Feel the burn.  Work to failure.  No pain, no gain.

I may be fitter than ever at 37, but the gray flecks in my hair, the sudden need for a good 15 minutes of warmup and ten of cooldown for all but the easiest workouts, and the new need to plot my day around naps have led me to the slowly-dawning realization that I'm not 19 anymore. 

And that's cool--I kind of like feeling like an elder statesmen among my daughter's kindergarten friends, rather than a peer. 

But I have been casting a suspicious eye on the above principles:  does exercise need to be painful to be effective? 

Not long ago I would have said absolutely, yes:  pain means you're pushing your limits, you're climbing that fitness mountain, getting stronger with every step.  Without pain as your compass, you're spinning your wheels, right?

Or even--God forbid--getting worse.   

But these days it's getting tougher to hold my ground as an "Exercising is Suffering!" zealot.  The fact is that even if I can lift more, run faster, and touch my toes more easily than I could in my teens, my soreness last longer.  My back and joints protest more often.  And these days, I haven't got time for the pain.

I took a workshop this Saturday that opened my mind to one very promising alternative:  Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais was an Israeli physicist, athlete, and judo practitioner.  After hurting his leg in a soccer game, Feldenkrais created a system for rehabilitating injury that treated not only the site of injury, but by re-wiring the way he moved.  Like the work of Joseph Pilates, Feldenkrais began as a way to treat dysfunction, but has since evolved into a way to guide healthy, even high-performing bodies towards optimal functioning.  Professional dancers, athletes, musicians and performers of every stripe now swear by Feldenkrais.    

The workshop consisted largely of the instructor  (Stacy Barrows, also a physical therapist) leading the ten participants through a series of nearly-imperceptible movements, usually done lying on the floor in a darkened room.  I'd done a few hours of Feldenkrais work in graduate school and so knew a little about its wonders, but I sensed the skepticism among some of the other students:  What could THIS be doing?

It didn't last long, because almost instantly, most of us felt different.  Taller, longer, more aligned, more easy in our movements.  As a guy with some theatre background, I noticed that the voices in the room sounded richer, more resonant. 

And, as cheesy as it sounds, people looked happier. 

I was, once again, blown away, and totally sold on its benefits.

I don't know much about the mechanism behind this work, but one of the primary principles behind it is awareness:  all of us have habitual movement patterns, many of them caused by injury or self-consciousness, and locked in by decades of habit.  We may have injured our shoulder ten years ago, but we still carry the arm in a protective, unnatural and asymmetrical attitude.  Feldenkrais work corrects the habitual pattern not through endless reps of resistance work but through making the nervous system aware of the damaging pattern and offering alternatives. 

As Chad Waterbury has suggested, the nervous system is often the forgotten element in physical training:  when we move and train our bodies without awareness, without new stimulus, we wind up reinforcing old patterns.  We're driving with the emergency brake on.  Corrective resistance exercise, which trains primarily muscle tissue, is the long way around.  Feldenkrais targets primarily the brain and nervous system, which is infinitely adaptable and can elicit change almost instantly.

One of the more interesting exercises was a guided visualization:  we were told to lie on our sides and think about a series of tiny movements in our shoulder blades.  At the end of the exercise, everyone's shoulders felt freer and easier. 

This was not a group of gullible, incense-burning tofu-snarfers, either.  Most were hardcore athletes, science-oriented physical therapists and athletic trainers, and all of them copped to the impressive effects of these seemingly-insubstantial movements.

I think there's a lot of potential in this kind of work:  not only to heal injury and correct poor function, but also to help us find the equivalent of the athlete's 'zone' of relaxed readiness in everyday life and in athletic activities as well.

This video shows Moshe Feldenkrais at an advanced age lecturing about his method.  Good stuff.

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America's getting fatter:  whose fault is it?  Even though I'm a trainer, I've never been 100% comfortable with the typical trainer's Protestant notion that it's All Your Fault, and that if only you weren't so gluttonous, lazy, and undisclplined, you'd look like Brad Pitt. Allen Durgin has a bone to pick with these moralizing types, and manages to articulate one possible defense against their uncompromising logic.  Warning:  Big Al uses some words that have more than one syllable.