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“Is this normal?”

This is the number one most common question I get from folks who are working to increase their range of motion and are feeling stuck.

A few days ago I got a DM from a woman experiencing ongoing hip pain from her splits training. She was working on her splits every day until she started to feel a deep, stabby pain in the front of her hip that lingered after she was done training. If she took time off from flexibility work the pain went away, but it came back every time she started up again.

So she wanted to know, is this normal?

While I understand why people ask me this, I always respond by saying that this isn’t the question that will get them the answers they want. When it comes to bodies there is no such thing as “normal”.

Though we have commonalities and shared experiences, each person has their own unique anatomy, nervous system, history, practice, and sensory experience that dictate the way that they respond to training. “Normal” implies that there is a right and a wrong way to experience training, and that is not the case.

The more useful question to ask when confronting a physical sensation that you want to understand is, “what is my body trying to tell me right now and how should I respond?”

Our cultural understanding of fitness often positions the body as the hapless victim of our workouts. Our brain, in pursuit of some aesthetic or performance goal, imposes a series of exercises on the body and, if done correctly, those exercises will produce the desired outcome.

This assumes a mechanistic conception of the body, as if it were a robot that just needs the right parts and programming and it will execute a lovely square split for you on command.

If you have been following along for the last month (and if not you can find a list of relevant articles below) then hopefully you know that the body is nothing like a robot. It is an extremely complex system of movement, sensation, imagination, and memory all mapped on to this weird meat suit that is at once delicate and marvelously resilient.

You cannot simply apply a stock series of inputs to your body and assume that your outcome will be the same as the person next to you.

I find it is far more useful to think of training as a conversation with your body. You have decided on some goals and chosen some tools and techniques, then you and your body try them out—then your body gets to give feedback.

Your ability to interpret and respond to that feedback is what will determine whether you proceed towards your goals, stagnate, or end up in the OR getting your joints repaired.

I realize that so many of us are already overwhelmed by the amount of thinking, planning, and deciding that life requires. Modern existence is not simple and relaxing and it would be nice if our workouts could be a time to shut off our brains and just tick off a list of exercises for that dopamine hit at the other end.

Our general state of overwhelm is compounded by the fire hose of fitness and flexibility advice that exists on social media. When I first started posting flexibility advice on Facebook back in 2010 I was the lone voice talking about splits and back bends. Now there are countless coaches and influencers offering tips, dictates, and of course sales funnels promising spectacular results.

What’s an overwhelmed human who doesn’t want to make fitness training their full time job to do?

The approach that I take, and that I coach, is to shift the entire way we think about fitness. I’ll give you an example from one of my long-time clients.

Like most of my clients, Laura has no desire to make fitness a huge part of her life. She has a busy career and social life and has never been particularly compelled by working out for its own sake. She does, however, want to keep her mobility and address the lower back pain and annoying little injuries that keep popping up, so she knows that working out has to fit in somewhere.

She had been doing an online weight lifting program using hand weights in her living room but she was bored and had a hard time being consistent. It seemed like there were always a million things distracting her from the tedium of exercise.

I asked Laura to spend one month treating her workouts as if they were a sacred time for her to build a better relationship with her body. Instead of watching Netflix or listening to a podcast, put on music you love or work out in silence, directing her focus on the sensations of the movements and how she feels while she is doing them. I asked her to do all of this without making any substantive changes to the workout itself.

We made a few changes in order to facilitate this change. Instead of working out in her living room she started going to a nearby gym. Even though this added time overall, her actual workout took less time because she wasn’t constantly distracted. I also asked her to take a few minutes after each workout to make some notes about how she felt before, during, and after each session.

After one month of treating her workouts this way, Laura experienced a shift in how she felt about working out. Paying more attention to her experience of the workout helped her notice which exercises were flaring her lower back so we could make changes to prevent her pain. By paying more attention to how she felt as she moved the workouts became less boring and tedious and she actually started to look forward to them rather than see them as a chore.

While she was spending slightly more time overall on working out, there was less time spent procrastinating, getting distracted, and dreading. The payoff was feeling like she was actually progressing towards her goals of reducing creakiness and taking care of her lower back.

The specifics of what worked for Laura may not work for everyone. It is a luxury to have the time and resources to go to the gym, and not all pain can be addressed by modifying an exercise. I don’t relay this story as a prescription but as an example of how modifying the philosophical approach to fitness can revolutionize the experience and outcome.

This idea of using fitness as a conversation is by no means new. It is one of the oldest concepts of physical practice, a fundamental tenet of yoga and moving meditation. However it is too rarely applied to other forms of fitness outside of the yoga world, especially fitness that is primarily driven by performance and aesthetics.

Approaching fitness as a conversation with your body does not mean abandoning performance and aesthetic goals. It does mean that you can’t turn off your brain and mindlessly follow any coach or program, no matter how legit.

There is no perfect set of exercises. There is no “normal” way to respond to a training practice. There are tools and adaptations, and there is your body. The conversation is what makes those tools both effective and interesting.

My advice to the woman in my DMs with stabby hip pain every time she tried to do splits was that her body was trying to tell her something, with increasing urgency. It was up to her to set aside whatever ideas she might have about how she “should” feel after trying the splits and pay attention to what was actually going on.

More on this next week!

Want to go deeper?

Further reading:

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This November I'm co-teaching a week-long flexibility and mobility retreat in Oaxaca, Mexico with Kerri Krisinski — a small group, hands-on, in the jungle by the pool. The whole week is designed around building a better relationship with your body.

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