Intent. In(tension). In...effort?
One more time with feeling, and effort, and tension.
I think a fair amount about why we exercise - or rather, why are we doing what we do when we exercise?
It seems to me that most exercise “prescriptions” are random: arbitrary recommendations assigned as if just doing that thing will magically elicit “results.”
But what are we really trying to do when we exercise?
How do we use exercise to get certain results?
If I'm trying to become a better writer, I can sit down in front of a computer and type all day, but it won't make me a better writer. I need to try to produce something - some kind of piece of writing - in order to analyze it after the fact to see where I can improve. Then I need to apply that information to new pieces.
That, very briefly summarized, is the process of getting better, or at least getting a result.
That is the essence of practice: repetition of an activity with a specific intention, working toward the end goal of an improvement in that particular skill.
So if my goal with exercise or movement is to get stronger, or improve on a specific movement, I need to have a way to analyze the movement in order to know if I am doing the best thing possible to get the result I desire.
This requires time, attention, and focus. I've talked about these before, and I'm sure I'll talk about them again. But today we're going to talk about three of the most valuable tools for improving body awareness and strength (muscular and neurological):
-Effort
-Feeling
-Tension
Effort
I’ve talked about it before and I’ll talk about it until I’m blue in the face:
Exercise needs to be hard in order to be effective. Not necessarily hard like gasping on the floor, feeling like your limbs are noodles, but hard as in actually challenging. What that means depends heavily on what you’re trying to get out of your exercise.
Most of exercise culture is built around getting people tired: working until exhaustion. That’s easy to do - just do a physical activity really quickly for a long time and you’ll get really tired.
But we’re asking more of exercise.
We want measurable skills that we can apply to life.
Being able to do more stuff is good, and doing lots of physical activity helps build that, but it’s not everything. It’s part of the equation, but not the whole answer.
To become stronger/faster/more flexible/generally more awesome, the body needs enough stress to disrupt its baseline. This is one of the basic principles of exercise. What the type of stress is depends on what you’re trying to do: if you’re trying to be faster, you need to run hard enough that it’s really hard - but not so hard you lose control, stumble, and fall.
In fact, that’s a good analogy for the level of effort necessary for progressing any physical skill: the amount of stimulus you need must be intense enough that it’s really hard, but not so hard you lose sight of your intention.
So maybe it’s a weight that’s heavy enough to make you think “dang, that’s heavy” or maybe it’s pushing up against the edge of a stretch that feels a little uncomfortable, but not so hard that you can’t do it.
Whatever the stimulus is, it needs to be hard. There needs to be some effort.
Feeling
Part of getting the result we desire is understanding and applying feedback. When it comes to the body, the main way you get feedback is, well, listening to the body.
NOTE: being in one’s body can be overwhelming for some, especially for a history of those with body image issues, trauma, and other conditions like chronic pain and illness. I encourage anyone who struggles with anything along these lines to consult a trained, trusted mental health professional for guidance and tools to use when attempting to dive into any type of body-feeling work.
Here’s a couple examples of physical feedback while performing any exercise/movement:
-How hard was it (Effort)?
-Did I experience any pain of discomfort? If so, where?
-Did I feel any area(s) of my body working or expressing effort?
-Could I have done more of that exercise/movement? If so, approximately how much (usually measured in reps, time, or distance - depending on the activity)?”
A common way to measure feeling in exercise is by feeling muscles work (stretching, contracting, burning, etc). This is a tool that stems primarily from bodybuilding and physical rehabilitation modalities, but it’s been co-opted into the wider fitness sphere as the main way to tell if an exercise is “working.”
You can probably tell by the quotations that I think it’s not the only way to tell if an exercise is doing what it’s supposed to do. Part of the rise of this measurement is its ease of use: if lactic acid builds up in the muscle, it creates a burning sensation - easy to say, “boom, that’s working.”
The body is much more complex, and, although much like heavy breathing and exhaustion it is one of the most common ways for people measure the efficacy of exercise, muscle burn doesn’t necessarily mean an exercise is or is not doing what we’re trying to do.
Feeling can be beneficial in building better body maps (creating a brain image of our body), increasing our ability to understand and control the movements of our body, which in turn can translate into more effective execution of whatever type of movement we’re trying to perform.
Tension
Tension is the active contraction of our muscles.
To help better illustrate tension, try this drill:
Choose a hand.
Any of your own.
Look at said hand.
Open it.
Close it.
Open it again.
Now try the same thing, but when you close your hand this time, make the tightest fist you possibly can.
Then relax.
That's what I'm talking about when I'm saying tension. Your body has the ability to do this with most of your muscles. It's the voluntary contraction of any muscle group or groups.
The more in touch with this we can get, the more we can harness the contractile potential of our muscles (aka get stronger).
It is not enough to just strengthen muscle fibers. Tissue capacity is important, but there must be developed an ability to manage and produce tension from within the body at will (internal tension).
There must be a positive connection from foot to center to grip. If any point along this chain is unable to create matching tension, it becomes a “leak.” Through here is lost power, strength, and connection.
Simply put, we want to be able to create internal tension to match external stress. It’s good to be loose and relaxed, but it’s also good to be able to respond and react to external force with matching tension. It’s one of the core tenets of athleticism: the ability to go from relaxed to tight and back. That’s explosiveness in a nutshell.
Summary
The tools that we use for this don’t matter nearly as much as how we use them, and the understanding of toward what purpose we are using them and why that purpose matters to us.
We do not lift a weight just to lift it, but to discover the limits of our ability - physically, emotionally, mentally. Part of this is discovering the limit of our ability to create tension insofar as we can impose it in an object. Finding our limits, or edges, helps us establish an understanding of the leaks that may be limiting any aspect of our moveability (tension, range, complexity...)
The ability to understand, create, and direct effort, feeling, and tension at will also becomes a valuable skill as it teaches the contrast between active and relaxed.
To understand effort is to know how to handle physical stress.
To understand feeling is to understand feedback from the body.
To understand tension (tightness) is to understand what it is not (relaxation).
These are basic components of the development of strength, though they bleed in to power, athleticism, grace, stability, and flexibility. They are all sides of a many-faced coin (or dice if you’re real): they may appear different, but are all connected through universal strands like effort, feeling, and tension.