John Alton grew up immersed in Western sports and athletics, but during the 1970’s, he developed a keen interest in Japanese and Korean martial arts. By the time he was thirty, he had earned two black belts, and his ideal image of fitness was Bruce Lee.
At age thirty-one, Alton met an American master of Chinese “internal” kung fu, who also was a practicing traditional Chinese physician. Around the same time, he broke his wrist in a bicycling accident, but instead of having the wrist properly looked at, he simply assumed it was sprained and wore a brace on and off for about a year. When he finally broke down and saw an orthopedist, he found that his navicular scaphoid—a small bone at the base of the thumb—was broken into several pieces. After a year in a full arm cast, one of the bone pieces still would not heal, leading the orthopedist to conclude that the bone had died, a condition known as avascular necrosis. The orthopedist recommended surgery, but could only guarantee a fifty-fifty chance of recovery. Alton turned to the kung-fu master, who administered massage and acupuncture and prescribed internal kung-fu exercises. Still, the injury would not heal.
In desperation and hope, Alton turned to Mainland China for answers. He took a job teaching English at Beijing University, where he became the personal student of the coach of the martial arts team who was also a master of Qigong. With the coach’s help, Alton not only healed his wrist but also unlocked what appeared to be an innate ability to self heal.

      After Alton returned to the U.S., he formed a school called The Three Emperors, a direct translation of the Chinese San Huang, the name of his Chinese teacher’s school. In 1997, he published Living Qigong: The Chinese Way to Good Health and Long Life (Shambhala Publications), which focused largely on his experiences in China and the healing methods his teacher passed on to him. Living Qigong not only sold out its first printing but was praised by Yoga Journal as “An outstanding book that demonstrates a deep understanding of the art…”
In 1998, the Beijing Health Promotion Society (BHPS), an organization of prominent Chinese doctors who practiced both traditional and Western medicine, got a hold of a copy of Living Qigong. Impressed by what Alton had to say, they invited him to Beijing to discuss his ideas. In January 1999, the BHPS arranged a week of meetings between Alton and a number of China’s leading traditional healers as well a government officials interested in Qigong, chief among them, China’s Minister of Sport. By the time Alton left Beijing, the Minister of Sport recognized him as the first non-Chinese Western Qigong master, and the BHPS formed with him Health Masters International (HMI), LLC, an international corporation for combining Chinese and Western medicine. As a gesture of support, the Ministry of Sport sent over two of its leading experts to work with Alton in his studio: Dr. Xu Weijun, who at that time was the Deputy Director of the Beijing Wushu Institute (BWI) and a leading figure in the field of self-healing exercise, and Master Lu Shaojun, a young professor of martial and self-healing exercise at the BWI. Master Lu has since taken over directorship of the BWI.

In spite of these gains, Alton remained convinced that purely traditional Chinese approaches to health and fitness were incompatible with a hurried, skeptical American mainstream. Thus, in 2002 he published Unified Fitness: A 35-Day Exercise Program for Sustainable Health (Hampton Roads Publishing Company). In addition to combining Eastern and Western approaches to health, the program integrates into its theoretical framework the emerging discipline known as “evolutionary medicine,” championed by acclaimed biologist Dr. Paul Ewald, author of Evolution of Infectious Disease and Plague Time, both of which argue that infectious disease may be the primary cause of premature death among human and animal populations, especially heart disease and cancer.

Out of this theoretical framework, Alton created Reflective Exercise (RE), a simplified, Westernized version of Qigong that can help practitioners develop extraordinary self-healing ability in as little time as two weeks. In 2002-2003, the University of Virginia Varsity Swim Team adopted RE as part of its training and had its best year in school history. In 2003-2004, the Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies found among UVA varsity swimmers a significant correlation between RE practice and a reduction in reported respiratory infection. Alton went on to present these findings to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Currently, the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Cancer Center is conducting a study on the effects of RE on cancer patients receiving radiation therapy. More recent investigations using an innovative pulse monitor show that RE practice may help keep the thoracic aorta elastic, a crucial factor in maintaining healthy central blood pressure. Combined with the evidence of RE’s immune system effects, this new finding suggests that RE has the potential to revolutionize preventive health care.