POSE METHOD AND PHYSICAL CULTURE
Culture - latin
cultura -
- fineness of feelings, thoughts, tastes, manners, etc.,
- civilization of a given people or nation at a given time;
- development of the mind or body by education, training, etc.,
- behavior that is socially taught, rather than instinctive or individual.
Thorndike-Barnhart Student Dictionary, HarperCollins Publishers, 1992 p.270.
My daughter's advice and discussion on Pose Tech's Running Forum initiated by Poser123 made me think about this topic, which was supposed to appear anyway in the long run, as an urgent necessity.
Why do we need to talk about the Pose Method, especially in relation to running, in connection with physical culture? Because it's time to bring up the realization that when we talk about a method of teaching it means talking about developing our culture, developing our fineness of feelings and thoughts as it is defined in the dictionary.
Yes culture is our "fineness of feelings, thoughts, tastes, manners," and "development of the mind or body by education, training". Therefore when we study how we are supposed to run and how we learn to do it, we are developing our culture.
As it follows from the definition above, our culture is not something given to us just to take and use, but it is a process we have to work through in a special development.
It is an education, which had been ignored for a long time and kept on a layman level for no reason, but just a simple denial.
We are at the point of our history when our understanding of the necessity to study everything that we are doing is vital to our existence. If we continue our life of ignorance, we'll continue damaging ourselves and our future. Not understanding that our tremendous number of injuries comes from our lack of culture in a specific area of our life is the same thing as eating fast food, and getting overweight, but not connecting them.
Lack of culture (read: education and knowledge) in strength and skill development in baseball brought up a bad substitute for it - anabolic steroids. The same thing we can see in track and field. Just during the last of couple of years almost all top sprinters were caught and disqualified for using prohibited substances and their results were taken off the records (Tim Montgomery, Justin Gatlin and others).
It's a shame and a disaster what is going on at the current Tour de France, where whole teams are taken off competition, and scandal after scandal follows the race.
I don't think it will be the end of these stories in this year or closest years ahead. Our cultural level, our mentality, our social mind is not ready to quit this. For many athletes going for the highest "stakes" of Olympic medals and achieving top level professional performance is a way of living, and the way of making money. It is so appealing to make it to the top quickly with some "magical" pills and shortcuts. The payback would come later, and they'll have to do it, no doubt, but it is not so obvious for them today when they are young and healthy. In many cases our society still tolerates the cheating behavior of our "heroes". They still play baseball, football, run after two years of probation and perform on wrestling shows. We love big bodies, we pay money to see them and get excited to see their muscles and strength in action.
Well, we do not often witness how tragically their lives end, but now we can see it.
It is not a behavior that is socially taught, it is an opposite, threatening our life. So our culture is diminishing.
There is no solution here except for one - to make our fitness, and sport training a real physical culture - development of the mind or body by education. This is our only choice to find the way to the top of civilization. The only right choice is to learn how to use our mind and spirit, how to integrate ourselves with Nature and become strong and powerful. We have to give to everyone who wants to dedicate their lives to reaching their potential in sports the most powerful tools - the methods of learning, teaching and training. Only in this way we can win in the war against drugs. But we have to start it now. Start from the simple steps of acceptance of the necessity to learn, to study what we want to do and bring this mentality to our common consciousness. This is the culture we need to develop and we can do it all together.
Dr.Romanov
