RTF: Radically Transformative Fitness
Sharpen your mind while you strengthen your body
By Edward Yu, Certified Feldenkrais Practitionersm
A new way of thinking about fitness is emerging from age-old wisdom and the result will transform not only your physique, but your posture, gait, coordination and sense of awareness.
While conventional fitness classes are good for strengthening muscles and getting a cardiovascular workout, RTF brings the added elements of functional strength, coordination, balance, awareness and learning. By breaking down movements into smaller, more digestible parts, you begin to understand the fundamentals of efficient and powerful movement in a much deeper, embodied way. These fundamentals can then be carried into any sport, dance, or martial art, as well as to every day life activities like walking, cooking or mowing the lawn.
Functional Strength vs. Conventional Strength
The martial arts masters of antiquity worked painstakingly to embody the fundamentals of efficient movement, which is why they possessed such tremendous power, speed, agility and good health. Once the building blocks for powerful, coordinated movement were in place, it was much easier to put them together into larger, faster, more devastating movements. The result is what I call functional strength, and it is several times more powerful than strength that relies solely on how much you can bench press.
Drawing on the masters, RTF helps you discover the building blocks of powerful, coordinated movement, and thereby helps you build functional strength. Whether or not you lift weights, functional strength allows you to maximize the collective power of your body because instead of having different parts working as separate units, you begin to work as one unified whole. In addition, because more of your body is involved when you are moving as such, you end up getting a better workout.
Intention
The Chinese refer to intention as Yi, and it is the driving force behind Qi, or universal life-force. For our purposes, intention can be likened to the pathway through which your body moves. While ambiguous intention is akin to a path wrought with potholes, sharply focused intention forms a smooth path like a freshly paved racetrack. The clearer your intention, the more precise, coordinated and powerful your movement.
From this standpoint, intention determines the smoothness, power and ease of any movement. Clear, unambiguous intention, however, is not something we normally possess, but rather something we need to cultivate day to day, moment to moment. The reason is because there is so much unclear, that is to say, unconscious, intention forming potholes in our path. Most of us behave as if these barriers are an immutable and inevitable part of life—as if the definition for pathway is a dirt road filled with large, gaping holes into which we frequently fall. Obviously, it is not, but in order to fill in the holes—that is remove unwanted ambiguity—we must be aware that the ambiguity exists in the first place. And we must realize that we put it there.
Power, coordination and freedom from tension
Ridding yourself of such ambiguity and creating clear intention is an integral part of RTF. As you weed out unnecessary tension, you quickly become more powerful, graceful, coordinated and free of tension. Each new movement pattern in turn has a positive effect on your posture, breathing and sense of well-being.
Edward Yu is a Certified Feldenkrais Practitionerssm offering classes and seminars on: RTRunning; RTFitness; Taichi, Bagua and Martial Arts; Back and Neck Revitalization; Pain and Stress Reduction.