Inside out or outside in

Sometimes it is tempting to let the weather win when it comes to working out.  It can be hard to leave the nice warm covers to lift weights or run or bike or swim or dance.  I try to use one of two opposing methods to get myself motivated when the weather is bad.

One is to embrace the weather.  We are an advanced civilization.  We have raincoats with hoods and non-skid soles on our shoes.  I can go walk anyway.  It’s not like I can’t jump in a hot shower and dry off with a fluffy towel afterwards.  I can’t think of a rain-based sport off the top of my head, but without snow, there would be no skiing.  We need some kinds of weather to enable some kinds of play.

The other is to avoid it.  Gyms were invented so that we can do all the things without dealing with the wind and the rain and the barking dogs and the honking cars.  It is perfectly all right to work out inside.

Some days, one of these methods will appeal more than the other.  It doesn’t matter which one works.  We can keep working!

You can also get stronger lifting Russian novels...

My English teacher my junior year in high school, Mr. Johsens, was determined to make us think.  (He may have felt some frustration in this task, taken out on us in his choices of reading, which were uniformly depressing; if I were looking for a book list to encourage suicidal tendencies, I might choose the books we read that year.  He, however, remained consistently cheerful and engaged.  End of digression.)  In the course of this thankless (until now:  thank you, Mr. Johsens, wherever you are!) task, he spent a fair amount of time emphasizing the importance of premises.  All of our arguments begin with the premises we choose.  Among those premises, we find the meanings we assign to particular words.  Yes, I am getting to the point now.

We have to decide what we mean by fitness.  I can help my clients become fitter, but that might mean something totally different to different clients.  One may want to lose weight.  Another may want to increase mobility in the face of chronic disease.  Yet another might want to keep up with a perpetual-motion kid.

Let’s have that conversation.  Let’s figure out a fitness goal that makes sense.  Then we can get there from here.

I meant to do that...

Over the weekend, I got to see some amazing dance performances and a few that were less amazing.  In trying to sort out what made the difference between amazing and not, I realized that the magic ingredient, as far as I could tell from the outside, was intention.

All of the dancers spent hours training and rehearsing.  They all had developed muscles and methods of controlling those muscles.  Body type was not an indicator—some of the most transcendent dancers were older or heavier than what we, societally, think of as dancers.

The ones who moved me, as I sat there in my moderately uncomfortable chair, were the ones who knew why they were there and what they were doing at every second.  There were no body parts unaccounted for, no movements sketched when they could be deeply drawn.  It was an integrated, flowing whole, that kind of dance.

Not all of us are cut out to be dancers.  But all of us can strive, from time to time, for the clarity of mind as we move our bodies that creates beauty out of strength and purpose.  Maybe we’re just doing curls, maybe it’s the third set and we’re tired and we’d rather be on a beach somewhere.  Maybe it’s time to check our hearts and invest in being where we are, doing what we are doing with full intention.  They could be the most beautiful curls ever.