• Sleeping – 8 hours or more is essential. Consistent fatigue requires additional sleep. The body heals itself between 10 p.m. – 2 a.m. but the human body can tolerate midnight – 6 a.m. Deep sleep (proper) occurs during these hours and it’s when the body makes vital repairs. Afternoon catnaps are great at adding hours to your sleep if demands on your energy are high, or you are recovering from an illness.
• Eating-not optional. Our metabolisms are relatively constant. Extreme weather and environmental conditions can alter metabolism. During early parts of the day, our digestive systems are at their top performance; therefore large meals should be eaten during breakfast and lunch. Dinner should be nutritious and light because it is in the evening (when digestive system slows), but our Western ways practice the exact opposite. There are herbal concoctions designed to be taken first thing in the morning to utilize digestive energy. Late night eating stagnates.
• Breathing – poor posture, lack of proper exercise, jobs that require consistent sitting, are all responsible for poor breathing. Women tend to hold their stomach in, which in turn prevents the diaphragm (controls breathing) from being properly used. Non-utilization leaves lungs either not fully filled or emptied, and organs in the stomach are deprived of essential massage from respiration.
• Exercise – depends on sex, age and constitution to be defined as the right kind. The first third of life asks for vigorous exercise; middle age should utilize harmonizing and regulatory, while old age should rely on meditative and relaxing. Your physique also determines the amount and type suitable. Weak and ill/recovering people should use gentle, focused area exercise and not deplete resources through overexertion.
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Article comments
1 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
I think this article should have been published under the "Culture" section. Fitness isn't what I have in mind when I want to read a Science / Technology article.
2 - Bob Lloyd
There's a fascinating sleight of hand in the introduction to this article in which you introduce the word Qi as referring to a "bio-energetic field" and then go straight into a typology of the concept as if the existence of this field is demonstratic, evidenced, and real.
Unfortunately, what you are dealing with is a concept which you are then elaborating into a typology to hang various practices on. You say the concept Qi describes a bio-energetic field but unfortunately no-one has ever been able to demonstrate its existence.
In the absence of any convincing evidence that it exists, elaborating the concept serves only to convince believers to continue believing since, if someone has taken the trouble to create such an elaborate structure of related and derived concepts, then maybe it really refers to something real...
Many alternative medicine therapies do similar things. We see people asserting that magnet therapy works and then immediately switching into explanation mode elaborating a theory about energy transfer. Unfortunately magnets don't work like that and the assumed phenomenon doesn't exist.
There are of course very many biological phenomena and it is possible to measure energy changes at the cellular level. But that's real science in the real world and clearly if Qi existed, it would be possible to demonstrate some real, tangible, demonstrable effects at the cellular level. That's been tested, and Qi just doesn't exist.
But the religion of analysing the concept does and goes from strength to strength, just as long as no-one spots the sleight of hand, the clever jump from claiming against the evidence the existence of that bio-energetic field and calling it Qi, over to analysing the concept of Qi and elaborating all the rest of the stuff.
If you can demonstrate the existence of Qi, you can collect a Nobel Prize. It's odd that it hasn't happened already if it's so obvious.
3 - Bob Lloyd
This is listed as a science article but I'm at a loss to find even the slightest hint of scientific thinking, evidential thinking, rational analysis...
Maybe the guys at BC are taken in by this stuff but there must be at least one of the editors with high school science that can tell the difference? Surely?
4 - Dr Dreadful
I have a personal theory that feng shui is not an ancient Chinese theory of aesthetics which taps into the energies of the Earth, but was in fact invented in San Francisco in the 1970s by a Mr Yu, who realized that there was a boatload of money to be made from some very gullible people.
I suspect that qi energy has much the same sort of provenance.
5 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
So, I'm not the only one here who thinks this "Qi Energy" thing is a bunch of nonsense that obviously falls back on proven dieting & exercise methods to support false claims?!
If everyone ate & exercised properly they, too, would see results. It's got absolutely nothing to do with the Bank of Qi or how many loans you take out.
6 - D Clarke
If you can't percieve something with your five objective sences or because science has not yet found a way of detecting it, does it mean that it doesn't exist? Years ago we did not believe that the brain emitted vibrations and then the electrocephalograph was invented to prove this was true. Perhaps some day we will have a device that can be used to determine the quality of a persons vital life force at a particular time. Mr. Lloyd would probably still beleive the earth was flat if there were no satellite photographs to prove otherwise.