Body sense and martial arts fitness
Have found a series of posts about “body sense”, partly following a conversation on Tom Haskins post, I am not really familiar with the psychology yet and trying to get my head around the interaction of sensations, emotions. Both Tom and minh were extremely helpful in their descriptions of how we learn.
Body sense appears to be about reconnecting to your body, increasing your awareness of what is happening.
Body sense is the ability to pay attention to ourselves, to feel our sensations, emotions, and movements on-line, in the present moment, without the mediating influence of judgmental thoughts…
The body sense is more technically called embodied self-awareness. It is composed of sensations like warm, tingly, soft, nauseated, dizzy; emotions such as happy, sad, threatened; and other body senses like feeling the coordination (or lack of coordination) between the arms and legs while swimming, or sensing our shape and size (fat or thin), and sensing our location relative to objects and other people. Thoughts about the self are called conceptual self-awareness. The table below gives a summary of the differences.
Conceptual Self-Awareness
- Based in language
- Rational, explanatory
- Abstract
Embodied Self-Awareness
- Based in sensing, feeling, and acting
- Spontaneous, open to change
- Concrete, in the moment
The series also looks at eating, exercise both with and without mirrors, body image etc. I find this interesting in relation to taekwondo. Out of the three dojang sessions I do weekly, one is with mirrors. This can be very helpful, because when someone is explaining that you are doing something wrong and they demonstrate it and you get it wrong again, if you can see what you are doing in the mirror, you have a better understanding – possibly ..it is easy to get distracted by your image in the mirror although in a dobok – less so.
I guess if men or women are in a gym with mirrors and wearing tighter fitting clothing you naturally become more self conscious. I’m not sure how much difference it makes – I haven’t trained in a gym for a few years and from what I remember, if I was in a good mood to try and exercise which made me concentrate or a really bad mood and concentrated in order to snap out of it, then I didn’t notice the mirror so much. Some of it, like a treadmill where you can be staring into a mirror can work both ways, either your mind drifts to other things because of the monotony – you stare through it, or it can be distracting.
It also depends, if a work or personal situation is on your mind, then it is more difficult to focus anyway, so seeing yourself in the mirror exercising hard may be less than helpful, unless you are an olympic athlete or similar ! Maybe if conceptual self-awareness does exist, then you are more likely to drift back to conceptual in those circumstances.
One of the benefits of martial arts training in the dojang is that there are others around, very fast paced and variety of activities and you are training to develop balance, focus, co-ordination. In terms of general fitness, I dislike running in gyms, you cannot replicate the wind, rain, unexpected changes in the environment as you run around either streets or fields, I feel so much better when I have run outdoors.
Time and budget permitting, I’m thinking about starting video series soon – taking some fitness gadgets for a spin, in both running and martial arts training. Heart rate monitors have been around for a long time, then Nike and others looked at tracking in trainers, now in 2009 there are gadgets like Fitbit*, Apple and Nokia both releasing or partnering with others, GymTechnik etc
Does any of this make any positive difference to how we perceive the benefits to our body / exercise or are they a physical distraction in themselves?
I’m not convinced right now, I am very happy with how I currently train for martial arts without wearing any digital technology. I don’t record anything formally other than documenting the 33 days on this blog earlier in the year and I don’t have plans to do anything more detailed. This will also be alongside continuing a deeper exploration into chi, internal martial arts and eastern philosophy.
In the meantime:
* via: http://www.downes.ca/archive/09/09_25_news_OLDaily.htm
