3: How to use your body
3: How to use your body
Thoughts from a long, long gym break.
I haven’t really missed exercise. That was a surprise to me - someone who, in their normal life, intentionally moves their body every day, often in the gym, an area specifically designed for people who like to work out. Usually, going a few days without moving results in a feeling of restlessness, anxiousness, skitishness. I find the rush of movement ironically settling, both for uncomfortable physical sensations and running thoughts.
When I went away to work remotely for six weeks, I imagined myself carving out times to move intentionally. Yoga videos precariously done in the narrow floor space of hotel rooms, long walks timed outside of the high sun, bodyweight circuits performed once or twice a week against the raised surfaces of the hotel’s pool. I knew the longing for a squat rack wouldn’t be enough to book myself into an unfamiliar gym in a country where my language just about extends to ‘a small wine, please’ and ‘can I have the bill?’, but I assumed the desire would be there.
This did not happen. Instead, one day I rolled out my mat on some awkward brick floor in an attempt to stretch out some post-surf tightness, and realised I hadn’t thought about moving in weeks.
This is different from not moving in weeks. Despite my ignorance, I’d hiked an hour and a half to a supermarket via a well-recommended coffee shop, pulled my body against a tide for two hours during a surf lesson, pushed my 25kg suitcase down the road for 30 minutes between hotels. I had been using my body, just not in the way I had intended to.
Somehow, that seemed to have given me the same outcome. I had still starved off the irritating itch of anxiety that lives at the bottom of my stomach, as though a ball of cotton wool is rolling around my gut. I had the same energy as when I plan a mid-morning workout to get blood pumping to the sluggish corners of my body.
Using my body had been thoughtless, which is perhaps why it’s been so freeing. Exercise is sold to us as a commitment. We have to carve out time to move to counteract the times that we don’t. Even among some of those who believe all movement counts or who preach an ‘active lifestyle’, shunning the gym in favour of a walk outside or a swim in the sea, exercise is intentional.
I didn’t realise how forced this type of movement felt until I stopped doing it. I’ve preferred the spontaneity of using my body, of unintentional endorphins. That I can make my body feel good almost effortlessly has been quite the discovery. I imagine parts of my brain that were stuck full of fitness shoulds and musts slowly unclogging.
I get why using our body isn’t really a mainstream narrative - it sounds clinical, dull, something to worry about when we are old (which I realise is an able-bodied perspective, given that I can use my body without thought, concern or planning). Instead, fitness - at least on Instagram - tends to be about the things we do while doing fitness. We measure strength by how many more plates we can put on a barbell while attempting to build strength or how much further or faster we can run while running to be better at it.
Yes, it feels good to be able to lift shopping bags out of the car easier or to pant less after walking up a flight of stairs. But how often do our workouts extend outside of the gym? Exercise is often spoken about as preventative, conversations centring on pushing back the unspecified time in the future when our heart might fail.
I want to use my body now, though. As Casey Johnston recently wrote in her newsletter She’s A Beast: “I’ve been leaning in the direction of wanting to find fun things to do with all strength I have, instead of cultivating more and more strength for strength’s sake. It's not just for fun’s sake either; my body has changed so much in the last almost-decade that it doesn’t feel fair to me to contain it to lifting and gyms.”
Of course, using your body is easier when you are in a warm country with no 9-5 job. Strapped to my desk in the English winter, there aren’t the same opportunities to use my body as there are along warm coastlines. Even though I walk everywhere in my normal life, they are often done with a hood up and a desperation for my destination, knowing that at least I’ve moved today.
The ability to use my body is also a result of intentional movement. Without my standard exercise routine, I am feeling my ribs stinging with a stitch much sooner than before. On the ski slopes, my thighs burned in a way they haven’t for years. My lower back is feeling a bit funky. I went back to the gym on Monday for the first time in months and put about 50% less metal in my hands.
But I really want my schedule to look different now: I want to work my body less and use it more. Finding a way to plan that while maintaining the unintentional nature is oxymoronic, but I think it boils down to letting my body guide itself rather than letting my brain slice the lines between ‘moving time’ and ‘non-moving time’.
Thanks for reading this week’s Gray’s Anatomy! I’d love to hear how do you balance intentional and unintentional movement?
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