Present Tense Fitness

There’s a lot that I glean from my initial conversations with people. And the clearest tell that someone is chasing a feeling rather than an adaptation is that they try to dictate what their training should look like. It’s the guy who wants to put on mass who tries to tell me that they need heavy back squats (maybe they do maybe they don’t). It’s the person who has conflated being lean with being strong, so they tell me they want to get stronger but want to do a ton of supersets (sometimes supersets are helpful, sometimes they’re not).

The point is, if you’re reading this post, what I encourage you to do is think about whether you’re chasing a feeling while you’re working out, or whether you’re chasing the adaptations that come from several weeks of intentional training and programming. Knowing the difference between these things can be the difference between achieving your goals or not.

The clients I’ve worked with who trust and commit to a process are most often the people who like the way they feel after they’ve achieved their actual physical goals. They feel strong because they are strong. They feel athletic because they are athletic.

With this change and prescription and my now ubiquitous readers, my transition to Strength Coach™️ is now complete.

Upon entering the training studios, every client and dancer shall dry scoop protein and drink a gallon of milk.

It’s a gorgeous day here in New York. I’m underslept and underfed, but it’s a gorgeous day here in New York.

We’ve been training dancers for many years now, and one of the things that comes up often is having to re-teach dancers how breathe. They walk into gym spaces having been taught patterns that not only don’t serve them, but very often cause the very problems (back pain) those patterns were meant to prevent.

So it ends up looking like this.

1.) Dancers are taught breathing patterns that don’t match up with the physiology or biomechanics of breathing.

2.) Dancers experience back pain as a result.

3.) Dancers are told their cores are weak, and then do a bunch of exercises supposedly targeting the transverse abdominis.

4.) Dancers’ back pain persists and even increases.

5.) Repeat.

If we can break this pattern, and I think we can, then I think we can significantly reduce incidents of back pain in dance populations.

In Part III of this series we will discuss how we train the core.

I call this the chaos gauntlet. Dancers jump these ten randomly placed hurdles and then immediately do 10-15 seconds on the CrossFit-style bike (in this case, the Rogue Echo), completing 3-10 rounds without rest.

Why the chaos (hurdles of different size)? — I want their brains to have to navigate a “puzzle” under the stress of fatigue.

Why combine cardio with the hurdles? — I want them to have to organize their bodies and maintain good jumping/landing mechanics while tired.

Why do this at all? — This is a way of being sport- or dance-specific without the activity looking exactly like dance. It’s a safe “laboratory” way of introducing difficulty without putting dancers into real danger. We chase cardiovascular, connective tissue, muscular system, and nervous system adaptations that will translate into (hopefully) a less scary time onstage.

Another way of putting it is that we want to chase the adaptations in a controlled environment such that the inevitable chaos of the stage can be handled no matter what comes up.

I talked a few posts sho about the values of dependability and urgency.

Urgency might seem at odds with this post, so I wanna explain.

Urgency is different from reactivity. Urgency means we take ourselves seriously every single day with the tenderness to know that taking ourselves seriously doesn’t mean that we are perfect every single day.

It means we commit to a process. And when we fall short from our process, we take ourselves seriously enough not to judge that falling short but to analyze. I think we often confuse self-flagellation with self-improvement.

When we do this. When we commit to taking ourselves and our bodies seriously, slowly but inexorably over time we learn about ourselves. What works. What doesn’t work. And the urgency is in committing to THAT every day. Not perfection.

Because you know life will hand out behind whoopings when we least expect it. When that happens—none of us can escape that—the urgency we had during calmer times will be there for us.

It won’t save us from the turmoil—I mean look around right more!—but it can help us create a bridge from survival to wonder again when the time is right.