I am not able to grasp existential finality. I can understand the ending of a chapter or the ending of a story, but I cannot grasp the ending to consciousness itself. That ending is just simply a boundary.

There is no reference point. We grasp death, for instance, only at the end of life, and even then, some of us go out fighting, bargaining. And we only experience it once. No one has yet to come back and really give us an in-depth reporting of it.

I’m looking at how various philosophers have dealt with the issue. Kant, our reasoning is limited to phenomena that we have experienced. Heidegger, the possibility of the impossibility of existence… How do you process either? Camus and Sarte just framed the dilemma in terms of anxiety — the tension that trying to use reason on something that is unknowable causes. I’ll argue that not only is it unknowable, but that is also unreasonable. Life at its most rude. Our intellectual machinery idles. This is where the Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics collide. The “rules” of reason no longer apply, and we’re left trying to read our palms.

For many of us, religion fills the gap. Religion tends to tell us that there is a continuation. The problem is that we have to die to experience it. So, we have to have faith that it is true. Our understanding of existential death is not something that we can reconcile experimentally. We have to accept it, to reconcile it emotionally and intellectually in whatever way provides meaning for us; it is all about acceptance.

Many things in life are just simply about acceptance. We didn’t cause it; we ain’t going to control it… ; we may be able to influence it — can be a mantra. Living in a place of ambiguity tends to be difficult.

I wonder if what I’ve learned about myself is true for others as well: At least unconsciously, I seem to think that if I can understand it, I can control it. That’s a flaw. Perhaps a character flaw? Perhaps the human demand to make reality make sense?

https://www.ms.now/news/cory-booker-different-path-for-democrats-virtue-stand

That interview with Sen. Booker is really disturbing. For days, I’ve been sitting on it, ruminating, thinking deeply. Here goes:

Sen. Cory Booker wants Democrats to channel the spirit of John Lewis. But John Lewis didn’t have a senate seat or a committee gavel when he marched; he was an outsider demanding entry. Today’s Democratic leaders are already inside the gates and, therefore, pretending they are still on the margins isn’t a moral stance; it’s an abdication of authority and strategy.

The Outsider vs. The Insider
When considering the circumstances and the stakes, in a recent interview promoting his book Stand, Sen. Booker advances a troubling argument: that the answer to political crisis lies in a commitment to virtue, restraint, and non-divisiveness. He suggests that anger should be channeled, not unleashed, and that doubling down on confrontation is both ineffective and corrosive.

On the surface nothing about that argument seems objectionable. However, as a framework for political action, it is misapplied. First, the country is already divided, and not in some abstract or rhetorical sense. The division is measurable and visible across multiple domains: elections decided by razor-thin margins, a Congress that is routinely gridlocked along party lines, and a Supreme Court whose decisions are understood through ideological rather than legal interpretation. Public trust in institutions has fractured, with large segments of the population questioning the legitimacy of elections, the credibility of the media, and even the authority of federal agencies. This is not a unified society awaiting moral guidance; it is a contested political arena in which power is actively being exercised, challenged, and, at times, exploited.

The historical figures Booker references operated from positions of profound powerlessness. Booker adopts the rhetoric of resistance movements without acknowledging that the circumstances are different. Ghandi had nothing but a shepherd’s staff. King had a bible. They were excluded from the very institutions they sought to reform. They did not have the numbers nor the control over any societal institution. When practiced by the powerless, nonviolence exposes injustice predicated on an otherwise law-biding citizenry. And virtue becomes aligned with integrity. So, nonviolence was both a moral stance and a strategic necessity — a way to confront overwhelming force without access to conventional power. However, when invoked by the powerful, it can be suicidal. It then functions as a self-imposed restraint on the very tools that are provided to protect the public.

The Sunk-Cost Fallacy of Bipartisanship
Booker’s emphasis on bipartisanship — specifically his defense of confirming officials who may be hostile to an institution’s mission — reflects a “sunk-cost fallacy” of political norms. His claim that disagreement strengthens coalitions assumes an environment where negotiation is conducted in good faith.

History shows that cooperation is not inherently virtuous. Whether it is good or bad depends on how it is used. When all it is is appeasement with one side using it as a shield and the other viewing it as a hurdle, the party adhering to “restraint” is not being more virtuous. Depending on the stakes, it can be argued that it is actually being quite foolish.

Agency vs. Atmosphere
There is a deeper issue in Booker’s framing: the idea that the current crisis is a broad “cultural condition” rather than the result of specific actors. By describing certain figures as “accelerants” rather than sources, Booker shifts attention away from agency and accountability, which undermines taking an oath of office.

His reframing risks diffusing responsibility into an either/or proposition at the precise moment when clarity about cause and effect is most needed. The erosion of democratic institutions is rarely the result of mere cultural malaise. It is enabled by institutional failures and a reluctance among those with institutional power to act according to doctrine while it is still possible. Passivity carries its own moral and practical consequences.

Virtue as the Exercise of Authority
Booker is correct that anger can be destructive. But anger is often a signal, not a flaw. It can be appropriatley used and directed. It reflects a recognition that a boundary has been crossed. Why bother to question anger while being unwilling to address the conditions that produce that anger?

Effective political action often requires confrontation, clarity, and the imposition of consequences. These are not the opposites of virtue; they are expressions of it. We need our political leaders to stay in the fight when one is brought to them.

Conclusion: From Symbolism to Action
The core issue is not whether leaders should abandon civility. It is whether they accurately understand their own position. They are not disenfranchised protesters standing outside the gates; they are the keepers of the gates. Their responsibility is not to model resistance, but to exercise power within the institutions where they are appointed.

Virtue, in this context, is not restraint for its own sake. Frankly, suffering is not pretty. And no one was elected to symbolically suffer. When virtue is aligned with reality, it becomes stewardship. Booker’s vision gestures toward moral clarity, but it stops short of the demands of power and integrity. “When they swing low, we swing high” is just another way of saying that we’ll watch them walk-off with the till. Currently, without diving into the fray, virtue risks becoming not a guide to leadership, but a substitute for it. If virtue is aligned with justice then it does not exist in the absence, at least, of some true effort toward implementing fairness.

But here’s the catch, what might be doing the Democratic party in is not its lack of leadership, but instead its greatest asset: diversity — the inability of the party to prioritze competing desires. Competing interests is making a working strategy difficult to discern.

There are at least two ways to understand the completion of life. One is simply that death completes life. Life ends, and therefore it becomes complete. The second way is different: when we die, we have actually lived all of the life that was granted to us by God. We have inhabited our lives, even if we struggle to explain where the time went.

I prefer the second understanding, because it removes the sense that death has cheated us or that we have somehow been cheated. Under this view, the completion of life means that we have lived every last bit of the life that was given to us.

Life is a gift that we unbox slowly, each step a surprise. The constant ignorance under which we live — the fact that we do not know our expiration date — is mercy. If we were born knowing exactly when we would die, it would change how we live. Some might become overly cautious, measuring every choice against the clock. Others might become reckless. Either way, the knowledge would distort the experience of living, of creating and maintaining. Instead, we just inhabit every moment as if only the moment matters.

Likewise, if we were told in advance that our lives would involve great struggle, some might choose not to be here at all. I tend to think of all of this as God’s theatre. God, I suspect, has an incredible sense of humor and is more forgiving of human frailty than many of us are. God wants us to choose Him and, therefore, gives us agency to help make the relationship meaningful to us. That agency is not only a sign of choice, but also one of soul.

Not knowing allows us to trust, to hope, and to commit ourselves to life. Because of that, when death comes, we die while living — while we are still engaged in the movement of life.

Yet “living” and “life” are not identical. A person in a vegetative state is still alive, but not truly living. Life is active and messy, full of surprises — and perhaps that one more day to get it right — is why we savor it. When we say that we die in the middle of living, we mean that life still feels active and unfinished from the inside. Life always feels unfinished because we are always living it. It is an active process — a to-do list. It retains vibrancy until it simply is no more. But in terms of life itself, death marks the end. We have fully lived the life that was given to us. And it’s richness can be measured by density, instead of by years.

Disliking the choices we have made, or the choices we were forced to face, does not negate the fact that we lived a full life. Death is simply the final leg of life’s journey.

Our attitude toward our choices reminds me of the poem The Road Not Taken. At some point, we have to accept that unless we did something truly evil, we likely did the best we could with what we had at the time. Results are another matter, and so is responsibility.

Had we actually had control (of the outcomes), then when we came to the fork in the road we would have known which path to take. Life would hold no surprises, but we would also have no true agency, because the road would already be mapped for us. And if we chose the wrong road, given the outcomes, we would always be at fault, and that would likely be too heavy a burden to carry under all conditions. Every bad outcome would become a character indictment. Agency is an aspect of influence, not control. Likewise choice is also not control.

Part of what we weigh when we make choices is how much responsibility we are willing to accept for their consequences. We may steer clear of certain occupations, such as medicine, being a physician, because we do not want to take that much responsibility for another person’s life… We may decide not to work in a prosecutor’s office for a similar reason. We may not want to recommend putting someone to death…

Not knowing the future does not mean we should live recklessly. It simply means that we live without certainty, trusting that the life given to us is the life we are meant to live — and that when it ends, we will have lived all of it. We fully inhabit life, even though we sometimes wonder where “it all went.”

Death does not cheat.

The Architecture of “Systemic”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it actually means to call something “systemic.” How to tell when discrimination, for instance, is systemic. When I first returned to California, I remember telling someone that my experience with this state was that the discrimination here was “bottom-up.” I had experienced racism and homophobia, sure, but it felt like it stayed on the ground level. I hadn’t experienced “top-down” discrimination in California yet — or at least, I hadn’t seen it for what it was. That was all just part of a narrative that I told myself so that I could live. But since making that statement, my experiences have changed and/or how I see California has, too. I’ve realized that systemic discrimination isn’t just a collection of personal disputes; it is, at its core, a top-down phenomenon. Systemic also does not mean specifically defined by policy either. Laws and policies have no agency.

When discrimination is bottom-up, it’s a fight at the level of ordinary actors. It might be a next-door neighbor who doesn’t like your race, your sexual orientation, or your religion. It’s a personal dispute, and even though racism or bias is involved, it isn’t “systemic.” In those situations, the harm starts with individuals exercising their own personal agency. In a healthy environment, you can still look to the system — the laws, the policies, the institutional oversight — to correct or restrain behavior that is against the law or against public policy. The system acts as the referee.

But top-down discrimination is where the definition of “systemic” lives. It’s not about a feud with a neighbor; it’s about what happens when the system itself insulates that behavior. It becomes systemic when there is no punishment, no reprimand, and in many cases, when the system actually encourages the behavior. This happens through Gatekeepers, who hold institutional authority.

The laws and policies aren’t alive; they are just ink on paper. They cannot move or act on their own. They are only animated, operationalized through the actions of the people empowered to apply them. When those Gatekeepers use their positions to interpret, enforce, or shield rules in ways that allow illegal treatment to persist, in ways that allow your tormentors to chase you, they are the ones giving the system agency. Yes, they are individuals. They are individuals whose actions are validated by the system and, therefore, their behavior tends to define, and to be intrinsic to, the system.

What determines whether behavior is systemic is not a matter of where it originates. It is a matter of where the enforcement of policy lies. Top-down, yes! Bottom-up, no. Top-down is the system itself in action, carried out through its Gatekeepers, who are empowered to define what the system means.
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P.S. Structural inequality is something different than systemic discrimination. In systemic discrimination, no one is held accountable, like what we observed in “Mississippi Burning,” etc. Those who have systemic agency refuse to enforce the rules and, thereby, reproduce the harm to keep the institutions running (as is).

Structural inequality points to historical factors that are often the lingering effects of historical systemic discrimination. Structural inequality can have a life of itself own. It does not require ongoing discrimination, just a refusal to undo the damage already done. Basically the refusal to make people whole again.

All of us inherit a cultural script about love. From early in life, we are told how our emotional lives are supposed to unfold. One of the most powerful assumptions within that script is that romantic love — the feeling of being in love — will naturally develop between a man and a woman.

At the same time, we are surrounded by many other kinds of love: the love we feel for parents, siblings, friends, and people who are deeply important in our lives — platonic forms of love. Yet we are rarely taught how to distinguish clearly between loving someone and being in love with someone. Instead of teaching us how to discern those differences, the culture simply tells us where romantic love should be directed.

For people whose lives align with the script — that is, heterosexual people whose romantic feelings develop toward the opposite sex — the distinction between loving someone and being in love often appears to sort itself out. Romantic feelings emerge in the direction the culture already anticipated, so the difference between affection and romantic attachment can seem seamless.

But our knowledge of the distinction was only assumed.

For those of us who are homosexual, and for many whose sexuality appears to exist along a spectrum, there comes a time when we realize that our emotional lives — our inner lives — do not align with the direction the script has given us. We were taught to anticipate romantic feelings toward the opposite sex, yet we discover that our romantic and/or sexual pull is directed toward people of the same sex.

This realization often creates a profound kind of emotional dissonance. The framework we inherited for understanding love and desire does not explain what we are feeling. The distinction between loving someone, which to me is intimacy without sex, and being in love with someone suddenly becomes something we must learn to discern for ourselves.

Like heterosexual people, we may go on dates and try to build relationships, and many of us begin sexually experimenting, but for a slightly different reason — to understand what our emotional and romantic lives are actually telling us, while some of us do not need to become involved in opposite-sex relationships to know that we are not sexually or romantically interested in people of the opposite sex. Our internal lives are broadcasting more intense signals regarding our desires. But for those of us who need to experiment, we may discover that although we genuinely care for and feel affection toward our opposite-sex partner, we are not in love with him or her. We feel the same loyalty, care, affection, and trust toward our opposite-sex partner that we feel toward other people in our lives. However, it is through those experiences that we begin teasing apart feelings that had previously been bundled together by cultural assumptions. We find ourselves asking questions that heterosexuals never have to ask: If this is romantic love, then why am I attracted to that other woman across the room? Why, then, does my date feel like an accessory? I am engaging in “show ’n’ tell?”

We fantasize about having same-sex partners and may begin to feel that we are faking a romantic love that simply is not there. This does not feel fair in any sense of the word. It is not only unfair to us, but it is also profoundly unfair to our partner(s), to our children, and to anyone else who becomes entangled in the charade. However, the charade was all part of a setup. We were simply participating in cultural expectations that we genuinely tried to align with, partly because we assumed the script fit us too, partly to make life easier for everyone. And some of us are not able to fake it. And some bodies, such as the female body, may be better at faking it. That does not mean that there are fewer lesbians than gay men.

Much of this process of discernment unfolds internally. It often happens quietly, long before we can articulate it. Frankly, many of us are never able to clearly describe the tension, because our culture has not developed a language for doing so. We are not acting or attempting to fool anyone. Like heterosexuals, we are experimenting and learning. Yet it is emotionally intense, because we are trying to understand our own hearts and desires without the guidance of the cultural script that fits. We were never heterosexual. None of us “knew before,” because knowing was unnecessary.

Likewise, for people whose lives align with the scripts, this work of discernment is usually unnecessary. But for those of us whose emotional landscapes fall outside the script, learning to separate these threads becomes part of the coming-out process, part of discovering who we really are.

We cannot know the position and the momentum of a moving object at the same time. If it is moving, then it has no fixed position.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:

delta(x) x delta (p) >= h/4pi

delta(x)=uncertain position

delta(p)=uncertain momentum

h= Planck’s constant = measures the relationship between energy and frequency

pi = constant for measuring arcs

Reginald Shepherd constantly experimented with who the “I” (object, subject) was. He was consumed with getting a snapshot of it. I seem to know who the “I” is, but it has no fixed location. It is always engaged in tiring performances. My poems are an attempt to situate the “I.” The more layers that comprise an identity, the more movement. Like you’re constant trying to dance atop hot coals packed extremely densely. To me, the poem provides the four walls, the roof, and the floor, although a small, elevated window may be present. The “I” is triangulated. I have to create maps to locate myself, at least temporarily to rest. I think Mr. Shepherd’s “I” was never at rest. In any case, the ovelap is that the “I” in both of our work have had to navigate multiple vectors of positioning and, thus, layers of being. However, he was looking for something different than what I look for. He was looking for a mirror. I am looking for a foundation. His “I” was fragmented. The fragmented “I” seeks validation: Am I worthy? Am I beautiful? Do I have a right to be here? Shepherd was often in dialogue with tradition as a mirror, but his poems were philosophically and intellectually dense. He locates his “I” in the language itself. His “I” is distilled into beauty by the beauty of the language — the metaphors, similes, alliteration, assonance. The language is his voice! That is why his poetry tends to fit best in the lyric-experimental poetic genre. In that genre the language itself, the structure of the poem, so to say, is the meaning of the fragmented “I”. My “I” doesn’t ask for permission. Mine is constantly on the go, looking for fit. My “I” just simply announces itself, tired of asking for permission to claim what nature has already granted.

Others try to fix the “I” and its location, because they too become dislocated when an “I” is nearby, but unfixed. They see others as landmarks. So, they are never really sure where they are located in relation to that “I”. An “I” that is in constant movement is blurry, illegible, which is disconcerting to people who need to be in control. The problem: They try to fix the “I” to advantage themselves.

P.S. I think a read a science article recently that explains how scientists are trying to solve the Heisenberg conundrum: take really quick “snapshots” of the object (article) to fix it at a specific location, and keep taking snapshoots at the same speed to study momentum. Something like that.

We’re just physical phenomena, too. However, we are actually much more complicated the stars and the planets are…

I’ve lived nearly 20 years longer than Reginald Shepherd. Had he lived longer perhaps he would have gotten tired of asking for permission, too.

I likely have oversimplied the vulnerability that poets tend to show.

The Human Condition

We invent our way out of the human condition: we now can live forever. However, what we now find is that we do not want to do so. We are worn down by everyday life. While we have managed to indefinitely prolong life, we have not changed behaviorally or emotionally. Our bodies have become so robust that we cannot destruct them, while our minds remain fragile. So, we build “suspension chambers,” places that we can rent to sleep in for various lengths of time — five, ten, twenty-five, or even one hundred or more years — and wake up refreshed. We can choose to wake up in a new era — maybe it would be worse, maybe better. That is the chance we take. Our ESP has not improved. Because there is such demand for these chambers, we are limited in the number of times we can use them, as well as in the length of time.

After a while, the chambers become ordinary. We book them the way we book long trips or medical leave. At first, we talk about numbers. To most people, five years sounds practical. Ten sounds like a luxury. Twenty-five makes us pause. Someone says, “That’s a long time.” Someone asks, “Is everything okay?” A hand reaches across the table and stays there a moment longer than usual, as if an apology is owed.

When the numbers get larger, the questions stop. We nod, but don’t say much. Someone changes the subject. Someone talks about logistics — what to do with apartments, with work, with plants. The conversation moves on, but it doesn’t ask why.

Over time, the numbers drop out of the conversation altogether. We stop asking how long. We stop explaining why. We talk about the chambers the way we used to talk about death. We say we’re “going to a better place.” That phrase becomes enough. It spares everyone from having to ask what kind of tired we mean.

Inside, the chamber is smaller than we expect. Clean, quiet. The surface is warm enough that the body doesn’t brace. There is a faint hum — steady, almost domestic — and then very little else. The lid lowers without ceremony. There is no countdown. No last thought worth holding onto. No final meal. The body just loosens its grip, and whatever we were carrying slips out of reach. When we wake, there is only the fact of being back.

The body feels intact, even grateful. But the world has shifted in our absence. Familiar places have changed hands. Some names no longer come up in conversation. We say things like that was expected, or that’s how it works now, and move on.

Some things still seem stuck where we left them. We find that whatever we hoped time would take care of — whatever we believed distance alone might fix — sometimes remains. It’s hit or miss.

We do not enter this world alone. We come into it through other people — through hands that hold us, voices that orient us, faces that tell us where we are and who we belong to. Long before we understand ourselves as individuals, we are situated relationally. That orientation is not something we outgrow. It is how we learn to locate ourselves in the world.

Our senses do that work. Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste — these are how we know where our bodies are in space and who is near. They tell us what is familiar, what has changed, what is missing. When those sensory anchors are interrupted or removed, orientation itself is suspended.

For a long time, we told ourselves that the problem was death. It seemed obvious enough. Everyone dies; time runs out; end of story. But the older I get, the less convincing that feels. Death is clean. It arrives, takes what it takes, and leaves. Life is messier. Life keeps going, even when nothing has been resolved.

I think what wears us down isn’t that we will die, but that we must live on, often inside stories that do not resolve. Sometimes people deny what is right in front of them. Sometimes they leave before anything is repaired, taking parts of our stories with them unfixed in time. We carry conversations that ended too early, apologies that were never made, versions of ourselves that only existed in the presence of someone who is no longer here.

Much of a life depends on witness. Not attention in the grand sense, not recognition or praise, but something quieter and more practical: someone who knows how to read us, who remembers where we came from, who can say, yes, that happened, or no, that isn’t how it went. When those shared spaces collapse, the self loses coherence. Those versions linger, incomplete; they leave us partially illegible to ourselves and to one another. We keep functioning. We keep showing up. But we remain unfinished, which makes death seem like robbery.

We compromise. If the body cannot be destroyed, consciousness can be set aside. Perhaps time, passing without us in it, will do what we have not managed to do ourselves — soften grief, dissolve conflict, loosen what has tightened beyond repair. In the chambers, time does not witness for us. It only passes. We have the illusion of infinite time to become complete; with death on the horizon, we once believed we were complete, but lacked the time to express it.

And we try and try until we’ve used up our chances in the chambers. Anxiety increases. It turns out not to be a flaw in the system. It is the signal. The residue of needing other people in order to become whole, with no guarantee they will stay, or see us clearly, or be willing to stay present in our lives. As long as meaning is relational, anxiety is existential, not pathological, not anxiety that overwhelms functioning, detaches from context, or misfires.

I don’t think the human condition is about being. Being takes care of itself. The very act of contesting being demonstrates that it is a fact of nature, and that those who exist have the right to exist simply because they do. Existence persists whether or not it is welcomed. The problem is knowing — whether a life will ever be fully legible, whether the story we are living will ever feel complete before time, or exhaustion, intervenes.

That’s what we’re up against.
Not death.
But living through one another, without assurance that it will be enough.

Frankly, I don’t think it actually matters if it is or not. We all know that Black people have the unique hair and skin coloring because of genetics and knowing so has help Black people how? All that happens in a society in which one isn’t given room to breathe is that every negative thing becomes attributed to their genetics.

Many southern states would likely be willing to make abortion exceptions if the fetus’ can be identifed as LGBT. Many anti-abortionists have already said that they are willing to make exceptions for Black women.

What we see with discrimination is people’s hatred and willingness to romanticize and to criminalize “the Other.” The “Other” is objectified, becomes an object that we think we can use and/or abuse, i.e. LGBT women are often used, seen a source of recreation, and LGBT men are often abused.

We just have a tendency to be self-centered and selfish. Some of us try to put our crap in check. Others let theirs run wild.

There really are nice people in this world who sometimes do bad things, and there really are evil people in this world who do something good every now and then, usually only if it somehow benefits them.

I think that spending energy to “prove” that being LBGT is genetic is a waste of precious resources.

And Oh! Let me add this: Religion is a choice! So, not everything that is covered under the Civil Rights Act is genetic.

I’m still not feeling okay yet, but I need to add my two-cents worth to various arguments. Here’s my take on the casting of movie characters. Race should only matter when casting historical figures, because often race was a defining charateristic of the lives of those characters, i.e. Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandi, etc.

However, James Bond and many of these other characters people are fighting over are fictional, made-up! Race is almost always irrelevant to the narrative.

The creators of Star Trek, as well as those of other series have shown, that just as characters are often made-up so are their races — Borgs, Klingons, Vulcans, and Romulans.

In the real world, race is a social construct, and not a fiction. Afterall, racial slavery existed in most of the West from about 1492 until recent times. People weren’t in chains fictionally.

Writers rarely tell us what the race of a character is or is meant to be, because they haven’t thought about it.

Plyometrics 101

Today, I’m studying plyometrics (that’s lie): exercises that are geared toward increasing agility, power, coordination, and reaction. Plyometrics training causes tendons and other soft tissues and muscles to stretch and contract. I think of it as a form of dynamic stretching. It trains our central nervous systems to react quickly and trains are bodies to react gracefully. Plyometric exercises should be specific; that is, they should directly relate to the movements that we are trying to improve. For instance, if we are trying to improve our jump shots, then we should practice jumping.

However, I’ve learned that plyometric exercises have another important feature and that feature is related to its potential to prevent injury. Plyometric exercises emphasize eccentric contractions. Eccentric contractions occur during the stretching or lengthening phase of resistance. Reminder: even aerobic exercises involve resistance (running causes the muscles in the lower body to contract). Eccentric movements are associated with antagonist muscles; the muscles that causes the agonist muscles to snap, or move, back in their natural positions. For instance, when doing a bicep curl, the antagonist muscle is the triceps muscle. It is the muscle that lengthens when you flex at the elbow. If we continue to flex (at least once), our muscles go through an amortization stage; a stage in which they are preparing to contract, a delay. During the amortization stage, the nervous system is preparing for a contraction. That is why contractions are a product of the neuromuscular system.

The idea of plyometrics is to speed up the signaling process (the rate at which the nerve cells release the chemicals that cause contractions) via practice. The more time that is spent in the amortization stage, the less powerful the contractions (the eccentric, too, for you need a good stretch as a starting point), because heat is lost while you are in the amortization phase. Think of it this way, the deeper and faster you can squat, the faster and higher your jump shot is likely to be. That may be especially true for women, because we tend to use the strength of our legs more when playing basketball, because we don’t have the same upper body strength as men.

Although plyometrics should be a part of most people’s exercise program, it could really help senior citizens prevent injury and help athletes to perform better. Plyometric training helps people control deceleration. Eccentric contractions are responsible for deceleration. Deceleration is controlled by the parasympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system. Concentric contractions are controlled by the sympathetic part of that same nervous system; the fight part. Our bodies are made up of a bunch of systems. Most are open in the sense that they are interrelated or even tangled with other systems. However, each is self-defined. That is why they are systems. (The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is also composed of the enteric, digestive, nervous system that works so well on its on that it is almost a closed system. It is often referred to as the second brain.)

Each year, like most large urban areas, the San Francisco Bay area holds a race. It’s a 7 mile race that San Franciscans call, “Bay to Breakers.” Runners race from San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. Many runners have said that they struggle more going down San Francisco’s hills than they do when climbing them. Deceleration (eccentric contractions) is the culprit. Body mass exerts some negative energy when moving downhill. It is usually stated in terms of some negative power. (Cadence and stride changes on the downhill.) For example, to determine VO2 max (the amount of oxygen our muscle use) relative to others, body mass has to be taken into consideration. Bigger people usually can take in more air than smaller people; men more than women; it’s often assumed that they consume more oxygen as well. (Air is only ~ 21% oxygen; it is mainly nitrogen.) So VO2 max equations that take body mass into consideration often looks similar to this one: VO2 max = ml x kg^-1 x min^-1. What is means is this: maximum oxygen consumption is the amount of oxygen your body can consume (inhale minus exhale) per kilo of body weight per minute. Why are there negative ones in that equation? Because deceleration, period, but especially when it involves hills, steps (stepping out of bed)… involves some negative mass or a subtraction from the person’s normal work effort which is related to body mass. Generally, people sense stepping down as easier than stepping up. That’s because gravity pulls us down. It helps us. When we step up, we work against gravity and have to do more work (which is a function of (body mass x distance x cadence^-1 (rate of movement)/revolutions or strides…)) and be more conscious of what we are doing, because we are forced to be. Often when something is easy, it is easy to be inattentive. In some ways, for instance, it is more difficult to control a lighter weight than a heavy one, because it is too easy to move it. It’s easy to say, subconsciously, “I’ll let gravity help me out of bed.” Unfortunately, that sometimes leads to “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

So plyometrics training can benefit all people. Although not all people should be trained in the same way. For senior citizens and non-athletes, designing easy to moderate exercises that concentrate on controlling eccentric movements would decrease their chances of incurring an injury while engaged in everyday activities. However, plyometric training should not be confused with resistance training, which is geared toward improving muscular endurance, hypertrophy, strength, and/or power. Non-athletes should use a normal speed (force x distance) when lifting during the concentric phase, but slow down during the eccentric phase. If working with a senior client, for example, increasing the load and assisting on the concentric contraction and spotting on the eccentric could be helpful for gradually increasing strength, too.

Now, to me, this is important and it is a recommendation that is made by the NSCA (National Strength and Conditioning Association): Do not work to the point of fatigue or work anyone to that point, because at that point, body awareness (proprioception) is lost and form breaks down and injury is likely to occur, along with the fact that there is nothing to be gained once fatigue sets in. (Even during aerobic exercise, it is time to quit slightly before or at the point at which form starts to breakdown.) For well conditioned athletes, who can work at VO2 max, interval training can be used. Interval training raises and lowers oxygen consumption, which provides breaks in intensity and, therefore, delays the point at which form breaks down.) The point is this: Muscular endurance is not the goal of plyometric training. The goal is to increase body awareness by training the central nervous (CNS), the neuromuscular system specifically, which improves the ability to control deceleration by improving proprioception. Proprioception is directly related to coordination, balance, posture, and agility. Balance is especially important. There is a lot of hopping, skipping and jumping (one legged or two) in lower body plyometrics and most lower body exercises end in a partial squat.

Although strength is related to some aspects of proprioception, it should be trained separately. And moving slowly during the eccentric during strength training after the proper form is learned, only allows lactic acid and, hence, fatigue to set in sooner rather than later.