Hey, it's Coach Will checking in on you as we enter…[scary voice] February.
I have a quick story for you I just learned about, and it might just shift how you see 'training' your body…I'd love to hear what you think:
In 1973, a couple British scientists (who happened to be married) landed on Daphne Major, one of the small volcanic islands that make up the Galapagos Archipelago.
Peter and Rosemary Grant were there to camp out and take on-going measurements of the finches that call Daphne Major home, as part of larger research questions about natural selection.
The island offered some special advantages--isolation, mostly--which also made the work a true labor of commitment, even for just that first 6 month stint.
I say just because they kept--keep--coming back for 40+ years.
40 years of measuring birds.
From the sounds of it though, these two couldn't be happier about their situation, perhaps because those measurements have provided some of the most important evidence of how evolution actually works, in real-time.
Ok, so pausing the low-key biology class for a sec… somehow, these two were able to stay focused on a long-term question, day in and day out, for 4 decades.
In a very tangible way, their deep curiosity was sufficient to guide and energize their way, to give them the drive to fill thousands of water-proof notebooks with precise measurements of population size, feeding habits, bodies, and beaks.
There are so many parallels to fitness and training that I kept yelping while reading about them**, much to my girlfriend's annoyance 😏…
Like, how the Grants literally did not know what they would discover, even while they knew they'd have to be there for at least a decade to get even a scrap of insight. They were satisfied with merely asking big, interesting questions.
What if we embarked on the project of training our bodies with even a fraction of this perspective? What if instead of goals we were powered by questions?
Or, how intimately the Grants came to know the finch populations. In addition to creating powerful statistical models that helped them see how the populations were changing over time (ie big picture info), Peter apparently could identify every individual bird by site most seasons (600 - 1000+ individuals 🤯...that's some serious detail).
What would knowing ourselves (with that type of high and low-level) clarity mean for our relationship with our bodies? What kind of body wisdom would we find intuitively, by feel, with no need for outside experts?
Now I'm not proposing that we all go out and buy those hyper-accurate calipers and start measuring our beaks (🐦). No, we're lucky to have a tool that's much better-suited to knowing ourselves, physically: CARs (aka Controlled Articular Rotations).
Complete with a nerdy-sounding name, these movements offer a way of scientifically researching ourselves, and the results can be profound, especially if we stick with it for a few weeks, months, or
The thing is, CARs give us that intimate detail and that big-picture view of how things change. They help us answer the important questions.
And as a bonus, a full body set (about 10mins) makes just about the best daily physical routine we can think of….
So good in fact that we made a follow-along video that you can watch (for free) on YouTube, because we think they're just that important/cool. (There's a bunch more free-free on our channel right now, too!)
Here's to finding your gold (even in February 😉),
Coach Will
PS: If you check out the CARs routine, like it, and want more of this kind of thing, hit that 'Subscribe' button...it helps us know that this is a useful channel for our peeps (aka you)!
** I read about the Grants and all the ways that their findings have impacted our view of the world in Justin Wiener's excellent book, called The Beak of the Finch → BIG recommend if you like dense (but highly readable) non-fiction 👌