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: 2022-10-23 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.