Last week I spent five days in Colorado for a good friend of mine’s bachelor party. Part of the bachelor party itinerary included a day of skiing. For those of you who have never enjoyed the sensation of downhill skiing, it is one of the most intense lower body workouts one can experience. First-time skiers often gripe that they use muscles that they never even knew they had, and a single day of skiing often leads to several days of soreness from the quads all the way down to the feet. The more one skies, the more their leg muscles gradually acclimate to the new positions and flexes that the sport demands. If one continues skiing throughout the season, the leg pains diminish to the point where they are hardly noticeable. But as soon as one takes an extended break from skiing, the pains and cramps start right back up again the next time they hit the slopes.
So for me it came as quite the pleasant surprise, when after a 4 year gap in skiing excursions, I completed my first day back on the mountain with my lower body feeling almost exactly as it had when I had woken up in the morning. To be honest, I was actually looking forward to the soreness, the feeling that my body was tired from the muscular workout, but it never happened. Usually the soreness of skiing doesn’t fully set in until the following morning, so I waited…and woke up the next morning…nothing. There was a slight soreness in my calves, but my quads (where the majority aching usually occurs) felt as if I had not even skied at all.
This was odd. Not only had I not skied in 4 years, but thanks to the Chicago winter, I had barely even exercised in the past 2 months. After pondering my lower body muscles’ sudden acclimation to extreme stress, I finally figured out the culprit…my Chinese toilet!
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A typical Chinese toilet…in this instance, the hole is submerged in toilet paper.
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Unlike the toilets common in the Western world where a toilet’s ergonomics are designed to represent those of a chair, a traditional Chinese toilet* is designed to represent a hole in the ground. Typically, the hole is at one end of a porcelain oval. The user squats over the oval, does their business, and then pushes a button that releases a stream of water which whisks the remnants down the hole. The most difficult aspect, however, is balancing oneself over the porcelain oval, which like skiing, requires one to use muscles they never knew they had—not to mention superb balancing skills, unless there is an available guardrail nearby.
When I lived in Fuqing from March 2004 until June 2005, all I had in my apartment was a Chinese toilet. Using it effectively was one of my greatest challenges upon originally moving to China. It wasn’t that I had any cultural or sanitary aversions to popping a squat, but rather that after 3 or 4 minutes of squatting over my new throne, my legs would give out. I was forced into timing my excretions so that I would enter the bathroom just before the impending droppage moment. I also had to relinquish my preconceived idea that my time in the bathroom should be relaxing. Rather than turning the pages of a magazine, my arms had now become balancing aids, and the limitations of my leg muscles no longer afforded me the time in the bathroom to finish reading the latest sports scores.
How did the Chinese do it? Why would any people design a toilet which was so physically demanding to use? The more I thought about it, the more incredulous I became. I knew from traveling and college anthropology classes that the squatty potty had been the default toilet for the majority of the world (not just China) throughout most of human history, and that it was probably a misnomer to refer to it as a “Chinese toilet” since it was Westerners who first began molding their porcelain goddesses in the image of a chair. Therefore, it would probably be more accurate to refer to our toilets as “Western toilets” and to my little porcelain oval as simply a “toilet.”
As I traveled around China, I noticed that Chinese squatting occurred in more arenas than just that of the bathroom. I would see Chinese workers spending their breaks squatting in the streets, reading the newspaper in squatting positions, playing cards in squatting positions, and on several instances even sleeping, leaned against a wall in a squatting position. How was it that they were able to relax in this position, one that I could barely even hold for 3 minutes, merely for the sake of carrying out one of nature’s most basic functions?
As the months wore on, I began to notice my legs were no longer giving out as quickly on me in the bathroom. The pain that I once felt in my quadriceps had diminished, and I found myself able to remain squatted over my porcelain oval for increasingly longer periods of time. My balance improved as well, and one day, during my first summer in Fuqing, I undertook the bold task of attempting to read the sports page of the China Daily while in a squat position over my Chinese toilet. With a little practice, and several near catastrophes, I was finally able to balance myself well enough and long enough to actually start enjoying my time in the bathroom again. As time passed, I was able to remain in the squatting position longer and longer, and not just on my toilet. I would squat when I had to pick something off of the ground, squat when chatting with the migrant workers around my building, and on several occasions even squat while eating street food when no tables were available. After a year and a half of daily squatty potty usage, I was able to remain in the squatting position for nearly an hour before my muscles would begin to cramp up.
Now fast forward back to my ski trip. Even though I have not used a Chinese toilet since August, it seems that the muscle I built up from squatting in China is still present in my lower body. Otherwise, I can think of no other possible medical explanation for my lack of soreness from my first day of intense skiing after a 4 year layover. This wouldn’t be the only benefit of defecating Chinese style, as squat toilets are generally more sanitary as well as easier on the colon than those in which one sits. But if it truly is my Chinese toilet which has led to my apparent increased lower muscular endurance, then maybe the U.S. ski team should adopt a policy of using only Chinese toilets.
*Thesedays most newer Chinese buildings are equipped with the same sit-down toilets found in the West
