I might as well come out and say it: Hannah and I are engaged in a full-scale turn-away from traditional fitness norms.
A huge part of that is dismissing the tired narrative that springs from the Diet-Culture narrative that says changing your body size or shape in any way is the reason to do anything physical. We are learning more every day how to address this toxic storyline, even as we continue to be struck by just how often it pops up.
But another part of bucking old norms is also embracing new ones. Without alternative guide-posts to navigate by, it's just too easy to fall into the same old trap of training so that other people accept your body. Remember: in our view, the only person who should have sovereignty and control over your body is you.
So today I'm hoping to map out one of those new norms, and it's a juicy one: daily practice.
Now before you get your eyes stuck rolling them all the way around ("I'm not here for any pseudo-spiritual 'practice' BS Will!"), I'll share one fact with you: movement is how your body maintains itself.
For example, movement is the way that lymph (the carrier for your healing/guardian white-blood cells) moves around your body, as there is no central pump to help it move. In contrast, your blood gets pushed around your body by your heart, although even then it needs some help from your muscles to pump the blood back from your extremities (which is why hospitals will put mechanical calf-massagers on bed-ridden clients during extended stays).
And that's just the tip of the ice-berg.
Since our bodies are in a continuous state of rebuilding, with special cells running around laying down new tissue and breaking down old tissue, continuous movement is always happening on a micro level.
But the only way those cells know what kind of tissue to make is by the physical forces they receive, mostly through the large movements we make with our bodies. A hamstring stretch (like when you reach for your toes) signals those special cells to make stretch-able tissue in the back of your leg; a tough hike that gets you huffing and puffing signals those cells to repair and build-up cells in your heart and lungs.
Without those signals, those cells don't know what you'd like them to make. Over time, those cells become less and less active, your natural self-building and self-healing processes slow, and that ever-present tendency toward disorder--entropy--takes over.
So whether we'd like to reverse this course or continue prompting our body to become even stronger, more resilient, more expressive, more whatever, we're going to need to use movement to send that signal.
Which gets me back to the significance of daily-ish practice (I say -ish because you don't get any extra gold stars for a perfect daily record). When you get into the habit of sending a small but persistent signal to your tissue two incredible things happen:
**Your body truly receives the signal you're trying to send. Consider back pain, something that 80% of us will experience in our lifetime. A massage, an adjustment, or an acupuncture treatment might be a clear enough signal to change your present situation (and allay the presence of current pain), but it is certainly not enough signal to change the dynamics of whatever caused your back pain in the first place. Only regular inputs--at least daily--have a shot at telling your cells to do something different. **
You learn new things, and make different (unconscious) choices. While there is a significant effect that movement has on the meat-and-bone tissue, your brain is also highly impacted by physical movement in that our brain makes choices about what is possible for our bodies based on the movements we practice. We can shape the 'working map' that our brain has of our body simply by moving in regular, consistent doses. And armed with an upgraded map, our brain makes different choices all day long to more effectively carry us through the world; even a slight shift in posture might be the difference between debilitating back pain, and none at all.
All of this--and much more--is what's at stake when we propose a daily practice.
And rather than being something you should do, yet another stressor or shame-trap coming from Diet Culture, this proposal is one that gives you a little more personal power every day.
It's a way to begin directing your physical process, to take control of that process, and receive the fruits of that process.
And--perhaps most importantly--it's a daily way to undermine the other signals we might experience from the media, friends/family, and everywhere else, telling us what we should do.
Last thing... I'll have you notice that I haven't spelled out here what to do with that daily practice, and that's not because I don't have an opinion (ask my girlfriend, she'll tell you I have an opinion about everything ;). No, I left that part out because way more important than what you do with your daily movement time is that you actually move everyday.
Most of the time I will write to you about ways to move, how to move better or differently, but today I simply want you to remember to move.
Please: in whatever way that feels right, go honor that life-affirming capacity that you have to relocate your bones, to flush your blood, to explore the space that holds you.
The bottom line is that there is a way to think about changing your body without getting tripped up by what other people think your body should look like. And it all starts with regularly engaging your body in conversation. It starts with a daily-ish practice.
Go be your own hero! Coach Will
PS to those of you NOT currently training with: This day-by-day process toward building self-sovereignty is the meat-and-potatoes of what we teach; the actual movement coaching is easy in comparison to getting into an effective dialogue with your body. If you're curious to learn more about how to get started with this process we'd love to have you join us for our inaugural Getting Unstuck 4-week program, which starts July 13th. Click here to learn more.