Paul Chek Interview

[This interview is also posted at Integral Fitness Solutions.]

If you don't know who Paul Chek is, you should. He is the leading voice in the world of integral fitness. His ideas are way outside of the mainstream of performance athletics, yet he is enormously successful. He must be doing something right.

While most trainers look only at the physical elements of weight loss or muscle building (and maybe the emotional), Chek includes the physical, the emotional, the mental, subtle energies, earth energies, and the soul. Not your normal fitness guru.

T-Nation is not exactly known for its integral approach to training (aside from the occasional article on getting "psyched" for your workout or some other low-grade attempt at including the interior-individual quadrant), so this interview is unique for them, as the introduction indicates:

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.

Read the rest here.