Always from the same height
Oct. 22nd, 2022 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is one of my most formative works of fiction, and one of the things I've always appreciated is that it rewards rereads, and different elements come to the fore depending on the age in which you read it. I read the first book as a teenager, and certain elements didn't make sense to me until many rereads later, in adulthood.
One such aspect is a thing the series says about learning. Its protagonist, Lyra Silvertongue, gains the ability to read an 'aletheiometer,' a device which allows her to ask questions (about future events, about hidden or secret motives — basically questions about things that she would not be able to figure out independently) and receive a true answer. She's a child, and she learns to use the aletheiometer without being taught — the knowledge just happens to her, in much the same way as toddlers learn to walk, and talk. (I mean, obviously it takes effort and repetition and mistakes for toddlers to pick up these skills, but they aren't consciously aware of this effort and it's not something that we remember in later periods of our lives.) All other characters who can read aletheiometers learnt do so as adults, using books, with painstaking effort, and they're not as fluent at it as Lyra.
However, at the end of the trilogy, Lyra loses her ability to read the aletheiometer. This loss is tied explicitly with her transition to adolescence, and impending adulthood. She is told that she will be able to learn to read it again, but never in that effortless way — it would be a life's work of scholarship, and constant, conscious effort.
As a child, this always struck me as pointlessly cruel, and although I understood that Pullman was making a point about the differences between childhood and adulthood learning, I always hated that Lyra had to lose her special supernatural power. However, once I became an adult myself and experienced these stark differences in ways of learning (even of the same skills!) my perception of this narrative choice of Pullman changed.
All this by way of preamble of something sparked by one of the responses to yesterday's Friday open thread: a skill that I learnt unconsciously in childhood, and then had to relearn in adulthood with much effort, and trial and error. I'm referring to the ability to build a habit of regular exercise. Because at least one person mentioned that they'd be interested in knowing how I managed this, I've decided to write a post on the topic. Obviously what worked for me is not going to work for everyone, but it may possibly be helpful to some.
For some context, I was an extremely active, physically fit child. I was in constant motion — given the choice, I wanted to be up a tree, sneaking onto the roof of our house, running around, climbing on play equipment, swimming, jumping on trampolines or off diving boards, and so on. My mother noticed when I was about seven that I was always doing handstands or cartwheels (entirely self-taught) or hanging upside down from tree branches and play equipment, and enrolled me in gymnastics classes. I continued doing gymnastics until I was eighteen years old.
My involvement in gymnastics increased from the hourly Saturday recreational class when I was seven, peaking to around twelve hours a week spent training throughout the entire time I was at high school. I competed locally against gymnasts from other clubs in my hometown, and at national level (by which I don't mean I represented my state, but rather that I compteted against gymnasts from other clubs from all over Australia), and by the end although I wasn't a brilliant gymnast, I was a competent one and would occasionally win medals for individual apparatus at local competitions. Getting to this level required persistence and consistent work — not only repetitively learning specific skills and tying them together into gymnastics routines, but also doing daily strength and conditioning exercises (as part of gymnastics classes, and at home on days when I didn't have classes), and weekly ballet/dance classes in the gym, and understanding that all these things were necessary to achieved the desired result: to execute technically proficient routines at competitions, and to continue to progress in order to compete at higher levels each year. I never questioned the need for such efforts and accepted them without question as necessary for achieving the required outcomes — and in any case I enjoyed pretty much all aspects of gymnastics training.
As a consequence of all this gymnastics, I was reasonably good at a lot of other kinds of sports without much effort or need to practice — I represented my school in swimming, long-distance running, and dance at state level, and I generally got good grades in PE class. I picked up skiing, roller blading, roller skating and ice skating without any difficulties, and to this day I have never fallen over on a ski slope, roller or ice rink. I was, and remain, absolutely dreadful at any form of sport that involves bats, balls, rackets, kicking, throwing or hitting and compensated for this whenever we had to do such things in PE class by running around energetically and appearing enthusiastic.
So basically, as you can probably tell, maintaining a regular exercise habit as a child and teenager was no trouble at all for me, and it was basically as natural as breathing. If my parents hadn't been able to afford gymnastics classes I probably still would have been extremely physically active, and would have ended up doing one of the various other sports I mentioned above, for free through the school.
After I quit gymnastics, a few months before my eighteenth birthday, everything changed. As with many childhood habits, the loss of an explicit 'reward' (a good grade on a school assignment or piano exam, a good score and a medal for a gymnastics bar routine) destroyed my motivation completely. What followed was a long period of trial and error to find ways to motivate and maintain consistent exercise practice, with many false starts and long stretches of very inactive life.
What ultimately ended up working was a combination of several factors. The first was the identification (after long discussions on the topic with my mother) and removal of barriers to exercise. She correctly made me realise that the more difficult and complicated exercising was for me, the less likely I'd be able to stick with it. It sounds weird, given what I've said about all the gymnastics training and competitive swimming and running and so on, but I've actually always been a fundamentally lazy person, so something needs to be easy for me (or feel worth the effort) for me to do it consistently. 'Difficult' means different things to different people; in my case it was a combination of when and where the exercise took place, the cost, and whether bad weather was likely to deter me. I dislike exercising on a full stomach, I prefer to do it as my first activity in the day, and the need to use any form of public transport to get to the exercise venue would deter me: and therefore I always exercise first thing in the day (on days of the week where this fits with my work schedule), and the exercise either starts the instant I leave the house (back when I was a runner) or is within walking distance (now that I swim four times a week). Cost and classes at inconvient times were always going to be too high a bar to clear — and so I do yoga at home, daily, through free classes on Youtube.
The other thing was picking forms of exercise that wouldn't irritate me — so that I wouldn't spend the whole time just wishing the thing would be over. I prefer to use distance rather than time spent as a measure of 'sufficient' amounts of exercise (because I like the prospect of completing the exercise sooner if I move more quickly), so it needed to be things that could be measured in distance — running a certain route, swimming a certain number of laps, etc. I'm also someone who likes to have to-do lists and cross things off, so I added specific exercise targets to my bullet journal habit tracker, and found that it worked as a way to maintain a consistent practice.
So that, in essence, is how I retaught myself how to exercise consistently, after acquiring this skill rather effortlessly in childhood and then losing it. The specifics of my situation aren't necessarily relevant — what's important are the general principles. Take a step back and think: what would make exercise easy for you? Is it the form of exercise, the time of day it takes place, the location, the cost, whether it's measured in time or number of repetitions or distance, or some combination thereof? If any of these things are currently a barrier, try to identify other forms of exercise that might not have these specific impediments. You need to make the exercise itself as desirable and practical as possible, so that the desire to skip it or procrastinate doesn't arise.
I personally don't think it's a good idea to have exercise goals tied to either weight loss or comparisons with the skill levels of other people — at least initially, as they can be demoralising, demotivating, and act as barriers in and of themselves. The goal should be solely to make a specific consistent exercise practice an ingrained habit — once you've got beyond that point, maybe you can start thinking about other goals. I'm also well aware that what I'm saying is only going to work for people like me, who dislike team sports and have zero interest in exercising as a form of social activity — I'm not much use when it comes to people who are interested in joining their local amateur football team or similar. Maybe people who do these kinds of sports could chime in in the comments?
In any case, I hope some of this is helpful.
One such aspect is a thing the series says about learning. Its protagonist, Lyra Silvertongue, gains the ability to read an 'aletheiometer,' a device which allows her to ask questions (about future events, about hidden or secret motives — basically questions about things that she would not be able to figure out independently) and receive a true answer. She's a child, and she learns to use the aletheiometer without being taught — the knowledge just happens to her, in much the same way as toddlers learn to walk, and talk. (I mean, obviously it takes effort and repetition and mistakes for toddlers to pick up these skills, but they aren't consciously aware of this effort and it's not something that we remember in later periods of our lives.) All other characters who can read aletheiometers learnt do so as adults, using books, with painstaking effort, and they're not as fluent at it as Lyra.
However, at the end of the trilogy, Lyra loses her ability to read the aletheiometer. This loss is tied explicitly with her transition to adolescence, and impending adulthood. She is told that she will be able to learn to read it again, but never in that effortless way — it would be a life's work of scholarship, and constant, conscious effort.
As a child, this always struck me as pointlessly cruel, and although I understood that Pullman was making a point about the differences between childhood and adulthood learning, I always hated that Lyra had to lose her special supernatural power. However, once I became an adult myself and experienced these stark differences in ways of learning (even of the same skills!) my perception of this narrative choice of Pullman changed.
All this by way of preamble of something sparked by one of the responses to yesterday's Friday open thread: a skill that I learnt unconsciously in childhood, and then had to relearn in adulthood with much effort, and trial and error. I'm referring to the ability to build a habit of regular exercise. Because at least one person mentioned that they'd be interested in knowing how I managed this, I've decided to write a post on the topic. Obviously what worked for me is not going to work for everyone, but it may possibly be helpful to some.
For some context, I was an extremely active, physically fit child. I was in constant motion — given the choice, I wanted to be up a tree, sneaking onto the roof of our house, running around, climbing on play equipment, swimming, jumping on trampolines or off diving boards, and so on. My mother noticed when I was about seven that I was always doing handstands or cartwheels (entirely self-taught) or hanging upside down from tree branches and play equipment, and enrolled me in gymnastics classes. I continued doing gymnastics until I was eighteen years old.
My involvement in gymnastics increased from the hourly Saturday recreational class when I was seven, peaking to around twelve hours a week spent training throughout the entire time I was at high school. I competed locally against gymnasts from other clubs in my hometown, and at national level (by which I don't mean I represented my state, but rather that I compteted against gymnasts from other clubs from all over Australia), and by the end although I wasn't a brilliant gymnast, I was a competent one and would occasionally win medals for individual apparatus at local competitions. Getting to this level required persistence and consistent work — not only repetitively learning specific skills and tying them together into gymnastics routines, but also doing daily strength and conditioning exercises (as part of gymnastics classes, and at home on days when I didn't have classes), and weekly ballet/dance classes in the gym, and understanding that all these things were necessary to achieved the desired result: to execute technically proficient routines at competitions, and to continue to progress in order to compete at higher levels each year. I never questioned the need for such efforts and accepted them without question as necessary for achieving the required outcomes — and in any case I enjoyed pretty much all aspects of gymnastics training.
As a consequence of all this gymnastics, I was reasonably good at a lot of other kinds of sports without much effort or need to practice — I represented my school in swimming, long-distance running, and dance at state level, and I generally got good grades in PE class. I picked up skiing, roller blading, roller skating and ice skating without any difficulties, and to this day I have never fallen over on a ski slope, roller or ice rink. I was, and remain, absolutely dreadful at any form of sport that involves bats, balls, rackets, kicking, throwing or hitting and compensated for this whenever we had to do such things in PE class by running around energetically and appearing enthusiastic.
So basically, as you can probably tell, maintaining a regular exercise habit as a child and teenager was no trouble at all for me, and it was basically as natural as breathing. If my parents hadn't been able to afford gymnastics classes I probably still would have been extremely physically active, and would have ended up doing one of the various other sports I mentioned above, for free through the school.
After I quit gymnastics, a few months before my eighteenth birthday, everything changed. As with many childhood habits, the loss of an explicit 'reward' (a good grade on a school assignment or piano exam, a good score and a medal for a gymnastics bar routine) destroyed my motivation completely. What followed was a long period of trial and error to find ways to motivate and maintain consistent exercise practice, with many false starts and long stretches of very inactive life.
What ultimately ended up working was a combination of several factors. The first was the identification (after long discussions on the topic with my mother) and removal of barriers to exercise. She correctly made me realise that the more difficult and complicated exercising was for me, the less likely I'd be able to stick with it. It sounds weird, given what I've said about all the gymnastics training and competitive swimming and running and so on, but I've actually always been a fundamentally lazy person, so something needs to be easy for me (or feel worth the effort) for me to do it consistently. 'Difficult' means different things to different people; in my case it was a combination of when and where the exercise took place, the cost, and whether bad weather was likely to deter me. I dislike exercising on a full stomach, I prefer to do it as my first activity in the day, and the need to use any form of public transport to get to the exercise venue would deter me: and therefore I always exercise first thing in the day (on days of the week where this fits with my work schedule), and the exercise either starts the instant I leave the house (back when I was a runner) or is within walking distance (now that I swim four times a week). Cost and classes at inconvient times were always going to be too high a bar to clear — and so I do yoga at home, daily, through free classes on Youtube.
The other thing was picking forms of exercise that wouldn't irritate me — so that I wouldn't spend the whole time just wishing the thing would be over. I prefer to use distance rather than time spent as a measure of 'sufficient' amounts of exercise (because I like the prospect of completing the exercise sooner if I move more quickly), so it needed to be things that could be measured in distance — running a certain route, swimming a certain number of laps, etc. I'm also someone who likes to have to-do lists and cross things off, so I added specific exercise targets to my bullet journal habit tracker, and found that it worked as a way to maintain a consistent practice.
So that, in essence, is how I retaught myself how to exercise consistently, after acquiring this skill rather effortlessly in childhood and then losing it. The specifics of my situation aren't necessarily relevant — what's important are the general principles. Take a step back and think: what would make exercise easy for you? Is it the form of exercise, the time of day it takes place, the location, the cost, whether it's measured in time or number of repetitions or distance, or some combination thereof? If any of these things are currently a barrier, try to identify other forms of exercise that might not have these specific impediments. You need to make the exercise itself as desirable and practical as possible, so that the desire to skip it or procrastinate doesn't arise.
I personally don't think it's a good idea to have exercise goals tied to either weight loss or comparisons with the skill levels of other people — at least initially, as they can be demoralising, demotivating, and act as barriers in and of themselves. The goal should be solely to make a specific consistent exercise practice an ingrained habit — once you've got beyond that point, maybe you can start thinking about other goals. I'm also well aware that what I'm saying is only going to work for people like me, who dislike team sports and have zero interest in exercising as a form of social activity — I'm not much use when it comes to people who are interested in joining their local amateur football team or similar. Maybe people who do these kinds of sports could chime in in the comments?
In any case, I hope some of this is helpful.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-22 06:24 pm (UTC)Unlike you, I'm someone who is motivated by the social aspects of exercise. I don't like gyms and I'm not interested in the competition of team sports, so what works for me is martial arts. I practice aikido most days of the week, because I find the focus on personal growth and mentorship intrinsically rewarding. Plus, I have a group of great friends at my dojo after so many years practicing there!
The knowledge that I'm part of that community and people enjoy seeing me and practicing with me, and I enjoy seeing them and practicing with them, helps motivate me on days when I need a little extra push. But also, at this point, it's just habit and I feel weird if I skip a day.
(I suspect I could build a habit of solo exercise, but I'd need to start from scratch there!)
no subject
Date: 2022-10-23 12:00 pm (UTC)I know for many people that the group aspect is a huge motivating factor in pushing them to persist with regular exercise, though, and I think it's a thing that can be a barrier for some in establishing a consistent practice. It's definitely something I would suggest people consider if they've always exercised alone and find it a bit of a struggle to maintain. It obviously works very well for you!
no subject
Date: 2022-10-24 09:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-24 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-24 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-22 07:19 pm (UTC)As a child, going to sports regularly, for me wasn't a skill so much as it was something that was taken care of for me by my parents. they enrolled me, paid the fees, made sure my clothes were washed and ready, got me there, picked me up again, and so on. I didn't have to do anything to make it happen. I stopped doing any kind of extracurricular sports as soon as I had to take on some of those responsibilities myself, and the last time I was truly in good shape and physically active was the two years I spent at boarding school ages 15-17, because they scheduled and enforced morning runs and PE/other sports several times per week. the only thing I had to take care of myself those two years was my own laundry. and all of that is in addition to all the other things that are taken care of for you when you're a kid such as meals and schedules.
As an adult, making exercise happen and as a regular habit is very very hard, because now I have to take care of all those things myself. I have to make every single decision in my life by myself and then carry it out. it's a lot! I don't understand how so many people can just get on with it - it's such a struggle for me in *every* aspect of my life. And just exercise alone - nobody is helping me with any of it - timetabling it, paying for it, making it accessible. and I just don't have the energy, most of the time. If it requires effort to go someplace, it's not happening (unless a friend is roping me into it, in which case it becomes a 'date with a friend' thing, and uses different executive spoons). the fear of losing money if I don't go (if I'm paying for, say, a gym membership) isn't enough of an external motivator to bypass all the other steps, so every time I try, I cancel the membership as soon as it stops working after the initial few weeks of stubborn determination to see it through this time. I have been trying many things on-off for the past fifteen ish years and none of it has worked for more than 2 months.
I have started a Chloe Ting routine of sorts - or more like, I'm experimenting with it to find a way to make it stick. I don't expect I'll be able to keep it up for more than two months, no matter how much I want to, or need it to (since my motivation this time is my health, and my goal is to become pain free). I'm identifying and cutting all the corners possible to try to make this work, because nobody is helping me with it. so an example is, I'd like exercise to be the first thing I do in the day since I dislike doing it in the evenings, but realistically that's never going to work out for me except on weekends because I'm never going to be able to have a routine where I get up early enough to do it, since I already feel like I'm getting up too early just to go to work. at boarding school I didn't have this problem because if we weren't outside at 06:50 at the latest to start our runs, we would be chased out of our beds, not that I ever was - just the fact it was already timetabled for me was enough. all I had to do was put on my running clothes and shoes and go. I don't see this exercise routine building as a skill to be learned or re-learned, but a problem of executive function that needs to be solved in a way that will work long term. stubbornness only gets me so far.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-23 12:07 pm (UTC)It seems from what you've said that you're approaching all this with the right attitude — the knowledge that it's going to be hard to make a routine stick permanently, and the understanding that maintaining a routine for a couple of months, stopping, starting again, and so on is fine under the circumstances.
I should possibly put a disclaimer in my post that I'm neurotypical and able-bodied, since those two things alone put me at a massive advantage in this context. Identifying barriers doesn't always mean that every single person will have the capacity to permanently remove them, and that's okay.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-22 07:34 pm (UTC)On exercise, I took up roller skating at the start of this year and wish with all my heart I'd come to it earlier. I like fresh air and urban walking and I've always walked a lot, but that's basically it for me and exercise, the bar to do anything additional is just too high. But now I go skating a few times a week, I do classes and skate outside on my own, and it all feels wonderful to me. It turns out the barrier was something I actually enjoyed for its own sake, but I'm not exactly why skating is it and not anything else. Outside and fresh air, not gym and not special clothes are all factors, but who really knows!
no subject
Date: 2022-10-23 12:13 pm (UTC)Roller skating must be such a fun way to exercise, for all the reasons you've outlined — being outside is so much better than exercising indoors, and the ability to start the exercise the instant you leave the house is another massive positive, in my opinion. I'm glad you've found something that works for you.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-22 09:00 pm (UTC)I also did gymnastics as a kid so this was fun to read :D Unfortunately, I lost interest when I entered teenagehood and the club's focus turned from "making the lessons fun" to things more focused on competition and winning.
I've been trying various ways of adding exercising to my routine over the years, especially since the pandemic started. I'm discovering that it really takes very little friction for me to just not do the thing. Even changing clothes is too much effort, but I wear jeans usually so it's not really what I want to do stretches in!! Now that things are opening up, I'm cycling and walking again to go places (always have walking shoes on if I decide to want to walk rather than take the bus, and cycling-appropriate clothing: zero or very little friction!) So that is good, but I need to do things (stretches, ideally!) for my back and shoulders, and while the ring fit was really good for that for a while, it requires... changing, among a couple other things, and apparently that is too much friction. I'm still hunting for a way to work past it somehow and create a routine, and appreciate your timely post to get me brainstorming again :D
no subject
Date: 2022-10-23 12:20 pm (UTC)What you're describing with your own struggles to build an exercise routine is really really hard. If the barrier is changing clothes, the only thing I can think of is making your 'day-to-day' clothes be exercises clothes (like leggings or tracksuit bottoms) on the days you want to exercise, rather than jeans. Then you don't need to change. But that may not be practical if you need to wear something more formal during the day.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-23 06:25 pm (UTC)Thank you for sharing some thoughts on how I might be able to make it work, too! :D <3
no subject
Date: 2022-10-23 06:50 pm (UTC)I did a lot of sports as a child: swimming, judo, gymnastics, netball, rugby, tae kwon-do, but thought of myself as "not very sporty", I think because my school had a weird culture divide between "academic" and "sporty" and I was definitely academic. When I went to university I got out of the habit of sports, but got back into the habit of exercise when my College installed a gym, and I went near-daily during my final year.
In adulthood I've discovered that I tend to set up my life to include some physical activity (e.g. walking or cycling as a commute) and I get unhappy when I don't have it, so that acts as a motivator to find something to do regularly. I've done rock climbing and adult ballet classes and lane swimming at different times post-university. I picked up couch-to-5k for fitness after my second child was born, because I knew I needed something flexible enough to fit around baby feeds, and accessible enough I could just do it. It turned out I really enjoy running after about the first ten minutes of every session, so as long as I could push myself through those first ten minutes it was a very useful way of getting regular intense exercise. I did learn during the covid lockdowns that I have no real interest in cycling for its own sake, I just find it a good way of getting around Cambridge, but I would cheerfully go running regularly regardless.
Most recently of course I've fallen headlong for ice hockey, which is absolutely riddled with barriers (venue, equipment, training, travel time) but it turns out I love it so much that I was very motivated to get over those barriers. Although, I did find that I really need structured training sessions, and I need them enough that I travel two hours each way to London to get them rather than go to the local unstructured stick-and-puck sessions. Now I have landed a place on the university team, I am kind of stunned/grateful at how much of an opportunity it is: three hours a week on ice, another hour of supervised strength-and-conditioning training, games on top of that, all scheduled and organised for me.
So uh, the short version is: find something you don't hate but can fit easily into your routine, or find something you adore beyond reason and will organise your life around in order to keep doing it.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-24 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-25 08:08 pm (UTC)so something needs to be easy for me (or feel worth the effort) for me to do it consistently.
Same!
The other thing was picking forms of exercise that wouldn't irritate me — so that I wouldn't spend the whole time just wishing the thing would be over.
Gosh, I wish I could find a form of exercise that I didn't spend the whole time wishing it would be over. But I still have not been able to. I manage to jog + take one yoga class a week, but even with those, I'd rather be doing soooooo many other things and can't wait for it to be over. There is no form of exercise I actually enjoy, unfortunately.
Take a step back and think: what would make exercise easy for you? Is it the form of exercise, the time of day it takes place, the location, the cost, whether it's measured in time or number of repetitions or distance, or some combination thereof? If any of these things are currently a barrier, try to identify other forms of exercise that might not have these specific impediments. You need to make the exercise itself as desirable and practical as possible, so that the desire to skip it or procrastinate doesn't arise.
This is a very wise approach and it's kind of you to share!
no subject
Date: 2022-10-26 06:50 pm (UTC)This is such a shame, although you've clearly found something that motivates you to persist with these, even if you don't enjoy them.
I'm glad you found the post interesting!