Knowing is more than half the battle
When people hear the word “Fitness”, they tend to imagine dieting, exercising or a combination of both. While practicing either of those things will help you achieve fitness, I view fitness as a deeper concern of the human mind; It’s the pursuit of improvement, well-being, and self-maintenance.
In today’s world, many people spend a significant amount of time in front of a screen. If you use your phone while it’s below you, you can hurt your neck as you’re looking too far down. Most people text from this stance and with time, can develop neck problems. Similarly, because we spend such a large amount of time sitting down in our jobs (most of us at least) our back muscles become elongated and our front muscles shrink; this causes people to hunch forward as they walk instead of “straightening their back” however, if you’re anything like I used to be, perhaps the phrase “straighten your back” seems ambiguous to you too.
I see proprioception as one of the most important goals of fitness. Proprioception is one of the many human senses, and it is what allows us to detect how our body is oriented in space, how our weight is distributed and which muscles are active as we attempt an action. Your proprioception is how you know your shoulder is here, your arm pulls this way, and your neck doesn’t bend that way. Because the human body is flexible and our muscles are stronger than they need to be, the human body doesn’t need to be in proper form to move; that’s the reason people can walk with improper posture and still live their entire life, despite maybe having a hunch in their back. However, since you’re born into a body and your body is the machine you’ll be operating your entire life, it’s extremely helpful to learn how to use your own body properly; after all, why carry all those tendons, ligaments and muscles around if you won’t use them?
Before, when I would think of “straightening my back”, I didn’t have an understanding of what exactly I was doing and what to look for; I would merely over arch my lower back and ask “like this?” and if people said yeah that’s better I would accept it and move on thinking that any sort of pain I got in my back was due to the fact that I hadn’t been straightening it in the first place; however, straightening your back shouldn’t be tiring, it’s the way your body was meant to stand! Your entire skeletal system is designed for you to stand upright and if standing in your spot with a straight back gives you pain in your knees, back, shoulders or any other joint, there’s a high possibility that you have an issue with a component of your posture.
So if posture is the result of multiple muscles activating properly, how do we get better activation of our muscles?
When we think about flexing a muscle, our brain sends a pulse of electricity down the required nerve to activate the muscle we are thinking about. If we are unfamiliar with a certain muscle, it is only because we haven’t activated it properly. Once we get activation in a muscle, our brain notes “Aaaah, that’s where I left my rhomboid” and then you can almost instantly recruit that muscle to push or pull, depending on what you need the muscle to do, but first, you need your brain to comprehend where that muscle is located within your anatomy. Over time, this connection (known as the neuromuscular junction) gets strengthened as it becomes easier to activate (or rather, a single impulse from your brain achieves better activation at the muscle) and you will be familiar with your hip muscles like the back of your hand.
As we learn to utilize more and more of our muscles, our posture ends up fixing itself. When you fix your posture, you will begin to appreciate putting in time to take care of yourself. The straw that broke my back with regards to my back posture was when I had to help my parents move some 800 books. The books were on the third floor and had to be transferred to the ground floor. Despite using an elevator to assist in the movement, after I moved the books with one of my friends, I ended up straining my lower back. This strain made me take a day off work as well as a muscle relaxant to be able to rest the following morning. Afterwards, I decided to learn how to lift, pull and push properly. Learning proper posture (gaining proprioception) is a skill that is crucial if you want to avoid neck injuries or spinal injuries.
Furthermore, as we begin to pursue this form of self-awareness, we begin to identify the problems we have in our muscles due to our lateral dominance. Despite things like “handedness” or “footedness” being genetic, there is no physical reason why we shouldn’t be able to use our other hand or foot to do something like write or kick. Surely enough it won’t be as good because we don’t practice as often, but if we focused our mind on utilizing the muscles in our arm, we should be able to write a sentence in decent handwriting, after all, our dominant hand can only do it because it’s already familiar (or rather, your brain is familiar) with that section of your body and you can get better at using any part of yourself if you just keep trying to use it and thinking about where your brain is trying to activate. Many times when people push, lift or pull, they tend to use one side of their body more than the other; pushing with one arm more than the other or pulling with one side of their back more than the other. If you develop your sense of proprioception by focusing on the activation that’s occurring, you’re less likely to hurt yourself.
When we first work out, our muscles don’t develop that much for the first month or so because the beginning of the workout process trains the nervous system. For that reason, I believe that fitness starts off with your nerves, from the ones in your brain that allow you to think, to the ones connecting to your muscles that allow you to carry your will. Our neurons are what give rise to our habits and behaviour and to change our perspective on health, we need to first change how we approach the topic of health.
The Tortoise’s Path
The process of changing the way we think, and thus our view of being healthy, can be arduous without patience. Many people seek a method that gives them results sooner rather than later. However, I find that the slower method is much easier to maintain, provided one has the right mind frame and perspective on it.
When it comes to improving our health and seeking fitness, I find that people tend to follow a hare’s approach. I like thinking of my method as a tortoise’s approach.
The Hare approach is trying to shotgun your way through the different criteria that must be done to reach the goal. If your method of maintaining fitness is to exercise, diet, track your weight and count your calories, you’re using the hare’s approach to fitness. This method allows you to constantly push yourself further and further, until you reach that goal you seek. You get feedback by tracking your weight and seeing how much you’ve improved over the last week or month and you keep at it till you reach the end of the race you’re running with yourself. While this method may work for some people, it can become difficult to maintain for a long period of time, although, some people are up to that sort of challenge and are able to maintain that lifestyle. The people who use this approach receive higher amounts of positive feedback in a smaller amount of time; provided they can stick to the restrictions they set for themselves. Additionally, I find that negative feedback has a much larger effect on people who are working their butts off, trying to get a certain result. This is holistically different than the tortoise’s approach.
The tortoise’s approach to fitness is trying to change yourself from the inside, such that living a healthier life style becomes easier to do, over a long period of time. Theoretically, If you can remove the bad habits you are expressing that keep you from reaching your fitness goal, you will keep getting closer to what you envision. You need to train yourself to NOT desire things like sugar, deep fried foods and salty foods as well as learning to enjoy movement, exercise and making time to take care of yourself; because those are the things that are making you take steps backwards, or are perhaps making you drop out of the race entirely.
Unfortunately, for many, appeasing a bad habit is nearly impossible. When people make exceptions in their regime, the entire thing can fall apart in a single instance of akrasia. Momentum gets lost very quickly and soon we find ourselves back at the beginning. When people regularly go to the gym and they skip a single day, it can sometimes become two days or a week before they get back into the swing of things and even then, it can take a couple of more days before there mind is back in “Gym mode”.
If you are dieting and you have a single cookie, or a cupcake, you will find it harder to resist the sweet the next time it is offered to you. Our urges for sweets are not like itches that leave our body once we scratch them, but more like mosquito bites that will keep itching so long as we continue to scratch them. This is largely due to the way that the human body is integrated with the bacteria in our digestive track. Luckily, it is precisely knowledge of this biological mechanism that will allow you to gain control over your eating habits, and fixing your eating habits is a great place to start.
The microbiome is the combination of bacteria that lives inside your gut and digestive track. These bacteria send signals to your brain that tells the brain to eat certain types of food that the microbiome bacteria like. They also play a large part in training your immune system, controlling your mood and are a hot topic of science in the year of 2018, but for now, we’re focusing on the microbiome effect on fitness and food cravings.
If you’re the type of person who does not like celery, you can train yourself to like it by introducing it slowly (first have whatever you can stomach of celery, then have a larger piece…), eventually, your microbiome will grow to include bacteria that like celery; this happens because when you have the celery, the population of bacteria that like it will eat it and grow in numbers. Once these bacteria populate a larger portion of your digestive track, you will suddenly find that celery doesn’t taste so bad. You’ll just end up thinking “the taste grows on you!”
As such, if you establish to yourself that you want your eating habits to change and recognize the “unhealthy yet tasty foods” as a furtive saboteur to your fitness goals, with time, your body will learn to not crave the stuff; although this can take up to five months or fewer, depending on the person, their metabolism and how disciplined they are; this turn over period is precisely why the tortoise method of fitness requires a lot of patience. However, it is motivating to think that each day you keep to it, you’re making tremendous progress, and one day you’ll get over that hump that keeps you going back to greasy food or fatty foods because the bacteria inside you will definitely grow daily, and their growth is solely dependent on the food you decide to feed them, and that puts control in your hands.
Furthermore, if you use the Tortoise’s approach, I strongly recommend you work on fixing your diet first and then introducing the exercise. When you don’t have the hassle of going to the gym to work out as you are learning how to eat properly, you merely focus on the fact that one part of you sees the problem of cravings you need to overcome, and the other part of you is trying to convince you that there’s no problem at all. Once you eliminate “the bad stuff” your body is prepared to further develop its fitness.
I found it much easier to quit processed sugar entirely, than to fit it into my schedule. Again, because of how the microbiome works, a cheat day once a week will have long-lasting effects on your psychology and physiology throughout the rest of the week. If you get used to not requiring the cheat day and focusing on the good you’re doing for yourself by not allowing yourself a day of free eating, it’ll become much easier to maintain the healthy life style because your microbiome changes will be maintained, as opposed to disturbed, once a week. If you include even a single day or frequently make exceptions in your diet (but it’s a birthday, but it’s a wedding, but it’s the cinema, but I’ve had a rough day), you end up increasing the resistance towards your goal until eventually, you get fed up with trying and you go back to where you started.
For many people, sweets and dessert are coterminous with happiness. Even asking people to CONSIDER abandoning dessert will beget responses like you are asking them to amputate a limb. As mentioned in a previous article, before you can make a change, you need to make a consideration. If you cannot consider abandoning dessert, then you are already making it harder for yourself to live a healthy life style. If you can make the consideration, as in, think about the prospect of stopping dessert, but choose to continue having dessert, then at least you’ll know that it’s your choice and that the choice can be changed if you will it.
I completely believe that the idea of “dessert is happiness” is a type of illusion that many people live in. What we put into our gut has long lasting effects on our mood and behavior, but people have just learned to put up with the nuances of having dessert regularly. If your sugar intake is regulated, you don’t have sugar crashes throughout your day, nor do you intake empty calories. Regulating sugar helps you wake up easily and you don’t worry so much about whether your diet is making you gain fat, cellulite, diabetes or any of the other problems associated with a sugar-heavy diet. Additionally, what makes this “dessert is happiness” illusion even harder to dispel, is that the issue is not just in the sugar of the dessert, it’s in the concept of dessert, in and of itself.
If you spend your time looking for healthy desserts (Lo-fat whatever, vegan brownies, artificial sweeteners or a zero-calorie drink) you’re still not training your brain to exclude dessert, and with time, you might go back to the dessert that you’re trying to replace. This is not true for everybody, but definitely something to look out for.
As stated above, the tortoise’s approach is to change yourself from the inside such that maintaining the trajectory towards your goal is easier to maintain. When we have dessert and snacks regularly, we tend to think that it’s the norm (which, in today’s world, it is normal, but unfortunately, this new norm is also why obesity, hypertension and diabetes are on the rise) if you can train your brain to learn happiness without dessert, you will be well on your way to better fitness. If you want to snack, try to snack on fruits, nuts or vegetables; if that doesn’t sound appealing right now, at least you know that in forcing yourself to eat it, instead of what you currently crave, you’re training your microbiome to convince you otherwise, and with time, you will feel differently as the tastes grow on you.
Another thing to look out for is “stomach boredom”.
Sometimes we don’t have much going on and we find ourselves opening the fridge to look for something to snack on. This sort of behaviour can go undetected if we don’t keep our eyes open for it. If you find yourself getting hungry frequently, consider whether you are engaged in an activity or not. Entertainment doesn’t help much in avoiding stomach boredom because many people are conditioned to snack as they are entertained (ever go to the movies and not get snacks? or a show?) so try to find something that requires you to use your imagination to keep your mind focused and remove your stomach boredom. The main problem with stomach boredom is, many times, having a small snack expands your appetite instead of satiating it, and soon, you’ll find yourself hungrier than you were before you had the snack. If you absolutely must munch on something, try to make it on a low calorie, high fiber food like celery, spinach or kale. If you don’t like these kinds of foods, you will, but only after the bacteria within you populate enough to make you like it, and patience is key.
As stated before, you don’t want to appease a bad habit, you want to terminate it. Furthermore, if you introduce any degree of exercise on top of this sort of diet, you end up progressing rapidly and maintaining momentum; when I don’t go to the gym for 3 weeks, I don’t much worry about my body becoming sluggish because I’m not having sugary or unhealthy foods during that break period. I go back to the gym and it feels normal to start again. In fact, sometimes it feels like my muscles have rested properly and I’m better prepared for a workout. If you stop going to the gym and you ruin your eating schedule, it will feel like you’re starting from square one. This is the reason I believe that fitness starts with fixing one’s diet.
The current diet I follow only cuts out processed sugar (Cupcakes, brownies, ice cream, caramel, chocolate… etc) but it doesn’t exclude fruit. Sugar isn’t inherently bad for you, the main issue is that processed sugar (in the form of say, high fructose corn syrup) enters the bloodstream very quickly. That spike in blood sugar causes our bodies to release insulin and that insulin will take a portion of the sugar and convert it to fat. That’s the reason you don’t want to overload on sugar from fruit (mainly by drinking too many juices) either because that’ll have a similar effect to having processed sugar.
The recommended intake of sugar for a male is 25g~ and less for women, when we consider the fact that some beverages have 55g of sugar, it should raise a red flag. However, if you end up having 30g of sugar because you decided that you wanted two more oranges today than usual, it’s completely fine. My method doesn’t count calories, nor do I scrutinize the specifics of my food. What you do want to look out for though, are the times that you’re strongly craving something even after eating it, especially since this sort of behaviour is operating under the assumption that you won’t be able to access this food again, and that’s almost never the case.
For example, I will try to have 4-6 dates if I’m in the mood to have dates, but if I find myself craving a 7th or an 8th (honestly, I could eat 20 in one sitting), I will just stop because I know that I can have more tomorrow. The road to fitness is a long one and it’s very helpful to think about the fact that you can always have more tomorrow, just don’t have more today. In the previously mentioned example, if I crave a 7th or 8th date in a given day, I tell myself that I can just hold off on eating them for today, and tomorrow I’ll have them. If you spend time thinking about how you want it now, it’ll be difficult to ignore the impulse because our desires are saying “Come ooon, I just want one more”, if you think about the fact that you’ll have them tomorrow, it’s much easier to control yourself. If you’re thinking you can just have the extra dates today and have more tomorrow, you’re not entirely comprehending the tortoise’s approach to fitness.
A similar thing can be said about high salt foods. I personally try to avoid deep-fried foods or high salt foods like chips or fries but I don’t find them as terrible as processed sugar. If I had a cookie, I know for a fact I’ll crave another cookie later, which is why I don’t have cookies anymore. When I have fries, I don’t get the same urges, I’ll have a few if they come with a sandwich but I’m not going to go all out on ordering them. If you’re the type of person who frequently craves fries even after eating them, consider the possibility that removing them from your diet will help you reach the goal you keep striving towards. Salty foods will make you carry excess water weight and that excess bloat will make you feel lethargic. Furthermore, they’re very addictive and much like learning “happiness without dessert” takes time, unlearning “Salty is delicious” can take a long time. Frequently when people’s taste buds adjust to higher levels of salt, they will find food bland without it and as everything already has salt in it, constantly adding a little bit of salt can become a lot more added salt at the end of the day.
Discipline is something we must uphold for ourselves and to give in to certain things makes us give in to others. When you set yourself a limit, it’s important to uphold that limit for your own sake; letting go in one instance will make you less likely to maintain it the next day; and during a year or more, these small deviations in limits and restrictions can give rise to a disturbed eating schedule or a lack of discipline. Focus on the long-term goal and recognize the times that you’re slipping away from your plan. It’s important that you construct your environment (both mental and physical) in a way to maintain your wilfulness to achieve a healthy body. That way, you will find the road much easier to travel down.
Examples of these deviations can include things like people who will snack or eat, stop, and then go for one more bite before stopping all together. If that’s where it ends, it’s not that bad, but in many cases, that “one more bite” ends up becoming two or three over the course of a week. At first you go for one more bite, after a couple of days it becomes an extra half serving and eventually can become an entire dish. As we eat more, our stomach craves more food, as we eat less, our stomach becomes smaller and we get full faster. If you can train yourself to not desire that extra bite, you could be saving yourself from eating a lot more food than you realize in the future. Food is strongly tied to our behaviour and we don’t always realize the effect it has on us. You can sometimes see people tip a soda-can upside down to get every single drop out, and I wonder if people do this consciously or their body is just doing it on its own. If you drink soda and you can get yourself to not need those last few drops, you’ll be on your way to not needing the entire can. If you need every single drop in the can, then recognize the hold the sugar has over your behaviour and consider change.
I believe that the road to fitness begins with fixing one’s diet. If you exercise but eat poorly, you undo the hard work you put into the gym. However, if you eat properly but don’t exercise, you stabilize your weight gain. Once your weight gain is under control, it becomes easier to progress through the next steps, as they’re all-natural extensions of taking care of one’s body. Compare nutrition and taste but remember that nutrition is more important in the long run. If you are facing complications at the age of 50, you won’t much care how good something tasted when you were 30. Commonly, people don’t eat vegetables or healthy foods as they don’t always taste as good as greasy food or sweets. However, in our move towards fitness, we will find it extremely beneficial to get used to eating these healthy foods. Firstly, because introducing these nutritional, but not tasty, foods into our system will allow their taste to grow on us, and secondly because with time, our metabolism slows down, and if we can’t get used to eating healthy at a young age, it’ll be even harder when we’re older.
Dieting and exercise can be very stressful together, so split it up and take your time with them. Perhaps it’ll take you 3 months to learn to eat broccoli, and it’ll take you 6 months afterwards to stop craving chocolate, but eventually, you can get these urges out of your consciousness (by adjusting your microbiome with time) and then you’ll be ready to start working on your vigor and strength.
The tortoise’s approach to fitness is about learning to become a healthier person without stressing over the fact that you’re not there yet. You take it one step at a time, making sure each step is in the right direction. Don’t focus on counting calories and your weight this week, these things will hold you back in the beginning; instead, start off by removing the bad foods you like from your diet, and, learning to like the good foods you hate. Afterwards, you’ll recognize that your actions are slowly guiding you towards the better body you dream of, and, that you’re moving at your own pace, but at least it’s in the right direction.
The body you want to attain is yours to claim, but only if you can convince yourself to start working for it.
Channelling the Energy
I think that fixing one’s diet is, by far, the harder part of fitness training. However, if you find that your food is in check, and you’re doing well in getting your required nutrition, you should feel more energetic than before (at least I did, and so do many others who clean up their diet). Afterwards I would advise that people begin introducing a period for stretches and some form of cardio into their schedule.
Stretching has legendary effects on the human body. From the benefits yoga has on the mind and physique to the preventative effect stretching has on sprinters; stretching is the beginning of proprioception, which, I believe, is the easier way to achieve a more fit body. Even if it’s five minutes a day, try to stand up and get your body a little bit looser than it was before by taking the time to stretch. Don’t worry about stretching your entire body in one go; although it’s better to stretch completely, even stretching partially is better than not stretching at all. The “All or nothing” approach will have you constantly waiting for that perfect time when it’s better to just take a moment to do it and then get back to what you need to do.
The real benefit I find to stretching, is that it helps us learn where the muscles in our body are. In learning the position of our anatomy, everything we do feels better. When you walk with improper posture, those small stresses on your hips, ankles, spine and neck accumulate, and one day you’ll wake up thinking “man, I’m so tired, must have been something I did yesterday” but, it can be the days, weeks or months of neglecting certain muscles that actually caused your fatigue. This neglect isn’t necessarily intentional, as we don’t all know where our abductor is, and when we learn where it is, we don’t necessarily know how to recruit it in movement. If you stretch however, the movements you do will alarm your brain to the location of these muscles, and then it’ll feel very natural to use them. When you use your muscles properly, your posture gets fixed and that hunch in your back disappears, the pain in your knee might go away, the neck strain will dissolve and as a result, you’ll be a much happier person.
I strongly advise people to start off by learning how to use their body as it helps them do everything. In learning how to recruit all the muscles you carry, you allow yourself the opportunity to resist forces from every angle; you can do more. Despite not working on my flexibility, in learning where my muscles and joints are, and familiarizing myself with moving them, I’m now much more flexible than I used to be. I couldn’t touch the floor without bending my knees, but after I learned how to properly straighten my back and use my leg muscles, it was a cinch.
Before you start stretching, it’s helpful to pinpoint to yourself your own distances because we all have different bodies. I recommend standing in front of the mirror in a neutral stance (just stand comfortably) and gauge the distance between your eyes and your joints as well as your joints to each other. Try to learn where the base of your neck is relative to your eyes, and where your shoulder blades are relative to your eyes and neck, then your clavicle to your shoulder blades and then your elbows, wrists, hip bones, knees and ankles etc. Keep in mind you have two bones in your forearm connecting your elbow and wrist, so try to feel both from your elbow. When you stand and you look at yourself in the mirror, you want to see and feel your muscles holding you up, you want to feel the pivot of your hip and whether you are putting more weight on one side than the other. We all have tendencies to lean one way more than the other or use one side more than the other, so trying to sort this out in the mirror will give you a better sense of balance.
Once these distances are established, your mind has a much better idea of the landscape it’s covering. When you think about your elbow, you now have a better idea of where it is, and your brain should find it easier to recruit that area. When you’ve established these distances, try to rotate your limbs by focusing on the joints that encompass the area you’re targeting.
For example, focus first on your wrist, elbow and shoulder (while standing in a neutral stance, try to flex them respectively). Distance your wrist as far as you can from your elbow (at least, imagine that’s what’s happening) and you will feel your forearm flex. Once your forearm is flexed, try rotating your wrist inwards (towards your body) and hold it at the farthest you feel you can. If done properly (make sure you’re focusing on all three joints), with that rotation, you should feel a tension move from your forearm, through your elbow, to your bicep and then to your deltoid. If you rotate your wrist in the other direction (away from your body, again, after you tried distancing your wrist from your elbow to the best of your extent and with focus on your joints) you should feel the tension go from your forearm, to your elbow to your tricep and teres.
You could spend a good amount of time learning just your wrist.
Bending it towards your palm activates one part of the forearm, bending your wrist towards the back of your hand is another part of your forearm. Moving your wrist towards your thumb or pinky will activate a different subset of muscles as well. Rotating it one way or the other will again, do the same. The way in which your wrist can be activated in so many ways is the same as virtually every joint in your body. However, many movements will require us to utilize more than one joint at a time so learning each joint individually is very important to learning how to use our entire body.
As a rule, none of these movements should hurt you or be painful unless you have an issue with one of your joints. This “twist” concept can be applied to your legs as well although it’s a bit trickier than your arms. Try focusing on your glutes, hip, knee and ankle (but keep your foot relaxed) while standing and try rotating your feet one way or the other while focusing on all mentioned joints. You will find that one rotation works the outer half of your leg and the opposite rotation works the inner half. To target the abs, you can try focusing on your shoulders, hips and knees.
Never use a burst of force, but rather, try a steady increase in tension as you spiral your way through your limbs. If you use a lot of force but don’t direct the tension properly, you could injure yourself, if you work at it slowly, you’ll know instantly that something is wrong (because there will be pain) and then you’ll need to figure out what muscle is not being recruited that’s causing you to feel that pain. Sometimes when doing a shoulder movement, I wouldn’t use my bicep properly and it’d cause me shoulder pain.
My approach to proprioception is to rely more so on the internal feeling we get from movement than to try mimicking a pose or stance we see. Watching videos on YouTube can be extremely helpful if you’re looking up a guide for stretching, but it’s also important to develop your own neuromuscular junction by learning it internally (at least, that’s my theory). Another thing I would do, is to perform regular movements at a slow pace. This gives you an exaggerated feeling of what muscle you are using and how that muscle connects to one joint or the other. Later, when you try to do an exercise like a push up or a squat, you’ll be much more aware of the issues in your posture as your brain will feel like there’s a sort of “void” in activation. This void just entails a portion of your body that you can’t feel “flexed” yet. Secondly, do make sure to work on both parts of your body regardless of dominance. I am left handed but I feel like I have better control over my right shoulder and my left shoulder needs more work. I’m constantly trying to balance out my body so that I can feel my left and my right side equally.
The point is to get your brain to learn that there are muscles in certain locations of your body and that every muscle can be accessed by focusing on a different set of joints in your skeleton and moving those joints relative to each other. I learned many of my muscles by using the method I described above but many others will do better if they attend a yoga class or get a personal trainer.
My stretching has consisted of me doing moves that target areas I’m unfamiliar with and learning how to “tie it all together”. A fun exercise I did was lying flat on the ground and trying to thrust into the air at a very slow speed. The push to get off the floor started with my arms, traveled to my tricep, rear deltoid, my back, then it moved down to my hips, glutes, hamstring, calves, then around to the front of my body until it ended in my core at my bellybutton. This languid movement activated a lot of my back muscles that, prior to it, I didn’t know existed. Another similar exercise you can do is trying to take 20 seconds or more to sit down on a chair. You will feel your core flex as you push your butt out, then that wave will activate each of your abs (you should be able to feel distinct points of activation if you do this properly, four of which are above your bellybutton) before the weight is loaded onto your hamstring and glutes and when your butt is finally on the chair and you try to straighten your back (remember, very slowly) you’ll feel your back activate too. You can do a similar thing by taking 10 seconds to go up a single stair step to activate your legs.
On top of thinking of your joints, another thing I would do, although, after I had done exercises or tried activating a region, is manual muscle separation. To do this, find a joint (again, let’s go with the elbow) and use your hand to feel around the joint. If you feel a muscle, try to follow it from one joint to the other and try to flex that region at the same time. I found this a great way to get your brain to realize that the region from here to there is all one muscle, then it separates at a certain angle and that’s another muscle. With time and practice, you’ll begin to feel your individual muscles and it’ll be much easier to activate them once you can see them separate with your eyes. The angle at which you’d do a deltoid raise becomes very clear once you see the angle at which the deltoid is positioned. Before that orientation is comprehended by your brain, doing an exercise feels confusing where you’re not sure whether you’re doing it properly or not. The areas that you don’t have access to (like maybe certain parts of your core, your back, or maybe hip muscles) will become clear as you begin to establish a firm knowledge of other areas. It took me a while to learn how to access my teres muscle but before I knew how, I could feel that my brain wasn’t reaching that part of my body and once I achieved activation, I could feel the muscle separate itself from the other muscles around it.
However you prefer to learn the configuration of your anatomy, do it. Even looking at anatomy charts and trying to find the muscles on your own body will help you achieve a better form.
On top of working on stretching and learning your muscles, doing any form of cardio (even if it’s only 10 minutes) will have great benefit because at this point you should have stabilized dieting. I started off with jogging and jump rope but perhaps you’d rather start elsewhere, so long as you’re not noptimizing your start, you’re good.
My goal was to jump rope for 10 minutes and then go for a jog around a local school. The first day, I could only do 3-4 jumps before I’d make a mistake, within a week I could reach 10, before a month I had reached over 100 but only after I stopped counting how many jumps I was making. Don’t obsess over where you are right now, just focus on getting more jumps in and practicing. Some days will be great, others will be mediocre, but both are helping you reach your goal and that’s what matters the most.
Cardio is a great way for you to utilize your knowledge of muscles as well as building up stamina. It loosens the body and gets it used to moving which will be beneficial when you take it a step further to either body build or do some form of a sport.
I encourage everybody who is interested in fitness to do at least a year of body building as it can tremendously help you with your proprioception. Prior to body building I had no idea how to straighten my back, engage my lats, push with my chest and I had a bit of a hunch in my neck. After learning proprioception, if you maintain your diet, you should be in pretty good shape in the long run; otherwise, try to find a sport or some sort of a hobby that keeps you moving and likewise, you’ll be fine as your diet will be in control. Going to the gym isn’t the most enticing thing for everybody, but when it becomes more about the knowledge you’re gaining for yourself (you want to learn how to use the muscles on your body, otherwise, they’re dead weight you need to carry) I feel like it becomes easier to get excited about going. If you learn how to use your legs properly, going up stairs becomes a lot easier because there are more muscles helping on each step. If you body build for a while and strengthen your mind-muscle connection, when you try to swim, jog or do martial arts, you’ll do much better and it’ll come much easier to you.
This is the method I used to become familiar with my body and achieve fitness, and this familiarity has made me appreciate myself in unprecedented ways. The path I took started with considering living a healthier life style, accepting the consideration, fixing my diet and then working on my mind-muscle connection via body building. After my gym membership finishes, I might check out yoga. You might have a way that works better for you, maybe you know a friend who can teach you or you’re subscribed to a person on YouTube that teaches it very well. I just believe that gaining proprioception makes fitness more fun and tremendously easier because you rapidly perform better in everything you do, especially when you train at thinking of your body as a fluid system in motion. However, getting situated with activity is difficult when we are not eating properly because eating poorly makes us encumbered and lethargic.
When we are young, we don’t necessarily think about our health and how our actions are affecting our bodies. With time, we can lose sight of the fact that we’re not a certain age anymore and some people even feel helpless against losing the weight they’ve gained or trying to fix their lifestyles. We don’t always consider trying to improve our specific quirks either; some people complain about a kink in their back but never really go to get it checked out, even if it causes them pain, some people learn to accept their weight and continue their way. We should love ourselves the way we are, but also note that the way we are is a product of our thoughts and actions, and we have control over those things. Like the consideration of removing dessert, you can consider changing yourself to the way you dream of being, and if you reject that consideration, that’s fine, but if you can’t make the consideration, then I think there’s an issue.
In considering living a healthier lifestyle by getting rid of habits and desires that keep us from reaching that health and strength, and by learning how to use our bodies, we become better equipped at carrying out our desires and we increase our longevity, expand our patience and amplify our strength. The road to acquiring a fit body doesn’t have to be a race. Let it take five years if it must.
It’s better to work on something slowly and guarantee it gets done than trying to finish it quickly and giving up multiple times.
Metacognition 
Leave a comment