A lot of people start working out once they're past those first years in the workforce and have built up a bit of money. Around thirty, in other words. In my case too, health problems made me decide to take exercise seriously. Not that I'd given it up entirely before then. I'd drop by the gym here and there, mostly lifting around the big three. But that was exercise I did because everyone else was doing it — riding the trend, you could say.
It started with parkour. One day I was playing Assassin's Creed and it suddenly struck me that I wanted to try parkour. Moving freely. That looked cool to me. Not so much the backflips and all that. So a few weeks later I went to a parkour gym. A place called Undercover Songpa. I did the first trial session, figured I could keep going with this, paid for a month... and somehow I've been going for over a year now.
It's rare for anyone to stick with a parkour gym for more than a year. Whether they lose interest, or it's the money (it isn't cheap), or they get injured. I'm not someone who's good with my body, so the coaches probably had me pegged as a guy who'd quit after a few sessions. But one way or another, I'm hanging in there. Keeping parkour up for over a year is a pretty meaningful thing. Because it means I haven't been seriously injured. Being thick-skinned enough to hold back when you should is a skill too.
With parkour as the starting point, I began signing up for all sorts of other things — climbing, CrossFit, swimming. Normally those would have felt too daunting and I wouldn't have bothered, but once parkour broke through that barrier, getting started felt less intimidating. I happened to be unemployed at the time, so I had plenty of time to devote to training. Setting aside athletic ability or health, the person had changed. Into someone who doesn't feel that pressure. Trying something for the first time? Ah, what the hell, give it a go. So what if I'm bad at it. Being a beginner is a state I'm used to. In every world I'm the newbie, and in most groups I belonged to I was the youngest, so being treated as the easy mark is familiar territory.
If you were an athlete from the start, none of this matters, but someone like me — hopeless at sports — needs a trigger of some kind. Whether that's a health problem or Assassin's Creed looking cool. But what really matters is identity. (Atomic Habits makes the same point about identity being key to changing habits.) I don't have the kind of diligence that gets you to the gym consistently, no complaints. Because with narcolepsy I use being tired as an excuse and skip the gym.
So I have to change my identity into someone who moves their body. Born to Run. Just as there's a famous paper and book by that title — born to run — I have to rewrite myself as born to move. Only by trapping myself inside a narrative do I keep exercising. For a person like me, anyway. Just doing it isn't enough. Because I'm a cherry-picker who only wants to suffer when the suffering means something.
For someone whose body has stiffened up and who's trying to get moving again, here's what you need first. Which is to say, this is a piece written for me in October 2024. For the me who's about to run and vault and climb and lift and swim.
Loosening Your Muscles
Rather than doing things that hurt, like lifting or running, it's probably better to start with things that feel good. Sustainability is the key. And for sustainability, I think there are three things to look at:
- The sense that you're improving: self-efficacy
- Injury prevention
- The act itself feeling good
To hit 1 and 3, start by diligently loosening your muscles. Done at the right intensity, it feels good. You need some tools: a Rumble Roller, a foam roller, a lacrosse ball, a Theracane, a massage stick, roughly that set. If you want a powered massage tool, something like a Theragun or Therabody Wave will do. You don't need useless stuff like a Polio.
You work the muscles loose while feeling that good kind of ache. That alone feels good. As the days go by and the ache diminishes, you also get the sense that your body is improving. If a particular spot hurts, you study a bit of anatomy on the side to learn what's in there. And from there you naturally end up studying rehab too.
Getting into the positions for loosening up is itself a kind of exercise. The moment you lie face-down with your thigh on a Rumble Roller to work the quads, you're doing an easy version of a plank. Just getting into the positions to work every corner of your body takes you out of the postures a desk worker holds all day. For a beginner, the process of loosening up is itself a simple Pilates workout.
This light-exercise aspect matters especially, because desk workers often have their local muscles deactivated and their posture collapsed, and if you decide to "start exercising" and jump into high-intensity training, only the global muscles get stronger while the local muscles fail to develop. Apparently, when people with movement dysfunction do high-intensity training, there are even cases where local-muscle strength decreases instead. 1 Think of how gym bros, surprisingly often, turn out to be bad at Pilates.
Strengthening the Ankles
Running, parkour, climbing — for all of them, the ankles matter enormously. Two of the best athletes I know have had serious ankle injuries. One from parkour, one from climbing. For them it was an accident, a single moment, but for beginners it seems the ankle is the easiest thing to injure through accumulated damage. Because for all its importance, nobody thinks to strengthen it.
So it's best to start with ankle strengthening. Follow the ankle mobility work from Squat University, then strengthen the ankles with calf raises, jump rope, depth jumps, and the like. I sometimes just drop into a squat in the middle of daily life. I do it on the subway. Though once some old crank yelled at me to stop sitting on the floor. (I wasn't sitting on the floor.)
Footnotes
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Corrective Exercise Solutions to Common Hip and Shoulder Dysfunction ↩