that is frequently associated with parkour: “être pour fort être utile” (to be strong to be useful).  The desire to help others is a strong motivation to improve my own physical capabilities and, with two brothers completing practical sport science degrees, I was indirectly influenced by (and convinced of) the power of a rational approach many years ago.

This post looks briefly at how I recognise my need for information, how I source information, and how I apply information.  The purpose of doing this is to demonstrate the learning process I have employed in my physical development so that others can do the same, or better.

My need for information
Every time I come up with a new goal for myself (often through seeing what others might do and wanting to emulate them), I can often see that I have no idea how to bridge the gap between their physical capabilities and my current ability.  Do you ever see a martial artist performing high kicks or breaking bricks and want to do the same?  Or perhaps an acrobat performing a somersault?  Unless you have tried (or thought about trying) those things, you probably won’t realise how much strength or technical proficiency is required.  If you have tried, you quickly realise that there is a seemingly unbridgeable gap to that level of ability.  What the good learner must do is decide to find out how to overcome that gap.  The temptation is to cast aside the lofty goal because it seems like too much work.  The thought that it is impossible to achieve shouldn’t occur to us because if others have done it, I should be able to also.  It might take me a little longer if I am a slower learner or have different physical aspects to overcome, but I can rest assured that if someone else can work at something and achieve it, so can I.

Without that desire to do things, I would never have a need for the information to improve myself.  And without an awareness that someone else has managed to find that information, I would not realise that it is actually possible, and that it should just be a matter of applying myself appropriately to achieve what that knowledge can allow me to achieve.

If you are a truly adventurous and creative person, you might even want to push the boundaries beyond what anyone else has achieved before.  You would do this by applying the same information differently, but that is another story for another time.

So how do I source my information?
In short, I use Google, YouTube, and I even talk to real people sometimes.  What I am looking for is information from someone else who has achieved my goal and accounts of their experiences.  

The challenge is to sort through the masses of information to find the most useful resources.  The most useful resources for me are those which communicate the relevant details in a clear and concise manner, while keeping the language relatively simple.  If a resource doesn’t give me the impression that it can quickly and easily communicate the information I want, I will discard it and keep searching.  For instance, learning to back flip (not parkour, but still a fun skill) I will go to YouTube and search for “backflip tutorial” and sort the search results according to the number of views.  The top two results have more than a million views and have been available for 3 years.  This gives me confidence in them so I will open both to view them.  While I am waiting for the videos to load (thank you slow NZ internet) I will have a quick look at some of the comments posted to get further knowledge of whether it is worth waiting for that video to load or not.

Taking note of comments that people have taken the time to write, about the resources they have actually used, is one of the most useful tools for finding the best information, especially if you are considering paying for it.  I came across the best stretching resource this way, and that lead me to a publisher that has pretty much all of the information relating to physical development that I could ever require:  www.stadion.com

How I have applied the information
I’m not intending this section to be a list of my achievements, but if you want an idea of what can be achieved by almost anyone with a bit of dedication check out www.beastskills.com

It might be better to rephrase the section heading as “How I can make the best use of the information to achieve the goals that I have set for myself".  There are a set of qualities that will see you through, and that you must develop to become efficient at applying the knowledge.  Some of these things are: self discipline, self motivation, a vision for the future, humility, perseverance, creativity, self awareness, a realistic point of view, emotional control, patience.  Some of these are obvious, such as having the self discipline to stick with a precise course of action over a long period of time (perhaps years or decades) and being able to use your view of the future achievement of goals to motivate yourself.  

Less obvious is the place of humility, which you must have in order to take a realistic look at your current knowledge and practice to see if it is wrong.  It can be hard to admit you are wrong or that you have wasted your time and money on something.  This pride will cause you to continue using methods that don’t work.  

If you can’t control emotions of frustration, you may give up on a good idea too fast.  Sometimes you must be patient and not try to do too much.  In sporting fields especially, rest is vital and over training is a sure way to reduce progression and increase frustration at slower than usual  progress.

For technical skills involving movement, you must develop the self awareness to “listen” to your body.  Being constantly aware of the feedback your body gives you, such as pain or smoothness of movement, is one of the most powerful sources of information to govern how you refine skills.

There are many more attributes, but you should be able to get the general idea from these few examples.  I hope this knowledge can be applied successfully in your own life, as it has greatly improved mine and others before me.