The Best Exercise for Your Meridians

Train with the Meridians & Upgrade your Workouts

Most people think that meridian energy pathways are only accessible through acupuncture points and energy work. But the truth is that meridians are accessible to everyone via their muscles and movement.

The most common examples of exercising for your meridians are yin yoga and tai chi. These practices activate the energy of your meridians using specific poses and encourage energy to flow more smoothly through the body.

But you don’t have to tap into your spiritual side to engage the muscles of your meridians.

The energy lines that run from the tips of your toes to the top of your head each pass through different muscle groups. So, when you do certain types of exercise, you are inadvertently activating certain meridians.

Keep reading to learn more about the different types of exercise for your meridians, including different ways to exercise with each of Infinity’s Meridian Archetypes. 

Benefits of Exercise for the Meridians

The meridians support every aspect of your physical body, mental health, spiritual self, and emotional well-being.

Say you’re training for a big race. One day, you may wake up and go for a run and feel like every step is dragging. You don’t come close to your best time and you feel exhausted when you’re done. All of these are clear signs that your meridians are not in balance.

With meridian-balanced muscles, you will feel like you can run all day. Your energy levels will be high and you will probably crush your goals without even trying.

The benefits of exercising with the meridians are:

• Stronger, faster, and more efficient movement
• Feel energized instead of drained after exercise
• Easily access the “flow state” and fall into a natural rhythm that fits your body
• Exercise has a deeper meaning and purpose than getting fit
• Faster exercise recovery
• Better balance between strength and flexibility
• Quicker recovery after an injury
• Injury prevention
• Less pain from old exercise injuries
• A more effective form of crosstraining!

Exercising with the meridians is a powerful tool for athletes. Olympian Dara Torres used resistance-based flexibility training to remove tension after her workouts. By removing tension daily, she was able to start training the next day from a place of clarity. She removed the recovery time and was able to improve her performance almost daily.

Infinity works with many athletes and active people to permanently eliminate pain and injury. But you do not need to be an athlete to get the benefits of meridian training. The exercises remove tension after any repetitive movement or exercise. They go deeper into the muscles so that you can even treat old injuries and movement patterns that may have been causing you pain for years. 

How Meridians and Muscles Connect

If you want to exercise with the meridians, you need to understand how the meridians connect to the muscles. 

Each meridian corresponds to a muscle or group of muscles in the body. The lung meridian, for example, goes from the tips of your thumbs to the front of your chest. The muscles that activate the lung meridian are the pecs, anterior delts, and biceps.

Even if you have an organ removed – a gallbladder, appendix, kidney, spleen, etc – you still have a meridian and the corresponding meridian muscles. 

Meridian & Muscle Connections

Resistance-based Flexibility training at Infinity uses the meridian muscle map to bring balance to the body. We do a form of muscle testing to find which meridians are active or strong and which are inactive or weak. Then we go through the body to strengthen muscles, support meridians that are turned off due to overuse or inactivity and encourage energy flow.

When you know which meridians are strong or weak, you can support your own meridian healing with exercise. 

Exercising for the Four Worlds

The best exercise for each meridian is based on a couple of different factors. First, the exercise should work with the corresponding meridian muscles. But it should also relate to your dominant meridian world – physical, emotional, analytical, or spiritual.

In The Four Worlds article, Infinity goes through which meridians reside in each of the four worlds. Each world craves different things from exercise. 

People who tend to be more analytical like a goal-oriented approach to exercise – whether that’s training for a marathon or working toward a goal weight.

People who tend to be more emotional love breathwork. They are drawn to exercise that allows them to connect to their emotions and breathe deeply, like breath of fire in kundalini yoga.

People who tend to be more spiritual are extremely adaptable. They excel at the types of exercise that combine physical exercise and spirituality, like yoga.

People who tend to be more physical enter the flow state with ease. They are physically grounded in their bodies and are the most athletic of all four worlds. Any challenging physical activity will attract physical types, like team sports.

However, just because one world comes naturally to you doesn’t mean you should spend all of your time there. We all contain aspects of the physical, emotional, analytical, and spiritual worlds, but most of us have one or two that feel more familiar. Exercise can be an opportunity to strengthen the worlds we don’t access as easily.

If the analytical world comes naturally to you, try balancing it with the emotional world through exercise that incorporates breathwork, like Kundalini or transformational breathwork.

If the emotional world is one of your strengths, explore the analytical world through goal-oriented exercise, such as training for a marathon or working with a strength trainer.

If you naturally gravitate toward the spiritual world, bring in more of the physical through grounding movement, outdoor exercise, hiking, or other activities that bring your attention firmly into your body.

If the physical world is your natural strength, explore the spiritual through practices like yoga or tai chi that bring another dimension to physical movement.

When you combine exercise using the meridian muscle map, you get a perfectly balanced workout for you!

Types of Exercise for Each Meridian

Your strongest meridians can offer insight into the kinds of movement that may come most naturally to you. Once you find your dominant areas, you will gain valuable insight into what exercise will support you the most.

Infinity’s Recommendations for Meridian Exercise (based on the meridians)

Of course, no matter what meridians are in balance or out of balance in your body right now, you can benefit from exercising all of the meridians. But, if you find that you are attracted to a certain form of exercise, it could be a clue to your strengths.  

Learn more about the meridians and their archetypes in the Meridian Archetypes series!

When you exercise for the meridians, you unlock a powerful internal system. Infinity Flexibility Integrative Bodywork in Natick, MA, works with the meridians to bring balance to the body, mind, and spirit.