Brando and Bruce

One of the most enriching experiences I ever had as a fitness pro was spending three years in a professional acting program.

Wha--?

Before I got my M.F.A. in acting, I was your typical meathead in the weight room.  For literally six years, I'd been using the same body-part split, the same exercises, the same set-rep scheme.  Sure, I'd up the weights from time to time, but basically my workout was my workout. For six years. 

No stretching.  Almost no warmup.  No cardio.  Certainly no foam rolling or dynamic stretching (which, to be fair, weren't at all in vogue at the time).

The strength-training stuff I was doing wasn't bad, exactly--I just stuck to it about five years and eleven months too long.  I was terrified, really, to change it up, because I'd built some muscle on the program and I didn't want to go back to being scrawny.

But that's exactly what I needed to do.  And if I didn't know enough exercise physiology to understand that, I probably should have heeded the warning signs of a shoulder that dislocated on a regular basis and a recurring pain in my thoracic spine that laid me out for days on end every couple of months.

I shudder to think that I spent my prime muscle-and-fitness-building years on such foolishness.  Youth, as we in the fitness world know well, is truly wasted on the young.

When I showed up in graduate acting school, my body was pretty jacked up.  My movement teacher--an astoundingly perceptive, not to mention preternaturally patient woman named Jane Ridley--gave me and my classmates exercises to help us move with less effort, less tension, more ease. 

She pointed out that a tense body is actually weaker, and that high-level performers--athletes, as well as the dancers and stage actors she trained--cultivate a state of 'relaxed readiness,' in which the body is supple, sensitive, able to move lightly and quickly, not just heavily and powerfully.  Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon and Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire are great examples of how athletes and actors both move in a way that suggests readiness for anything:  fluid, spontaneous, with flashes of startling power and strength.  

At one point, Jane assigned us each an animal whose movements we were to study and imitate, with the intention of forcing us to take on a physical vocabulary very different from our own.  She assigned me the polecat--a squirmy, quick-moving, zippy little critter, rather like a chipmunk, whose physicality was the exact opposite of mine.  Moving like a polecat was tortorous for me, but very instructive:  I was too heavy, too lumbering, too overcommitted to each movement.  Lightness and agility were not my strong suits.

At first these were tough lessons:  it was, of course, hard to discover that what I'd been diligently cultivating for years in the gym was actually limiting me as an actor and making me vulnerable to injury.  But gradually I started to embrace that the world of fitness was significantly larger than I'd suspected, that there was a lot more to moving well and being in shape than simply building big, strong muscles.

What I've realized in the last few years is that these two goals should not be mutually exclusive:  training should address not only how you look but how you move and feel as well, and that if you train correctly, you can feel great and look great; avoid injury and move big weights; improve your posture and your one-rep max in the squat as well. 

All roads--the one that Jane Ridley put me and my classmates on back in the early 90's, the one followed by practiioners of yoga, Feldenkrais, Olympic lifting, power lifting, and a hundred different athletic endeavors--should ideally lead to the same place:  towards a body that's healthy and pain-free, looks great, and moves effortlessly through everyday activities and powerfully and gracefully through athletic ones.