A factor that greatly supports the opening of energy in practice is exercise and care of the physical body.
So being present becomes more and more the exercise the older you get.
The bench press per se is not a risky exercise. When done right, it can help improve upper body strength and size. It's only when form takes a back seat to numbers and when it's grossly overtrained that problems result. Injuries occur in the shoulders and elbows when the bench press is overtrained, poor technique is used, such as rebounding the bar off the chest and bridging, no other exercises for the upper body are included in the program, and there are no core exercises done for the upper back. Quite often, it's a combination all these factors.
Because it is a 'use it or lose it' brain, when we develop a map area [in the brain], we long to keep it activated. Just as our muscles become impatient for exercise if we've been sitting all day.
I take exercise for each part of the body: arms, legs, back and whatever muscles are required to keep the body fit. I do at least 20 different exercises daily for my upper and lower body. Then I come here every morning to do calf raises and play tennis. If there is time in the afternoon, I play tennis again. At least three hours I spend on weightlifting and bodybuilding.
Every building you come out of, there is a parasite there exercising his constitutional right to make money out of being a parasite, trying to take your photo. Frankly, folks, I go to work, I do my job. I really concentrate, and if you go to the cinema, pay your money and have a good time. That's the end of it, as far as I'm concerned.
Stress such as you experience in exercise is what creates builds focus, strength, and the capability for expanded expression; and the same is true for any kind of performance.
What the hell do doctors know about exercise? Most of them know zero. You gotta push elderly people to failure like anybody else. Then the body responds.
I wake up in the morning, I do a little stretching exercises, pick up the horn and play.
Never be silent! Make your opinions known, and do not fear retribution for speaking your mind! The only ones who will aggressively try to silence you are the ones who do not respect the liberties and rights of the individual. Those people deserve our contempt, and when you draw them out of the shadows by exercising your civil right to freedom of speech, they will expose themselves for what they truly are.
Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.
It's always been pretty easy for me to exercise my imagination. The other part of the brain, the one that does mathematics, is a nightmare for me. It doesn't work at all.
I don't see any Stoic practice as problematic or risky, but I would advise to engage in extreme versions of the negative visualization exercise only if you are an advanced practitioner. The negative visualization is a meditation during which you visualize, slowly and deliberately, something bad or discomforting happening to you.
We live in a society running from pain through alcohol, through too much exercise, through sugar, through drugs - as opposed to realizing that these things come up because they are lessons. It's a way to wake you up.
I do love exercise. I do love yoga, which keeps my body nice and healthy.
Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
We'll all make better choices about diet, exercise, and personal health when someone else isn't paying for the consequences of those choices.
It's just an impulse, in some actors. You want to make the audience like you. That's the aim of the exercise.
I eat right. I exercise. I run 5 miles a day on the treadmill.
I believe that a healthy lifestyle isn't just a regular exercise routine or your eating habits, but a synergy of a healthy mind and body.