Wholistic Fitness

“The skillful art of lifting weights in the fierce poetry of “Yin and Yang Awareness” is what characterizes a Wholistic Fitness® warrior in a gym. We are trained in conscious elegance of posture and breath while responding to the Yin and Yang of the imposed demands inherent to strength training.” nothing an ilg loves better than pumping some squats beneath Grandfather Sun…and increasing my sarcomere fitness and making my joints bombproof!

Due to popular response to Part I; the complete Teaching is now available as a Pay-Per PDF in the WF Tribal Pro Shop:

Pay Per PDF’s

Rachel Blievernicht, who just finished 4th at the World Bouldering Championships, knows a thing or two about the necessity of keeping her connective tissues strong. That’s why she prioritizes HP Yoga® PROP WORKOUTS each week!

Ben “Patki Dass” Sullivan, who got 2nd place in the Cat 3’s on Sunday during the Lake Mary Road Race and won a 12-hour race last month, used the training programs in TOTAL BODY TRANSFORMATION plus two weekly HP Yoga® classes per week during the winter because he understands the wisdom of Wholistic Fitness® during the off season to produce more power-generating sarcomeres during the Race Season and no injuries!

In Part One (DL; 6*27*08) i used my professional and direct experience of the exceptional torques, tweaks, and tensions associated with rock climbing to illustrate just how vital is taking wholistic care of our Connective Tissue (CT). The same Teaching lands true for all of however. Runners, cyclists, triathletes, strength athletes, skill athletes; we ALL need to understand how a wholistic training effect can take care of our CT over the course of our lives. Why would anyone NOT want to take wisdom care of their CT? Few really do, however. I know sport-specific cyclists and runners that are literally ‘scared stiff’ to come to my yoga classes in even the face of herniated disks, chronically inflamed hamstrings/lower back, pinched nerves and other associated dis-eases that are born from an addict’s obsession with a single sport. “For Buddha’s Sake,” i try telling them, “just get into my yoga class – at LEAST during your off season – and let’s start bringing some much needed elongation, suppleness, and physiologic/pranic fluid into your suffocated and tight tissues!”

Should be a no-brainer, right? Especially when such encouragement is coming from a guy like me, once paralyzed, who used yoga to re-accelerate to national class multisport competitions solely through yoga; no drugs, no PT, no nothing but being brave enough to stay consistent with mindful stretching, strengthening, and breathing. Sadly, i may as well be talking to bricks, man. Selective deafness to the point of crisis. I’ll see ’em out there still riding their bikes in pain, running and climbing through injuries. later, through the grapevine, i’ll hear that they finally got surgery and well, sure enough; they’re still stuck in suffering.

Let’s erase the suffering by easing into an appreciation of our CT and how to care lovingly and wisely for it.

The Contractile Component and improving it.”
Our muscle’s ability to increase tension is called the contractile component (CC). Think of CC as our generator of tension. Muscles both shorten and lengthen as tension is generated. Only through the progressive resistance of Strength Training can we strengthen, re-orient, re-generate, and re-align our muscle/CT relationship. Since 1982, i’ve taught you how to strength train with conscious elegance in my books and blogs. Instance; a Malasana/Biceps Curl – our biceps creates explosive strength and power on what i call the “Yang” phase, which is when the lower arm bones decrease the angle between themselves and our upper arm bones. In Western terms, this is called the “concentric,” or shortening phase of muscle contraction. As we lower the resistance, “eccentric” tension is generated in a “Yin” fashion; developing slow, controlled strength endurance which is imperative to strengthening our tendons and ligaments nearest joint articulations.

Think here of the “Iron Temple” Teachings i created to get us to strength train elegantly; “Staccato Technique,” “3-Stage Technique,” “Ku Form,” and the others! Rare is the non-WF trained person who approaches the Iron Temple with the same fierce attention to elegance of form as does a WF yogi. We push no discipline, no sport, no modality out of the yogic arena. Breath-animated movement is our saving Grace. Never lift, never do a chaturanga, never make a climbing move without allowing the Conscious Breath to animate it. Seemingly, only the WF Yogi stands up to the ancient sutra; “Tat Twam Asi,” or “That Thou Art.” Yoga – the science of union – is everywhere, is in everything, is within everyone! Yoga is especially potent in the gym; where we can strength with grace our tissues, our organs, our minds like no other Temple. If you have a karmic obstacle with pumping iron? And if you are really going let that obstacle wither your wholistic, yogic balance and decay your performance? Fine. Then you better at least default to a once weekly sessions of my HP PROP WORKOUTS, which are my asana-equivalent of gym-type of strength training, is your last call toward deep-fiber CT health.

When we are pumping our mountain bike up a steep hill, our capacity to fire a powerful amount of CC depends upon the fitness we’ve trained through strength training of the filaments and their cross-bridges. If tension is proportional to the number of chemical links established between these two filaments, then the greater is the overlap between the filaments. All this means is that the more binding sites we make available for our filaments and their cross-bridges through balanced strength training, then they can interact more efficiently. As we continue cranking up the hill and start dropping our friends who don’t strength train, we can smile to ourself, knowing that we’ve created an ability to generate greater tension. Rock climbers will be able to hang out and “make those nasty clips” on hard routes with less muscle pump.

It pretty much boils down to our proteins. Any wonder why i’ve been telling you all these decades to get on amino acids like MAP Amino Acids to make dang sure you keep your body in a positive nitrogen balance to make sure all these bijillions of proteins are being taken care of and regenerating from your workouts? Sarcomere fitness is everything. A sarcomere is a cross-striated myofibril, which is just basically smaller, cylinder proteins within our muscles. Back to our Bicep Curls; our biceps contain over 100,000 of these power-producing sarcomeres. If you shy away from progressive Strength Training, you are murdering your sarcomeres; you’re letting the poor guys just wither. So really, you can kinda see how we ‘deserve’ our overuse injuries by not prioritizing our sarcomere fitness.

How HP Yoga Develops Sarcomere Fitness
When i designed HP Yoga, i did so from an athlete’s devotion to sarcomere fitness development. That is why my HP Yoga-specific techniques such as, “Hold n’ Hover,” “Sit n’ Simmer,” and “Hugging Principle,” are such Big Medicine for us Westerners. We, who do not grow up sitting in Full Lotus and can’t run barefoot, need to prioritize a steadfast joint-conditioning fitness in yoga.

Side-by-side my joint-conditioning approach to developing functional suppleness in HP Yoga philosophy comes a most wonderful training side-effect: an increase in maximal contractile tension. This neural increase develops in my students because the techniques used in HP Yoga force our sarcomeres to lengthen to the extent of peak actin/myosin filament overlap. Such ‘gateway points’ of sarcomere fitness development can only be developed when techniques like those in HP Yoga are used. Intensity is key. So too, is proper alignment and progressive amplitude. The greater we can increase our muscle’s and CT functional length, the number of crosslinks are diminished as filament overlap decreases. This is desired, for it results in the reduced tension and the making of graceful ease during difficult postures or sport movements. As i continue to have you hold a posture in one of my yoga classes or my dvds, the tension developed becomes less and less to the point whereupon the tension during the stretch can equate to that in a passive muscle. This is wonderful inner terrain that those of us who started stiff as a board and then, decades later, can enjoy the blissful solace of holding a once ‘trigger red’ posture easily just can’t explain to those ‘scared stiff’ non-yogis. The WF Training Principle of “Less Is More” when it comes to our filament overlap is explained by the fact that at such lengths, the actin/myosin no longer interweave…thus, little or no tension!

The Stretch Response/Stretch Reflex Through Which Sarcomeres Are Blessed
Physiology researchers Gowitzke and Milner showed us that when our tissues are stretched, they develop tension. This tension is known as the Stretch Response, which is independent of the central nervous system and is a mechanical property of the connective tissues being stretched. Essentially, to enhance our Stretch Response? That’s right; HP Yoga + MAP Amino Acids will provide the neural environment the space and cellular feed required.

On the other hand, the Stretch Reflex is a response by the central nervous system which causes the stretched muscle to contract in response to stretch stimulus. The more familiar your body is with coping with intensities at stretch-out positions, the more efficient and strong and capable grows our electrical, neural, fluid, pneumatic, and pranic systems. Short answer once again: HP Yoga + MAP Amino Acids. Just going climbing or cycling or running won’t do it. That just builds imbalance. In a lifestyle of imbalanced demands, you MUST anchor your fitness with a balancing agent. That is where the scientific art of Wholistic Fitness® comes in.

Imagine a rock climber, hanging on her elbow tendons at arm’s length while attempting to gather the kinetic energy to explode toward a higher handhold. When her muscle is stretched out, the stretch is not uniform along its whole length. Sarcomeres nearer her tendons stretch to a much lesser extent than do our sarcomeres in the middle of her muscle. As she hangs out, sarcomeres at the end of her biceps muscle may still have considerable filament overlap, while those filaments in the middle sarcomeres are more fatigued due to being stretched beyond the point of overlap. Her sarcomeres nearer her tendons can still develop reflex tension and influence the degree of extension. Only the symmetrical wisdom of HP Yoga plus feeding your muscles and CT the MAP Amino Acids will provide a long-term strengthening in balanced fashion for your sarcomeres and other neuronal/chemical feeds.

Regardless of what sports or activities we do, a tremendous amount of stress, force, and torque is placed repetitively upon our connective tissues. This stress must be appropriately trained for. Otherwise, we risk a neuro/chemical/pranic imbalanced that over the long term invites only injuries, dis-ease, and all the other sad effects from not training wholistically.

Keep Cranking.
Wisely.
Wholistically.
Over the long-term.

head bowed,

coach ilg
“the mountain yogi”