I was recently speaking with Ed Baran about one of the profound differences between weight training and self-resistance exercises. 

The biggest difference is this: With self-resistance exercises, isometric as well as isotonic, you can directly target, with pin-point accuracy, the weak links in the body’s chain.

With weight training and calisthenics, it is much harder, and in some instances, impossible, to find your body’s blind spots; areas of the body, where regardless of your strength in any number of major movements, you are surprisingly weak when it comes to simple movements. 

You can do a great job targeting energetic weaknesses with calisthenics – but self-resistance exercises allow you to hit the bullseye with every dart you throw. 

If you cannot find your body’s blind spots, you cannot target them and make them stronger. All you can do is continue on the road to ruin, giving yourself injuries that can defy explanation. 

For example, you may be asking yourself: Why does my shoulder hurt? Or why does my knee hurt? Or my elbow?

The quick and easy explanations are that you engaged in a repetitive motion and this caused your injury, or that your mechanics were incorrect, and this lead to other muscles over-compensating. That’s why your body broke down. 

But is that really the whole story? Is there more to the puzzle? 

Indeed there is. 

In simple layman’s terms, your body has energetic leaks, it has blind spots. 

Imagine a 5-gallon water jug. The jug looks fine from a distance, but why is water seeping out of it? You get closer and begin to inspect it. Upon doing so you discover a couple tiny leaks. So you grab a hammer and begin hitting the jug, hoping this is going to plug the leaks. But the hammer does the opposite of what you intended. It expands the size of the leaks. 

This is what happens to your body when you address the biggest muscles in the body and ignore the smaller ones. You have weaknesses and instead of directly targeting them, you grab a barbell and begin to hammer away. 

This method can grow your muscles and make you stronger, but eventually, you find the strength draining. The injuries become so great that you cannot train the same way you once did anymore. 

With self-resistance exercises, you can seal the leaks in your water jug (your body). In doing so, you regain your strength, your flexibility and a newborn feeling of youthfulness. 

That, my friend, is what Farmer Burns brought to the table in his 1914 course. 

At 58 years of age, my days of competitive wrestling are over – but there is nary a day I don’t flip open this course and do the physical culture exercises contained within. 

The exercises appear, at first glance, to be too simple to have much use in our modern-day whirld of machines, gizmos and electronic contraptions.

Yet, it only takes about a minute to discover and say to yourself, “Holy schmokes, these exercises work. I’m hitting the exact weak spots that the other exercises never address.”

Correctomundo.

You are sealing the energetic leaks in your body. You are giving “vision” to your body’s many blind spots. 

That’s why I begin my day with the simple exercises Farmer Burns taught in the first lesson of his course. I can pretend that I’m way too advanced for these exercises – but the truth is that I’m not – and I don’t think anyone else is either. 

Let Farmer Burns show you how to “do your thing” better than you have in years; maybe even better than EVER. 

Rid your body of its many blind spots, NOW.

Matt Furey