When Hannah and I meet (we have realized after many, many years of working together) we are as interested in the inspired, rambling tangents that we find ourselves exploring as we are in actually managing the nuts and bolts of our business.
It was during one such tangent recently that we happened on an idea that completely changed my perspective about what we do as coaches.
There are a lot of lessons tied up in this moment of realization--why collaboration is a critical part of any creative process, how inductive and deductive reasoning are both involved in finding shared truth, how 'staying on task' is not nearly as useful as it's chalked up to be--but here, now, I'd like to just share the realization itself….
Physicality is a birthright, central to what it means to be a human (or a squirrel, iguana, bacteria, etc), and movement is the main way we engage with that physicality.
For this reason, and thanks to significant biological machinery that creates a powerful reward circuit, humans want to move--if they can.
We've believed this much to be true for some time, even though it flies in the face of most of the fitness industry. Remember, there are still many, many trainers who see physical activity as some sort of penance or tax that each of us have to pay...or else. (cue the doom music).
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Movement is way, way more important than that. And much more fun.)
Like gravity pulls us toward the ground, our physical make-up--our biology, neurology, genetics, and environment--pulls us toward movement*. *
That pull can be interrupted in any number of ways, and when it is blocked severely enough that a person can't *move how they'd like to, that person is blocked from realizing the expanse of their personal power.
Our work as coaches is simply to help 'unblock' our members from the four main ways that humans are blocked in their pursuit of movement.*
So what are those four obstacles??
In no particular order, and with some definite overlaps, these obstacles can be summarized like this:
Lack of Access: if the perfect movement outlet for a person requires being in a certain place, or if it costs too much, it simply will not work for someone. And that's not even close capturing how Lack of Access blocks movement for folx. In fact, when we zoom way out on this problem, making movement accessible is actually at the foundation of any/all 'solutions' to help folx get moving how they want.
Lack of Empathy: so many people we have worked with tell us horror stories about previous gym/trainer experiences, and those experiences almost always revolve around how those tasked with guiding them (their coaches, trainers, friends, whatever) actually shamed them or bullied them toward 'the goal'. Beyond just sounding cruel and unnecessary, this kind of approach seems to ignore a simple truth: doing new or challenging things is emotionally hard, no matter your experience, background, or intended destination.
Lack of Mobility: as in, a physical lack of space to move at one or more of your joints. This can (and does) literally limit the movements we can make; when we ignore these limits, we often pay the price with injury, pain, or frustration. Learning about and improving mobility is the piece of the equation that has become our bailiwick at The Fitness Alchemists, mostly because the tools involved are--somehow--quite far outside of the realm of expertise for most trainers.*
Lack of Interest: when all of the other obstacles have been realized, acknowledged and worked through sufficiently to allow someone to live into their physicality, there still remains another block: people have to actually care about what they're doing. I know--weird, right? 😏
If they are not interested or curious enough, they will eventually lose any drive to keep going (as an aside, this is why competition is SO powerful: it is supremely interesting--for some humans--to test themselves, over and over).
This last obstacle in particular helps shed some light on why I can so confidently say that humans are driven toward moving their bodies.
Movement is part of how we express our drive for understanding.
When babies are born, they reflexively begin moving all of their parts, not in some pre-programmed set-up protocol, but actually just to explore their surroundings. Those surroundings are transmitted to their brain via sensory cells in their eyes, ears, nose, skin and--most significantly for our purposes--in their joints.
And that sensory information is translated, over time, into a map of sorts for their brain to follow as that baby finds their place in the world.
So when an arm waves, the baby is not just feeling the air with their hands but actually is mapping the physical possibilities for further exploration (If that babies nervous system was providing commentary, it might say something like… "Ooo, I can move my arm over here!")
This same link--between curiosity about ourselves, our surroundings, our possibilities, and physical movement--is a central part of life for adults, too.
In fact, if movement is really interesting, it will actually obscure the blockages caused by other obstacles (example: if I love playing soccer enough, it will be easier to ignore physical limitations in my ankle or hip).
On the other hand, if movement is not interesting, it quickly becomes stale and starts to feel like busy-work--something you have to do, and not something you'd like to do. We all know what that feels like.
There's much more to dig into in future newsletters, but I'm going to pause there for now, because I'm curious….
Do you feel these obstacles present in your life? How do they manifest for you?
I'd love to hear from your nervous system's perspective 😉.
To finding your gold,
Coach Will
*which I can understand! It took us fully 1-2 years of practice and study--after already training for several years--to really implement the kind of training that truly builds mobility.