The New Fitness Pyramid: First Principles

What are the training principles that will take us where we want to go, to realizing more of our individual potential?  Let’s look at two ideas that will get us started.

First we need self knowledge. Who are we and what do we want?  I am training for a 50k run in April.  A friend is training for a half marathon.  My wife wants to improve her health, maintain enough endurance to enjoy short walks, and live with less pain. Another friend wanted to be able to continue to continue to play and practice the piano without succumbing to pain due to long hours of practice in where she held habitual positions at the keyboard.

There are no quick fixes. Better health and function are processes taking place over a lifetime.  This process always involves learning.  The more we know what we want and what we are currently doing, the more we can do what we want.  Questions to ask might include:

• ·         How old am I?

• ·          What is my current state of training/ health? 

• ·         What are my strengths/ weakness?

• ·         How do I approach training / life?

• ·         What is really involved in doing what I want?

• ·         Am I aware of the little things and their value?

• ·         Do we give our bodies/ minds the things they need to succeed?

• ·         Do we realize that it is as or more important how we do things as that we do them?

All these questions deserve a separate article. Books have been written about each of them.  In the long run, the process is as important as the goal.  It is all about particular kinds of learning.

The next principle is consistency. We can all recall the story of the tortoise and the hare.  It is a great parable. My dad had a number of sayings that he would use repeatedly and he liked to say “slow and easy does it”.  Slow and easy gets the job done.  I had difficulty taking that advice as a kid, preferring to bull my way through most things, yet the advice still echoes in my mind.  Millions of Americans have seen the Grand Canyon and marveled at how the Colorado River carved a mile deep gorge over eons of time.

 Persistence has no equal and yet we are accustomed to everything happening quickly in the 21^st century.  If we have to stand in line, we may just go somewhere else where we can get served more quickly.  We want the pizza delivered in 10 minutes, perfect body in 30-90 days. We want a faster race time achieved quickly through a generic training program. We come to physical therapy wanting to be “fixed” as quickly as possible, instead of persisting or leaning new habits.  It is simply the way of life in the modern world.

Legendary champion Mark Allen, winner of six ironman triathlon world titles trained smarter than most of his competition.  He took days off when needed. He acknowledged his age when going for his sixth ironman title at age 37 and modified his training and focused his training to provide an optimal environment with enough training challenges, sleep, and nutrition.  He was ahead of his time in using carbon fiber bicycles. Most of all he developed inner confidence.  It took many years of training his inner and outer self before he came to dominate the sport.  Mark Allen also failed to defeat Dave Scott six times before he finally succeeded in winning his first title in Hawaii.

Like Mark each of us can realize that we cannot do it all with determination and brute force. Life-long experiential learning is necessary.  Learn, persist, and be consistent.  Consistency trumps a single hard effort. A one days flood does not carve a very deep canyon.

For help with your training / goals, contact Scott Forrester at awareathletes@gmail.com

By Scott Forrester, LPTA, CPT, Running form coach, Feldenkrais student Awareness Through Movement Instructor

Learning to Access Your Potential

Compare the foundations of the "Old Fitness Pyramid" tm and "New Fitness Pyramid."ttm  In the former the foundation is goal setting in the latter the base that supports the pyramid is potential.  Lets examine both concepts.  First, what is goal setting?  Where does adherence to this concept lead?



Goal:

1. The result or achievement toward which effort is directed; aim; end

While no one would deny the value of setting goals, when a goal becomes our core concept everything else is measured by that concept.  It's an end without a process, straining toward a goal, using effort to make up for lack of skill.  The result is failure and injury, while bypassing the learning process.  This is called the "quick fix"  approach.  But there is another way.

Potential has two important aspects:

1. Capable of being but not yet in existence'; latent
2.  The inherent ability or capacity for growth, development, or coming into being.

• Latent;  present and capable of emerging or developing but not now visible

Potential is what is possible or capable of existing within each individual.  We all have vast amounts of potential, untapped possibilities.  Aspect #2 implies possessing the capacity for growth.  When we look at potential we are embracing individuality and the learning and growth process.  The "quick fix" approach allows only success or failure.  When we embrace life as a process of learning toward potential, there is no failure.  All learning involves experience, error, and recalibration.  The quick fix cannot match the combination of self knowledge and commitment to growth and development.  To discover your potential, embrace your weakness.

Find your true weakness and surrender to it, therein lies the path to genius.  Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses.  Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don't divide themselves, those people are very rare.  In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation." -Moshe Feldenkrais

Embracing his weakness, Jim Ryun, a world record holder in the mile, discovered his immense talent and dedicated himself to developing it.

"I attempted as many little boys do, to excel in sports, but had no success.  In junior high I was cut from the basketball team and all of the other teams that were available, so I finally went out  for the track team.  We were having an orientation assembly and the football and cross country coaches were making presentations for their sports.  At the time I was 6'2" and 140 pounds, and I knew that once I got hit by a football player, that'd be the end of it.  So I chose to go out for cross-country, not knowing what it was."  As the weeks passed Ryun slowly came to realize that his running ability had only begun to be tapped (http://famteam.com/sampleAAchapter.htm)

George Forman recaptured the World Heavyweight Boxing title at 45 and held it till he was almost 47.  He was a very powerful puncher, but relying on power made him vulnerable to fatigue.  George was famous for losing the title to Mohammed Ali, falling victim to Ali's "rope a dope" strategy.  Foremen learned to let the opponent come to him using his energy more efficiently, combining his strengths and weaknesses.

Do you want your health and activity to last into old age?  Helen Kelin, famed ultra runner, in her seventies, inspired her teammates to finish an Eco-challenge.  In her eighties she set a world marathon age record because she said she learned to "run within herself."

Are you injured?  The solution is to learn exactly what you are doing and how you are doing it.  Learning is the gift of life, a special kind of learning, that of knowing oneself. People learn to know "how they are acting and thus are able to do what they want. . . the intense living of their unavowed and sometime declared dreams." (Moshe Feldenkrais)

Fitness, Health and Achieving Your Potential Introducing the New Fitness Pyramid ™

The American Heritage Dictionary gives as its first two definitions of the word fitness:

1.       The state or condition of being fit, suitability or appropriateness.

2.       Good health or physical condition, especially as the result of exercise and proper nutrition.

From this definition we might be justified in thinking that fitness and health are synonymous or at least closely linked.  However, in popular culture fitness is often associated with cosmetics (six pack abs) or even high athletic performances, at the expense of health.

A new disease was identified and a new term coined by an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Nicholas DiNubile, the term “Boomeritis”. It refers to the explosion of “itises” of all kinds among the Baby Boomer generation.  This is the first generation to be this physically active in mass and pushing their aging frames to the limit.  According to 2006 statistics from US Department of Health and Human Services Center for Disease prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics, musculoskeletal symptoms were the number 2 reason for physician visits.  Some sources say they are the number one reason.

·         Musculoskeletal symptoms cost the US $850 billion dollars.  (American Academy Orthopedic Surgeons, 2008)

·         Back or knee injuries are the most prevalent

·         The cause of 132 million physician visits

·         Result in 440 million missed work days from musculoskeletal injuries.

According to Dr. Timothy E. Kremcheck, MD and a spokesman for the AAOS, Baby Boomers have two problems when it comes to exercise...

1.       They are sedentary  

2.       They forget their age

In other words this generation wants do at 45 what they did at 25 or at 65 what they did at 45.

 But lest we confine the discussion of fitness in American culture to Baby Boomers let us not forget individuals in all walks of life and athletes of all ages who fail to realize their potential due to injuries.  Their stories are epitomized by the tremendously talented Ernie Zamperini, a young Olympic athlete before WWII who aspired to compete in the 1948 Olympics.  His training was going well despite an ankle injury suffered during the war, yet when the ankle began to hurt he elected to push through the pain exacerbating the injury to the point of making his Olympic bid impossible.

It seems that there is a widespread belief in the old saying “no pain, no gain” an adage which apparently comes from a proverb of the 1500’s and that appeared in John Ray’s proverb collection of 1670 as “without pains, no gains” (American Heritage Dictionary) It may be time to lay this antiquated proverb aside.  Since the greatest capacity of mankind is to learn, perhaps we should embrace, “No brain, no gain”

I would like to propose a New Fitness Pyramid.™  It is new not because the individual ideas are new but because culturally we need a new concept of fitness.  I hope to be able to comment on the details later.

Scott Forrester, LPTA, CPT and Feldenkrais Student. awareathletes@gmail.com