The Habit of Making Progress

How long does it take for a tree to grow? That's an interesting question, because there are a thousand answers. You can say it takes a tree ten years, you can say that a tree grows a little every day. It can take a lifetime, or two, or three lifetimes! But, when you watch a tree, when you look at it in your yard or through your window you can't see very much change unless you look for specific markers of change. You don't see change unless something dramatic happens, like it gets hit by lightning.

Our personal growth is like this, too. In our fitness journey, or, indeed, through the process of life, we grow and change and continue that change daily. That change is also generally imperceptible unless we look for markers of the progress or unless something drastic happens. 

Today, I hope we can take a meaningful look at that change, how we perceive and judge that change, and how we can appreciate the process more than the markers of change. 

A big selling point in the fitness industry (or really in marketing in general) is results. What do you become through a program? What end result is this product promising? 6 pack abs or a smaller shirt size, or doing 85 pullups, or a BRAND NEW CAR!!!! 

Well, maybe not the car. 

The point is that those who sell products are really generally trying to sell the image of the result of buying said product. You can become different (while promising you that said change is better, and therefore you will be happier). What you are receiving, along with your product, is an assurance, a mental image, of how you will be in the future. 

I believe that this is pretty much unavoidable in sales and marketing. It's neither good nor bad. But it's probably beneficial to be aware of this aspect of desire and fulfillment. 

All life is driven by change and change is inevitable, so we should pursue positive change, right? It's noble to pursue lofty goals and personal growth. That's what we're told. I believe there's a way to be, to conceive of that change, that makes the process easier to attain and more fulfilling in the doing.

What is the result of being driven by results?

I think the first and most obvious point is that we're generally unsatisfied until we achieve that result. If you're looking for 6 pack abs, our mind constructs an image of what that SHOULD be. And our mind compares how we perceive ourselves to be in relation to that preconception. If those, inevitably, don't line up, we are setting ourselves up for failure. 

If we are looking for an image of ourselves with abs, we miss all the little changes and successes on the way. Even if we don't, it can be easy to miss those changes. Perhaps, through our process of getting 6 pack abs, we become stronger and more capable of other physical abilities, or we gain fortitude or patience. But since our goal is ABS, we can miss those other, smaller, changes that we weren't training for explicitly. 

Let's change our focus. 

Each spring, when the weather warms and the sun is out for longer, and the rain falls, new growth begins again. Imperceptibly, buds form, and then leaves, and then flowers. 

Suddenly, that tree is in bloom! We noticed some changes, yeah, but one day it seems to have transformed completely!

The tree doesn't care for a particular stage of that transformation. In fact, it probably doesn't feel like being in full bloom is an end point at all. Those flowers will fall, and then the leaves, and then it will be bare and covered with snow. 

And then it starts again.

In our lives, we, too go through cycles. 

We might have six pack abs one day. And then in a few years we might gain weight, lose our hair, get a new car. And a few years later we might have 6 pack abs again. We might be able to pick out milestones, but all of that is looking at a freeze frame, a thumbnail, along the way. 

So with that in mind how do we progress?

I would argue that we should stop looking at a wellness journey, a fitness journey, as if we're looking for an end point. 

Each day we show up on the mat or at the doors of the gym, we can grow in that practice. 

How did you feel doing the exercises?

How did it help you see yourself? Did you learn how you approach challenges?

Maybe you felt strong that day, maybe you didn't. 

Maybe you were punishing yourself for eating too much cake. 

Maybe you were present and enjoying your body as it moves. 

Sometimes we come to movement from injury and need to rehabilitate. 

Sometimes we come to movement through pleasure and it's a hobby or game. 

But just like the tree there is imperceptible growth every day. 

This is the habit of movement, and a way of approaching it as a continual transformation instead of a means to an end. 

Certainly we might end up with six pack abs, and that should be celebrated, but we can know that, no matter how beautiful those abs are, just like the flowers in spring, they are the mark of the process of change and impermanent.

I am certainly not saying that it's wrong to have goals! But if we can keep the goal secondary to the process, we might be able to enjoy focusing on each step of the way, instead of focusing on an imagined point in the nebulous future that will, inevitably, never arrive in the way we've think it should be. 

Learn to enjoy that little growth we see every day. 

Have a great day growing, my friend!

The Slow Crawl Toward Mastery

Personal Progress

    I have been doing some bodyweight training programs on and off for about two years now. The programs are fun and have allowed to to have a lot of fun with my training. I really appreciate flow and control in fitness, often telling people that I like "human tricks" more than traditional exercise. And there are a lot of benefits to this. The scope of this short post, however, is not to talk about programming specifics, but rather the trajectory of a journey through the weeds of bodyweight exercise.

Real quick, though...

    In my own personal life, mental health and other problems (topics for another post) had led me to be less than consistent in my own movement practice. I still TAUGHT classes like Yoga, Tai Chi, general group exercise, and I still TOOK classes like Fencing, Pilates, and Fitness Hooping. But as many fitness instructors will tell you, that doesn't really count as a personal fitness program. It keeps you moving, there is some general conditioning that happens, but it's not really the same.

    So when I talk about my personal fitness journey, I'm really talking about a sort of rocky two years that led me to where I am now: an on-again, off-again wild ride that saw me completing two programs in the space of time where I probably could have done six.

    Despite those setbacks, I still noticed progress. Increase in strength, motor control, and mobility. Increased ease of movement and sense of wellbeing. Increased patience with progress. Less demand to "crush" every workout.

All Exercise is Different

   There are many different types of training. I have done Yoga, weight training, Tai Chi, and various different styles and types among those basic archetypes. Each one can lead to insights, personal evolution, and mastery. My goal here is not to put down other styles, but to show what growth toward mastery and a passion for a program can do to your life. Each mode of exercise has it's own general applications and progressions, so I don't mean to belittle other training styles or say that this one is best, just that this is where my focus is, currently.

A Different Animal

    In bodyweight training, I feel that my goals are now building toward specific skills. Currently, I'm working on developing my pullup. All of my training, even the things that might seem antithetical, are directed toward that goal. Sometimes parallels are simple: doing the TRX builds grip strength and pulling strength in other planes that can help support my pulling strength against gravity. The Hollow Body Hold and rocks help support the core strength necessary to lift the body skywards. But there are other exercises that also support that goal. A bear crawl, for instance, will simultaneously develop thoracic and upper-limb mobility that can help pullups, as well as core strength. Rolling, like the forward shoulder roll, will similarly help.

    But there are other exercises that I have necessarily excluded as well. Or at least put on the back burner. Tai Chi Sword and Rope Flow, while I love those modalities, are put on hold until I am working on more subtle flow components later down the line. Currently, I want to focus on building that strength.

    A little bit of a tangent there, but all to say this: in bodyweight training no exercise is in isolation. No exercise is done "for the sake of itself" as in bodybuilding. I'm not doing push-ups "for the chest" but for the components of that movement that translate into the skill on which I am focusing.

The Shell

    The other major focus for me is the looping back around that happens in bodyweight training. I used an image of a shell as my header, here. Similarly to Yoga, in bodyweight training there is a looping around, a repetition of themes, and a return to certain movements. Sometimes, inevitably, that is as a rote formula: a yoga class HAS to have child's pose and savasana, right? But in doing my current training routine, focusing on a certain skill, that cycling has developed an outward and inward spiral. The more I return to the bear crawl, for instance, the deeper I can go with understanding how it applies to the pullup. The more I do the hollow body hold, the more I can build stability and greater strength.

    

    But this is the crux of the subject matter. The shell spiral, the outward-inward path, is the foundation of, the key to, and the penultimate expression of Mastery. We'll take a break here to look at what I mean by mastery, and why the fundamentals and growing in appreciation, application, and subtlety of the fundamentals is really mastery, manifested. 

Mastery

    Mastery is just what it sounds like. You OWN that movement pattern. You don't just go through the motions because you've done it a thousand times, you embody it. You can do it wherever, whenever, in whatever condition.

    Through the repetition of basic patterns, mindfully, you have achieved strength and control over that exercise to the point where it has gone to another level entirely.

    But this brings us back to our previous categories. Other exercises support it; it supports other exercises. If you have mastery with the bear crawl (a fundamental pattern), even a basic version supports handstands, bench presses, Dancer's Pose. Almost everything. So repeating these fundamentals over and over builds foundational capabilities for higher level skills, and in turn reinforces those more fundamental patterns.

    That mastery takes time, though. You come back to the fundamentals to create the necessary components to work higher level abilities which again in turn build your foundations in the fundamentals. That's the spiral. Upward and outward to new abilities, inward and downward to deeper understanding and stronger foundations.

All this to say:

    Any form of training can bring you here. Yoga, bodyweight, bodybuilding, Feldenkrais, breathwork, Beat Saber in VR, anything. But sometimes you need a shift in perspective, a more cohesive approach, to re-capture that essential creativity and expansiveness that is human movement. 

    Playing has many forms. Experimenting is great, as long as it is in the context of a deep self-searching into the capabilities and applications of those forms. Try to understand the fundamentals. Circle outwards in to a greater ability in that medium. Circle inwards into a greater appreciation of the fundamentals. 

    I hope through reading this it comes across that I am not knocking any form of training, not placing any innate limitations on those modalities. Simply that through my personal journey, I have come to that insight through the training I am doing currently. I am here, now, doing bodyweight skill-based work and I see the magic of the body in motion again. I want to use that to inspire you to bring that awareness into whatever form of movement you use, and help you enjoy it more, and get more from it.