Deconstructing Paul Chek
by Chris Shugart
Ten minutes into my interview with Paul Chek I knew I was in trouble. Ninety minutes later, as my digital recorder beeped that it was full, my only thought was: "What the
fuck have I gotten myself into?"
Paul Chek Ten
minutes later, I'm back on the phone with Chek with a fresh recorder.
Another hour passes and my phone begins to lose battery power. I
quickly switch to another one. An hour after that and the recorder is
beeping at me again. This is when I start to panic. I'd been assigned to interview Paul Chek, I'd been on the phone with him for close to four hours, and I didn't understand
a single goddamn thing he was saying. How
was I going to transcribe this? How was I supposed to cut it down to
5000 words for an article? How was I supposed to get info out of this
guy when every question I asked about protein and training garnered me
an hour long diatribe about magnetic poles, chi, God, the planets,
"cosmic consciousness," and the soul?
Shit. Was this interview a bust? Had I wasted his time and mine? No,
I didn't think so. Because in the back of my mind, I knew that Chek was
one of the best in the world in his field: corrective and
high-performance exercise kinesiology. In fact, with his holistic
approach, he's practically reinvented the field. I knew that, at 44
years old, Chek could outperform a lot pro-athletes in their twenties.
(In his own words, he can "hammer the shit out of them in the gym." And
he really can.) And his physique is pretty damn impressive too. There
was something to learn here. Maybe a lot. I
also knew that while a lot of Chek's ideas were "out there," all really
innovative and powerful concepts sound a little crazy at first... Or
hell, maybe he's just a nutcase. I'll leave that for you to decide. Since
it would be impossible to transcribe a four-hour interview, I'm going
to bullet point only the most intriguing bits. No questions, just
Chek's words. Let me say right now that "sound biting" Paul Chek isn't
entirely fair. It's like the story of the blind men who inspect an
elephant, each describing something very different because they can't
see the whole animal. Chek is a
very big elephant. We're about to begin, so take a deep breath. Don't be gullible. But don't be obtuse either. Here we go.
•
I've been doing this for 22 years hardcore. That's a lot of study and
work. I've done the equivalent of three or four Master's degrees in the
last ten years. This isn't a haphazard, light duty job for me. This is
15 to 18 hours a day, every day. It's all I really enjoy doing. It's
all I care to do. This is what I came here to do. •
I've got good pictures. Anybody that needs that kind of verification
can certainly get it. That's a 160 pound dumbbell I got up there with
one arm.
•
My father left my mother when I was three years old. My mother had to
work two jobs to support us. By the time she was 18 she had three kids.
She was all alone. She spent her whole life soul searching, trying to
find support to get her through. That resulted in me as a child going
from one church to another and having exposures to different
experiences. I was kicked out of public school so I even had
to attend a Seventh-Day Adventist school for a while. And then my
mother found Self-Realization Fellowship founded by Paramahansa
Yogananda. I was indoctrinated into that. My mother entirely changed as
she went to temple and learned to meditate. It was almost like the
universe had given me my mother back. I went to
Self-Realization Fellowship summer camp as a teenager and learned
advanced meditation from monks. That whole experience catapulted me
into a quest to understand religion and spiritual development, and
learn why people get stuck and why they don't progress. And while I was
doing that, I was developing myself as a therapist and as an athlete. So
I've lived these parallel lives the whole time. The spiritual component
has always been there. It's been part of my life since the beginning of
my life.
Paul Chek at age 12. •
Why do people go to the gym and lift weights relentlessly, sometimes to
the demise of their own health? What's behind that? These are
essentially spiritual pursuits. Many people don't understand because
they don't know how to investigate their own psyche, and that's what I
do for a living. • Back in 1995 when
I launched the C.H.E.K. certification program – which is the four
levels of certification and it takes four years to do – I had to focus
on very measurable things. There was no need to talk about the Faulty
God Model when someone had a blown cervical disk or a torn rotator cuff. • My job isn't necessarily to make people happy. My job is to tell them the truth. •
I've been working with Mike Modano, captain of the Dallas Stars hockey
team, since the beginning of March, 2005. His work with me, as with all
my athletes, is a combination of physical, emotional, mental, and
spiritual. His program includes specific training and homework
assignments in all those areas. If you follow hockey at all,
you'll be able to see a very big difference between his performance for
the year or two before seeing me and his performance this season. He's
been interviewed about "the changes" many times now.
Chek consulting and training Mike Modano of the Dallas Stars •
The same people who criticize what I do are in the gym using Swiss
balls and don't even realize I'm the guy who started that! When I
started that everybody said I was a fucking idiot. Now they're rolling
around on the balls and don't even know where the hell it came from! •
Over 85% of the world's population subscribes to some religious
practice. One of the things that Western science has done is
compartmentalized everything. As a mirror image of our
scientific practices and people worshipping science, we've also
compartmentalized our lives to such a degree that we actually segregate
our weightlifting, exercise, and food from the church. Yet all the
really ancient philosophies that still exist today – yoga, tai chi, chi
gong, and many of the martial arts with deep spiritual foundations –
those were all practices that integrated lifestyle, philosophy,
religion, and exercise. They were complete holistic symptoms. Here
in the United States, we've compartmentalized our lives. People act
like idiots at work or grunting silverback gorillas in the gym, then go
to church and act like goody two-shoes. All I'm really teaching is to
carry it all within you. Don't segregate it. Let the best parts of you
shine through in everything that you do. •
When you're working on the knee of a Hindu, it might look like the knee
of a Christian or a Muslim, but it isn't. The software that drives it
is completely different. In order to be an effective therapist and
trainer and coach, I've had to study world religion. The physical body
is like a vehicle, but your spiritual beliefs are your software by
which you navigate life. • I've got
hundreds of studies on the function of the abdominal wall. Most of them
aren't worth the paper they're written on. They were so simplified that
uneducated, usually hung-over college students who haven't had enough
sleep could to do them.
Chek performing a 200 pound crunch. •
You can't do a scientific study on the function of the abdominal
muscles without first making sure someone has healthy organs. The
organs are superior in the chain of biological function. Neurologically,
any time any organ is in trouble, the sympathetic nervous system
diverts blood and therefore nutrition away from the muscles into the
organ to help the organ heal first. You can get by without an arm and a
leg, but you can't get by without a liver! •
Everything we see going on in exercise, resistance training,
bodybuilding – if it's not spiritualized and it's not managed, then it
becomes a dysfunction. So what do you see? You see all sorts
of one hit wonders that win a bodybuilding contest once as an amateur
and you never see them again. Why? Because they hurt their back, they
hurt their neck, they exhaust their adrenal glands, and they gain so
much weight after one contest that they can never lose it again without
extreme dietary practices, and that puts them further and further into
the hole. What you end up with is a bar full of 40 year olds
that have a picture of themselves in their first bodybuilding contest
who say they used to be able to bench press 400 pounds. •
I'm a 44 year old who can run as fast as he did in high school
football. I can lift more weight than I ever have in my life. I can
outperform almost every single professional athlete in the gym that
I've ever conditioned – and that's a lot of them. And the
first thing they ask me every time is, "What drugs are you using?" I
tell them chicken, carrots, broccoli, water, sleep, and a reason to be
alive. I go into the gym and lift weights because it's a part of my
spiritual practice; it's part of maintaining the temple. I don't need
to go to church; I am the church.
•
The more spiritually developed anybody becomes, the healthier anybody
becomes, then the more in touch they are with the intangible and the
more real the invisible becomes. •
It's only through a healthy body that you can have a functional,
rational mind. Aristotle made his philosophy students workout with the
Olympic wresting team. One of the main reasons I train my body is so
that my mind works effectively. •
Toxicity means you're bringing in more toxins from the outside than you
can release. You can't have a functional detoxification system unless
you have a functional digestive system. Anyone who's eating cheap food
is likely to have a digestive system that isn't working. •
If you don't want to have problems, eat real food. Stop eating all this
cheap crap. I've had multi-millionaires and world-class professional
athletes in my office tell me that organic food is too expensive. I
walk them to the window and point to their $140,000 sports car and say,
"Eat that fucker then! Because when you die they aren't going to bury
that son of a bitch with you!" It's just a matter of getting your priorities right. The more toxic your body is, the lower your quality of life is. • If you can't pronounce a word on the label, don't eat it. • The people who say that organic food is no better then regular are what's technically known as
controlbots. A controlbot is somebody whose mind has been taken over by corporate entities or religion or anybody who has an agenda. The
people who say organic food is no better are equivalent to people who
don't have enough mental capacity to ask and answer their own
questions. They are puppets for the media. All they're doing is
regurgitating the garbage that's been fed to them by people who have a
strategic plan. • Look at the rate
of disease. In the year 1900, between one in thirty and one in fifty
people would die of cancer. Today it's one in
two and rising fast. In
the year 1900, the amount of organic food being consumed was
dramatically higher than it is today. In the year 1945 they sprayed
200,000 pounds of pesticides and herbicides on American farming soil.
In the year 2002 they sprayed two
billion pounds, yet crop
losses were double what they were comparatively in 1945. This shows the
cure isn't working; it's failing yet they continue to use the same
leverage to sell the chemicals. •
Scientific studies show that hands-down, bar none, not only is there
far more nutrition in food raised organically, but there are
detrimental effects to the consumption of any commercially raised food.
This isn't only because the commercially raised food carries
the residues of the toxic chemicals within and on them, but the soil
microorganisms that are responsible for generating the nutrition to
feed the plant and provide much of the immune system of the plant are
rapidly killed by the application of chemical fertilizers, pesticides,
and herbicides. • One of the
things commercial farmers do is they put so much salt on the ground
that the plants have to suck up huge amounts of water to neutralize the
salt and survive. This makes for bigger, lovely looking produce, but in
reality you get big empty corn cobs and big empty carrots. One
research study showed that today, to get the same nutrition from one
head of lettuce as you did 50 years ago, you'd have to eat 20 heads of
lettuce from the commercial farms.
Paul teaching in the Eleiko Sports Center in Halmstad, Sweden.
Lun 13 Aoû - 14:07 par mihou