The Real Fountain of Youth - Movement
- Quick change vs Sustainable change
- Movement and health
- Pain is unfortunately the best ambassador for good health
Arnold Schwarzenegger famously once said that “There is no magic pill. There are no shortcuts. Everything is reps, reps, reps.” Disappointing? Perhaps. But true, undoubtedly so.
As nice as it would be to be able to “hack” the human body and have instantaneous change be possible, it simply isn’t possible. Not if you want the change to last, that is. Moreover, there is quite a lot waiting to be discovered during the process of training.
While drastically cutting your calories and dialing your exercise levels up to 11 may result in a quick transformation, such practices simply aren’t sustainable, nor are they healthy for you. However, if you were to allow for a slightly longer time frame and progressively build good habits that help you achieve your goals into your routine, you’d find that you’d end up at a similar physique anyways, but that you would be able to keep that progress much easier and for longer, and you’d likely have picked up some impressive moves along the way.
When people think of getting fit, the first thing that typically comes to mind is fat loss, muscle building, and the like. In today’s fitness marketing particularly, where the prevalent narrative tends to revolve around quick hacks and otherworldly transformation photos, there is often a rather superficial emphasis on fat loss and appearance. And although improving body composition is undoubtedly a worthy goal in and of itself, there is a lot more to fitness than just appearances. The value of movement and mobility for instance, is something that shouldn’t be overlooked.
As things stand, it is commonplace to have gym training be very one dimensional in the sense that exercises are very fixed and targeted. Do squats for legs, do cardio to lose weight, and so on — Input A to get result B. Those have their place for sure, and caring about appearance isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but being able to move throughout different planes of motion, scan your environment and react as necessary is something crucial to daily life, especially if you play a sport. If you don’t play a sport, then learning and practicing scanning becomes even more essential to daily life since you don’t get the chance to do so as often.
While there is undoubtedly a case to be made for single axis movements like those typical in a gym setting, it’s definitely worth questioning and exploring other skills. Being reactively strong but mobile throughout various different body positions can help prevent simple but potentially devastating things like tripping and falling, resulting in broken bones or worse, or straining a muscle when reaching for something or picking an object up — All very, very common causes of injury, especially in the elderly. Unfortunately, pain is oftentimes the best ambassador for taking care of one’s health, and many tend to ignore their niggles and physical degeneration until the point they simply can’t ignore it anymore.
While many people seem to be under the impression that losing movement capability is a natural part of getting older, it really doesn’t have to be. Ironically, investing in your physical health early on and teaching your body to share forces properly can help maintain those capabilities for longer, allowing you to play your favorite sport a little longer, allowing you to play with your kids or grandkids, and just being able to do more in your life. Furthermore, in the process of training your body to learn full movement capability, your body will likely change anyways.
Believe it or not, it actually is possible to achieve body transformation without it being the primary focus. As athletes routinely show, the human body is capable of so much more than just looking good, and rather than making appearance the be all end all, it’s actually possible for it to be a byproduct of good training in a sense. People talk a lot about athlete aesthetics, and how they would love to look like that. Well it may surprise you, but the vast majority of athletes don’t train for aesthetics, but rather for function.
Athletes are constantly training to run faster, jump higher, hit harder, and so the way they look is really a result of their training, which incidentally, is also why there are very different bodies for athletes playing different sports. For instance, a rugby player will have a different build to a swimmer, a swimmer will have a different build to a gymnast, and a gymnast would have a different build again to a tennis player. If nothing else, this just goes to show that at the end of the day, form and function go hand in hand.
Calisthenics athletes, gymnasts, and martial artists regularly perform seemingly impossible movements, beautifully controlling and contorting their body through space. Some would call those movements superhuman, even. And yet, a lot of people can do them, which begs the question, is it really impossible? Well it doesn’t seem to be now does it. Every athlete started somewhere, and learned as they progressed, and as they progressed, so too did their physiques adapt for their sport.
So if we go back to the idea of training for aesthetic purposes, which oftentimes becomes a tedious mental drag for no reason other than the framing of the concept, why not approach it from the opposite direction? Why not learn to move for the sake of moving? For the sake of being able to keep moving? Since your body will adapt to whatever you throw at it anyways, why not make it a fun exploration? So ask those questions, how strong can I get? What skills can I acquire? And guess what? In the process of training for those skills, your physique will almost definitely alter itself to better lend itself towards your goals anyways.
For a more in depth conversation on the topic, check out the @JointDynamics podcast! Available on Spotify and Apple Music.