T-Nation Interview With Paul Chek

T-Nation interviews Paul Chek, very cool. Chek is a bit of a maverick in the fitness world. While most trainers only look at the physical mechanisms involved in losing fat or building muscle, Chek includes emotions, the mind, subtle energies, and the soul. It's these last two that often get him in trouble with the establishment--and make him important to the integral world.

From the introduction to the interview:

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.