Excerpt from The Nia Technique by Debbie Rosas & Carlos Rosas

1983

"Debbie. Carlos. Let me see you move," the martial artist said to us. We just stared at each other. Move how? Straight leg kick? Flat back? Cancan kick? And where was the blasting disco music to rev us up?

We began to do jumping jacks.

The sensei shook his head. "You have fifteen seconds' worth of knowledge," he said softly. "You know how to exercise, but you do not know how to move." Well. Gee. Then why were we two of the most successful aerobics teachers in California? This was way back at the height of the aerobics movement, and Debbie's fitness company had fifty teachers who together taught over a hundred classes every day. But we had come to the sensei because we knew that something was wrong. The aerobics industry was riddled with injury, burnout, and pain. A study done around this time showed that traditional aerobics had an injury rate that hit 76 percent among teachers and 44 percent among students. Of those injuries, 82 percent were to the knee or below, indicating that the human leg just isn't built for the pounding of conventional aerobics, including long-distance jogging.

What was wrong?

We got our first feel for what was wrong that day at the sensei's martial arts dojo.

The first thing we found out was that we weren't nearly as fit as we'd thought. We were appalled, because Carlos was an indefatigable tennis teaching professional and Debbie was the diva of Bay Area fitness. However, when the sensei asked us to do some basic martial arts stances, our legs started to quiver in just a few seconds. We realized that we had strength in our large muscle groups, but were weak in the smaller stabilizer muscles that provide power and definition. We also found that we weren't as coordinated as we'd thought. Within the confines of traditional exercises we were flexible, but when we had to simply move, we felt clumsy. Our heads told us to move one way, but our bodies went another. Part of the reason for this disconnect was that all our repetitive exercises had programmed us neurologically for rigid, mechanical movements, something very common among exercisers.

On that momentous day in the dojo, Debbie also became painfully aware that her style of movement had become rather hard and masculine -yang, in the terminology of the sensei. In trying to be fit, she'd sacrificed some of her natural physical grace.

We also found that we were overthinking most of our movements, which was anathema to our sensei. The whole point of martial arts is to defend yourself during an attack, and if you stop to think for even a millisecond about how to move, you're dead. That's partly why martial artists are so fluid and deft-they don't think, they just do, and it brings out the body's natural beauty. Most noticeable of all, though, was that we'd both lost the joy of moving. As we watched our smiling sensei move with great sensual pleasure, we realized that we'd lost the childlike, playful, pleasant quality in our physical actions. For us-like so many others who struggle to be fit- movement had become work. It was donkey kicks. Sit-ups. Push-ups. Repetition. Drudgery. We were like wild horses, captured and domesticated, that now pulled a plow.

But what could we do?

If only we'd known then what we know now.

NEXT: The Body's Way

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