Blogging has been sitting on a back burner…lots of work, and professional continuing-ed at present…
Today: Nine-hundred strength training exercise movements 60% External WR. 40% Bodyweight WR.
2-days ago: Vehicle Push-Pull.
Hike four days ago.
Soccer Scrimmage five days ago.
the open sky
If you delve into your least favored training areas, be it endurance, primary muscle strength, core strength, or application in sports, arts, or work, you will be raising the level of your foundational condition.
Let tedium become self-training in the gift of focus.
Let hardship be your elevator.
Let slowness be your path to thoroughness in preparation, and prevention.
Cheers!
Plant your training efforts in time and space, and watch yourself grow. Nurture these actions with good eating, sleeping, and drinking habits as you would water and feed crops. Harvest the bounty when the time is right, by executing your sport, art, or work better than before. Share the yield and nourish others with your gains.
when you spend a lot of unexpected time at a rehab place visiting for the holidays, you find beauty where you can
Cycles surround us. Yet sometimes chaos forces us into fast waters, whipping us about like a leaf in a flash flood…
As when a close family member is hit by a car in a parking lot while walking into the grocery store. In a moment of chaos, of disordered mental and physical operations, a driver strikes down the man who raised you. And that man makes it, but his many decades mean he faces a big recovery challenge from that broken hip. And as his adult son or daughter, all of your plans change. Your duties call, honor calls, love grounds you. You turn to the task of caregiving, arranging, and spending some mind-body numbing hours on hard surfaces attending, watching, listening, and learning what is needed to prepare, transfer, and make in-home care a reality so this VIP of yours can get some sleep, recover faster, and be among loved ones. Here the stress adaptivity of your training is tested.
So it is with all of us. Our training lives morph into something completely different during this time. They move from a training life to a doing-life, as the physical things we do in caregiving become the top priority. This is not likely what we trained for in previous days, however, with a well-rounded training approach in more orderly times, the fringe benefits feed these unexpected efforts we face.
We work in sustaining intervals of what-exercise-we-can-get to sustain our ongoing effort: as when a simple swiss ball can help us redistribute life-giving blood, energy, electric signals, and physical force through out muscles, connections, and body in a small fitness room on the road to retrain ourselves from the sitting, leaning, and waiting of institutional buildings and unnatural light.
These can be the times that training comes to the front and stands by us when the chips are down. There is going to be a price for taking on duty. There usually is. That is the way the world works. Yet by decisively embracing it we may seize the purpose of our training lives on a different level of motivation and performance, where one real event and experience is not a training drill, but itself an opportunity to set new precedents and become open to new dimensions in our future goals.
Is there a perfect snowflake?
Or flower?
Or is there a perfect child, or grandparent, or wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, or friend?
There are so many good, for the good makes room for a small, small world of countless differences.
Perfection, philosophers assure us, is the enemy of the good. Yet it is good to excel. What do we excel toward? Perfection. Then how is perfection the enemy of the good again?
Because while we excel toward perfection, perfection is not the goal. Perfection is a divine gift, an ideal that British radar pioneer Robert Watson-Watt said, “never comes.” I believe he should have said, “..in this life,” but that’s quibbling with his context. Also, there is an exception to every rule, and perhaps an exception to that rule too.
Perfection evades our grasp as entropy dogs us, the unexpected delays us, or survival challenges tax us. Yes, attachment to this world seems to anchor us down, unable to fly up to havens of perfection.
All the dreams of perfection we want, such as immortality, eternal love, and inalienable acceptance are retirement benefits that vest only after our own personal work as the farmers of our souls and as helpers of our fellow farmers, is done. And the work is only done when we die, true? At the end of this life, everything takes extra work. Just ask those living into the golden years. Earthly retirement is not real retirement, for the work goes on!
Living and dying while struggling to excel in goodness-for-goodness-sake is the work of our lives that we can and must excel at. Genuineness in this quest can’t be faked, and comes with letting go of desiring and grasping, yet receiving all blessings thankfully with hands that multiply and distribute them to others. Some call this renunciation of self, yet it is more. It is giving of self, enlarging one’s heart by letting go, and expanding in spiritual freedom and vitality by giving.
Death is retirement from this noble work in this life. Afterward, retirement benefits kick in, that is, the Divine Gift (some believe by other agencies) of immortality goes to those who farmed within their hearts the seeds of goodness. There is more wisdom in our entropic bodies than meets the eye, as they fertilize with humility the spiritual seeds for resurrection and eternal life awaiting the Sunrise. Eventually, the Harvester of growing crops comes and transplants them where all are nourished without eating, and there is no entropy or waste. People of love rise again and the Spirit says, “It’s all good.”
So let go of grasping for receiving, and grasp your partner to dance, or grab a hand and pull someone up who is down, or grab a rock and pull yourself up for a better view by which to navigate for a greater purpose and destination than temporary self satisfaction. We handle the good to give, not to keep, but to share and distribute once it has taught us what we are to learn on the day. We excel each time we do this. We plant new seeds and make our fields more fertile with humility each time we do this.
And how will we know when we are prepared enough? When we’re done. When our spirits have left our broken bodies. How does that all work? I believe we’ll find out. Until then, let’s help and inspire each other. Let’s imbue each other with value, making value, multiplying value, and giving the value of love and all of its goods to one another, and do so for our entire lives.
Events conspired
chances were-
collusion collided
with our
busy battles
of self.
We missed
the convergences.
The movement around us
conjured visions and passions
that we were moving.
Yet we were as idle
as burning engines in Park.
Motion heats, yet also cools
the wind in our sails disperses
the over-concentration
of all that
we did not do
but expected others to.
Entangled, unfree, incomplete
as an Example
to lead on our feet.
To catch up on my periodic journaling of training experiences:
Vancouver, BC. Be it known that I skipped the hotel fitness center in Vancouver BC, and opted for family whale watching, walks in the rain, and bicycling in the sunshine.
On the whale boat I could have sat the entire journey and monitored the Pacific waters for sea life. But I spent some wonderful time holding my child and working on fixing on distant, relatively fixed points to avoid symptoms of motion sickness as we motored over the waves to where the whales were spotted off the coast.
Going up to the boat’s viewing roof, I found that riding those waves in a rain coat afforded me a nice, standing core exercise trying to stay balanced on the boat, minimizing dependence on the rails.
Movement with Forces training came into play staying out in the rainy, windy sea weather and exposing myself to the wet cold for a time. Cold, wet sea weather is a force.
Another force encountered was the motion of moving in circles on my feet on the top deck relative to the boat’s forward, swell-riding motion. The circling was to scan the ocean’s surface for whales and other sea animals, while keeping balance, orientation, and trying to mitigate motion symptoms. This was a unique experience. I might have slogged through it, jetting along with the experience incidentally, and trying to avoid the elements as sources of discomfort instead of sources of mind-body training.
Instead I decided to consciously engage the ride as a crossing of training dimensions, and I thoroughly enjoyed it while witnessing the stunning beauty of the NW coasts and isles. Along with others I got to share ocean air and space with killer whales, humpbacks, sea lions, porpoises, and varied seabirds. The salt on the air, the relaxing of the boat’s fellow riders, and the graciousness of the husband-wife captain-naturalist team really enhanced our day.
Our walks in the rainy city gave us many chances to negotiate the architectural inclines, hilly city blocks, and wall tops as we used our feet to move through the concrete, glass, and steel mountains. The sea air blowing between them was a bonus. After much cool weather walking about, you can imagine that fish and chips, coffee, and hot chocolate called out to us a time or two. Let me also recommend the practice for parents of safely holding hands with your child in the city, and swinging him over the lines, manhole covers, sidewalk designs, and props found along the city course. I think switching sides and getting both arms in on the child swing is a good practice. Teaching city safety  and enjoyment awareness at the same time is a bonus. During these walks, sudden footraces are known to break out, too. Race you to that monument — to that hydrant — to that vent – to that tree…
Our bicycle outing was just plain fun in the sunshine viewing the mountains we hadn’t been able to see for the clouds for three days straight. And walking some sandy, shelly, mossy, and very clean inner beaches came with the cycling trip through Stanley Park.
We had no time to hit all the most advertised destinations, but we saved a list for another time if it comes available.
To counter the experience of sitting on planes, trains, and automobiles, I used the symmetrical carrying and lifting of luggage, treating it as if I were carrying kettlebells, and keeping the exercises with it closer-in and less conspicuous so as not to embarrass family too much. This included lunging it, squatting to lift it, shrugging it, variable one and two armed rows, curling it, shouldering it, and the like. Same with the carry on back pack. Luggage that I carry is often between 35 and 40 pounds, and serves nicely as a clunky kettle bell by the top handle. I also kick it up with my foot when putting it on wheels and pulling the handle out to pull it. Sitting in airport seats I am able to do wrist curls with my luggage, propping wrists on knees and grasping the top handle.
Trips can afford more than in my laziness I took advantage of.
If in our hearts we thoroughly prepare for lifelong grace after victory or defeat, neither victory or defeat can undo us.
Let the Reset happen. Your mind lets go of the intractables, puts them back into your heart, where the mysterious storms, the lightening, the oceanic forces of the Source break them up and produce a path forward for you.
More than ever, children need daily exercise, a sense of purpose, and adults to lead by example in getting, and staying fit, functional, and capable of taking on new endeavors. In a word, adaptive parental leaders.
A favorite running place.
Many say outer-confidence behaviors, even their pretense, will soak-in eventually to transform our inner lives. In sports, this is the performance-self toughness of the Loehr-Jansen-Evert book, Mental Toughness Training for Sports.
Others say, concentrate on inner strength, and all else will follow. This is an ancient principle passed down through the wisdom of many disciplines developed from antiquity. Dr. Loehr may call this our true-self, strengthened.
Either way, personal strengthening takes time. Perhaps using both ways shortens the time.
Outer-confidence may be a personal fear deterrent as we go among predator-types, i.e. those who may take advantage of our real or perceived weaknesses: intellectual, physical, social, etc. They’re out there, but probably not as often as we fear. So many fight their own battles, as Plato wrote in his case for kindness. Aggression or predatory behavior is often rooted in fear in the other. This reminds me of a lesson covered in Dan Millman’s “Way of the Peaceful Warrior.”
In some sense, outer-confidence is plumage. In another, it reduces self-distracting fear, improving our focus on what we are doing. It is not-bleeding, or sucking-up the bloodied nose, or swallowing the broken lip’s blood among sharks. And so it has real tactical value. ‘Don’t let them see you sweat.’
However, inner strength weathers a shark frenzy, and defeats the sharks. It is hyper intelligent, perpetually determined, and immortal. It defeats, deters, fools, or evades them altogether (more often the latter). It is the source of total focus. It determines what we do, not how we look. It is the final arbiter in our contribution to outcomes. Inner strength eventually joins with outer confidence, and multiplies it.
Observe, journal, test, temper, and learn. We are not alone, and each of us has a good purpose for being related to the rest.
Adaptive fitness means owning your physical training life and ending co-dependence on unsustainable, packaged dieting and fitness hype. Learn ten principles to help rewire yourself to train adaptively, consistently, and thoroughly for life. Seven training dimensions expand your training spaces. Spread the word to everyone who wants a sea change in their physical conditioning, sport, art, or work life…
It’s official. Click on the book cover icon at the upper right side of this screen, and you can go there. The E-book will be available in about one week. For now, it is print on demand, with some extra cost of production. I tried to set as reasonable a print price as possible considering all factors. You can also click here:
Farm Your Training Day: An American Dream of Sustainable Personal Fitness
Sticky note for the peak register at Mount Parnassus, CO. A favorite photo because someone dedicates the summit hike “to Kristen who has never hiked above tree line.”
Soon it will be time to release the title, cover, and the book on adaptive training principles and dimensions.
Once the book is released, please feel free to share the book with your friends, family, and anyone you believe may benefit.
Adaptive training principles and dimensions can help anyone create their own best foundations and pathways to new levels of training consistency and fitness.
Physical training is where you go, and how that changes you. It is directly experiential, yet also relative to other life endeavors.It transcends the physical.
In the world, water flows cascade down steep inclines. The forces move according to structures and properties  of water, gravity, air, angular rock, and so on. The rocks are changed, and the water does countless things on the way down. By much work, the water is purified. Then, one day it evaporates, leaves the Earth and joins the clouds. I believe we are like that.
The self-conscious caveat must be stated: when you run in Boulder, Colorado ye shall come upon runners whose exhaust ye shall breathe. Whether ye are happy about it dependeth upon thee and thy circumstances. Today I was happy to breathe that exhaust and dodge that dust. The vapor trail of this runner even cooled my brow a bit.
Deadline for the M7 Adaptive Fitness Guidebook approaches. Adapting to such a goal while continuing to train is itself a subject of the Guidebook underway. Using my sense of feel as to when my run should end in light of my priorities, I ended my run shy of where I’d normally end it, then headed off to place of writing.
It is humbling and humorous to write a book about sustainable adaptive training and to experience the hybrid passages of multidimensional training. Like sharing trails with faster, more efficient runners. This morning it happened at the end of my run.
On a sandy flatland trail this morning in the last half-mile of my run a young woman passed by who ran more efficiently by far than I. In the spirit of my own pace, I kept my cadence, yet it formed in my ears these words: “as you were.” Not even footfalls can escape the verbal energy of  book season.
“As you were.” Exactly. It was as if a ranking officer in the sport of running entered my running space, passed me by, and all I could do was hope to draft this human antelope and let my image in her wake inspire her to finish yet faster. However, this was a run-out and back trail, so this VIP would return, so the humility was not complete.
She apparently reached that milepost promptly and had turned around. I was grateful that I was further along than I thought I’d be when we again crossed paths. All I could do was give a snappy thumbs up with a salutary smile. I said, “Way to go.” I was very happy with the response. Rather than her smile betraying raucous internal laughter, she smiled a joyful smile suggesting happiness with her accomplishment and gratitude that someone had witnessed it. It’s a privilege to share the trail with those who enjoy their sport in which you are a visitor.
My multidimensional training life is one of forays into others’ sports. I enjoy learning from the excellence found there, as this morning observing the efficiency of a runner. Yet there is something in the comradeship of the running community that accepts everyone whatever the pace. You’re in it with the runners if you’re running. Even in competition, its a community.
Which leads me to a sustainability topic: comradeship. With humility and respect, nearly every sport community admits you as beginner, novice, rising star or champ with a sense of community. Aberrations from good sportsmanship are rare. Being serious about participation in the sport while participating is enough to belong. This is great cause for enthusiasm in getting involved sooner than later. Do not put off for tomorrow what you can start today. Starting today merely means we will arrive at ego pacification earlier, and sooner get beyond ego and into the sport, art or work we entered.
It doesn’t have to be your major or even your obsession although it may become that. Anything worth doing is worth doing the best we can while remaining faithful to our sense of feel and rightness at our respective levels. That sense will prevent injury and have us training into the sustainable fitness we aim for.
Strange as it may seem, humility enables excellence. It also sets the tone for the day when our vapor trail cools the ambitious brow of one of our competitors or fellow athletes. Winning and forging bonds that last puts winning on a whole new plane, a higher, sustainable, joyful plane. May you run there often.
Cheers!
Every sport is also an art, and when our performance becomes artistic, we are excelling.
In my sport this morning I worked through movements that challenged my ranges of motion in the muscles and structures surrounding my hips and shoulders. I observed myself in and out of alignment with efficient bodily structure, and felt the implications for balance. I challenged myself, and made some improvements in form, technique and movement. While there are scores of other movements I want to improve on and excel in within my current focus, I am pleased with any progress. My art and sport challenges me with movements that are not part of my normal base conditioning and training.
After this experience, I went out and ran three miles and some tenths in my Altras. I was more aware of my running form following a session in my sport this morning. I also found myself at a brisker pace than I expected after having denied myself running for three days.
Train to uplift others and dance until you’re 95.
G2G Fit 
