Ok so moving on, describing my movement practice this is what I call gear 3, which is nothing other than aerobics. And of course aerobic are just dance so there is nothing new here. My only contribution is to merge this practice with movement practice where we move slower and more consciously, so when we play faster we have more structurally sound neuro-muscular patterns.

A time long long ago back when phones were wired to walls and Pac Man was considered advanced gaming technology, people would superstitiously collect VHS tapes of people doing exercise so they themselves would become fit. Videos of people doing what they called aerobic exercises often in leggings were ubiquitous. At some point, our VHS were updated into DVD and aerobics mutated into Tae Bo, but the basic concept of people bobbing around for 20 min or so remained. Then it seemed a cultural revolution happened in the exercise world. Exercise becomes more sophisticated. Yoga, Pilates, CrossFit all started to vie for our attention and time. There are certainly many advantages of these more sophisticated forms of exercise, but I think we lost something when we threw out all these cheesy exercise tapes.

So before I go further in explaining the benefits of aerobics I want to go over what I see as their 2 big flaws. It’s easy, especially if you happen to be new to exercise, to hurt yourself, and they tend to get boring really fast.

So the first issue. With any high-intensity workout, it's easy to twist an ankle, buckle a knee, torque a back, pull a neck or do do any number of things that can hurt us. Aside from acute trauma, it is easy to find ourselves in poor movement patterns that over time will give us what is often erroneously called overuse injuries. Of course "overuse" injuries are really misused injuries. The liquid shape of our movement should be precise and intentional. We should know exactly where all the parts of our body are when we move. All those parts should work in harmony with each other. This is why I feel we should hone our movement patterns while we are moving at our slowest cadence. By taken time to iron out our movement in that realm we will be far less likely to miss-move and strain a muscle or to create an ergonomically off movement groove that over time will do more harm than good.

Our second issue, boredom is also addressed by slowing down. As we move slower it is easy to explore different movement options and create new patterns for ourselves. We should always be working within these 2 cadences to conjure new movements and then to invite them into our dance as we move faster. This keeps our exercise practice from becoming our exercise routine.

So now that we declared the caveats, what are the gains to be made by moving at a faster speed? For starters, it is here our endurance is forged. We learn how to pace ourselves and our breath. It is here we can learn to sustain energy without being winded.

If we want to get a bit more precise let us zoom into our circulatory and system. Our veins which carry deoxygenated blood from our trillions of cells back to the lungs and heart only move blood through gravitational and muscular force. Our lungs and heart are pretty elevated on the body so require muscular forces to squish the deoxygenated blood up to the lungs. Any exercise that creates healthy muscle tone will improve our circulation, which in turn will help out all our many many cells.

Our lymph system like veins requires muscle energy and gravity to move its content. Unlike our vein that supplies the vital commodity of blood, lymph acts as a sort of municipal sewer for the many cells in the body. As cell secrete excess and unwanted fluids they are disposed of in these tubular structures that are found throughout the body. Movement and exercise keep our lymph system flushed out and clean.

We could go on and on describing how all the systems in the body benefit from an aerobic component to our movement practice. If we look beyond the scientific though we will see that every culture has some form of dance, which is all this really is. Dance has been forever associated with healing and spirituality by virtually all people regardless of how their cultures explain it. We intuitively know that moving around will shake off any bad energy we have. While we may not be able to cure major maladies through dance we certainly can improve our mood and mindset to the point where we can better fend off harmful but comforting in the moment's patterns that our time can kill us. There was nothing novel about all these aerobic tapes when they came out people were just rebranding the wheel and throwing some spandex on it.

Anthony Bruni