Movement Culture- from a trainer’s perspective
I pulled up to a weekend workshop after working for five hours, driving for three, and starting my day before dawn. It was a Friday evening. The sun was low in the sky. People were doing handstands in the parking lot.
I walked to the taqueria on the corner and had a vegetarian burrito, wondering briefly if rolling around on the floor with a full stomach was a good idea. I was starving and decided food was worth the potential lethargy.
The group was intimidating, lanky bodies contorting themselves into shapes I can’t make for their warm-ups. I sat in the back and observed, gently folding myself into positions to counteract driving and traffic.
The instructor walked in, calm and mellow. He guided us quietly through a moving meditation. As we stretched and breathed, the collective energy of the 60 people dropped. We slowly transitioned from quiet contemplation to the more active movements of pushing, pulling, opening, and closing, eventually putting these simple ideas into our own flow, creating an interpretation of the concepts uniquely our own.
There is a subculture of fitness, one which hovers on the periphery of the more mainstream, socially acceptable aspects of a traditional exercise program. It’s a culture of movement, and consists of people that want to use their bodies as a form of expression, as a vehicle to interact with the world. It attracts those of us for whom movement is something more than a number on a scale or the amount of weight lifted or how fast we did our last 5K. It’s a practice, a game that values embodiment over aesthetics and is less attached with the outcome than the experience.
In traditional fitness culture, a gym session consists of a warm-up, cool down, lifting weights, and maybe a little stretching. A couple of times a week there may be running or walking to work on cardio. Fitness has become segmented into these three categories: strength, flexibility, and endurance. To practice movement is an intersection of the categories. Working on the three aspects independently only makes the movement practice more enjoyable, because to have the strength to support your structure, the mobility to move with ease, and the endurance to play for long periods of time makes the process more fulfilling.
It’s very similar to learning to play an instrument. You start by learning scales, establishing a foundation and developing a sense of touch to manipulate the keys or the strings. When you begin learning a song, you don’t play it straight through. Instead, you work on pieces, developing the necessary skill to play with a sense of ease. Eventually, you put it all together, playing the entire composition.
After you’ve played long enough, you may play with putting sounds together on your own, but you still practice scales and you still play other people’s music. This is your foundation. It gives you the support and structure you need to play in an unstructured way.
To move freely, without being told what to do, is a little bit scary. We are consistently told how to use our bodies, which muscles should be working, and what we should be feeling, creating disembodiment and a lack of self efficacy. But with a foundation built upon elements of strength, mobility, and stamina and developing skills using small movements you can begin to put things together, creating a version of someone else’s song that eventually becomes your own.
For the outsider watching, it’s weird because it’s different. My Instagram feed is filled with people moving in unusual ways, so I view it as normal; my sister, on the other hand, has a more “normal” Instagram feed with the exception of me. Once in a while she will call me, her voice a little bit panicky as though I have completely gone off of the deep end. “What are you doing?” she will ask. “And why are so many people watching it?” In a traditional gym setting, moving around freely on the floor, without a set/rep scheme attracts stares and the occasional mimic, standing off in the corner trying to coordinate his body in an unfamiliar way.
On the last day of the workshop, I was chatting with a dancer. “I am surprised so many people from fitness are here,” she said. “What brought you to this?”
I told her I had always felt like something was missing from fitness, and later, from yoga. “I have been on a journey,” I said, “to help people move freely and with confidence. People still need to be strong, and I still use more traditional strength exercises, but awareness and the ability to play are just as important.”
She said she, too, felt like the dance world was incomplete. “I just kept feeling like there was something more,” she said. In that moment, I realized I wasn’t the only one struggling with a sense of isolation as I pursued movement from a wider perspective.
In the world of fitness and health, cross pollination of ideas is healthy. I will never excel at gymnastics, power lifting, or dance, but that doesn’t mean I can’t utilize concepts from those areas to become stronger, more fluid, and live a more meaningful life.
Maybe that is actually the point. Movement is a way of life, not a segmented thing that has to be done because your doctor recommended it. When movement seeps out of the gym and into the world, our experiences become richer and our mindsets shift. We see the world as a landscape for potential movement and it’s no longer work- it’s a new reality. If you have a body, you might as well use it.
