Cultivating your inner athlete: can an ancient Chinese philosophy improve your game?

Every now and then, someone comes along with a new idea - or an old idea that's so old it might as well be new - that's so peculiar that you can't help but pay attention. Case in point: the main premise of Working Out, Working Within: The Tao of Inner Fitness Through Sports and Exercise (Tarcher/Putnam, $24). Authors Jerry Lynch, PhD, and Chungliang Al Huang claim that working out can be a spiritual act, that sport is an arena for "the battles within, where your obedience to athletics and fitness cannot be separated from the search for life's verities."

While martial arts have always mixed philosophy with physicality, this is a pretty odd notion for most of us, especially when applied to weightlifting or even riding a stationary bike. But to Lynch and Huang, the kind of exercise isn't as important as what's going through your head as you do it. The authors' program is based on three simple techniques, all with an overlay of the ancient Chinese philosophy known as Taoism. The three techniques are "breathwatching," a form of relaxation or meditation in which you pay attention to your breathing; "visual recording," or relaxed visualizations; and "affirmation reciting." The philosophy comes to us courtesy of one Lao Tzu, who 2,500 years ago wrote a short book called Tao Te Ching (say "dow de jing") that by design is difficult to understand. (The tao that can be talked about, Lao Tzu wrote, isn't the true tao.) Still, Lynch and Huang take an earnest stab at making sense of it. "Tao is, like water, the path of least resistance," they write. "Tao means the way of natural truth and encourages you to notice how nature works and then act accordingly."

Lynch is a sports psychologist, distance runner and founder of the Tao Sports Center for Excellence in Santa Cruz, California, where his clients include numerous collegiate and professional sports teams. Huang, a tai chi master and calligrapher, lives in Illinois and is the founder and president of the Living Tao Foundation. They both claim that we become better athletes when we unite mind and heart through such virtues as spontaneity, noninterference and stillness in motion - a sort of calm in the center of the storm. All of which, presumably, contributes to a better understanding of self and the world around us. Still, the question for me when I called Lynch was how all this would help me get ripped.

Bottom line, Jerry: If I do all the things you say in your book, will I get bigger pecs?

If that's your goal, then I assume you know what you have to do to make it happen. And if it's not getting done, my question is why? Tao sports won't make your pecs bigger, but it might clear the way for you to find out what's blocking you. Do you lack the technical knowledge? Or is it fear of success, or fear of failure, or lack of time?

Good questions. Your system includes three disciplines - breathwatching, visualization and affirmations. What's new here? Some athletes have been using these techniques for years. You're right, lots of athletes do pieces of these practices, but not many do all three every day before training. I've taken ideas that have been around for thousands of years and put them together in a workable practice. When I work with an athlete, we sign a contract - every day the athlete trains his body, he'll train his mind and spirit.

How could I integrate this practice into my weight training, for instance? Before you go to the gym, spend 15 minutes on this. First, meditate to empty your mind. Then visualize the workout you're about to do as clearly as you can. Then come up with an affirmation to reinforce it - say to yourself, "I am a vibrant, strong athlete." Get the negative out of your mind. When I lift weights, I visualize what's happening internally. I visualize the rush of blood into my muscles, and I see myself relaxing as I lift. When I do that, I can lift more with less pain. I get a better workout.

I can see that it would help you concentrate. In fact, that's something in your book that bothered me a little, the idea that sport teaches us about life's verities. Frankly, I view the gym as a refuge from life's verities, and everything else. The last thing I want is for a workout to get all tangled up with lots of thinking about the meaning of it all.

For you, the training is meditation. That's good. Same with me when I'm out running by myself. In a race, though, it's different - but one doesn't negate the other. In a race, if the guy on my shoulder throws in surge, then I have to decide whether to go with him. Then you struggle with self-doubt, with matters of courage and heart. So you can apply the lessons you learn there to any area of life. Another thing: The practice helps you take your mind off the outcome.

Why shouldn't I think about the outcome of my workouts?

Thinking too much about results leads to anxiety and tension, and that's not productive. I've been working with the University of Maryland's women's lacrosse team, for instance. They're the best in the nation. They've won four consecutive national championships, but at the beginning of this season, they lost their first two games. They were thinking outcome: "How're we going to win the championship again?" I turned that around so they could play in the moment. That means narrowing your attention to the here and now. When you climb a mountain, your focus shrinks to the rock in front of you. Same in any endeavor. I asked each of the women on the lacrosse team to come up with five behaviors she would like to exhibit on the field, things like sprinting downfield to the defense, sprinting to the offense, diving for ground balls, things like that. That's what they were thinking about when they played their next game, and they won. Tao sports is a process that trains the mind to focus on the moment.