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I didn’t get around to posting last week. I’m sad.

I don’t feel bad about being sad. It would be a little weird if I weren’t. The world is in an increasing shit spiral of dehumanization, violence, alienation, and imperialism. I’m grappling with one of the biggest injuries of my life and all of the limitations in movement and activity that go along with it. So I’m giving myself grace.

At the same time I have to get up and do stuff. Moldering will only dig me deeper into the velvet quicksand of despair and, as my friend Alec recently tattooed on their hands, “hope is a weapon.”

So this week I thought I’d share some of the things that have helped me to stay consistent with my workouts and pre-hab, keep reaching out to the world, and continue to fight the good fight for my body, my life, and my values.

In my post on establishing new training habits that I wrote back in January I talk about reducing friction to working out by making it more convenient, and how an established habit is easier to do than to skip, even on those days that we feel like ass.

That reminds me of another magnificent tool that I have relied on every day when I was performing regularly in the whacky world of freelance circus: muscle memory. My circus career was mostly performing in different venues, with different people and circumstances, nearly all the time.

Even if I sent my tech requirements in ahead there was a very low probability that anyone would read an honor them. I was warming up my back in beery taprooms filled with stoner clowns, in public bathrooms, in alleyways, and in dressing rooms so crowded we ended up covered in each other’s glitter. I performed on cement, plastic wrap, floors slippery with spilled cocktails, narrow bartops, and rocking ship’s decks. It was stressful.

I learned, through all those unpredictable variables, to rely on my body. The memory of movements I’ve done one thousand times lives in a part of my nervous system that is deeper than circumstance and noise. Even deeper than sadness.

This is part of why I advocate for all of my clients to always begin their workouts the same way, every day. Since the hardest part about working out is showing up and getting started, I’ve made the first 20 minutes of every workout an inviolate ritual. I roll out my back, I mobilize my T-spine with breathing exercises, I rotate my pelvis, and I do my favorite Pilates series. By the time I’m through all of that my sad mind has arrived in my body enough to keep going through the rest of the session. I almost always feel at least a little better. I never feel worse.

In the aforementioned post I also talk about community, but since the cult of individualism has reached an unnatural crescendo I’m going to keep shouting it from the keyboard: we need other people.

I am one of those people who likes to work out alone, music echoing through my head. A moving meditation. But I really need to do it alone together. My gym is always filled with familiar faces. Some of them are friends, many of them are just familiar faces who I see as we sweat near each other, nodding to acknowledge our mutual pursuits.

Since my injury has increased my isolation, making it harder to be out in the world, this little immersion into a human pool is enough to haul me out of bed, out of the house. Another friend of mine, and avowed loner, just joined a climbing gym. Walking clubs, dance classes, pick-up basketball games, Tai Chi in the park—the modality is less important than the experience of moving together. We are, deep in our nervous systems, pack animals.

One of the biggest objections I hear to group activities is that it is uncomfortable. If we are feeling depressed the energy to show up in all our glorious imperfections may be elusive. This is where my last little hope nugget comes in: a good-natured dose of self-bullying.

I acknowledge that this last tool is grotesquely Gen X, a generation raised on love so tough it felt like a smack. While I have occasionally wondered what my youth would have looked like with a little less tough, I am endlessly grateful for my grit.

My friend Rachel has one of those inspirational placards above her desk that says, “I didn’t wake up this morning to be a bitch-ass pussy.”

While I don’t love the pervasiveness of gendered language around toughness (we all know pussies are way tougher than balls), I do love the sentiment. When I feel like I just can’t get myself up and moving, the weight is too heavy and the pain is too grinding and what’s the damn point anyway, I ask myself, “What kind of person do you want to be?”

And the answer is always , I want to be the kind of person who gets up, again and again, no matter what. I want to be a fighter, and fight for what I love.

We live in a world that demands bravery. We have to brave enough to be together, to take care of ourselves and those around us, and to hone the weapons of hope, health, and even happiness.

…

To those of you who made it all the way through this newsletter, thank you for taking the time! I know that I haven’t been posting lots of flexibility factoids lately and that may be why you signed up in the first place. I promise there is more science and training knowledge on the way eventually, but that just isn’t where my head is at these days. That said, if there is something you want to know about please let me know! I’m so happy to have more time to write and correspond these dayss.

Happy bendings,

Kristina