Excerpt
The Nia Technique
One
Beyond Exercise: Fusion Fitness
1983
"Debbie. Carlos. Let me see you move," the martial artist said to us.
We just stared at each other. Move how? Straight leg kick? Flat back? Cancan kick? And where was the blasting disco music to rev us up?
We began to do jumping jacks.
The sensei shook his head. "You have fifteen seconds' worth of knowledge," he said softly. "You know how to exercise, but you do not know how to move."
Well. Gee. Then why were we two of the most successful aerobics teachers in California? This was way back at the height of the aerobics movement, and Debbie's fitness company had fifty teachers who together taught over a hundred classes every day.
But we had come to the sensei because we knew that something was wrong. The aerobics industry was riddled with injury, burnout, and pain. A study done around this time showed that traditional aerobics had an injury rate that hit 76 percent among teachers and 44 percent among students. Of those injuries, 82 percent were to the knee or below, indicating that the human leg just isn't built for the pounding of conventional aerobics, including long-distance jogging.
What was wrong?
We got our first feel for what was wrong that day at the sensei's martial arts dojo.
The first thing we found out was that we weren't nearly as fit as we'd thought. We were appalled, because Carlos was an indefatigable tennis teaching professional and Debbie was the diva of Bay Area fitness. However, when the sensei asked us to do some basic martial arts stances, our legs started to quiver in just a few seconds. We realized that we had strength in our large muscle groups, but were weak in the smaller stabilizer muscles that provide power and definition.
We also found that we weren't as coordinated as we'd thought. Within the confines of traditional exercises we were flexible, but when we had to simply move, we felt clumsy. Our heads told us to move one way, but our bodies went another. Part of the reason for this disconnect was that all our repetitive exercises had programmed us neurologically for rigid, mechanical movements, something very common among exercisers.
On that momentous day in the dojo, Debbie also became painfully aware that her style of movement had become rather hard and masculine-yang, in the terminology of the sensei. In trying to be fit, she'd sacrificed some of her natural physical grace.
We also found that we were overthinking most of our movements, which was anathema to our sensei. The whole point of martial arts is to defend yourself during an attack, and if you stop to think for even a millisecond about how to move, you're dead. That's partly why martial artists are so fluid and deft-they don't think, they just do, and it brings out the body's natural beauty.
Most noticeable of all, though, was that we'd both lost the joy of moving. As we watched our smiling sensei move with great sensual pleasure, we realized that we'd lost the childlike, playful, pleasant quality in our physical actions. For us-like so many others who struggle to be fit-movement had become work. It was donkey kicks. Sit-ups. Push-ups. Repetition. Drudgery. We were like wild horses, captured and domesticated, that now pulled a plow.
But what could we do?
If only we'd known then what we know now.
What we know now:
The fundamentals of Nia
The Joy of Movement Is the Secret of Fitness. Stop exercising. Start moving. Follow the pleasure principle: If it feels good, do it; if it doesn't, stop.
When people make love, it's usually to feel good, not just to procreate, and movement is the same: People move mostly because it feels good. Fitness is merely a by-product of moving, just as procreation is a by-product of sex.
Fitness Must Address the Human Being, Not Just the Body. Exercise that's done strictly for its own physical sake, divorced from the emotions and human spirit, isn't satisfying, isn't fun, and eventually fails. To feel good enough to last a lifetime, an exercise regimen must satisfy the heart and soul.
Nia simultaneously addresses the body, mind, emotions, and spirit and puts them on the same page. Nia uses physical activity to integrate one's neurology (including the mind, emotions, and spirit), with one's outer body, or musculature. To achieve this whole-being integration, you must address the whole person, using a comprehensive, holistic exercise approach. Nia accomplishes this by combining several classic movement forms from the healing arts (including yoga), the martial arts, and dance arts.
Movement Must Be Conscious, Not Habitual. Whole-being fitness begins with heightened awareness-of both body and mind. To achieve this, you need to turn off the automatic pilot that so often governs your movements and thoughts. Living (and moving) by rote and routine kills consciousness and waters down the experience of life, turning people into hamsters on a treadmill.
Start focusing throughout the day on all the physical sensations coursing through your body, and start moving with purpose. Because Nia is a nonimpact program, it can be done without the protective padding of shoes. This makes people aware of exactly how they're moving, via the seven thousand nerve endings that are in each foot, and intensifies the physical and psychological feeling of being grounded. In Nia, we call the feet "the hands that touch the earth."
You should also stop performing conventional repetitive exercises, because they limit movement choices, reinforce robotic living, and often lock in mental and spiritual blocks. Constant physical repetition doesn't even build muscles, because the muscles quickly adjust to rigid, repeated movements, and muscle strength plateaus.
Use Your Body the Way It Was Designed to Be Used. Gain fitness by doing movements that shift your body's own weight, with varying levels of intensity, range, and speed. Replace and/or supplement repetitive jogging, jumping, and lifting with stances, postures, steps, blocks, and kicks that are compatible with your body's natural structure and that feel good. These movements will burn calories; reduce body fat; create strength and muscle definition; and promote balance, grace, flexibility, endurance, and good posture.
Use Your Body to Heal Your Mind, Emotions, and Spirit. Every muscle in the body has neuronal nodal points, memory receptors that are connected to the brain. These receptors help create muscle memory and help store the physical components of emotional traumas. Therefore, as you become increasingly conscious of your body, you can trigger awareness of these mind-body connectors and gain enhanced linkage to your mind and emotions.
In Nia, we use the body to heal the mind and spirit by joining muscular movement with introspection, intention, visualization, imagery, and expressiveness. Body language and verbal expression are used to help bring forgotten feelings-pleasant and unpleasant-to the foreground of consciousness. Thus Nia is commonly employed to relieve and reverse depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorders, substance addictions, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and abusive behaviors. It is used in hospitals, substance-abuse centers, and even prisons.
It is also used-not incidentally-to help people who already feel good to feel even better.
Take the Path of Least Resistance. Contrary to conventional fitness wisdom, the easy way is the natural way. The militaristic, punishing element often found in traditional fitness is not only passé, it's not as effective. Psychologically, it creates resistance and insecurity, rather than enthusiasm and self-respect. Physically, it creates too much strain to be worth the gain.
To achieve lasting body-mind-spirit fitness on this path of least resistance, you must move in accord with what we call the Body's Way: the structural design of the body that dictates its proper use. Even more precisely, you must move in accord with your own Body's Way, because no two bodies are exactly alike.
Function follows form, and proper function of the body is always easier to perform, and is more physically rewarding, than improper function.
. . .
These few, simple concepts all seem so obvious now! However, in the mid-1980s-when, for example, virtually no one in the fitness industry was doing yoga-these ideas were widely considered far-fetched. Some experts considered them a dangerous threat to the sacrosanct no pain, no gain philosophy. They were, in fact, revolutionary, and they changed the face of fitness forever.
the revolution in fitness
These days, there's nothing strange to most sophisticated people about the concepts of mind-body fitness or cross-training or getting fit with the healing arts (such as Pilates and yoga), or even combining movement forms to create fusion-fitness methods (such as Tae-Bo and Yoga-Lates). The current widespread acceptance of these concepts might never have occurred-or may have been much delayed-if we had not inaugurated all of them during the early days of Nia.
On that first day at our sensei's martial arts studio, though, we weren't trying to revolutionize the fitness industry. We were just trying to find a way to help people get fit without back-breaking punishment. Our sensei led us in slow, controlled movements that looked easy but felt hard. By slowing down, we discovered muscles we'd never used in aerobics. We also discovered some subtle principles that had been obscured by the frenetic, whirlwind pace of conventional aerobics. For example, we found that as we shouted Hai! with every kick, our diaphragmatic breath tightened our abdominal muscles even better than sit-ups did. Imagine! Getting stronger abs just from breathing!
We also got a jolt of insight just by taking off our shoes to perform the martial art of tae kwon do. It was the same feeling you probably get yourself when you kick off your shoes at the end of a long day: That feels better! Barefoot, we could feel the exact impact of all our movements, and it forced us to stop pounding our feet into the floor as if our skeletons were made of steel.
We kept going back to the dojo and almost immediately we began to see new ripples in our abdominal muscles and more definition in our legs, hips, and buttocks. We were getting "cuts"-those fine lines that define muscles-which most athletes get only from hours in the weight room.
Suddenly, we realized how much we didn't know. It was time to hit the books. Debbie, who had a strong academic background in anatomy and physiology, was especially industrious, and spent five hours in the library every day for the next year.
We soon began to introduce the fruits of our research to our aerobics students. No more boring donkey kicks! No more searing sit-ups! Forget the leg lifts! There's a better way! And they looked at us like we'd lost our minds. Many even left our classes altogether, but it didn't matter-we knew we were on the trail of something big.
As we kept studying and experimenting, we made additions to our workout. To balance the power and volatility of tae kwon do, we added the softer martial art of t'ai chi. From the subtle movements of t'ai chi, we learned important details, such as leading with our heels, rather than our toes, when stepping. Over time, we also added aikido, a martial art that enables people to become fit without force. Aikido has the visually beautiful characteristic of turning linear movements into graceful arcs.
From our growing involvement with the martial arts community, word got around that we were doing something completely different, and students began to migrate back to our studio. We were also starting to get some important positive reviews from the leaders of San Francisco's fitness community. The most important accolade came from Dr. James Garrick, who's generally regarded as the Father of Sports Medicine. Dr. Garrick was so curious about our work that he wired Carlos with loads of electrodes, to determine the exact degree of our workout's physical exertion. The workout didn't look very hard, and, once you got accustomed to it, it didn't even feel very hard-so how could it be as effective as it seemed?
Dr. Garrick couldn't believe the results. Literally. He thought his machines were malfunctioning. So he brought Carlos back to the hospital and did it all over again. Same results. The workout hit the ideal target zone for cardiovascular exertion-without all the usual grunting and groaning and huffing and puffing.
We also caught the attention of one of San Francisco's leading chiropractors, who for the past few years had been alarmed at all the casualties hitting his office from the city's aerobics studios. He loved our approach, as did the city's leading podiatrist, who told us that our students were no longer coming to him with broken-down feet.
Our success was picking back up, and we were getting a lot of media attention for our "radical" ideas. We were even starting to influence the aerobics industry, which copied our nonimpact aerobics by introducing low-impact aerobics (and later step aerobics), definitely an improvement, but still boring.
Even so, something was bothering Carlos. One day he put it into words: "This is effective, but where is the fun?" Carlos has a special gift for experiencing joy, and if he said it wasn't fun, then it wasn't fun.
So, we asked ourselves, what's fun? Well . . . dancing is fun.
We now had a new project. Carlos, who was always our guinea pig, started taking every dance class in the city. Jazz dance. Modern dance. Expressive dance. Eventually, we introduced a jazz dance and a modern dance component to the workout, and our students lit up like Christmas trees! It brought out the closet dancer in every one of them, and pepped up the workout even more.
Much of the reason students loved it was because we were careful to emphasize that there was no wrong way to dance. We weren't trying to put on a Broadway musical, we were just trying to get people moving. When we got rid of this regimentation, we also eliminated the slew of injuries that generally plague dancers. Strict dance forms may look beautiful, but they're murder on the body. Professional dancers usually end up even more crippled than pro athletes. It's the price they pay for doing things the traditional way, instead of the Body's Way.
Then we took our freedom from regimentation even further. Instead of telling our students what steps to do, we started giving them generalized movement directions, using imagery and visualization: "Draw a rainbow in the sky!" Or "Pull bubble gum off your shoulders." "Paint a wall!" We all did our movements differently, of course, in our own Body's Way.
People were smiling without being reminded to smile and breathing without being told to breathe. They felt good. One student summed it all up: "I don't know if I look pretty doing this, but I feel pretty." People were playing with balance, creating shapes with their bodies, letting time slip away, and feeling sensations they'd forgotten.
