How I Think Of Energy

I’m not a sports scientist or a physiology expert by any means. But I’m interested in talking about energy today because of my recent experience of doing 1080 bows.

I started my Buddhist practices because I was so sick and tired of my karma around fatigue. I over-stressed every time I was tired and centered my life around sleep. If I didn’t get a crisp 8 hours of sleep I basically made sure I ruined my day and blamed it on sleep. I had big visions of what I wanted to do with my life but it was all prevented by the single question: “what if I get too tired?”.

I started with 6AM 108 bows. When I started the bowing practice I took a bit of a break from jiujitsu because I wasn’t sure if my body would be able to handle a full time job + coaching business + daily practice + a sport that works by trying to submit your partner. Over time I moved to 5AM 108 bows and started introducing a bit of jiujitsu back into my life.

Over time I went back to my regular jiujitsu training schedule along with my 5AM 108 bows. My capacity for energy had significantly grown. I walked a lot in India but never felt too tired to be completely knocked out like many of the other participants. I noticed that even during jiujitsu training I’m not as fatigued as my peers. Something related to energy was changing.

Recently a few pieces of content made me think about energy. One was by a fitness influencer and they discussed the difference between rest and recovery. Rest is basically non-usage of an exercised muscle, giving it time to recover. Recovery is active participation in movements and stimuli that promote blood flow and regeneration.

The influencer went on to say too many of us are purely focusing on rest and completely neglecting recovery. This made a lot of sense to me because we do the same thing with our minds. Which brings me to the second inspiration: a book I was recently asked to review about craving.

The book explained how we never give our body and mind some time to participate in earnest effort comprised of meaningful challenges. Instead we made instant gratification so accessible that our body and mind stopped working in the ways it naturally worked. This has impact in our insulin production, brain chemistry, and most importantly cancer prevention.

With all of these considerations here’s my model of how energy works.

Energy is used regardless of what we do because life is an energy-extractive process.
The less we are proficient at something, the more energy we use; the more we are proficient at something, the less energy we use. In other words, repetition increases energy efficiency.
Our mental processes are multipliers for energy. When we enjoy something the energy restoration is multiplied, when we suffer the energy expenditure is multiplied.
Just like how the body thrives with rest and recovery, the mind also thrives with rest and recovery. There must be time in your day where your brain is off (sleep), and where your brain is on but it is not actively engaged (mindfulness).
Energy capacity growth has two dimensions: capacity and efficiency.
Capacity grows with incremental load. Efficiency increases by usage near limit.

Points 1-4 may be obvious to you, but 5 and 6 is what I thought a lot about these days. Based on my experience with 1080 bows, here’s how I came to those conclusions.

I know I have enough energy in my body to complete it. Why? Because other people in way worse shape than me have done it (my Buddhist order is full of people who do it and we come in various shapes and sizes). In fact, earlier this year we were encouraged to do it every Saturday for 3 months and there are people who have completed it.

Of course it’s hard. We don’t shy away from discussing that fact. But it gets easier over time because our stamina grows. Then when does it exactly grow? My traditional way of thinking about muscle growth made me think I need to do incremental load to stress my muscle to capacity to make it bigger, but how come we do the same number of bows and it gets easier?

Because we come in all shapes and sizes, I’ve seen people in my Buddhist order with bigger builds than me but struggle to bow while older people with smaller bodies have no problem. I’ve seen plenty of people with bigger muscular capacity feel more tired and fatigued after training compared to smaller people with less muscular capacity. What is responsible for that?

I could do one bench press of 100lbs (I don’t know if that’s realistic, I don’t lift) and that can be my maximum bench weight. But in my day I can do so many things and not suffer due to fatigue. Another person could bench press 200lbs, double my capacity, and feel too tired to go about their lives living the life they want. In this case, is muscular energy a good measure of life energy?

Regardless of muscular energy capacity, I think a greater model of viewing energy is our capacity to live our life. What is the unifying model that explains how we grow our energy?

It seems that muscle growth has a specific optimal mechanism of training incremental load until failure. But we don’t necessarily stress our mind to its breaking point to increase our mental resiliency. Based on my experience of increasing the capacity of the mind, we can give our minds new responsibilities we don’t normally have. Simply by undertaking the quest of daily 108 bows, your mental capacity grows.

I believe this is why our Buddhist order always encourages people to participate in more volunteering, and when they do we try and assign responsibilities for people. We pick the group leader for a certain event. We give the role of the photographer to people who never took photos before. We give people homework to promote upcoming dharma talks even if they’re introverted. New responsibilities like this challenge our existing boundaries of our capacities.

It may be the case that growing our energy pool is more about just increasing the total amount of potential calories we can expend. If we can store 100 abstract units of energy and our daily life uses 90 units, then when we stretch ourselves a bit thin or find ourselves stressed we’ll go over capacity. But even with the same starting point if we learn how to live more efficiently with just 50 units, then we’ll have a lot of energy left over at the end of the day.

My jiujitsu techniques grow the most when I’m at my last round, near my physical limit. I can’t rely on strength, I have to purely rely on my technique to save myself from a training partner who wants to break my limb. It’s the same 6 minute round, but I can physically tell the technique growing during the last round as opposed to the first round.

I internalized the dharma during my last 108 bows in my 1080 bows when my mind was about to go crazy. I had my biggest breakthroughs in meditation when I stayed present even near the verge of completely losing it. Whether it’s the 1st bow or 1080th bow, it’s the same action; but the ability to retain presence of mind in the last bow is only learned through the actual last bow.

To summarize, if you want to holistically increase your energetic capacity you’ll need incremental load. This means more weight for the body and new responsibilities for the mind. To increase your energetic efficiency you’ll need the ability to stay present during your energetic limit.

None of these are all that easy. But recall concept #3: our mental processes are multipliers for energy. The more you sincerely want inner growth as a part of your greater goals, the more you will actually find this process enjoyable. I truly mean this. It’s a special kind of a kickass feeling to learn that you’re getting better at living life.

Billy Seol

July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com