Stacy Barrows, the physical therapist and Feldenkrais practitioner I've mentioned a few times here before, has an interesting blog entry up this week addressing one oft-forgotten aspect of fitness:  movement efficiency, grace, and coordination:

How do you observe aging and preservation? Looking and feeling young? Perhaps you think of it as keeping your skin taut or maintaining your muscle tone. However, what has a large importance with aging gracefully is moving youthfully. ... if a person is a hundred feet away, what is the first thing you notice? Their smooth skin, their firm abs?  How about their graceful movement, their upright posture, the spring in their step?

Barrows makes an interesting point:  fitness as currently sold to the general public means having a body with certain static qualities--a certain ideal weight, a certain dress or pant size, so many inches around at this or that point.  The ultimate measure of fitness, if before-and-after evidence is to be believed, is something you can capture in a still photograph. 

Chasing fitness numbers isn't a terrible thing--it can be motivating and effective, certainly, to want to reach 120 pounds by your wedding date.  But those goals tend to be work best in the short term, and can only sustain you for a relatively short time.  You can't, after all, lose weight forever; something else has to keep you going for the length of your fitness career--meaning from now until the time you do your final mortal-coil shuffle-off. 

After awhile, fitness numbers become false idols.  Single-digit body fat and negative-number dress sizes may be nice to have for a while, but, pursued relentlessly for their own sake, they become stand-ins for unanswerable questions like "Am I attractive?  Am I worthy?  Am I good?" 

Performance numbers are preferable--Mike Boyle draws a nice distinction between aesthetic and performance goals here (scroll down to the entry from June 10)--but even they can start to resemble running on a hamster-wheel after a while:  will women find you that much more attractive if you bench press 350 instead of 325, especially if the pursuit of those extra 25 pounds costs you a rotator cuff?

Movement efficiency is something that can always improve and, as Barrows suggests, has a profound effect on the way we come across to other people.  I know some very fit people who carry themselves with such tension and shambling inefficiency that they make themselves unattractive; conversely, I've known some deconditioned people who move well and thus actually appear healthy and confident. 

When I work with someone and ask them to show me a particular movement and slow it down so we can both observe how they are moving, the common response is "I never move slowly." "I am always rushing." No surprise, given the time demands people have these days. But, again when I ask them to do this, they are unable to execute moving slowly even under time controlled conditions.

 As adults we reduce variety of movement to move more quickly and these patterns become habituated. There is a phrase things that fire together wire together. Neuroscientists discovered that the nervous system will make short cuts for efficiency. However, as much as we benefit from this, it closes down the ability to move in a child like way with freedom of choice, variation in speed of movement and using our internal error detection.

Just as we lose muscle tone, flexibility, and strength as we get older, we also lose movement options--plasticity of movement, the ability to 'be water, my friend' (good quote delivered with near-comical histrionics here by Bruce Lee).  There are lots of ways of preserving and improving these abilities (Barrows suggests, among other things, slow movements performed with attention), but one simple option is continuing to explore different sports, hobbies and activities, thus exposing yourself to a never-ending variety of movement patterns.