What is Fitness (Again)? Time, Training, Tenacity

“Fitness is being able to do what the body can do, when it needs to, for things we imagine, for the age we are and the needs of our lives at the moment.” This is a marvelously broad and affirming definition of fitness, though not one I seem able to believe. Tough to cite one’s own words and realize an impotent center to them. (see A New Question Begins, 12-16-12). Much more regular in my thoughts are the monolithic tropes of the overculture, particularly with respect to feminine form. “Being fit” in my head usually means

• wearing size 10 or smaller clothing
• having slim to no hips, thin thighs, absolutely flat stomach
• running a marathon or being a tri-athlete
• never eating sweets, pizza, or fatty foods

 Then I got interested in Crossfit, though not enough to actually pursue their “plan” or “product” myself. Yet. For now, I’m living vicariously through my trainer, who discovered this elite fitness community about 6 months ago. (See www.crossfit.com). The site offers an introductory article to introduce their mission in the world, entitled “What is Fitness?” which informs this entire post.

There, Crossfit suggests three basic standards to fitness. The first includes ten recognized, general physical skills: cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. “You are as fit as you are competent in each of these ten skills,” they write. They also observe that some training improves competence through organic changes in the body (endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility) while others improve through practice, changes in the nervous system (coordination, agility, balance, accuracy). “Power and speed are adaptations of both training and practice.” The symmetrical balance of body and ‘mind’ here pleases my sense of proportion. Makes sense that fitness should have a good balance of both physical and mental acuity.

The second fitness standard marks a high bar: performing well at any and every task imaginable. Instead of the ever-increasing achievements of weight or distance, this standard shows a pragmatic turn. Does your level of fitness allow you to perform what you need to perform, in any given setting? This kind of standard is particularly appropriate for firemen (women), policemen (women), and any who face physical challenges in their profession/job. Crossfit is particularly aimed—or at least well-suited—to these populations, as a matter of fact.

The third fitness standard governs (and assesses) performance in all three pathways of energy for human action—phosphagen pathway, glycolytic pathway and the oxidative pathway. The first dominates the highest-powered activities, those that last 10 seconds or less; the second (glycolytic) dominates moderate-powered activities, those that last up to several minutes; and the third (oxidative) dominates low-powered activities, those that last in excess of several minutes. The task is to develop and attend to all three pathways of energy for human action. Just learning about them, I can already confess that I’m really comfortable with the third, oxidative, pathway, as seen by my love of long-distance running. I’m less comfortable with—but can tolerate—those things that last less than 10 seconds. It’s that middle ground, the glycolytic pathway, that brings fear for me. Why? I have no idea.

Another schema in which Crossfit defines fitness lies in a continuum between Sickness, Wellness, and Fitness. In this frame, “fitness is and should be ‘super-wellness.’” I find this schema quite useful, particularly as our rather polemical culture can create “fitness junkies” whose obsession with their bodies, physical fitness, and presentation of form offers little to them (or others) in terms of health or wellness. Particularly for women, the media-saturated ideal of “feminine fitness” poses images and behaviors decidedly sick: anorexic, boyish-boney, even starved softness with shadowed make-up. In the CrossFit world, wellness integrates medical science without being enslaved by it. Wellness is based on measurements of blood pressure, body fat, bone density, triglycerides, good/bad cholesterol, flexibility, muscle mass, etc.  Sickness can address everything from excessive bodyfat to low bone density to mental illness (depression, etc.), with actions to be taken toward wellness before “super-wellness” or “fitness.” Fitness simply becomes wellness magnified, deepened, intensified.

Implementation of this “definition” of fitness attends to metabolic conditioning or “cardio” work, interval training, gymnastics, weightlifting, throwing, nutrition, and sport.  The hierarchy begins with nutrition, however, only ending with sport, or “a fantastic atmosphere of competition and mastery.”

When I return to the notions of ‘fitness’ that usually float like pixies in my head,

• wearing size 10 or smaller clothing
• having slim to no hips, thin thighs, absolutely flat stomach
• running a marathon or being a tri-athlete
• never eating sweets, pizza, or fatty foods

I smile with relief at the Crossfit mission and wisdom, even if it feels a bit like Everest from where most in the American scene live. A notion of fitness rooted in pragmatic performance, particularly one connected to one’s life/profession, how one needs to spend time in any given day, is quite satisfying. Honorable, somehow. I’m beginning to pay attention to how my profession naturally predisposes me to certain kinds of body experiences, which continue to be necessary, for now, but can become a choice too.

Mostly, this intensely articulate definition and implementation of fitness frees me from some of the overculture’s obsessions I’ve been internalizing for a long time. Size of clothing matters little. Wearing slightly baggier jeans has loosened and strengthened awareness in my belly, my womb, which I have needed for a long while. Having hip strength, even a repository of abdominal fat that stores energy for core-strength use, is a good thing for performing many tasks I might previously have thought impossible. Running long distances offers one kind of performance, but fitness can express itself in multiple ways. This makes the path to fitness so much more interesting and exploratory, which is marvelous too. For good or ill, I’ve also gotten a little less self-incriminating about food. I’ve noted my weight is up since I’ve focused on strength-training and development of upper-body musculature.  I also know, for a season, that the weight-gain may actually be necessary for what I’m trying to learn, to do. For once, my weight is a pragmatic portion of a larger picture about what my goals are, what I might want to explore, to learn. It does not define or condemn, but instead, contributes its part alongside other factors.

Come to think of it, I feel a bit more like a sculptor of form and less an impotent lump of clay shaped only by my impulses or outer culture. Not only does it feel good to have some agency in this morass we call feminine fitness, it’s incredibly empowering to name a goal (even if it still feels impossible to me!) and find relationships and a fitness community in which such things are mountains needing to be climbed, desiring to be climbed,…and simply a matter of time, training, and tenacity.

“Fitness is being able to do what the body can do, when it needs to, for things we imagine, for the age we are and the needs of our lives at the moment.” For now, I want to companion my body, with other wisdom-folks, into this exploration of upper-body strength, without an obsession or all-costs force-of-will, but with an impish smile and intention to be free—to act, to play, to grow.

Seeing the 'Personal' in Personal Training

A new, if obvious, angle into personal training has emerged this week ‘between holidays’ and amidst travel to visit family. The Personal.

I have begun my Pull-up Virgin Workout journal, a large-ish calendar I had purchased for some bodywork musing and planning, and have made a couple entries about my workouts every other day. The workout is pretty straight-forward, actually, and only requires doing it. Like most things, however, it takes all kinds of permutations to get to actually doing it instead of just thinking about it. But after a long day of rambling, then napping, with little else ahead for the evening, I finally got to it. I cleared the downstairs of obstructing furniture—coffee table, ottoman, etc.—and took my time with the calisthenic-esque workout listed (at end of this post). If one uses parts of the floor covered by furniture, there's less chance of being on floor where dogs (etc.) have been!

Thing One. One of the reasons I do so little body-movement or work-out things at home is the never-ending barrage of self-critique that comes. It's volatile and vitriolic, for whatever reason. Where did I learn to dislike my own form so very much? I can distract myself at the gym—there are all kinds of people around—and I can even deaden some of the internal noise with my iPod—depending upon the mood, using either oral-teachings from SoundsTrue or tunes of some kind. But at home, with all my familiar comforts and distractions, I find it hard to stay at anything challenging, requiring bodily stamina. I find it hard not to listen, eventually believe what my inner-demons have learned to spout about myself. Which then made me realize just how very much my personal trainer, N, keeps me talking and listening while I move, while she makes sure I don’t hurt myself. J Amongst all kinds of other benefits, I think I’ve become as strong, dare I say as fit as I am because I’ve been mentally distracted by conversations I value while my body moves. Keep the mind busy and the body may just have a chance to say something in its own ‘tongue,’ so to speak.

I need to continue to deepen my ability to listen too, as I discovered the next day. The entire workout felt good, actually. I observed the voices as they whined, encouraging them to whimper into some peace and quiet of just moving. I allowed the shortness of breath to be what it was, resting when I needed to amidst the sets of 15, knowing it was more important to simply complete the movements with good form, not worrying about timing or pace, just yet.  And I felt the pleasure that always comes when an over-achiever reaches her numerical goals, even surpassing them to 16 reps, “because my birthday is day 16” my mind rationalized.

But then I get out of the driver’s seat at  the Minnesota History Museum the next day and ‘toink!’ went my back. Lower back, to be specific. I probably overdid it, again without knowing it. It relaxed over the course of the next hour and it all seems fine. Never debilitating into no-movement-flat-on-the-bed kind of space, but a small sign that I had apparently missed something my body had said. So…I need to continue to deepen the ability to listen. Why does that always seem so elusive to me!? How do you listen for the quiet speech when the ugly voices are so strident?

But the new thing, the new awareness that is making me smile, is simply how personal personal training needs to be. For me, at least. I have new appreciation for how social it is, how connective it can be for a woman such as myself. It’s a relational thing, actually, with body-benefits. And it’s a body-thing, with learnings internal and external. Now that I know that, a new task is to learn how to integrate the simple body-movements of some basic-fitness into my work-a-day world, companioning myself as well as being companioned by a trainer. A bit in the morning, on my own, can only increase my strength-training skills and my ability to body-listen, which should also help the eventual familiarity with the pull-up bar in the end.

So be it. Oh, and here’s the Pull-Up Virgin’s Work-out, for now:

Set One

15 Superman-flight, hands-fee push-ups

15 wide-pulls with bands, squat form for leg-strengthening

Set Two

15 1-2-3 Superman-flights, 1-2-3 hold hands-free push-ups

15 quick-row, 1-2-3 hold wide-pulls with band, squat form

Set Three (had to skip; no easily identifiable weights)

Russian twists with weights—floor, floor, up 1-2-3

Russian quick-twists with weights

Instead:

Leg-lifts with abduction movements

Downward Facing Dog without touching the floor—15x

Set Four:

15 second-step lunge-raises, off-angle for hip-flexor stretch

15 lunges with core-twist, 15/side

Set Five:

15 each-side, Side-arm planks, arm raise and floor-touch

15 each-side, hip-movement elbow-planks

The Arrival of the Power-Tower

It became real last night. 

We dragged the large, thin box into the dining room from its ‘hidden’ place in the garage. (How does one hide a large piece of athletic equipment in a two-person family?) B surprised me by suggesting we put it on the tile-surface right there by the stairs, where I’d have regular access (and obvious reminder) of my new quest. The ‘power-tower’ for upper-body strength training. Yikes! We’re actually creating space in both our lives for me to do this one simple thing: a pull-up. I felt anxiety and potential embarrassment in the pit of my stomach. I still don’t really think I can do this.

As I’ve stated before, this is clearly not about a pull-up. But what, then?

I’ve mused on this question all week, listing potential topics I could muse ‘aloud’ about here… The preparation (or lack thereof) of young girls to love their own bodies, no matter the shape/size. Deeper acceptance of my own large-ish build—fit, but ‘big-boned,’ we always used to say when I was distraught about my body’s lack of conformity to the dainty norms of high school. What ‘fitness’ actually means. The business and relational life of ‘personal training.’ The vast realms of kinesthetic technique alongside the body’s rather mysterious or mystical ‘fingerprint of knowing,’ distinctly configured for each of us. Lots and lots of ideas and associations have been swirling about.

Last night was not about any of those, though. B and I drove to one of our favorite ‘date’ places for an early Christmas dinner, having set aside Saturday night as ‘our’ celebration of the holiday. Given the pastoral and familial dimensions of such things, we’ve learned to (often surreptiously) protect one evening before the ‘real’ holiday in order to enjoy one another, exchange gifts, dream a bit about our shared life in the year to come. As I turned the car onto the main road, I felt this pinch of anxiety deep in my gut…alongside something that felt new.

“I’m nervous,” I said aloud.

“Nervous about what?” he asked.

“I still don’t think I can do this. The whole pull-up thing. The thing we’ve now invested money in together.”

“Sure you can. N said you were this close…” squinting his voice and placing his thumb and finger a hairbreadth apart from one another.

“She’s just being nice,” I said. “You know, like we never believe one another, claiming ‘You’re biased.’? She’s just being nice.”

“Well, out of the three of us, she’d know more than either you or me.” he said, with a smile.

I laughed, consigning him the point. The feeling of impossibility—that pinch that comes into articulation as anxiety—lessened a bit, and I found myself lighter, smiling. Getting a big ol’ Christmas present, of substantial size/cost, proved once again that where one’s treasure goes, so does one’s heart. I have more heart about this process than I did yesterday morning. Impossibility—lessened, admittedly—alongside determination and heart. Not bad.

And I do acknowledge stretching in the bathroom just yesterday morning, awaiting the water to warm up before entering the shower. I startled. As I had raised my arms, I noticed that I actually had upper body muscles. I mean, like, pronounced ones, if small or slight, fitting. A lilt to the bicep. An angle to the neck and shoulder, with back muscles appearing over the horizon of the collar bone. “Shit,” I said quietly. “I think I have new muscles.” Brian laughed aloud, “Well, of course, beautiful.”

Beautiful, indeed.

An Old Tin Cup

Engraved into its metal are four rings, one-half cup each.

True round? Long ago relinquished, with history’s marks:

A crunched dent, two flattened sides, dull veneer well earned.

One baker, then the next, had packed it away with the salt,

All-purpose flour, baking soda, and bags of dry goods.

A couple hash-marks point to middling levels, low and high.

Two-thirds cup, a cup and a third. Slight allowance to exist

Between the regular lines of expectation. It’s an old

Tin cup, you see, its handle slightly twisted over time.

It knew Mother’s hands first, wife then matriarch.

She too had four lines, engraved into her mettle,

Sons who marked her fullness, gave texture to her form.

She kissed each at night, long after they had left home,

Regular lines to livelihood, a tenacious family heritage.

Those lines once held an infant daughter between them,

A slight dent in the family frame, then released, mourned, 

Accepted. Life’s force departed, blessed but uncontained.

Mother perfect in the round grew less true, but real.

Pregnant with her touch, it knew a son’s hands next.

Husband, father, teacher, but here, a brother and uncle,

Baker of bread, lover of words, purveyor of precision.

“I have something to give you,” he said, the old tin cup

In his hands. A luminous and willing lineage breathed

In those words, a transmission smiling with inheritance.

How does an artisan of intention and intellect, with

Inquiry as love’s ingredient, give himself in life’s measure?

An old tin cup, its handle slightly twisted over time.

Shaped by strength, will and devotion, this treasure

Now speaks its secrets to a granddaughter and a niece.

Its words are beyond their words, its sense within sense.

Ancient hungers seek their repast, full of unseen food,

Present ones ferment hope, a harbinger of this family,

A dispenser of care, a sign of hungers met, with bread. 

Stories arrive this way, the ones that nourish well:

Ordinary in flour, dull in veneer with dented forms,

Old tin cups, handles twisted together forever, over time. 

A New Quest(ion) Begins

A new quest (and blog-project) begins!

The last time I enjoyed a blog-project, of sorts, I was reading Jewish dietary laws and cleaning out my kitchen in preparation for a day of kashering and then four weeks of kashrut observance. That was nearly two years ago, with a variety of writing tasks catching my attention and energies. I’ve joined a women’s writing organization, flirted with poetry a bit more regularly, even enjoyed writing for writing’s sake, i.e. writing without a predetermined goal. I’ve learned a lot about myself too, with some deepening awareness, consciousness extended back into old narratives that had seemed too fearful or dark for reconsideration. (They weren’t). Several small goals have appeared in these journeys, but a well-defined one has become this quest, of sorts. I hadn’t thought of it as a new blog-project, but when I shared a brief essay piece about it with my writing-circle small group, one of them planted the seed of suggestion. Voila! It has grown into a preliminary post. So what is the new quest?

I aim to do one pull-up by my birthday in mid-March. Just one. It need not be pretty, nor technically flawless. Hanging on the bar, then one chin-up above it. That’s it. To mark my learnings and celebrate my progress is the blog task, I am presuming.

Why and what has this come to mean to me? I don’t have hopes of being immediately comprehensible in why this matters so much to me. What’s the big deal about a woman of my body-type and build doing a pull-up? Perhaps that’s part of the draw. 

To start, I’ve been immersed in about two years’ worth of personal-training at a local gym, various goals in mind over the months. I had originally imagined running a marathon or half-marathon, but as I listened to my own body-awakening in these weekly 'tutorials,' of sorts, that goal waned in lieu of other, less articulate pursuits:  fitness, flexibility, learning, loving, sensate awakening. Along the way, I’ve discovered that the fitness world is so much bigger than my rather one-dimensional focus on distance-running.  I’m fascinated with how the body moves, specifically how my body moves, and various ways to play with weights, machines, body-resistance training, and more. I’ve also grown curious about the inherited manners in which I conceive fitness, how we think about its importance and contour, how women experience our overculture’s obsessions and guilts about the human body and its fitness (or lack thereof), how I have experienced my body as a woman regularly trapped in a superfund site of media-saturated, imputed feminine and religious-traditional toxins.

True to form, I approach these fascinations and curiosities as a Christian theologian, if one increasingly unwilling to accept my tradition’s assumptions, language, and absences of the female body. For most centuries, it has neglected, abused, and ignored the body, particularly the female body. So, I find myself a Christian theologian with few resources that are not already toxic in and of themselves. I’ve also found few companions who are similarly unwilling to ingest a tradition’s 'good intentions' that are steeped in ignorance—both male and female—or even worse, malice and abuse.

The quest begins, though, with my sixth-grade self, second in line to the pull-up bar, where I awaited Ms. Hill to call me forward for that spring’s dose of shame and impossibility. Every spring, the Presidential Fitness Test would loom, which aimed to measure the fitness of the nation’s children, to communicate a governmental commitment to children’s health. Whatever else it may have provided, with statistical precision, it taught me one inexorable truth: Fitness is Fearful. The worst was being second in line, watching my girl friend hang helplessly at the bar, being timed for how long she could hang. The boys behind us would smirk and complain that girls were not required to do pull-ups proper, like the boys. “Wimps,” they’d say, disdainfully. Even when many of the boys couldn’t do a pull-up either. Standing there, second in line, you had to watch and then accept that the girl in front of you was ashamed and ‘unfit.’ Then you would be named the same when it was your turn. Yee-haw.

Another more implicit learning in this spring ritual impressed itself onto my own flesh as well: “My body is too heavy for any good, especially anything upper body oriented.” Lifting, endurance work? I’ll find somewhere else to be. Three decades later, I still fear my bodyweight and the impotence of my upper body.  Usually, this comes up in the obvious unavoidables: doctors’ office visits with their scales of shame, menstrual mornings of weakness when I, for some unimaginable reason, think it’s a good time to step on the scale. Days of moving furniture or stacks of books from one office to the next.

Imagine my surprise, then, when months of personal training developed into a fascination for the pull-up bar. Something about its impossibility, but also its invitation to a sort of freedom, weightlessness, playfulness...even for adults? Really? A couple women of muscular build and fingerless gloves caught my attention too—hands on bar, hanging, toes to hands. I marveled, but appreciated seeing women enjoy themselves this way.

So…my new goal, with a smiling face: one pull-up by my birthday in March.  My first guess is that one pull-up promises me something much more important than any Presidential Test Assessment of Fitness. I want to learn, come to truly know in my bones: my body is just as it needs to be, as I learn what that is and as I’m finally taught by those who know a woman’s body.  

I’m also eager to see whether facing the bar will make my sixth-grade self smile, perhaps even give my beloved PE teacher the bird for never preparing us nor inviting us to consider the beautiful mystery and wisdom of the human body.  I don’t hold it against her too hard—she was not trained to do so, nor could she actually do a pull-up anymore either, by the time I met her—but I’m eager to see whether I can learn what my sixth-grade self needs to learn, then share it with any and all young women who would benefit from such learnings.

Perhaps it’s finally time for me to name my own definition of fitness (tentative, for now) and really live into it, with my own body and form. Fitness is being able to do what the body can do, when it needs to, for things we imagine, for the age we are and the needs of our lives at the moment.

Working It Out

[From October 2, 2012]

This afternoon offered the first good, long workout I’ve had in over ten days. I remember days when those words could not exist in the same sentence—good, long, workout—but we are in a different season, for now. Perhaps from now on. My mind began to release its form as muscles flexed and eased, contracted and relaxed. I began to remember the awareness that comes when I listen first with my physique, second with my profession. I don’t think I have used the word physique either, in those days gone by. So what made it good?

I’ve learned to trust my body more than I used to, for one. It’s good to move, enjoying an active and different relationship with the world than any idea I have of it at a given time. There’s an inimitable reality about being in the world—it is what it is, no more, no less. Sometimes, in this trust, I see body parts that seem new to me, though they’re just as old as the rest of me. My hips, for one. My mother told me when I was 12 that I had child-bearing hips, which was meant to ease my adolescent angst. I’ve felt ambiguous about them ever since. Did she mean ‘large for a purpose’ or ‘maternal’ or what? Today, I eased around the track, confident in my stride and appreciative of how these hips have borne me along the world’s ways. Sturdy, strong, even gracefully curvy. Or there’s my belly. My belly has been the source of some of the most stringently critical voices I’ve mustered within my head. “Could stand to lose a few pounds, couldn’t you?” this whiny voice would accuse. “How blubbery!” said another version of voice, with a mean-streak. Today, I remember how my belly holds estrogen to make my bones strong, how it complements my form with an image of ease and nurture. True, the anorexic, boyish models of fashion today would starve for days to rid themselves of this beautiful belly, but that is neither their fault nor mine. I’m more at peace with my belly than I’ve been in years. Perhaps ever. Part of me startles to realize that my body knows its way around this world better than what I’ve learned or used to think about the world.

It was also good because it came at the end of a spacious day, meeting women of interesting purpose and inquiry. One woman sipped her large coffee while telling me of her youth in isolated, German-Lutheran Nebraska ‘back in the day.’ She seemed embarrassed that she didn’t have a classmate outside the family until 3^rd grade in their one room schoolhouse. “Those TV shows you know? Forget about it,” she said quietly. We were to lead another group of women in a program-meeting, ostensibly “to get to know each other,” though she and I are really the only new ones. This quiet woman seemed to discount every beautiful thing about herself. How terrified she must have been to speak in public, about herself. The other woman I met for tea is of similar generation but vastly different spirit. This one has seen some things then smacked them back down again, with grace but severity. She knows who she is, though she struggles with anger when others—particularly men in authority—fail to see her, even dismiss who she is.

The day appeared a bookend of contrasts, to be offered up in a relaxing run of thanksgiving. A good workout of the bookends in me, I suppose—the little one who felt isolated and discounted her own beauty; the older one who has seen a bit of the world, enough to know that sometimes you have to strong-arm your way back to visibility, even if just for yourself.

Finally, it was a good workout because it opened new energies in me for what I do, how I see, who I’m connected with. I walked through the kitchen door, appreciative of the new countertops and the newly cleaned grouted-tiles and carpets. I made some strong ginger tea, the kind that Carrie Newcomer believes in, and wrote a letter I had been nudged to write. I drove to the post-office in the dusk of the evening, enjoying the silence and open-air breezing in through the open windows. I was reminded that my work is changing but as it is, it’s still really good work. A long hot shower eased the muscles that had reawakened gratitude, and I ended the day in comfy sweats and a favorite t-shirt.

Today offered the first good, long workout I’ve had in over ten days. May the next ten days be only one or two.