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The original article is titled: To Stretch or Not to Stretch? The Answer Is Elastic from the New York Times.

Unfortunately, the article does not provide any substantial information. It’s not their fault, however, because the entire industry suffers from label confusion. Without being clear about what one means by a term like stretching, a writer can pretend to say something without actually saying anything. Like I’m doing, so I’ll change directions right now.

The body is smart. Really smart. Injuries happen when there is a breakdown, such as more force than a joint or muscle tissue can handle. We prevent injuries by staying within safe limits, and if we want to push our limits, we need to expand our capabilities. Most people argue whether or not one should “stretch” to expand our joint’s abilities, usually measured by “range of motion” or ROM. These people are missing the point.

If you want to prep a car to move faster or go on a road trip,  you would want to tune it up, wouldn’t you? Not loosen the bolts…

If you wanted to cook a dinner, you’d turn on the stove to the appropriate temperature, not turn it off…

What most people think of as stretching is actually passive stretching, or lengthening a muscle past it’s normal working length and holding. In fact, that’s a good way to relax, calm the nervous system, and simply feel good. There are lots of benefits to this, but preventing injury is not one of them. The body’s intelligence hides this error.

Yes, muscle tissue needs to be supple, flexible, movable, pliable, etc. Yet they need to be strong and they need to be on. Joints should have the range of motion they need as dictated by the needs of the movement. One way you can test this is by asking your muscles to get you to that ROM. In other words, lift your leg straight up with your hip’s strength. All the passive hamstring stretching in the world will only weaken and destabilize your hip joint if the quads/hip flexors and all the other hip stabilizers aren’t properly strengthened. In other words, most people are doing the wrong thing, at the wrong time, and can’t tell because their body is too smart. It’s like a parent who constantly cleans up after his child’s mess. The child never realizes what he’s doing.

A runner doing a one-legged quad stretch with his foot up to his glute is a great example of a stretch that feels good but has nothing to do with the movement they think they’re preparing for. It’s just that the body is smart and covers up their error. What they’re actually doing is weakening and turning off the propriocepters that the knee and hip needs to adequately handle all the forces they’re about to take on.  The runner would be much better served by turning on muscles, activating them through the needed range of motion, getting blood flow through movement. Again…the body is smart and the passive stretch does feel good.

In sort, to paraphrase Timothy Leary, “tune up, drop in.” How you do it is up to you and becomes just about obvious when you think about the movement you want to train, what the muscles are doing in all directions and what they need to do.

Michael Dowd has just released the new book trailer for Thank God for Evolution!, made possible by a generous grant from the Foundation for Global Community. Below Michael Dowd’s comments, I’ll post a few media links.

Watch the trailer!

From Michael Dowd:

As we enter 2008, I am overjoyed to report that we are in our second printing of Thank God for Evolution! The book is already attracting attention from major media worldwide including Newsweek, Wired, and the BBC, among many others. It’s introduction of Evolution Theology is inspiring thoughtful new conversations about the marriage of science and religion throughout the blogosphere. Connie and I are deeply grateful for your role in helping us realize our dream of sharing a sacred, meaningful view of evolution with as many people as possible, as soon as possible.

This April, our mobile ministry will enter its 7th year! As you know, Connie and I live on the road full-time, offering all of our programs and presentations for free to churches and other organizations across the continent. What you may not know is that 100% of the profits and royalties from Thank God for Evolution! will go toward furthering this movement and keeping us on the road sharing the good news, hopefully for the rest of our lives. We are grateful for the many gifts we’ve received, and this year we have a special request.

This one act alone, when taken together, may help us reach enough people to inspire an evolutionary revival in 2008.

Watch the trailer!

As news of global warming and global warring dominates the headlines, we believe that nothing matters more at this crucial crossroads in human history than accepting evolution as a fact of life. Reality is teaching us that it’s not just what we believe that matters, it’s how we choose to evolve. A sacred evolutionary worldview offers a way for people to make peace with themselves, each other, and the planet, and no gift could be greater than that right now.

So, thank you again for your support, and thank you in advance for helping us evangelize The Gospel of Evolution throughout 2008 and beyond!

Blessings,

Michael Dowd

Michael@ThankGodforEvolution.com

ThankGodforEvolution.com

P.S. Here’s a short note that you can cut and paste into a new email and send to your friends, which makes it easy for them to do the same:

If this book doesn’t end the science and religion war, it’s certainly a MAJOR step in the right direction!

http://www.ThankGodforEvolution.com/book-trailer.html

If you are so led, please pass this announcement on to others. Thanks!

Here are some media links:

• Wired Magazine: Former Evangelical Minister Has a New Message: Jesus Hearts Darwin

• BBC: There’s a new evangelist on the road in the bible belt of America, but whereas Michael Dowd once believed in creationism he’s now an evangelist for Darwin - and he’s not abandoned his Christian faith. Indeed his new book is entitled “Thank God for Evolution” and in it he claims that the marriage of science and religion will transform your life and our world. When Roger spoke to Mr Dowd he put it to him there was a time when he believed evolution was “of the devil”. What had happened?   Listen to the BBC radio interview

Using Science Magazine’s 125 Top Questions from 2005, the Mind Science Foundation put on this debate on the Neuronal Correlates of Consciousness. In very brief terms, here is the background:

Inquiry into what consciousness may or may not be has been ranging for over two thousand years, but it is only recently that science has allowed itself to explore consciousness. Yet it cannot, because though we know intimately that consciousness is there (I think, therefore I am) there is nothing to measure. The best science can yet do is to look at what happens in the brain during conscious and un/non conscious events such as sleeping, dreaming, waking, making love, watching television, driving cars, falling out of airplanes, etc. The activity they can measure are correlated to reports of subjective experience.

Here is the debate. It’s fast, so don’t blink or you’ll miss a whole lecture!

The MIND SCIENCE FOUNDATION
is pleased to announce that the October issue of Scientific American features MSF’s inaugural
“Distinguished Debates in Consciousness”
with a spirited debate between
Susan Greenfield, CBE, D. Phil. (Oxford) and
Christof Koch, Ph.D. (California Institute of Technology)
focused on one of the central issues of consciousness research – the search for the elusive NCC (Neuronal Correlates of Consciousness).

Moderator: Joseph Dial

For the 125 most compelling and puzzling questions today, visit the special anniversary issue of Science here.
Amazingly, the second question on their list is:

What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?

An interesting note: the framing of the question above assumes (consciously or not) that there is a biological basis out there to find. This is something like asking, “What is the mechanical basis for driving?” or “What is the physical basis for exercise?” Though it is a valid question, it may only tell us what is happening biologically at the same time the organism is thinking, feeling, and behaving in a particular way. The answer to this question cannot tell us what consciousness is any more than knowing the mechanical interaction of parts of a car will tell you what driving is, let alone the experience of driving.

NCCs seem to be but a way in the door of understanding consciousness, though from science’s stance on generating falsifiable hypotheses and testing them, it seems to be the best possible. Here’s the rub: science tries to remove itself from the limitations of subjective, first person experience. Here, I don’t know how to get away from actual subjective experience, that is to say, consciousness itself. For example, let’s say that we take the perfect brain scan, which tells us exactly which neurons are firing, which other neurons they are connected with, in what order, with such and such timing, and so on. All the electrical, chemical, and mechanical aspects of the interchange are precisely described. We would still be left with having to ask the subject of the scan what he or she was thinking at the time of the scan.. What were being done? What was experienced? That’s exactly what we’re trying to correlate - experience - with brain (and perhaps body) activity.

What we’re left is this: consciousness trying to understand the activity in a system, dependent on using consciousness itself to correlate activity to, well, consciousness.

Is it any wonder it’s such a fascinating and challenging problem?

For a definition of what seems to be THE problem of consciousness, just google “hard problem of consciousness.“

An interesting bit of talk has broken out about science, religion, and the nature of faith.
The most recent addition to the conversation was a new NYTimes piece on the Laws of Nature.

Laws of Nature, Source Unknown
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html?ref=science

I agreed quite a lot with Davies’ original op-ed and was shocked to read the Reality Club’s discussion on the Edge.org site. I thought they misunderstood Davies’ paper and spoke mostly to points he did not make.
The misunderstanding, I believe, comes from these writers’ confusion between religion and the source or insight that seeds most religions. In fact, the media’s naive debate between religion and science is often in the context of this misunderstanding - that religion is the truth. A distinction helpful to me is this: religion is the rule-making structure that rises up around an individual’s insight. That’s it. The religion is not the truth any more than the map is not the territory. It’s this fundamental point that religion’s deny or don’t understand, and many critical of religion don’t tackle. If anything, the emotion and indignation one can read in the Reality Club’s responses points to some unacknowledged truth. Like most any psychologist will tell you, your shadow will sneak up and show itself underneath your own nose when it is unacknowledged.

On www.Edge.org:
a) GOD VS. SCIENCE
A Debate Between Natalie Angier and David Sloan Wilson
b) Taking Science on Faith, Paul Davies
c) The Reality Club tackles ‘Taking Science on Faith’

http://edge.org/documents/archive/edge229.html

The original NYTimes Op-Ed:
Taking Science on Faith
By PAUL DAVIES
Published: November 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Paul Davies responds to edge.org:
http://www.edge.org/discourse/science_faith.html#davies

Paul Davies’ Website
http://cosmos.asu.edu/

A “Surfer Dude” has discovered the Theory of Everything? Won’t Ken Wilber be upset? Probably not. This work, the math of which is far beyond my understanding, points to perspective as being fundamental to our understanding of the universe. The purpose of a TOE (Theory of Everything) is to unite the many fundamental particles, forces, and our understanding of them into a cohesive structure out of which one could predict, well, everything!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaQ0EjobZZ4&feature=related

As our physicists improve their math and models of reality, we’ll be able to understand more and more about who we are, why we’re here, and where we’re going. We’ll have better tools to work with, and hopefully a more accurate worldview through with to look. But is anything missing? Without going into much speculation about consciousness and science, and assumptions and whatnot, I’ll leave you with this question: can a theory be a Theory of Everything if it cannot predict consciousness, sentience, and life?