Core Strength
Author: Paul Collins
Core Strength features practical, easy-to-follow exercises to help kids and adults, athletes, coaches and fitness enthusiasts alike to build their strongest body ever using their own body weight. The Body Coach, Paul Collins, provides step-by-step coaching, with detailed descriptions of over 100 exercises.
As a substitute for lifting heavy weights, Core Strength provides body weight exercises for strengthening, toning and reshaping every major muscle group in the body and staying in shape all year round.
These exercises are summarized for your convenience along with bonus core strength routines specifically for post-pregnancy, rotator cuff injuries, kids, running, racquet and bat sports, ball sports, balance sports, swimming and golf.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 6About the Author 8
Core Strength with the Collins-Technique 9
Key Elements - 3B's Principle 22
Isometric Strength Exercises 31
Abdominals and Lower Back 48
Leg and Hip Muscles 98
Back and Arm Muscles 130
Chest and Arm Muscles 149
Shoulder and Rotator Cuff Strength 166
Core Strength Training Routines 170
Post-Pregnancy 178
Running 179
Racquet & Bat Sports 180
Ball Sports 181
Balance Sports 182
Swimming 183
Golf 184
Kids 185
Testing Core Body Strength 187
Core Strength Index 194
Go to: The Limits of Globalization or What Is Sexual Harassment
The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life
Author: James Hillman
In his powerful bestseller The Soul's Code, James Hillman brilliantly illuminated the central importance of character to our spiritual and emotional lives. Now, in this magnificent new book, Hillman completes his exploration of character with a profound and revolutionary reflection on life's second half.
"Character requires the additional years," declares Hillman. "The last years confirm and fulfill character." Far from blunting or dulling the self, the accumulation of experience concentrates the essence of our being, heightening our individual mystery and unique awareness of life. Drawing on his grounding in Jungian psychology, Hillman explains here the archetypes and myths that govern the self's realignment in our final years.
The Force of Character follows an enriching journey through the three stages of aging--lasting, the deepening that comes with longevity; leaving, the preparation for departure; and left, the special legacy we each bestow on our survivors. Along the way the book explores the meanings and often hidden virtues of characteristic physical and emotional changes, such as loss of memory, alterations in sleep patterns, and the mysterious upsurge in erotic imagination.
Steeped in the wisdom of a lifetime, radiant with Hillman's reading in philosophy, poetry, and sacred texts, charged with a piercing clarity, The Force of Character is a book that will change--and affirm--the lives of all who read it.
Publishers Weekly
Our culture treats aging like a disease to be cured, but in this provocative volume, iconoclastic psychologist Hillman, former director of the Jung Institute, describes aging as the process through which character reveals itself. Extending a theory he introduced in his bestselling The Soul's Code, Hillman describes character as a force that shapes our genetic inheritance and all our traits, including seeming irrelevancies, into a unique whole. Applying ancient thought in a galvanizing way, Hillman draws on Plato and Aristotle to develop the idea that there is a form or a paradigm that makes each of us a recognizable individual through all the changes we go through in our lives. While modern psychology, he contends, strains out seemingly subjective qualities like modesty or bravery or timidity, favoring abstractions like "ego" and generalizing profiles, Hillman argues that such qualities are "the ultimate infrastructure" of a body and a life. He describes how the aging tend to shift from a focus on maintaining the health of the body to one on what is important for character. "In later years," he writes, "feelings of altruism and kindness to strangers play a larger role, as if psychological and cultural factors redirect, even override, genetic inheritance and its aim of propagation." Hillman maintains that the debilities of age allow us to better savor the irreducible complexities of character. He also describes a sweetening and softening of the old, including the adoption of concerns of charity over profit. Many of the views here may strike readers as romantic. Still, as always, Hillman breathes new life into a venerable concept, and in so doing helps us to rediscover the soulful possibilities of aging. Author tour; simultaneous audio. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Hillman, scholar, lecturer, psychologist, and author of more than 20 books, delves into the human condition of gerontology in his latest offering. He maintains that aging is no accident and analyzes the many facets of human character as they relate to age. His thesis examines how by living longer and becoming older we ultimately allow our true natures, or character, to emerge. Aging, according to Hillman, frees the human spirit and transforms each individual into a force of nature that releases a person s true potential. Also espoused is the belief that physical changes, even debilitating ones, brought on by this stage of life have purpose. A heart condition, memory loss, and even changes in sleep patterns allow the individual further experiences for growth that would be unattainable in any other way. Hard to plow through for the uninitiated, this is a worthwhile listen nonetheless; recommended. Marty D. Evensvold, Arkansas City P.L., KS Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Booknews
Jungian analyst Hillman applies the concept of identity he developed in to old age. Aging is no accident, he says, nor is old age a result of genes or modern medicine. He argues rather, that character requires the additional years or decades after fertility in order to be confirmed and fulfilled. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Parabola Magazine - Stone
The latest book from James Hillman, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, is a fascinating text that is both insightful and richly imaginative. As always, Hillman's writing is deeply subjective and poetically crafted. A text best read slow, The Force of Character delivers the goods by patiently unraveling the complex psychological motivations that inhabit the psyche of the elderly. Though the gods of old may have taken a back seat in the twentieth century, silenced by the Western model of biology and economics, James Hillman breathes life back into the archetypes. He makes a strong argument for a more imaginative study of old age, a study that encourages a collective acceptance of eccentricity and archetypal living. Contrary to genetic determinism that sees increased longevity as a tired deviation, Hillman describes old age as "ripeness," as a moment in time when we become experienced enough to appreciate the multiplicity of characters that inhabit the human psyche. "Aging is no accident," Hillman writes. "It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul." We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures appear. Thus the final years have an important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one's character. The Force of Character reveals much about the author's subjectivity: all quirk and intelligence. Only a craftsman of Hillman's caliber could create such a marvelously readable book out of material that many of us, unfortunately, struggle all our lives to avoid. Aging is Hillman's great opus and The Force of Character is a glimpse into the mind of a man whose organic understanding of life is deeply rooted in compassion. What makes this book so compelling is not that it offers readers a sugar-sweet vision of the end of life--on the contrary, Hillman revels in the pain, the loneliness, the countless ailments and inevitable incontinence that comes as our bodies fail. What makes the book a success is how the author, navigating his own rite of passage, pioneers forward and leads us toward an active appreciation of the aged mind's ability to transform us. Hillman's work goes a long way toward undermining the shame that our speed-conscious western culture projects onto the elderly. It investigates opportunities that await our elders even after their bodies break down and attempts to show how the authentic inside all of us can emerge and flower late in life. There is much that our collective culture can learn from the Hillman's writing as he presents an alternative that does not fit in with the narrow typecasting our cast-away society imposes upon its seniors. Should society embrace such a imaginative and mythological world view, we would be on the road toward a culture where misguided expectations would gradually disappear and the aging would be honored as the divine spirit of living history and poetic understanding.
Kirkus Reviews
The coming "age wave" has a new champion in Hillman, who investigates the brighter side of growing old. Although he has written or edited over two dozen books, psychologist Hillman made his splash in 1996 with The Soul's Code, in which he argued in almost fatalistic fashion that individual destiny is shaped by a soul's "daimon." Whatever. Here, he seems to qualify that predetermination by exploring how human character is only gradually developed/revealed, largely as we age. Like a fine wine or cheese, people become more "in character" as life progresses. Part one looks at "Lasting," the natural human effort to stay young and hang on to this life, the only one we know. He seeks to "decouple death from aging," challenging the prevailing view that we are only marching closer to death with each passing year. There are some fine insights here, such as when he notes that, until this century, death was associated with being young (dying in childbirth or on the battlefield, for example), not being old. He also embraces the elderly's reputed fear of the young as an important and instinctive self-defense mechanism. Older people should preserve their deeper, wiser character by keeping "youthful attitudes at arm's length." Part two examines "Leaving," and is perhaps the meat of the book. With an optimism that borders on Pollyanna's "Glad Game," Hillman takes on a dozen common complaints of aging and shows how they can help develop true character (e.g., impotence improves the erotic imagination and sexual fantasy; the irritating loss of short-term memory only helps to emphasize truly significant memories of pivotal life events). The final section, "Left," experiments with a refreshingconcept: how to remain fully in this life while we are also leaving it. "Can we imagine both going and staying?" he asks. Some fresh and useful approaches, but the second part's relentless sanguinity may alienate some who are aging painfully. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
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