An hour of basketball feels like 15 minutes. An hour on a treadmill feels like a weekend in traffic school.

David Walters

The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.

Socrates

So you’ve been on the couch for the last couple of decades and one day you wake up, look in the mirror and recoil in disgust. You’re shocked at what you see and disturbed by what you feel. Disgusted with your lumpy, spongy form and its appalling lack of function, you resolve to turn things around, get back on track and whip yourself into shape. Your desperate mind searches for a remedy and quickly seizes upon a solution. That’s right, you’re going to exercise!
Swept up in a fever of enthusiasm, you launch yourself out the door. You buy some new clothes, fill your bag with supplements and sign up for a program at the local gym. You’re ready to seize control of your fate and make a comeback.
But sadly, you’re off on the wrong foot and your mission will almost certainly fail, possibly within days, but definitely within months. If you’re like most people, you’re going to wind up back on the couch before you know it, nursing a beer and crafting a rationalization.
Your problem is that you called the thing by the wrong name. That’s right, you used the word exercise.
If you had thought it through a little more carefully, you might have had a better idea. That is, you might have realized that what you really needed was not exercise as such, but more physical movement.
To some, this may sound like a case of academic hair-splitting, but there’s actually a vital difference here, one that’s lost on most Americans as well as a great many coaches, trainers and PE teachers. Understanding this distinction will take us a long way towards regaining our lost physicality and maybe even improve our relationship with the world at large. By the end of this essay, I hope to convince you to give up on exercise and start getting more movement into your life.

exercise is abnormal

The problem with exercise becomes apparent as soon as we begin to describe it. That is, exercise consists of doing abstracted movements in a stereotyped, repetitive pattern. In essence, exercise is a specialization extracted from a larger whole, an activity taken out of its natural context. Just as white flour is an extract derived from a more complex natural grain, exercise is a behavior that is stripped down and removed from its original setting. In effect, exercise is white movement.
The problem comes into focus when we take the long view of human history. When we stand back, we begin to realize that exercise constitutes only a tiny fraction of the human movement repertoire. The human physical experience includes a vast range of kinetic behavior: locomotion and exploration, play, hunting, gathering, scavenging, climbing, sex, dance, labor, gesturing and expression. Exercise is only a very recent and minor subset of all possible human movements.
Exercise also stands out as a glaring exception in the natural world. Across the entire range of non-human animals, we see no case of anything resembling exercise, especially in the wild. Yes, rodents will run on wheels in their cages, but this is mostly a matter of incarceration and frustration: put a running wheel into a natural, grassy field and rodents will not be lining up to run on it. In wild settings, animals will play, hunt, graze, explore, fight and mate, but never exercise. Even chimps and bonobos, our closest primate relatives, don’t display anything that looks like our version of exercise. They get plenty of action playing, exploring and chasing one another around the forest.

boring

The main problem with exercise is that it’s all about sets, reps and mileage: just keep grinding them out until the clock runs out or your trainer tells you to stop. This, of course, is a recipe for physical monotony. And physical monotony, like any kind of repetitive behavior, tends to be hard on the bodymind and tissue. Keep stressing a joint, tendon or ligament in an identical pattern and you’ll promote inflammation and a lasting relationship with your physical therapist. Even worse, this sensory-motor monotony soon leads to a deeper, more disturbing psychospiritual monotony. Boredom deepens and the spirit becomes depressed. Resignation and apathy soon follow.

can we play?

Exercise also fails because stereotyped reps tends to drive out play. This is why it’s so hard to get kids to exercise. Their bodies are simply too smart to allow it. Treadmills are boredom machines; no healthy child will spend more than a few minutes on one.
The contrast is clear: Exercise is about repetition of known patterns, but play is about exploration and discovery of new patterns. Exercise is about enduring unpleasant sensation while play is about finding delight in diversity. Exercise is about repeating the known, but play is about extending into the unknown. Exercise requires external motivation to maintain participation, but play is inherently rewarding and reinforcing. Exercise is about labor, suffering and denial, but play is about wonder and imagination.

adversarial

Because of its repetitive, predictable and unpleasant nature, exercise ultimately becomes an adversarial experience: it’s us against the experience. Faced with the prospect of mind-body boredom, we start looking for motivation and incentives. Thus, the proliferation of boot camps, TV’s, carrots and sticks that we now bring to the exercise experience. We’ve even taken to programming artificial voices of encouragement into treadmills, stairclimbers and other exercise machines. And so, exercise ultimately makes a perfectly logical companion to that other famously adversarial health experience: dieting.

a non-solution

Exercise is commonly promoted as a cure for everything that ails our bodies and our spirits: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression and all the rest. “Just do more exercise” is the common prescription offered by both professionals and lay persons alike.
But if exercise was actually the solution to our public health crisis, wouldn’t we be seeing better results? After all, experts and celebrities have been promoting exercise for decades and the state of the human body continues to deteriorate. In fact, if we looked at the trajectories of  lifestyle disease and exercise promotion, we would find that they track pretty closely with one another. If we looked strictly at correlation, we might even come to the conclusion that exercise promotion causes atrophy, obesity and poor health.
Exercise advocates are quick to point to success stories. We hear about pounds lost, blood sugar normalized, heart disease prevented and bodies transformed. We hear about people who fought mightily against physical apathy and dragged themselves to the gym for weeks, months and years. And yes, they got results.
What we rarely hear about are the multitudes of people who tried exercise, found it to be a dreadful bore and dropped out. In fact, the entire health club business model is built upon the assumption that a substantial proportion of members will stop coming to the club shortly after signing the contract. In other words, failure is assumed, institutionalized and implicitly encouraged.
In short, exercise has been a spectacular public health failure and an immense waste of human potential. The biggest consequence of exercise promotion is that we have managed to make millions of people feel guilty about their failure to do something that is inherently unpleasant.

start a movement movement

So exercise fails. Do we have a better idea?
Yes, in fact we do.
The answer is authentic, joyful, functional movement.
For those who have never seen or experienced it, authentic movement looks and feels nothing like exercise:

• Exercise tends to be single plane; functional movement is multi-joint and multi-plane.
• Exercise is monotonous; movement is engaging.
• Exercise is specialized; movement is diverse.
• Exercise is scripted; movement is authentic and intuitive.
• Exercise is performed according to a program; movement is opportunistic.
• Exercise feels mechanized and forced; movement feels expressive and creative.
• Exercise is a means towards an end; movement is an end in itself.

Movement is better because it’s expansive and offers more options for physical creativity and expression. There’s more possibility and more room for the imagination. It’s more inviting, more engaging. And best of all, it’s less adversarial.

off the couch

So maybe it’s time to go out for a walk and re-think your entire mission statement for the coming year. Your best bet is to give up on exercise right now; you’d be doing that soon enough anyway. Instead, resolve to get some more movement into your life, by any means possible.
Of course, this emphasis on movement over exercise doesn’t get us off the hook: vigorous physical engagement is still essential if we want to improve or maintain our health. Sweat and exertion are still necessary if we want to reap the health and performance rewards. We still need to challenge our tissue and push our personal comfort zones.
So start by diversifying your efforts. Look for movement of all varieties. Be a movement opportunist; look for movement at home, in the workplace, in parks, airports and in the parking lot. But most importantly, look for dance. Dance with terrain, with gravity and with other human bodies. Dance with dumbbells, kettlebells and sticks. Dance with imaginary opponents and shadows on the ground. Dance with water, with bushes and with trees. Dance with finger cracks, faces and alpine ridges. Dance with stairs and sidewalks.
And remember, if it feels monotonous and boring, it probably is monotonous and boring. And if it’s monotonous and boring, stop doing it! There are countless variations, combinations and permutations that are engaging and exhilarating. So mess around, play with the possibilities until you find a combination of movement, speed, resistance and frequency that works for you.
You just might find a lifestyle that’s truly sustainable.

Don’t know for certain, but I’m pretty sure that this young Kenyan runner never had formal PE instruction or training in “proper biomechanics.” The human body is magnificent, right out of the box. We are wired for graceful movement.

In today’s workaholic world, things are getting pretty uptight. In disciplines ranging from athletic training to classroom education, there’s scarcely any room to move. Every detail of our curriculum is now pre-meditated, measured and monitored. We have become hypnotized by the illusion of our expertise and we have excessive confidence in our knowledge. In our quest for professionalism and results, we tighten up our acts to the point that people can hardly breathe.

If all this screw-tightening actually worked, that would be one thing. But it doesn’t. Our top-down delivery of expert knowledge actually deadens the learning process and inhibits personal ownership of education and health. And, from a neurological point of view, rigid programs may actually be inferior to messy, random and diverse practices.

Consider this masterful presentation by Gary Avischious, head coach at CoachingSchool.org. As Gary demonstrates, motor learning works best when it includes variation. And, not only does this principle apply to motor learning, it also becomes a metaphor for learning on any scale.

Coach Gary’s perspective is reinforced by a recent New York Times piece How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect. The short story is that violations of patterns and expectation actually stimulate the brain to seek out meaning. In this respect, play and modern art both activate the brain in new ways and keep our minds active.

Now obviously, we can go overboard with play, diversity and randomness. An over-randomized program doesn’t stimulate any training effect and simply wastes time. Nevertheless, it’s time to loosen up our training and embrace some variation. Not only does it work better; it’s also a lot more fun.

Here’s an excellent body-weight exercise from our friends at Simple Strength:

Next step? Perhaps wheelbarrow with a partner?

In conventional fitness circles, we’re encouraged to do work-outs with lots of physical labor. We sweat and grind out the reps, trying to overload our bodies, build muscle and burn fat. We’re serious, disciplined and determined to transform our tissue and our lives.

In this equation, play is considered a frivolous waste of time, an irrelevant sideshow for kids and puppies. But this formula misses an enormous vista of potential and possibility. Play, as it turns out, can take us to a higher level of physical health, vitality and social functioning.

This potential becomes obvious in a excellent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder reveal how play develops a sense of fairness and social cohesion in non-human animals. Finely detailed studies of animal play, especially in dogs, coyotes and wolves, demonstrate that these animals actively negotiate roles and behaviors during play bouts.

So, far from being frivolous, play is beginning to look like an essential activity for social functioning. And conversely, play-deprivation is beginning to look like a serious threat to health at all levels.

As fitness enthusiasts, we could build upon this knowledge by bringing more intentional play into our movement education programs. Yes, sweat and effort are still essential, but these elements are far from sufficient. If we bring more play into fitness, we expand the potential enormously. We go beyond the body and make our practice more holistic. This builds a virtuous circle: by using play to develop social cohesion, we also promote individual health which feeds back into healthier tribes and communities.

Exuberant Animal is honored to welcome legendary trainer Sebastièn Alary into our practice. Seby, originally from France, is a master teacher with vast experience across a wide spectrum of physical arts and is highly-respected for his knowledge of cardio, strength and functional training. He currently trains clients in the highly-acclaimed Pro Club in Bellevue, WA.

Sebastien’s specialties include a highly progressive understanding of partner-resistance training. Working with “the human bell,” Seby helps his students gain a deep understanding of functional core movement. He has developed dozens of new games and movement patterns in the spirit of Exuberant Animal.

Seby will share his unique orientation at our Exuberant Animal Weekend event, November 7-8 in Baltimore. This is a unique opportunity to see an extremely talented and charismatic trainer in action.

Experience Seby in person at a wonderful full-weekend EA event, Nov 7-8″
Mention the blog to keep the early-bird pricing: only $150

The “friking amazing” persistence hunt video is going around and you’ve really got to see it. It gives us the flavor of an authentic persistence hunt and is obviously useful in giving us a sense of primal human experience. But don’t get lulled into believing that this is the ultimate look at our ancestral heritage. These are true !Kung bushmen, but they are moderns and this is a re-creation of a historical event. Please note the shoes, the plastic water bottle and the metal spear. Not only that, we have to remember that this is only one hunt by one tribe in one bioregion, in one moment in time. Any conclusions that we might draw from this movie should be tentative.

Obvious flaws aside, this video gives us some good ideas for speculation. Most obviously, note the high level of environmental awareness. These hunters make every movement decision on environmental grounds. There are no highway cones, no white stripes painted on the concrete, no volunteers with stopwatches. Every single physical action is tied to terrain, plants, animals and weather. There are no arbitrary physical movements. Everything is in context. Everything is a judgment call. Walk? Run? Sit in the shade? All of these movement decisions are intimately tied to natural conditions. This is something we can take to heart. Instead of charging off down the road like a machine, we might do better to look around first.

Here’s a promising new look at playground design, a company called Snug. Modular components remind me of huge over-sized legos. The primary focus is on small kids, but the potential for all-ages play seems enormous. What if you could build your own custom playground apparatus at will?

“…I see that everything in nature arises from the power of free play sloshing against the power of limits.”

Stephen Nachmanovitch
Free Play
Improvisation in Life and Art

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”

Arnold Toynbee

Physical enthusiasts continue to grapple with the role of freedom and discipline in fitness and health. Some lean towards highly disciplined “work outs” while others prefer more intuitive “play sessions.” As always, advocates for work and play will continue to call each other out, but the conversation may actually be moving to a higher level in pre-school classrooms.

It may seem strange to draw comparisons between physical training and early childhood education, but that is precisely where the future lies. We get a glimpse of this trajectory in Paul Tough’s recent New York Times article: Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

The central issue of the story is “executive function” in young children. This phrase refers to the general ability to control one’s thoughts and behaviors. Specifically, it means the ability to dampen or inhibit impulses coming from the emotional or limbic centers of the brain. Obviously, this is a fundamental skill when attempting to master literacy and scholarship, but it’s also essential to skill development at any age and in any discipline, from chess to sports to business. (See also Daniel Goleman’s work on “emotional intelligence.”)

The finding reported in this story suggests that fantasy or pretend play, when conducted within limits, leads to the development of self-control. Students who play out fantasy stories and situations learn to master their own brains and channel their copious energies. This practice is described as a blending of play and work.

Successful students in almost any discipline know the paradoxical truth: progress requires a blend of both freedom and discipline. Improvisation is essential; so are limits. Copious research into the nature of talent and skill has proven that immersion, engagement and deliberate, intentional action are essential to moving brains and bodies to higher levels. Recent books such as The Talent Code and Talent is Over-rated make a compelling case for deep and deliberate practice. It’s not grinding labor, nor is it frivolous dabbling: it’s improv within limits.

This is why the martial art model is so famously effective in promoting self-control and regulation, in both children and adults. Martial art is all about participation and engagement. The sensei lays down the limits and enforces them consistently. Practice sessions are full-immersion experiences and are highly physical. Within those limits, play is encouraged. Students learn to control their bodies, their behavior and their own cognition.

Our schools and our gyms could learn a great deal from this kind of practice.

Dr. Kwame Brown, neuroscientist turned children’s fitness specialist, presents his own brand of Human Development at the Exuberant Animal Spring Trainer’s Workshop 2009, on Whidbey Island, WA. The presentation is a refreshing departure from t0p-down, command-and-control approaches to physical training.  Thanks to Lauren Muney for the video work!