Exercising for your health is not at all complicated. It is generally enough to seek out something you like, and do it regularly. People like to give advice like move every day, and in truth, I don’t think there’s much more to it than that. But I’m still writing more, anyway. Exercise and food are the same; they should leave you feeling good - capable, nourished and strong. They should not leave you feeling bad - depleted, exhausted or inadequate. There’s a strong argument that the most healthful, natural exercise program you could follow would include plenty of movement most or every day (at a low intensity – such as walking, taking the stairs, and/or having a job where you’re on your feet as much as you’re sitting down) and doing something at high intensity one to three times per week.
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It’s easy to forget that all things exist in context and to take for granted what has brought us to this place. As a kid, I had an awareness that exercise was good for you and it could be fun, but perceived societal pressures and my latent (mostly unindulged) desire to rebel prejudiced me against ‘going to the gym’. Also, as is often the case when you’re young, I didn’t have a sense of self-discipline or dedication towards my own personal development. Generally we need some problem to come up – something to remind us that things could be better – something to inspire us to change. If left to our own devices, with little to complain about, we are unlikely to evolve at a rapid pace. Or any pace. And that’s fine – if you don’t need to develop, if something doesn’t inspire you to change, sooner or later something will and our responsibility is only to ourselves – to be aware and respond to our needs truly. So says I! Sailors 'taking an observation' I saw some people training in the gym today. They were young, and new here. One was showing the other a range of exercises - lunges, pulldowns, sit-ups with a medicine ball. I’m not sure what their ‘motivation’ was, but what it looked like was two people just playing around and seeing what works. I like that. It reminds me - a couple of months ago two girls - they were maybe fourteen or fifteen - came in, and they started training. One of them was like, “okay I’ll be your personal trainer today” and she stood, feet apart, hands on her hips and started saying things like “push harder!” and “you gotta earn it! C’mon go faster… You can do it! Only ten more seconds!” And her friend ‘picked up the pace’. The old-school treadmill. Milling by treading. I only realised it lately – there is no such thing as cardio. Or to put it another way, everything is cardio. Which of course means the same thing, because when you realise everything you can do stimulates a cardiovascular response, the term becomes kinda meaningless. Your body doesn’t know when you’re training ‘strength’ or ‘cardio’ – nor does it care. These are concepts that we made up. Your body knows intensity and duration. It doesn’t matter what exercise you’re doing, if it’s short duration and high intensity, it provokes a strength response in the body – in the muscles and nerve connections. When you’re training for an extended duration at a lower level of intensity, that isn’t ‘cardio’, that’s endurance training. What’s the difference? ‘Cardio’ refers to cardiovascular conditioning which means: stuff that makes you breathe hard and gets your blood pumping. Everything does that, to varying degrees, depending on the intensity and duration. Ever done a heavy set of squats? Blood’s pumping hard, after ten seconds. That’s a cardio response. Sprinting, squatting, bench press, chin-ups, burpees, jumps – all of these stimulate your heart to beat faster and provoke a strength response in the body. Yet we think of sprinting as cardio and squats as strength work. That’s odd. You are a special unique snowflake, and you can do anything you want, you can be whatever you want to be. Frankly, that type of thinking guarantees mediocrity. It’s precisely because we are all special unique snowflakes that we cannot do ‘whatever’ – we can’t do all things the same, because we are different. We can train as much as we want and we will still look different, because we are different. But what about equality? We are equal, but we’re not the same. A marathon runner is not ‘worth more’ than a sprinter, who is neither more, nor less equal than a wrestler, who is worth no more or less than a painter. Do what you are good at. Overcome weaknesses, while playing to your strengths. We’re bullied into training. The usual approach is to exploit your guilt and shame and make you feel like you should be training; like you’re wrong and the way to make you right is through penance at the gym. But there comes a time when we start to respect and care for ourselves enough so that we’re no longer vulnerable to that kind of exploitation, and we stop training. We know that we ‘should’ be exercising, but on a subtle level we rebel. We feel guilty, but not guilty enough to train. That’s the point of self-respect we associate with laziness – we stop training because we don’t want to be cruel to ourselves any more. Sooner or later, the constant negativity and prejudice might wear us down enough to get us back to the gym, we might give in to the prevailing view that we’re lazy, uncaring and somehow morally corrupt, and we might start being hard on ourselves again. This is why we think being nice to ourselves means not training, not pursuing our development, and why we think we need to be hard on ourselves if we want to progress – if we want to look lean, ripped and rugged. Wild. Strong and independent. Like we Do It For Sparta. Our chiselled physiques are a symbol of the dedication, devotion and damage we’ve endured. We’re told that if we ‘eat right and exercise’, we’ll lose weight. It looks good on paper, but if you take a closer look, a logical look, a look from an evolutionary perspective (which seems to be in fashion at the moment) it doesn’t actually make sense. If restricted calorie intake plus exercise resulted in weight loss, we would have died out a long time ago. What makes sense is that the humans who survived and procreated and survived again – they (we) are the ones who have the ability to exercise for long periods of time without eating much food, all without losing weight. It’s because these humans who are resistant to weight loss don’t die of hunger. They don’t waste away when times are tough. They persevere. If exercising a lot and not eating much resulted in a massive, or even a marginal loss of body mass – our species would not have survived. If you have two unsuccessful hunts or one cold winter, everybody dies. I really like having athletic goals. I hate it how people say ‘results-based training’ when they mean changing the way you look, because what I - in my elitist approach - like to call ‘results-based training’ equates to improved athletic performance. Those are the meaningful results. If you move the focus of your training away from yourself, outside of yourself and onto a task, you depersonalise notions of success and failure, and it frees you to play and experiment with your training. When your goal is based on something athletic, your goal isn’t you. You depersonalise it, which in this case is a good thing, because you make your training task-focused, and when you fail at a task, you just fail at a task, you don't fail at being you. You can experiment and play more, because there’s less riding on your results – if you progress, that’s great – but if you don’t, you can maintain a better perspective because it doesn’t reflect badly on you as an individual. In my experience, this enables you to begin regarding yourself and your training with less negative self-judgement, and a more confident view. You realise that your identity doesn’t hinge on your training or your body image, you treat your training as the acquisition of skills, rather than a personal flagellation, and you start to achieve real and tangible things, but those things don’t determine you. We're told lies, people. LIES! I'm sick of them!
Truth time: The strongest people in the world are fat. I have a weakness for chocolate-coated almonds, which is to say - I like them. Considering that, I suppose I have a weakness for sweet potato, salmon and broccoli, and weightlifting too. I guess the difference is that I don’t think of these things as being bad. When we want to do something nice for ourselves, why do we think of being indulgent? Pandering to our ego? Is that treating ourselves with kindness? It may be, but it’s not all there is. What about doing something that nourishes your true self - whatever that is? I like being indulgent, I think it’s great! I enjoy it very much, which is precious. It’s much better than indulging and only feeling guilty - what’s the point of that? But being indulgent is not all I think of when I want to be nice to myself, when I’m in need of comfort. There are reasons we have cravings; they’re not all bad and I don’t think they should be ignored. Be aware. What do you truly, genuinely need, without preconception? That’s key. Take away the judgment – both the positive and negative. What do you need, for you? |