body rock

I was going to write this soppy and awestruck blog about how amazing the human body and mind are in their characteristics and abilities.

Instead, I'll just speak briefly about a few hacks and other exercises I've been working on and some other mumble jumble.

As we all know, our minds and bodies are very plastic to the environment. People who live in high altitudes have very high red blood cell counts and forearm blood flow, people who climb from a very young age have wide shoulders and big ape-indexes, people living in highly ethnically diverse places can be native speakers of four or five languages.

Our bodies and minds are also extremely sensitive to our own modification.

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I was reading about free divers (shortly after getting scuba certified) and found their physiology incredible. Huge lung volume, incredible breath volume-flow-rate, extremely low resting heart rate, and of course the ability to hold breath for a long long time. They have everything: strength, endurance and efficiency.

What a wickedly great ability to harvest oxygen and use it effectively, I thought. If I had some of these skills, it would make me better not just at swimming and diving but at everything I do. It would be like a firmware upgrade.

I'm also certain that free divers' abilities are not simply genetically inherited. I think they were cultivated.

Free diver breathing exercises (the ones I found, at least) are interesting, designed to force the body to build better lungs and improve other systems, but also to alter its programming to perform better in low/deprived oxygen environments.

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Needless to say I haven't been keeping up with them very well. Doing a good, effective set of exercises means sitting in one place (sometimes walking) and being very focused for more than half an hour. Doing it more than once a week (or month) is just too much inertia for me to handle. Free divers probably do them for hours every day.

What was shocking was how well I responded despite my lack of commitment. By my second session (a month after the first) I could hold my breath sitting down for two and a half minutes. Pretty shocking, eh?

I haven't done the exercises in about three months now. Hopefully I will get my act together soon.

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Other hacks and exercises on my plate : object manipulation (spinning), dancing (tango etc), martial arts (capoeira etc), free running, coconut tree climbing, language learning, musical instruments (clarinet etc), ambidexterity...

I wonder what I'm actually trying to achieve.