There are many questions that fitness instructors could consider. What is fitness? What is it that you want to make fit? The body, perhaps. What is the body? At first glance that’s obvious, but perhaps it isn’t really so obvious. Where does the “body” end and the “mind” begin? Are these the kind of questions that you often think about? Do they matter? Will they help you lead a better fitness class?
As a body awareness educator, I like exercises better than words, so let’s try an exercise which might put these questions into focus. Stand up, in a relaxed posture, with your feet spread apart a bit and your arms down by your side. Imagine that I am walking to a spot about fifteen feet in front of you, and I’m putting down on the floor a magic pencil. The magic is that with this pencil anything you write will come true. You could have a solid gold sports car or a swimming pool filled with chocolate ice cream.
I would like you to want that pencil. This isn’t an idea, a process of thinking about wanting it. It is a real feeling in your mind and body of desiring the pencil, wanting to walk over and get it.
What happens to your posture as you stay focused on wanting the pencil? Most people experience that they automatically tip a very little bit toward the pencil. (Some people may need more information to perform the exercise, or they may have other responses than I discuss, but for reasons of space, these brief descriptions will have to suffice.) Why is this important? Because thoughts about actions immediately recruit the muscles for accomplishing those actions. The intention to move automatically creates the beginnings of the movement.
This is important! It means that fitness activities are affected by and also affect body image and self-image. How you feel about yourself, your body and the exercises you do has a direct effect on how you move. And because the exercises you do embody your thought patterns, doing these exercises is a way of practicing those thought patterns and making them into very string habits. How many reps does it take to make an idea about your body into a permanent body habit?
What practical effects does this mind/body interaction have on fitness activities? It will have different effects for different kinds of fitness participants. Let’s start by thinking about new participants. Perhaps they are dumpy and klutzy, awkward and out of shape. What thoughts do they bring to the exercise class? “God, I look terrible!” “I hate exercising. It makes me sweat and makes my fat jiggle.” “I was never any good at sports, and I just know I’m never going to be able to do this.”
These are self-statements, beliefs about what the person is and can do. But they are not merely mental. Stand up in a relaxed position, and say to yourself, “My body is disgusting. Exercise makes me hurt.” Don’t just say it, believe it. What do you feel happening in your body? Does your posture sag? Does your breath get tight? Do you dissociate from your body (space out and distance yourself)? There are many possible physical changes that can be felt, but they all affect the muscle tone and joint structure. As a general rule, negative feelings and beliefs create constriction and imbalance in breathing and posture.
Will you be able to move with proper biomechanics if you are hating your body? No, you will not. The constriction and imbalance created by negative thinking will interfere with proper posture and breathing. And this will make the fitness exercises more difficult and uncomfortable than they need be. In other words, hating the body and hating the exercises will create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Negative feelings will interfere with movement and coordination and will create a genuinely distasteful experience, which will validate the negative beliefs about exercising.
It is important to help new fitness participants consciously create the body state of balanced, relaxed, energized enjoyment from which to do their exercises. It is possible to teach new fitness participants specific somatic processes which will release and balance their bodies, thereby actually improving their biomechanics and performance. For reasons of space it is not possible to go into detail about this, but these processes focus on opening the breathing, aligning the body for increased balance, and making the flow of awareness through the body radiant and symmetrical.
What about seasoned fitness buffs? What subconscious intentions do they bring with them to their favorite fitness activities, and how do those intentions affect their movements? Obviously there can be many different mindsets that people bring to exercise, but let me give an example of one common mindset and how it affects movement. I recently was asked to conduct a body awareness session at a health club, and one of the participants was a fitness instructor. When I asked people what they particularly wanted to get out of the session, she replied that she led a number of aerobics classes, was in great shape, but her body hurt from the constant pounding of the exercises.
I asked her to do a few moves from her routine so I could watch how she moved. Once I saw what she was doing, I led the class through some awareness exercises focusing on breathing and body alignment. You may wish to try these exercises as you read about them (though the written descriptions here are very very brief and may not have enough details for some people).
I had the participants kneel, and sit on their heels, Japanese fashion. Then I pushed on their chests and had them try to resist being pushed over backwards. Everyone stiffened to resist me and got pushed over anyway. Then I showed them a very different way to organize their bodies for postural stability and power.
I had them lie down on their backs, tense their stomachs, and then let them soften. I asked them to go even further with this, letting their bellies soften and melt more and more, releasing all tension. I suggested they release their pelvic floor muscles (the genital and anal sphincter muscles) as well .
Then I had the participants kneel again, and focus on letting the core of their bodies stay soft. I asked them to move their bodies down into a slump and then up into an upright sitting position. Most people believe that rising to an upright sitting position comes from straightening the back or moving the shoulders back. However, the real key is pelvic rotation. When you slump, your pelvis rolls back/down. When you roll your pelvis forward, that moves your torso up to an erect sitting position.
I showed the participants that to do this movement with maximal efficiency, it must come from the psoas and iliacus muscles (which are deep core muscles in the front of the body) rather than from muscles along the back. And I showed them that the way to access those muscles is to sit slumped and gently roll the pelvis forward, moving the pubic symphysis (the bone in the front of the pelvis just above the genitals) forward and down, toward a spot on the floor between their legs.
Once they were able to do this new movement, the class participants were able to effortlessly resist being pushed over backwards. The fitness instructor exclaimed that she felt more relaxed and stronger when she used her body this way. I had her try a few of her aerobics moves while keeping her body core soft and maintaining the new pelvic alignment, and she felt that she could do her aerobics exercises with more resiliency and less pounding.
But then she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and immediately tensed her body. She felt that she, and her students, had to be tense, tight, trim, and taut to look good. Our culture emphasizes that beauty comes from tension. The aerobics instructor felt that being comfortable, relaxed, and strong wasn’t worth looking loose and sloppy—as she thought of it. Personally, I thought she looked better when she looked stronger and more comfortable.
How many fitness participants come to their fitness activities with internal pictures emphasizing compression and tension? Exercising with that tension makes the movements awkward and unpleasant. Wouldn’t it be better to allow the body to move with freedom, ease, grace and pleasure? That is what is anatomically natural. It works better and it feels better.
I know that many people will have a hard time believing that power and movement efficiency could possibly come from softening and releasing the body core, but as a black belt in Aikido and Karate, I know through my own experience that the greatest power comes from the greatest inner softness. Words are not ideal vehicles for body awareness training. I wish we could practice together for just a few minutes, so I could give you the experience of soft power.
Try saying to yourself, “I must stand tall and trim.” “Suck it in, and tighten it up!” How does your body respond to those messages? What happens to your breath? Most people experience how those beliefs/intentions automatically constrict the body. Engaging in fitness activities that way is like driving with your parking break on. It is possible, through specific somatic processes, to help seasoned fitness buffs find a new power and a new joy in their workouts. That will not only help them achieve better motivation, but it will result in more effective movement patterns.
As you lead fitness activities, you can pay attention to the body as both a mechanical object governed by rules of structure and function and as a subjective process of lived consciousness governed by rules of awareness, emotion, and energy flow. If you broaden your focus in your fitness sessions to include awareness of the mindset that participants bring and how it affects their bodies, you will be able to help people create a more physically efficient, more healthful and more enjoyable experience—one which will keep class participants coming back for more.