Experience flow in Central Arkansas at a Flow By The River Total Fitness Boot Camp. BrickhouseBodymind.com is a mind body fitness blog, encouraging personal transformation through informative articles on integral lifestyle issues such as stress relief, sexuality and relationships, and transformative practices like strength training, meditation and yoga. The website is designed to help you train your body, sharpen your mind, and unleash your spirit, making total fitness a reality for everyone.
I recently came across Arthur DeVany’s blog, where he actively discusses his Evolutionary Fitness protocol. Art’s a 70 year-old guy who is in fantastic shape, weighing about 200 pounds at about 10% bodyfat. He’s really a picture of what any of us would want to look and feel like at his age. He’s been active for a very long time and is extremely smart. Over the years, his philosophy toward physical fitness has come to be informed greatly by the evolutionary heritage of the human species.
Now, I believe one of the greatest advantages of living in the 21st Century is our awareness of our own evolution. The baby-boomers are really the first generation to have wide-spread knowledge of the history of human development going back 40,000 years and beyond. The advantages this has to understanding your own personal development are huge, so when I stumbled upon Art’s work, I ate it up.
Keep in mind, I’m not a geneticist or evolutionary biologist, but I have done a fair bit of homework for this article. Even so, I welcome corrections from those who might have a more informed perspective on this subject. My general pattern when I come across an intriguing body of work is to consume as much of it as I can, digest it over a period of time, and spit it back out on this blog. Doing this helps me learn more about the particular system and internalize the core concepts, while making it my own at the same time. This article is my analysis of Art DeVany’s Evolutionary Fitness essay.
For those of you keeping score at home, it has been a bit over two weeks since the last post. One post a week was my goal when I started this blog 6 months or so ago, and up until now I have surprisingly been able to keep that pace. Now, however, work has begun in earnest on my book, I’m in training for a Prasara yoga instructor certification at the end of the month, and I’m working with my cameraman Robert to develop a 6-part Brickhouse Bodymind TV series chronicling his transformation from stressed-out, pot-bellied twenty-something to peaceful, hard-bodied heartthrob using the Brickhouse Bodymind Blueprint as it will be laid out in the book.
In the mean time, the amount of posts will probably diminish a bit, but rest assured that if you maintain your subscription, you’ll be among the first to be privy to the exciting new content coming later this summer. In an effort to keep some content flowing, I came up with the following post. It is an adaptation of a thread I started on the Tao Bums forum today in conjunction with some stuff I’ve been developing for my book. Hopefully y’all will get something out of it. As always, I encourage anyone to comment below if you have thoughts.
I believe we in the post-modern age, particularly those of us in the Western world, have done a wonderful job of compiling and translating ancient and foreign ideas about this thing called enlightenment. This is fantastic, but I fear that a largely borrowed vocabulary lacks enough relevance in the post-modern world to be as effective as it was all those centuries ago. These terms are more likely to make enlightenment seem like some distant thing than part of our fundamental nature. Let me be clear that I know the value of these ancient systems, and that I myself practice some of them, and am influenced by them. My purpose here is not to poo-poo these traditions but to frame their conceptual foundations in terms more familiar to those of us who have survived the Technological Revolution.
The terminology I’m talking about would be integral - both comprehensive and balanced - comprehensive in that it would take into account pre-modern, modern and post-modern sources alike, and balanced in that it would not leave behind any aspect of the individual (mind, body, spirit being the three major aspects).
Just in time for summer, one of the best flat-tummy core exercises I know - the spinal rock. In this episode I explain some tips for getting better results from the killer ab exercise, the spinal rock.
Special thanks go to Becca Davis for the production photos, Robert for his camera work, Signal Path for the intro music, and as always my wife for allowing me to spend time on this exhilarating diversion. Please let me know how you like the video content by commenting below, and don’t forget to subscribe via e-mail or rss so you don’t miss the next great recipe, article or video on integrating mind and body fitness.
This episode is a video response to James’s recent comment about asymmetry as it relates to joint mobility programs. I want to thank James for his comment, and I also want to make clear that this drill as well as the one in Episode 1 come from Andrey Lappa’s Dance of Shiva system, not my own head. I only present these exercises to give you an idea of the types of movements I work with everyday to improve my long-term health. If you’re interested in detailed instructions of this extremely complex system, I strongly suggest picking up his DVD.
In this episode I demonstrate the power and challenge of asymmetry in the vertical arm movements of Lappa’s system. These movements work the arms through their entire range of motion - internal/external rotation of the humerus, pronation/supination of the forearm, flexion/extension of the elbow, and flexion/extension of the shoulder. As you work with these movements, be careful not to let your shoulders become tense and creep toward your ears. These movements should be fluid and free. Try also to activate the bandhas as you get more comfortable with the practice. Enjoy!
If you haven’t already, be sure and subscribe via e-mail or rss, so you don’t miss the next episode. Thanks a ton to Robert for the use of his garden and his nice camera work, and thank you for watching!
Okay, so this is a post announcing the first of what I hope will be many BrickhouseBodymind Blueprints. These are pdf documents and will be of the same nature as my posts here on the blog. The blueprints are printer-friendly, miniature e-books that are aesthetically designed and contain high-quality images where appropriate. They will cover subjects I consider to be core elements of the Brickhouse Bodymind integral fitness lifestyle. I hope these will be more user-friendly to readers than filling a long blog post with a bunch of pictures. We all know what a nightmare those can be to print.
This first one will be freely available at the link below for as long I feel like leaving it there. In the foreseeable future, these blueprints will remain free of charge to those who subscribe to my e-mail feed, so go ahead and jump on board if you like what you read. If you’re subscribed already via a feed reader, I’m going to try and figure a way to make these things available to you as well. I’ll let you all know how that goes.
This blueprint is a detailed discussion of the use of the yogic bandhas to insure proper structural alignment in posture practice, in general exercise, and in life. These techniques are best explored with an instructor to give you immediate feedback, but this document should give you a good idea of what’s happening and why it’s to your advantage to explore these actions in depth. They are obviously part of the yoga tradition – and as such have innumerable applications within the practice of hatha yoga – but their practice and benefits extend far beyond yoga asana. I practice these techniques lying in bed at night to calm my mind and first thing in the morning to loosen up and energize my core. I find they are fantastic tools for building and controlling sexual energy and for increasing sexual longevity. They are great for helping maintain proper alignment while lifting weights in a gym setting as well. The applications really are unlimited.
