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Much has been said about exercise and motivation. This week’s little missive is a call to consider a motivating factor that I have not seen applied to fitness very often: curiosity.
We tend to think of fitness motivations such as performance, aesthetics, health, and fun. Certainly those are all valid, but they may not always be available. My current workouts serve none of the above as I run through my daily, tedious, painful knee-hab and whatever upper body/ab stuff is still available to me. I am not working towards anything impressive (bending my knee to 120 degrees will not get me IG likes) or boosting my muscle mass or VO2 max. I’m not getting deeper oversplits or nailing a handstand.
Deprived of the traditional incentives, I am cultivating curiosity: given this current state, what is possible?
In last week’s post about my breakdown over Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn and the inevitability of age-related adaptations to training I ended with a call to celebrate the gifts of training when high-level performance isn’t accessible. This week I wanted to delve into those gifts more deeply but I’m currently on the struggle bus and was feeling very uninspired.
Then I saw Asta Caplan’s post, responding to my blog. Asta is an accomplished Ashtanga yogi that I met when coaching in Europe in 2016. She is recovering from hip surgery, adjusting her impressive practice to a changed body.
Asta’s handbalancing is so badass!
She wrote, “Recovery and reconnecting in mobility is a never ending process. It’s been in my spotlight again more than usual for the last year going through healing and rebuilding after hip surgery. As the always wise @fitandbendy said about returning to practice of movement after a major shift in the body: ‘it’s not the same, but it doesn’t need to be.’ To be patient, ever curious and present for one’s body and mind is a lot more important than any fixation in the past. With openness one gets the best of the present. Small victories and the sparkle of being alive.”
To quote Ted Lasso’s mis-attributed Walt Whitman reference: “Be curious, not judgemental.”
When I was discussing this blog post with my husband Seth last night over his birthday dinner he said, “Curiosity, unlike judgement, doesn’t require things to be different.”
It is the enveloping embrace of curiosity that allows us to be fully present in our bodies and our training, unconcerned about making our bodies do anything in particular. Curiosity is loving, playful, and filled with opportunities for learning. It gives us space to feel that “sparkle of being alive” that judgement often leaves squashed.
As someone who has tried and failed repeatedly to meditate (I find it unbearable) I think that moving with curiosity gives me much of the same benefit. It is a feeling of complete presence, something that resembles peace. It feels good even if the thing that I’m doing doesn’t feel good at all.
If you are feeling stuck, uninspired, discouraged by your training… try curiosity. Even if you are working on big, lofty goals, judgement can really take the air out of the room. What happens if you approach your training like an explorer, filled with wonder at the amazing things this body can do.
As always I love hearing from you. Please let me know your thoughts!
Happy Bendings,
Kristina
Knee healing progress… it looks less like a sweet potato and more like a knee!
