Listen to Your Body ($)

The role of exercise in being in your body, and appearance as a vehicle for insight.

“That flow where nothing else matters; Nothing else is important other than what I am doing in this moment and time, and it’s a beautiful feeling.”
— Kobe Bryant, NBA basketball professional with the Los Angeles Lakers

Fitness As a Contest

Bruno Cooke asked for comments on an article he was writing (Cooke 2024) on the use of fitness monitoring devices. He wanted to know if there was a downside to constantly monitoring your progress. I said there was.

According to Bruno, everyone who trains uses monitoring devices to measure their progress. They walk, run, ski, train, or otherwise exercise while measuring their time, steps, distance, blood pressure, oxygen content, heart rate, and whatever else some device strapped to their body records.

As with everything we do, there is a perceived reward. The information provided by these body monitors taps into our psychological reward system. Higher measured performance is perceived as greater reward, but it may not be the reward we’re looking for.

“It’s easy to become fixated on numbers and lose sight of the actual joy of running, Instead of tuning into how your body feels. You can end up chasing stats, which can undermine the mental benefits exercise provides.”
— Jim Richard, Certified Personal Trainer

When I rock climbed, I was fairly obsessed with climbing at increasingly harder grades. The harder climbs were not just physically demanding, they were steeper, and more dangerous, sustained, and frightening. Mastering the technical difficulty could be done with physical strength, but mastering the psychological difficulties brought greater rewards.

In all sports, there are challenges other than strength. Often, the greater obstacles are mental. As pertains to rock climbing, and as has become clear over the decades, people now climb at higher levels of difficulty with the same amount of training as we did in the past.

Over the same period there has been an increased focus on the body and a decreased focus on the mind. In climbing, you could see this in the creation of climbing gyms, where harder climbs were otherwise identical to easier climbs except that they had fewer and smaller holds. This focus on sports’ physical aspects is reflected in the pervasive use of fitness monitoring devices which only provide objective measures.

What’s Missing?

Cooke’s article talks about deeper aspects of sport and exercise than are measured by a machine. He quotes me saying, “Coming into synchrony with yourself leads to an entirely different state of mind than winning the race or beating your best time. It depends on what you want to become, enlightened or addicted.” But Cooke doesn’t go further than referring to this deeper experience. An experience that’s more “in tune” with your body.

Exercise can be more than achievement or meeting an external standard. Exceeding external standards is the nature of competition. Gaining strength is a weak motivation for exercise, though it might be the reason most people give.

The deeper reasons for physical health lie in how exercise, sport, or competition make you feel. It’s a similar feeling in each case, but some people gain the benefit by focusing on one activity or the other. It might be called “flow,” but it’s more than that.

The term flow, introduced by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1960s, is “A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter” (Csikszentmihalyi 2008).

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Flow is a temporary, ecstatic experience. One can train oneself into this state, but the goal of training is more than temporary. The flow state is an indicator but not a metric. Achieving a flow state is no assurance of stability, satisfaction, or meaning.

Neurologically, flow is seen as a state of balanced immersion. It involves immediate feedback and leads to clarity and an expanded perception. But it does not mean this state is constant or will occur in other circumstances. The goal of exercise is to find consistent, immersive rewards.

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To find your states of flow and equanimity…

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