Jack7
First Post
Thanks guys. It's good to see there are guys who reject the stereotype of the fat/skinny, out of shape gamer geek.
For me personally, I've never believed in the dichotomy between intelligence and athleticism. To me an intelligent man oughtta make a good athlete cause he should naturally be able to easily master and exploit the mental aspects of physical training, making training more efficient. And a strong and athlete man should, because of the discipline he employs in training his body, be able to apply the same discipline towards improving his mind. To me it's like saying that because a man is a good artist he cannot be good at sports, or because he is a man of the cloth he cannot be a brilliant scientist.
In other words intelligence and strength, and art and science and religion, are not mutually exclusive, but complimentary and mutually exploitable.
I've always thought the Renaissance Man/Rhodes Scholar was a far better objective to shoot for than the idea of being exclusively or merely a Geek or a Jock, or an Artist, or a Scientist. It need not be Either/Or. You can be all of these things, and more, and if not all at the same time (because of time or other limitations), at least all of them at some point in your life, if you only wish and are willing to work to do so.
I had a somewhat strange relationship with the Yoga part of the program as well. As a kid (a teenager) I studied Yoga under a Yogin from Thailand. He taught me Raja Yoga (meditative yoga) and the asanas - or positions - as meditative stances. So I would undertake stances and stand or sit or lie in them for a long time, sometimes an hour or more. In other words I learned Hatha Yoga primarily as a series of static positions to strengthen and discipline the body (unmoving) in order to support meditation. It was just a support system for Raja yoga.
So it was kinda strange to do Yoga in the way P90X required, which was sorta like light speed compared to how I had been trained. If I did the Surya Namaskar in under five minutes, my Yogin would have said, "slow-down boy, it's not a race. It's control of the body and mind." So P90X yoga took some real getting used to, and because of my previous injuries, doing Hatha yoga that fast and in that way, well, it was a hard part of the program for me in that sense. I now like the Yoga part, and see the body flexibility advantages, but it still feels kinda alien to me. And I see BG's point about how hard it is to keep up with.
BG, I thought you also had a good point on one of your blogs about the improvements to posture. That was a good observation.