The Books

Why this method exists

I have spent most of my life trying to understand the human body.

I did not begin with a single system or tradition. As a child I was fascinated by shamanism, meditation and the extraordinary abilities attributed to people who had trained themselves beyond ordinary limits. I read Carlos Castaneda and accounts of Tibetan monks. Later I studied yoga, meditation, Buddhism, Taoism, Qigong, healing and many forms of martial art, particularly Shaolin Kung Fu and Tai Chi (officially 2nd Dan Black Belt instructor within the system I learned).

I practised obsessively on many levels. Physical, mental and spiritual. I trained for years and continue to do so. I taught. I experimented. I tested ideas against my own body.

At the same time, I studied science and eventually physics because I wanted to understand the same questions from another direction. I became increasingly interested in the possibility that apparently different traditions were describing the same underlying principles in different languages.

The question became simple:

What are the principles?

Not what does one tradition call them?

Not what exercise does another tradition prescribe?

Not what theory has been inherited?

What is actually happening?

This has been the central theme of my work for many years. I have tried to reduce complex systems to their simplest underlying principles and then see whether those principles appear elsewhere.

This is also the approach behind my work in ontology and my theory of the Aether. Again and again I have found myself asking the same question: can apparently unrelated phenomena be understood as different expressions of a smaller set of universal principles?

The Body Efficiency Method is the result of applying that approach to the human body.

I did not invent this as an exercise system

In the beginning I did not sit down and design a training programme.

The method emerged from observation, practice and deduction.

I taught different methods under different names for many years. I experimented with resistance, balance, meditation, Qigong, Tai Chi, martial arts and increasingly subtle forms of internal control.

Some of the training was deliberately extreme.

I practised Tai Chi with weights in my hands, dragged my feet through mud for resistance, trained blindfolded and spent years developing sensitivity through pushing hands and martial practice. I reached a level of internal control at which I could perform demonstrations that appeared extraordinary: breaking bricks on my head with a sledgehammer, receiving punches to the abdomen, bending an iron bar from the tip with my throat, lying on a bed of nails while a paving slab was broken with a sledgehammer, and sustaining hours of continuous pushing-hands practice while teaching Kung Fu.

These demonstrations are not the purpose of this book.

They are evidence of what can become possible when structure and control are developed to an unusual degree.

More importantly, they taught me something about the mechanism.

The body does not become powerful simply by becoming stronger.

It becomes powerful when it becomes organised.

Rebuilding the body

This became even clearer when I experienced four major surgeries to my abdomen.

Each time, I had to rebuild my body.

The obvious expectation would be that such weakness would permanently reduce physical capability.

Instead, the necessity of rebuilding forced me to examine my structure more carefully.

I had to find other ways to support the body.

I had to improve alignment.

I had to redistribute force.

I had to learn how to use the surrounding structure rather than relying upon damaged or weakened areas.

The weakness itself became part of the education.

I discovered that when the body is organised correctly, surprisingly little muscular effort is required to create stability and transmit force.

This experience deepened my understanding of training.

The objective was no longer simply to become stronger.

It was to become better organised.

That distinction is fundamental to this book.

From tradition to first principles

I have found remarkable similarities between traditions that are usually treated as completely separate.

Tai Chi speaks about structure, rooting, relaxation and internal power.

Qigong speaks about energy, breathing and internal circulation.

Yoga explores posture, breathing, awareness and control.

Martial arts explore timing, leverage, relaxation, elasticity and force.

Meditative traditions explore awareness and control of attention.

Modern biomechanics describes leverage, force transmission, joint mechanics and centre of gravity.

Physics describes structure, force, pressure, elasticity and equilibrium.

The terminology differs.

The underlying phenomena often do not.

I am not claiming that all of these traditions are literally saying the same thing.

I am asking whether we can look beneath their terminology and derive the common physical principles for ourselves.

That is what I have attempted to do here.

What is the natural body?

My starting premise is deliberately provocative:

We have largely forgotten how to use the human body.

Modern life provides enormous amounts of external support.

These things are not necessarily bad.

But they change what the body has to do.

A body that no longer needs to provide its own structural support may gradually lose the ability to organise that support internally.

We still function.

We can walk, sit, run, lift and exercise.

But functioning is not the same as efficiency.

The natural body, as I use the term in this book, is not a fantasy of primitive humanity. It is a hypothesis.

What would the human body be capable of if its natural structure, mobility, elasticity, balance and internal control were fully developed?

I believe the answer is far beyond what we normally expect.

This book is an attempt to derive that answer.

How to read this book

This is not primarily an exercise book.

I am not asking you to copy a series of movements.

The exercises and demonstrations can be developed from the principles, but the principles are more important than any particular exercise.

This book is a record of the method.

It is deliberately concise.

The aim is to preserve the complete underlying system in a form that can be understood, reconstructed and developed by another practitioner or movement expert.

The ten chapters form a progression:

Natural — recover it.

Whole — connect it.

Neutral — centre it.

Structured — preserve it.

Geometric — optimise it.

Tensegrity — strengthen it.

Elastic — load and release it.

Snake — make it flow.

Powerful — amplify it.

Efficient — apply it.

Each chapter introduces something necessary for the next.

The method should therefore be approached experimentally.

Do not believe me simply because I say something works.

Try to understand why it should work.

Observe your own body.

Find the structure.

Test the geometry.

Feel the tension.

Remove unnecessary effort.

Begin again.

The recurring instruction throughout the method is:

Never assume. Always derive.

A record of a lifetime of practice

This book is the culmination of many years of physical practice, teaching, experimentation, scientific study and philosophical investigation.

It is also a personal record.

I have spent decades trying to understand what the body is doing when it moves well, when it generates power, when it receives force and when it fails.

The method presented here is the result.

I now want to record it in its simplest complete form.

There are already many demonstrations of the practical side of this work. My YouTube channel contains hundreds of videos showing different forms of practice, experimentation and application. Those videos are not a substitute for the method described here. They are its visual counterpart.

The book records the principles.

The videos show what those principles can become in practice.

The method itself is intended to stand on its own.

I have called it the Body Efficiency Method because that is ultimately what I believe I discovered.

Not a system for doing more exercise.

Not a system for becoming artificially strong.

Not a collection of tricks.

A method for learning how to use the body more efficiently.

The central idea can be stated in three words:

Alignment. Tension. Relaxation.

Everything that follows is an exploration of those three principles.

The final objective is remarkably simple:

More capability. Less effort.

That is what I have spent my life trying to understand.

This book is my attempt to explain it.