Body, Mind, Breathing, Energy and Spirit

What makes a true martial artist? Is it just the ability to fight well and defend themselves against an attacker? It cannot be that alone; many street fighters can also do this, and they do not deserve the title "artists." It is far more than fighting skill; it takes a much greater commitment at many levels to be a true martial artist. "You must learn to first fine tune, then balance all five aspects of your being: body, mind, breathing, energy and spirit-then harmonize them with the three forces of Earth, Heaven and Human Nature," says Ramel Rones, master teacher of Northern Shaolin, White Crane, Chin Na, Weapons, Tai Chi Chuan and Chi Kung. Rones, a disciple of Dr.Yang Jwing-Ming, YMAA founder and Kung Fu grandmaster, has learned his lessons well. With more than 20 years under his belt training full-time with Dr. Yang and other renowned Eastern martial arts masters, he has won gold medals in solo form as well as fighting competitions in the U.S, Europe, and China. He has used his chi kung knowledge to help cancer patients survive and has helped the elderly cope with what he calls "unnecessary aging." He has also developed and tailored a mind/body approach, based on the principles of various martial arts, for debilitating diseases such as cancer and arthritis. "Fighting and forms successes are only the external manifestations of the arts, which is needed at a certain step of the path of a martial artist," says Rones. "After all, the real goal of martial arts is a life-long journey of self-discovery and self-mastery. If you learn martial arts only for the purpose of fighting, you will probably lose interest at some point or another-you will have achieved mastery only over the first building block of our being, the body; and nothing more." Rones believes that as you age, you will naturally be more concerned with health and longevity, and perhaps the goal of enlightenment (or at least intensive sitting or standing meditation) so that's where the other building blocks-mind, breathing, energy and spirit come into play. "The martial arts journey," says Rones, "is one in which you strike a balance between external and internal work and developing the mind and the body. By doing so, you will not only be on the right path to achieving great fighting skills, but maximum health and longevity and a better quality of life for you as well as the people around you." But how do you fine tune the body? "You begin to fine tune the physical body through finding a balance between strength and flexibility. One way to achieve this is by doing forms and drills," replied Rones. "Relaxing the body is the first step in fine tuning it. Only when you are relaxed are you able to find balance and find your physical body's center. Once you find your center, you're closer to finding your roots. And from there, you are just one step away from feeling an increased energy flow.

Child Obesity

Obesity in this generation of children is such that they could be the first basically in the history of the United States to live less healthful and shorter lives than their parents...''
''There is an unprecedented increase in prevalence of obesity at younger and younger ages without much obvious public health impact...but when they start developing heart attack, stroke, kidney failures, amputations, blindness, and ultimately death at younger ages, then that could be a huge effect on life expectancy."

These statements were made by Dr. David S. Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital Boston. He is one of the authors who reported on childhood obesity in the United States. This report was published in the March, 2005 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Although this report was issued 2 years ago, the matter has not gotten any better. As a matter of fact, childhood obesity is still on the rise. I was just looking at my childhood class picture from grammar school. It was taken in the late 50s or very early 60s. Out of a class of thirty-one students, there is only one that could be classified as overweight! The majority of students in today's classrooms are either overweight or obese. This is a complete reversal from four decades ago when my class picture was taken. Today's statistics are unbelievable. 1 in 3 American children, or about 30 million, are overweight. If conditions don't change soon, it will increase to 1 in 2 or 50 percent by 2010! Pediatricians are now treating children for diseases once only associated with aging adults. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, heart attacks and sleep apnea are being diagnosed in children. Medical doctors and researchers are now telling us that when these children reach their 20s, they can be expected to be diagnosed with chronic diseases that normally afflict adults in their 60s and 70s. Current studies of obese preschoolers seem to indicate a disparity between racial groups and economic boundaries. Obesity seems to be affecting Hispanic children from poor families especially hard. It affects white and black children also but to a lesser degree. MSNBC.com reported that 32 percent of white and black preschoolers were either overweight or obese; the figure was 44 percent for Hispanic tots. The authors of the study couldn't explain the gap between whites and blacks and Hispanic preschoolers. But they have noticed that obese mothers have a greater tendency to produce obese children. Also, the risk for obesity is greater for children who are given bottles in bed at age 3. Other studies have found that one of the predominate causes of childhood obesity is overfeeding. As children get older, reaching the preteen and teen years, their sedentary lifestyles and poor eating habits pack on the weight. The number one product which is responsible for America's overweight and obese children is soft drinks. Soda consumption has increased 500 percent from the 50s until now. In addition to soft drinks, children are exposed to sugary fruit drinks. The major ingredient in soft drinks and fruit drinks are artificial sweeteners such as sucralose (Splenda), saccharin, and aspartame (NutraSweet and Equal.) And then there is high fructose corn syrup. Not only is this artificial sweetener stored in the body as fat as is regular sugar, but it also prevents the body from burning fat! Our children are no longer eating nutritious home- cooked meals. They're raiding the school's vending machines and patronizing fast food restaurants such as McDonald's and Burger King. When I was growing up I ate home-cooked meals. By its very nature, home-cooked meals are more nutritious than fast foods and even your upscale restaurant food. One ingredient my mother added to our meals that no restaurant could ever hope to add is 'love.' The only love you'll ever get from eating establishments is 'the love of your money.' The other obesity factor which threatens our children is a lack of activity. Today there are just too many electronic distractions which woo children from valuable play time. There are cell phones, video games, internet surfing, and 24/7 television. It is hard for good physical activity to compete with that lineup. When I was coming up gym class was mandatory from grades 1 through high school. We didn't have cell phones or even personal phones in our bedrooms to interfere with play time. There were no video games, internet surfing or 24/7 TV watching. When we finally got a television, it was for the entire family. Viewing was limited to after we had to come in from playing outside. Even though I ate plenty of sweets such as ice cream, cookies, and cakes, I burned all those sugar calories by playing outside 6 days out of 7. And I wasn't exposed to modern technological food inventions such as high fructose corn syrup which wasn't invented until the 1970s. The obesity threat is all too real. Children are essentially being made old before their time by it. How? By incurring adult degenerative diseases before they become adults. They are also not going to live as long as they should. Another tragic side to the obesity threat to our children is bariatric surgery. Bariatric surgeries for the severely to morbidly obese are on the rise. Preteens as well as teens are having this procedure. The only type of surgery I knew about when I was growing up was the removal of tonsils (something I managed to avoid thank God.) There is a solution to this obesity threat to our children. There needs to be more safe areas and parks for kids to play in. There also needs to be a drastic reduction in cell phone use, internet surfing, video gaming, and TV watching. Healthy alternatives to sugary drinks and fast foods is a necessity.

SLEEP

A Crucial Component of Overall Health
Quality not Quanity, by Kendal Black

Quality not quantity. No matter how much your mother tells you that you need eight hours of sleep, if you're not tired and you can't truly relax, your sleep time will be worthless.

Robin Lloyd of Live Science reports that at the 2006 National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference, experts agreed, according psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego on the following recommendations for obtaining optimum sleep value: Do not take sleeping pills. This includes over-the- counter pills and melatonin. Don't go to bed until you're sleepy. If you have trouble sleeping, try going to bed later or getting up earlier. Get up at the same time every morning, even after a bad night's sleep. The next night, you'll be sleepy at bedtime. If you wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall back to sleep, get out of bed and return only when you are sleepy. Avoid worrying, watching TV, reading scary books, and doing other things in bed besides sleeping and sex. If you worry, read thrillers or watch TV, do that in a chair that's not in the bedroom. Do not drink or eat anything caffeinated within six hours of bedtime. Avoid alcohol. It's relaxing at first but can lead to insomnia when it clears your system. Spend time outdoors. People exposed to daylight or bright light therapy sleep better. A six-year study Kripke headed up of more than a million adults ages 30 to 102 showed that people who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a lower death rate than those who get 8 hours of sleep. The risk from taking sleeping pills 30 times or more a month was not much less than the risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, he says. So what happens when you don't have time for even 6 hours of sleep? Surely you can't go without sleep? Without adequate rest, the brain's ability to function quickly deteriorates. The brain works harder to counteract sleep deprivation effects, but operates less effectively: concentration levels drop, and memory becomes impaired. Similarly, the brain's ability to problem solve is greatly impaired. Decision-making abilities are compromised, and the brain falls into rigid thought patterns that make it difficult to generate new problem- solving ideas. Insufficient rest can also cause people to have hallucinations. Other typical effects of sleep deprivation include: depression heart disease hypertension irritability slower reaction times slurred speech tremors Båcause the amount and quality of the sleep we get affects our hormone levels, namely our levels of leptin and ghrelin, many physiological processes that depend on these hormone levels to function properly, including appetite, are affected by our sleep. While leptin is a hormone that affects our feelings of fullness and satisfaction after a meal, ghrelin is the hormone that stimulates our appetites. When you suffer from sleep deprivation, your body's levels of leptin fall while ghrelin levels increase. This means that you end up feeling hungrier without really feeling satisfied by what you eat, causing you to eat more and, consequently, gain weight. POLYPHASIC SLEEP Polyphasic sleep is a term used to describe several alternative sleep patterns intended to reduce sleep time to 2-6 hours daily in order to achieve a better quality of sleep. This is achieved by spreading out sleep into short naps of around 15-30 minutes throughout the day, and in some variants, a core sleep period of a few hours at night. The term "polyphasic sleep" itself refers only to the practice of sleeping multiple times in a 24-hour period (usually, more than two, in contrast to "biphasic sleep") and does not imply any particular schedule. Uberman's Sleep In application, Uberman's sleep schedule is likely to be the most widely known type of polyphasic sleep, and also the most strict. It consists of six naps of 20- 25 minutes each, occurring four hours apart throughout the day. This is also the closest schedule to the type that has been studied by Claudio Stampi in connection with long-distance solo boat races. Claudio Stampi advocates polyphasic sleep as a means of ensuring optimal performance in situations where extreme sleep deprivation is inevitable (e.g. to improve performance in solo sailboat racers), but Stampi does not advocate the polyphasic sleep as a lifestyle. Core Sleep "Core sleep" is a variant of Uberman that adds a block of sleep, usually several hours, to the Uberman schedule, replacing one or two naps. (This term is also sometimes used to describe accidental oversleep by someone following Uberman, though one will more likely see the term "crash", and occasionally "reboot".) Another variant is called Everyman sleep schedule. Buckminster Fuller advocated Dymaxion Sleep, a regimen consisting of 30 minute naps every six hours. A short article was published about this schedule in the October 11, 1943 issue of Time Magazine. According to this article, he followed this schedule for two years, but after that had to quit because "his schedule conflicted with that of his business associates, who insisted on sleeping like other men."

We'd like to remind everyone that this month's belt exam will be Saturday - 17 November 2007

Please review the testing schedule, exam roster, and upcoming events to see how it may affect you by visiting our website
@ http://www.athensmartialarts.net and clicking on the "Student Corner" icon.