2021.
At the height of the COVID pandemic and lockdown.
46 years old.
I learned to walk
No, that's not a metaphor. I know… I like my metaphors and you'd assume something like that would definitely be a metaphor. I'm a pop culture Pavlovian cultural junk drawer. But this isn't a metaphor. I really learned to walk, and it changed my life.
I've had a fairly self destructive eating and health cycle all my life (roughly speaking.) I've always been potato shaped; however, I was a very active potato. I love to walk, to hike to swim to bike. A 30 mile bike ride is a good warm up; a five mile walk with 400 feet of incline is an entertaining afternoon. Yes, I'm a masochist. My knees certainly let me know this… and my feet.
But not really anything else
After all, walking is an exercise of feet and knees and maybe some hip. It’s coordination and balance, and seeing how much strain those joints and pads can take before they tire (or wear out). I had internalized these lessons, since probably two or three years old. Because everyone learns how to walk right. It's like the first thing we learn to do. Maybe a little after baby babble and becoming fascinated by our own farts. Imagine my surprise to discover that I've been doing it wrong for over 40 years.
So it is 2021 and we're in lockdown. And I'm really looking to get some exercise especially in the fall and winter. My usual cycle is to do a bunch of stuff in the summer and then get in better shape as I do a bunch of exercise and eat good things, and then spend the winter eating comfort food but trying to not do quite so much that I can't undo the damage by summer. I am 46 at this point, and pretty much everyone my age knows your body's ability to bounce back wanes with time. It took more effort in the summer to get to reasonable shape and it took far less effort in the winter to undo that damage
So I bought a treadmill.
It was nice enough that it had a video screen with some built in and streamable videos of people doing hikes and drones and explaining and providing motivation as you hiked through lush landscapes. It also had a fancy feature to be able to incline and decline. And so hiking around islands offered scenery and elevation shifts, making for a fairly immersive hiking experience.
It was on a hike on St Lucia island with husband and wife team Chris and Stacie Clark. St. Lucia is a beautiful island filled with lush tropical vegetation, wandering paths, and epic sea and beachscapes. It was maybe my third or fourth hike, and I was at least getting over the intensity of the experience. Islands are just mountain peaks peeking above the waterline and so their terrain tends to be varied at best. The mantra that they kept repeating all the time, from start to finish, and from flat to challenging terrain, was to engage the glutes. All the time. Essentially, they were telling me to keep squeezing my butt.
They'd been doing it from the first video, but I really wasn't paying attention. I was just trying to keep up with the pace, but now I was listening. And they were explaining it a little more. If you squeeze your butt and keep it squeezed over time it gets tired and the nearby muscle groups, the thighs and the ABS will engage to help out over time. This means that if you “engage your glutes” while performing pretty much any activity, a great part of your core will similarly activate to help out. If you don't squeeze your butt, this doesn't happen and you put the entire burden on your knees, feet and hips.
This wasn't an entirely new concept. I remember for decades hearing about the wisdom of just sitting at traffic lights and squeezing your butt just as a way to passively exercise. And more importantly, I vividly remember Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live, in the skit “White Like Me” where he masqueraded as a white man to see what their life was like. “See how they walk? Their butts are real tight when they walk.” And like an incontinent dog at a fire hydrant, my pavlovian pop culture brain just goes there.
It was painful the first couple of times but doesn't tend to squeeze for very long periods of time and it would cramp. But if you could hold it, I could feel the ABS and the thighs start to engage. I could feel the whole area begin to work in coordination to accomplish a goal instead of leaving it all to a couple of isolated muscle groups. My hikes got easier. My training got easier. But even more importantly, I started applying the concept whenever I remembered as I was walking around my forest campground or when walking up and down stairs. Even when just standing or sitting. I started taking any moment to apply a little bit of effort and strengthen my core. I could lift more, walk further, and more importantly my hips, knees and feet didn't feel nearly the strain from the effort. And, because am a pavlovian cultural junk-drawer, I get a bit of nostalgic joy for my inner child each time I imagine Eddie Murphy bop-walking his way down the street.
Today I am not potato shaped. I went from what was presumed to be my permanent adult shape of about five eight and 240 pounds to 175 and still toning over time. This was really two major life changes in a virtuous cycle. The first was changing the nature of my relationship with exercise – seizing opportunities for growth no matter how small. I look for small behavioral changes that can be transformative in my life, and work to reject oversimplified solutions that seem effective in isolation but are ultimately a series of small, squandered opportunities.
This first change simply enabled me to do more more easily and it provided a platform and mindset for the second change: “food is fuel not fun”. And also, with increasing awareness of my joints and inflammations, “sugar is the enemy”. But we'll leave those topics for another day.
So, what is the metaphor here? Of course there would be one. For me, it’s team dynamics, and the power of collective efforts. The feet, the knees and the hips are the superheroes. They're strong muscles. They're the obviously, repeatedly engaged ones; however, they aren't nearly as valuable on their own. They are more effective when they are deliberately activated in ways that spread the effect around them. Rally support and other forces to task, and the entire system can get far more done far more quickly and with far less recovery time than any one or two heroes alone. A question of “who, not how” where forces are free to both collaborate, and focus more on their specialized purpose.
Building coordinated efforts can be a force multiplier. All you have to do is learn to walk.
Did this message resonate with you? Did you learn something new about walking? Did you learn how to walk effectively in the first place, and are just sort of shaking your head sadly at my late epiphany? Am I Jamie Tartt finally coming to grips with George Harrison’s passing? Let me know in the comments!
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