There are certainly milestones in my professional development. Getting qualified after completing a new course, moving to a new country, setting up a new business, delivering my first online session, putting together my first workshop and many more. And although I can’t say this is really a stone – it feels like the length of an entire highway as it had been a long time coming, – but realizing that everything works on a spectrum probably belongs to the top 3 for sure.
I used to be the black or white type of guy for a very long time. All or nothing. Be obsessed or not interested at all. While there are certainly topics and areas in my thinking that belong to the binary category (yes or no), most of them have transitioned to be somewhere on a spectrum. And while this possibly makes me come across as the indecisive guy (because the answer is often “it depends”), I am not. I just look at things from different perspectives and put them on a spectrum (feel free to put me on the spectrum too).
Currently, I train, because I enjoy being active. I lift weights. I do acrobatics and gymnastics. I ride my bike and go for runs. Sometimes I jump in a pool to swim, or join a yoga class. If I feel like that, I spend an hour on a random Tuesday afternoon and do some oldschool foam rolling, do some voodoo flossing magic, or have a massage. I do multiday hikes and I’m also okay to move after a 15hr flight. Maybe I’m just young, maybe I’m lucky, maybe I know something. Or maybe I am just a liar.
If you zoom in on one snippet of my day, you may see me doing some very slow movements, where I’m grinning like I carry the world of pain on my shoulders, so you may think I’m injured and I’m doing some sort of rehab work. Sometimes, people go further and ask so I can tell them I am not injured, I’m not rehabilitating myself, but rather doing some delicate inner work to avoid even becoming injured in the first place. Some people like to call it pre-habilitation, for me, it’s just part of the game. And ever so often people look at me during a workout and think I am a madman who is getting ready for a war. In reality, I’m just working on my ability so I can deal with some stuff in the future.
In case this is still a bit foggy, let me simplify. You can have a two way switch (lights on or off) and you can have a dimmer switch (and have all sorts of lights between dark and bright). You can be healthy or injured. Or you can be on the spectrum somewhere between healthy – slightly restricted – dealing with a small weakness – living in compensation land – be in pain – injured – rehabilitating after injury. The more you refine how much you need something, the better outcomes you will get.
My ultimate goal is to say yes to any future adventures – more importantly, to have the ability to live up to the task and not just to be delusional about it (sure, let’s sign up to Marathon des Sables and run 250km across the Sahara Desert). Since I don’t really know what the future holds, I have an open approach towards all sorts of physical and mental possibilities. The only thing I know for sure is that the fewer stones I leave unturned in my “training”, the fewer surprises I will meet. This mindset requires me to ask some often uncomfortable questions, like: why wait, or how much do we need to learn to get there? Oh boy, how much time you’ve got…?
I’m lucky, because I’ve spent the past 15 years going down this road, both from a learning and self-work perspective, so I’m certainly more prepared than many others. And I think especially nowadays, when it’s really easy to get hung up on what mainstream media is pushing into our faces, it’s very difficult to know what is wrong or right (if that even exists), or what is useful or not. But even simplifying it further, what is real. Possibly not the reel you just watched 5 minutes ago. Gosh, the puns are on fire today.
Continuing with the idea of spectrums, there are all sorts of hierarchies that exist within health and training as well. These are basically pyramids that organize needs, fitness or athletic development priorities from foundational essentials to advanced nuances. This could be a road to a healthy lifestyle in general (the pyramid from bottom to top: sleep – nutrition – exercise – wellness – beauty) or specifically for a certain event, let’s say in endurance training (the pyramid from bottom to top: training volume and frequency – high-intensity training – training intensity distribution – general periodization – sport-specific & micro-periodization – training stimuli enhancement – race training and pace training – training taper).
Apologies for the complexity, I just wanted to highlight that some people will go for a run, see a video about tapering, and maybe think that’s where the magic is. Or maybe playing a sport on its own will get us better at the sport. While these may be partially true, I think it’s impossible to pick some random videos and judge whether that’s the thing that we really need. Once again, this is nobody’s fault. But the more we know, the more we can enjoy what we do.
Back to me.
To be able to do physically challenging activities repeatedly, day after day, my old body requires some attention. Some techniques that I learned over the years help me immensely at these times. The work mostly includes taking care of my tissues, loosening up the muscles and getting some fluid moving around in my body so I can recover better (a massage could help with all the above, but it’s just not possible sometimes). My three go-to techniques are voodoo flossing, foam rolling, and my trusted EMS machine (electrical muscle stimulation).
Without getting more technical, let me tell you that all of the mentioned techniques are widely used in rehabilitation. But, since preventative work also includes taking care of connective tissue health, they are used in those settings as well. And needless to say that I prioritize them between two hikes, so the following days can be smooth and I don’t worry about that little niggle in my knee or having issues with a cramping hamstring.
When I was thinking about writing this entry (more so the creative title that I’m very chuffed about), I was rolling on the ground with my water bottle under my right calf. To keep things easy and to save space, I almost never carry a ball or a foam roller with me because my water bottle can take my weight and it can do the job. Between two grinning faces and painful moments, I look out the window and watch the setting sun creating a light show over the peaks of Mont Blanc. It is so beautiful that my calf even stops hurting for a second or two. But then I turn a little and OMFG.
This 15 minutes of self-love is enough so the next day I can go and do what I love again.
If it was a last resort attempt to fix a long-standing problem, probably it wouldn’t work miracles (or is it?!), but for me to do something for myself and my body is part of everyday life – whether that’s foam rolling, breathing, a massage or some other type of bodywork. This approach allows me to do the necessary work when I don’t have other things that are of higher priority. That priority comes from those hierarchies I mentioned earlier. And those can barely exist without spectrums.
The bottom line is, for me – more and more as the years go by – most things slowly stop being a standalone product and become a part of something bigger. Prehab, rehab, and ability go hand in hand.