FIT FOR LIFE
When the editor of Pacific NW Magazine, the weekly Sunday magazine at The Seattle Times, emailed me to see if I wanted to chat about a potential writing project, the role of a fitness columnist did not occur to me. Why would it? I had left the newspaper a year earlier to teach yoga. I assumed she wanted to talk about a freelance story.
During our call, she said, “Nicole, we’re looking for a fitness columnist. Are you interested?”
I was flattered—and baffled. It seemed ludicrous for me to write about fitness.
“I’m a yoga teacher,” I told her. “I don’t know anything about fitness.”
A yoga teacher is a perfectly good credential for writing a fitness column, she responded.
Was it? I knew how to do warrior poses. I knew nothing about taking a barre class or lifting weights. I didn’t even belong to a gym.
The idea, the editor said, was to try new approaches to fitness, take classes, and see what evolved.
I researched fitness columns in other newspapers and couldn’t find a columnist who tried a new activity every week; I wondered if there was a reason. I was unsure I could come up with enough ideas to last a year.
But I missed writing. Though I was still enthralled by my new teaching career, my inner writer clamored for me to say yes.
I wrote a column proposal, with ideas including paddleboard yoga, barre classes, and hula hooping. The editors named the column Fit for Life.
The column merged my peculiar mix of skills—writing, a baseline of strength and body awareness, and a willingness to do new things. What I didn’t know then was I had signed myself up for six years of weekly reminders that I could do more than I thought I could. I didn’t know the column would shatter every internal conversation I’d ever had with myself about my body and strength. I didn’t know Fit for Life would redefine my sense of self and reshape my future into one of a forever mover.
All I thought was: Here goes nothing.
CREATING A MOVEMENT-RICH LIFE
Taking weekly classes taught me that if weights or strength were involved, I’d like the class. If there was a competition, I’d want to win. If I was required to run, I’d detest every step, then tell myself afterward it had been good for me.
I learned that my yoga strength could carry me only so far, like when my brain overloaded from dance choreography in a hip-hop class, or I was sore for three days after bouncing on a trampoline for 30 minutes. For the first couple of years, I was sore. All the time.
I became a perpetual newcomer. I took new classes every week; I rarely took any twice. It was comical and frustrating, fun and ridiculous. If you haven’t been a newbie in years and are nervous about the prospect of trying something you haven’t done before, you are not alone.
I learned to be cool with mastering nothing. As soon as I caught on to a technique in an intro series, the class was over, and I was off to the next. I was forced to let go of concerns about looking foolish, because it was inevitable. You aren’t good at something the first time you do it, ever.
The column became the real-life version of a constant internal practice: Do a new thing. Get over yourself. Repeat.
Four years into the column, after I had tried hundreds of classes and learned a tremendous amount about how to recover from intense movement and injury, I was—truthfully—a bit smug. I didn’t think there was a whole lot more to discover about movement that I didn’t already know. I had done every permutation of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) imaginable. I’d rowed on open water. I’d learned to breakdance, and I’d swung from a trapeze. I’d smiled during swing dance, and I’d swayed my hips to the hula. I’d gotten up at 5:00 a.m. to go to an early morning yoga class followed by a dance party at 7:00 a.m. I’d returned home at midnight after snowshoeing by moonlight.
If you met me at a party and asked if I had tried a particular activity, chances were about 90 percent I had taken a class in it.
ENTER THE SCIENTIST
When I met biomechanist Katy Bowman, who was introduced to me as an innovator in the world of movement, I presumed she would tell me a more detailed version of what I already knew. By then I was subscribing to the approach that had taken root in functional fitness, that the reason to be strong was to carry your kids and live your life. I wanted to be strong! So I, along with so many others at fitness studios, swung kettlebells, did pull-ups, sprinted, and released sore muscles with foam rollers.
I was on the cusp of learning how much I didn’t know. I was about to have a massive turnaround in how I approached movement in my life.
An author, teacher, and podcaster, Bowman studies how gravity, pressure, and friction affect people’s bodies. What’s more, she shows people all the ways they aren’t moving, me included. Say what?
After reading her book Move Your DNA, I saw all the minutes of the day I didn’t move. I had my fair share of hours in a chair hunched over my computer. I added up the minutes spent sitting in my car and the time spent on the couch in the evening as I decompressed or sat at a table eating lunch or dinner.
The more I dug into Bowman’s work, which spans multiple books, years of blogging, and a podcast, the more I saw how rarely I walked. My shoes had heels and inflexible soles, keeping my feet from stretching and getting stronger. I hunted for close parking instead of walking a few extra blocks. If I was early to an appointment, I looked at my phone instead of taking a quick walk.
In other words, I was like everyone else I know—sedentary.
Wait a minute. Sedentary?
Because of my one to two hours of workouts a day, I was “actively sedentary,” according to Bowman.
Gee, thanks?
But Bowman does not tell people to exercise more. Instead, she prescribes broadening your mind to understand movement and how lack of it affects your hips, back, and shoulders. When you understand how much your body is impacted on a daily basis by choices not to move—enforced all day and everywhere by our sedentary culture—then you can find new ways to add movement back in.
Bowman advocates more time outside breathing fresh air and exposing your body to variation in temperature. Go barefoot on grass and rocks. Sit on the floor instead of the couch or chair. Walk a minimum 10,000 steps per day.
History teaches us healthy movement. In hunter-gatherer times, people sprinted to hunt animals; used their hands, shoulders, and feet to climb trees; and squatted to gather berries from low bushes. Their knees, hips, and shoulders had good range of motion; their feet were supple and strong.
In our modern world, water is piped to our house and food is prepackaged at the store. We sit on a couch, and many of us work at a desk. Sitting on a chair means we skip using ankles, knees, and hips to lower down and get back up. Shoes trap our toes, and elevated heels force us into a position that affects our hips and lower back. We walk less and scramble to find time to exercise.
We have knee injuries, shoulder injuries, and lower back pain. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, nearly 70 percent of the US population is considered overweight or obese. Bowman says, research has identified sitting and lack of movement as the foundation for almost every physical challenge modern humans face—hip issues, cancer, myopia.
Still, we don’t move, not in the ways that will help.
“It’s