Pack it in

I confess:  I am spoiled.  I don’t have to leave home to work out because I have a spin bike and a studio with equipment for weight training and Pilates right in my house.  However, I do pack a gym bag when I go swim and I didn’t always have all this cool stuff.  Here are the things every gym bag should have (besides the obvious clothes and toiletries):

•      Extra hair ties.  I don’t know where they go, but they vanish.  Sprinkle a dozen into the bag every few months to appease the gods.

•      Snacks.  Everyone has, at one time or another, a calorie crash during a workout.  Having an emergency energy bar or gel packet or baggie of nuts and raisins can save our bacon.

•      Extra water bottle.  These vanish, too.  Maybe it’s the gym version of the dish running away with the spoon?  The hair tie ran away with the bottle?

•      Towel.  Sure, the gym probably has towels, but when the cap is not on quite tightly on the water bottle, having a towel right there is useful.  Hand towel is nice.  Bath towel is living large!

•      Flip flops.  For shower or hot tub.

•      Emergency sweatshirt.

•      Extra headphones.  Because when they don’t vanish, they break.

•   Plastic bag.  Just in case.

Paradoxland: where the roller coasters are awesome!

There is nothing worth doing that isn’t worth doing poorly, as the saying goes.  This is true, but so is the saying that there is nothing worth doing that isn’t worth doing well.  Welcome to my world:  Paradoxland!

If I were some kind of stereotypical Zen master Yoda figure, I’d just stop writing right now and let anyone still reading figure it out.  Since I’m not, it would just be laziness masquerading as promoting independence or something.  Here’s why both things are true, at least in a fitness context.

A poorly-done workout is almost always better than no workout at all.  (The exception would be the workout with so little attention to form or safety that we get hurt.)  Maybe we don’t give 110 percent (not that that is even possible) or even 100 percent; maybe today we put in 25 percent of the effort.  That’s still infinitely more than 0 percent.  And it often turns out that once we have shown up with our bad attitude and our weary body and our intention to do the least possible work, we suddenly get into it and do more than we thought we wanted to or could.

However, there is joy in mastery.  When we try to learn the new Zumba routine and we nail it, we feel awesome (I am using my imagination here—Zumba is not my gift).  Figuring out the mechanics of heavy squats and then succeeding at a personal record can transform our sense of our own power.  Approaching our workouts with curiosity and attention, with care for the craft of working out, we become something better.

Some days, we get motivated by being able to do the worst workout we’ve ever done.  Some days, we go because we’re seeking the Platonic ideal of workouts.  Either way:  let’s show up.

Repeating history...

Our bodies know our history.  They remember the fall off the monkey bars that broke an arm in third grade, and all those sprained ankles in middle school.  We get more than stretch marks from having a baby and more than a scar from surgery.  In a more short-term sense, our bodies hold grudges about that uncomfortable seat on the bleachers during the kids’ baseball game and that ill-advised decision about trimming the giant tree out back alone.

On the plus side, our bodies also keep track of the positive things we do for them.  The classic example is riding a bike.  We don’t forget how to move our bodies even if our brain hasn’t consciously thought about it for years.  The instructions of our first dance teachers or football coaches (or both!) live on in our muscle memories.

Since we are not dead yet (zombies don’t read a lot of blog posts, I find…), this means we have an opportunity to create new body memories with what we do now.  Our future selves can have cause to curse us or to praise us.  If we work on strength and coordination and balance now, we will have them stored up for later, when we need them.  We may be able to avoid that potentially hip-breaking fall or stave off bone loss or catch up to that running grandchild on the playground.

Practicing what we want to be helps us become that very thing.  Let’s do it!