What are the five elements of sports and fitness?

At present, the mainstream consensus in the application field of traditional Five Elements culture is that the five elements of sports and fitness belong to wood in a general sense. There are also some opinions that different types of sports have different attributes and may belong to fire, water, etc.

The core characteristics of wood in the Five Elements are "hair growth, organization and stretching", which corresponds to the spring in the four seasons, which is a state of revival of all things and stretching of muscles and bones. The running, stretching, and strength training we do daily are essentially to dredge the blocked qi and blood in the body and activate the circulation of the entire body, which is exactly in line with the stretching characteristics of wood. For example, many of my friends who have been sitting for a long time have their shoulders and necks as hard as stone slabs after sitting for an afternoon. If they stand up and jump for about ten minutes and stretch their shoulders for two minutes, their whole body will be relaxed immediately. The stretching force is exactly the same as the state of branches sprouting new buds in spring. The Ba Duan Jin and Wu Qin Xi in the traditional health regimen are movements designed directly according to the characteristics of wood, focusing on smoothing the air.

However, there are also many practitioners who understand both the five elements and sports and do not agree with the statement that "all are wood" and feel that the attributes of different projects are quite different. For example, explosive sports such as high-intensity interval running and heavy weight lifting will make your heart beat so fast during the exercise, your body temperature will rise, and you will feel hot and sweaty after the exercise. It obviously has the attribute of fire. If a person with a strong internal fire practices such activities every day, he will easily get angry, develop acne, and get sores on his mouth and tongue. This is because the attributes are conflicted. Not to mention aquatic sports such as swimming, paddleboarding, and diving. We deal with water every day and have the moisturizing properties of water. If people who are cold and wet always go to cold pools to swim, they will easily become more wet and cold as they practice, which will harm the body.

Two years ago, I helped a friend who suffered from chronic liver stagnation and constant pain in his ribs to adjust his condition. He was lacking wood in the five elements. I didn’t let him come up, so he followed the blogger to lift weights. First, I asked him to go to the park every morning to do Tai Chi with the uncle for half an hour. He just did LaLajin. After just over two months, he said that he had basically no problem with the pain under his ribs. Even his habit of holding in his breath has improved a lot. In fact, it just happened to hit the wooden nature of ordinary exercise, which helped him loosen the blocked liver qi. In fact, in the final analysis, the classification of the five elements is a way for the ancients to summarize the laws of things. There is no need to be too obsessed with it. Rather than worrying about what it belongs to, it is most reliable to choose exercises that suit your physical condition.