Going With the Flow

Jamie Wheal knows that we have a lot to think about.

“A literate person in the European Middle Ages,” he told the 60 people who paid $5,000 each to attend his conference in Utah in August, “consumed the same amount of content in their entire lives as we do reading a single edition of the Sunday New York Times.” He would help attendees to his five- day event “upgrade” their nervous systems to meet this overload with “flow,” a state of being so absorbed in an activity that a person loses track of time and thought, guided by instinct and intuition.

Activities at the conference included balancing and bouncing on big yellow balls and acro-yoga, in which partners learn to lift each other in the air. Mr. Wheal also spoke about a set of sexual practices that he has found useful for achieving flow.

“We’re combining ideas about how to get into flow with actually doing physical things to experience it,” Kora Kinard, 29, an orgasmic meditation practitioner from San Francisco who attended, told The Times. “The flow state and the orgasm state are very connected.”

Maybe you’re more concerned with achieving a state of calmness, instead of flow. Try crystals. While doing Pilates, Emily Satloff sips from a water bottle filled with rose quartz and amethyst, which she believes aids in healing. “I feel calmer while drinking from my crystal water bottle,” Ms. Satloff, a jewelry designer, told The Times.

Nadine Abramcyk, a founder of an all-natural nail salon, covers her iPhone with a shungite crystal to reduce radiation. “I was sleeping with my phone by my head and waking up all the time,” Ms. Abramcyk told The Times. “Now I sleep much better.”

Crystals, a relic of the hippie era, are the latest accessory borrowed from Eastern philosophies and appeal to those who fight the anxiety from information overload.

Tom Brady, the American quarterback who has led his team to five National Football League Super Bowl titles, has a different recipe for peak performance. He has written a book extolling the virtues of TB12 Method, a program he developed with Alex Guerrero, his friend, business partner and “body coach.”

Mr. Guerrero’s theory is that pliable muscles, which are not the same as flexible muscles, are “soft” and not “dense,” The Times reported. Dense, stiff muscles are easily injured because they are not resil- ient and can tear during physical activity, while pliable muscles absorb stresses and impacts.

Mr. Brady, 40, attributes his unusually long N.F.L. career to his muscular pliability. Standard training, such as running and sprints, tighten and harden our muscles, opening us to injury.

We should do be doing “targeted, deep-force muscle work,” Mr. Brady writes.

You must contract muscles while also stretching and pummeling them, preferably with high-tech, vibrating rollers and spheres, he urges. These can be bought at The TB12 Method online store for $150.

This pliability, however, is a mystery to exercise scientists.

“It’s balderdash,” says Stuart Phillips, a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and an expert in muscle physiology. Muscles that are soft are sick muscles.

“When folks do little or nothing,” Mr. Phillips told The Times, “for instance, during bed rest, then their muscles get very soft.”