One of the first things you realise in studying any martial art is that, excepting the instinct to run, your instincts are no help at all. Instinctively, you’ll struggle, resist, and, typically, leave yourself right in the firing line. Instead, you learn to act against instinct. Over time, you condition a more useful—get close, move with— response.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the same instinct about modern fitness: to run. Any fitness instincts we once had are now scrambled, and any conditioned response we might have is equally warped. So the result is the same. And where I left you a couple of weeks ago with life sitting on your chest and force-feeding you pizza.
But given we live in an environment hostile to health and fitness—one not merely unsupportive to those ends, but incompatible— this idea of conflict transcends the metaphor. A literal truth that points to the solution.
To achieve and maintain any degree of fitness beyond the ever-declining state of ‘normal’ is a challenge. Increasingly so. And one we are ill-equipped to manage. Because fitness is a skill, more accurately, fitness is the product of a collection of micro-skills. And that’s just the conventional definition, as it relates to physical capacity only.
By the time you get to a Leftfield definition of fitness and come to include all those skills that might make us fit for purpose—nutrition, broader lifestyle behaviours, all underpinned by the relevant psychological and behavioural skills— you’re talking about a vast array indeed.
[ For brevity —and, I would argue, accuracy— you can read the term ‘fitness’ as used below as inclusive of all these things.]
But fitness and nutrition are rarely considered through this skills lens. Even then, it’s easily forgotten— as I did— there is a collection of behaviours involved and few will know how to do them all.
Most just try to do fitness. And so struggle becomes the norm. It’s like trying to ‘do’ piano. You can make a lot of noise but you, sure as hell, aren’t playing it. And, more to the point, you never well. Fitness and eating are life skills that, although fundamental to existence, are curiously unique. Because it’s not the normal, finite, struggle we might expect in learning any other endeavour, and despite often repeated efforts, we remain remedial. Here the struggle is endless.
The saving grace of failing to view this as a learning process is that it isn’t worth learning. With nothing close to a curriculum, there is nothing to learn. Our downward spiral is courtesy of an approach that is systematically unsystematic, characterised by unfounded expectation, governed by whim and other physiological fantasies.
If we’re doing anything at all, we’re advised to ‘do what we love’. And when that loses its lustre we’ll ‘try’ something else. And we’ll determine that through a similarly irrelevant lens, perhaps by how convenient it is.
Any of which might well be secondary considerations, were life, in the meantime, not beating the living shit out of us.
We can only act in an unskilled manner. A manner, worse still, that will never lead to skill. And our efforts— such as they are— invariably amount only to doing the wrong thing harder.
So you better get used to life stealing your lunch money.
Until, one day, a mysterious stranger arrives in your town. Or you set off on a long trek to a distant monastery. Perhaps stumble on an ancient, dusty, scroll.
Or a newsletter arrives in your inbox.
Opportunity for an upgrade you wouldn’t believe.
Lifestyle Jujutsu
Lifestyle: acknowledgement both that 'exercise' is not the point, but more so that the divisions we imagine between exercise, diet, work, play, sleep, stress etc. don't change the fact that everything influences everything. And;
Jujutsu: translated from the Japanese as 'gentle art.' Meaning first that you never meet an opposing force head-on. Secondly, you look to apply just enough effort, in just the right place, at just the right time.
If, after your brief introduction, you’re still thinking— when am I ever going to have somebody sitting on my chest?— fine. Take it, or leave it. But the clip clearly illustrates how a simple understanding of technique can turn the mysterious into the mundane.
But no less magical in its effect.
Jujutsu is a dynamic ‘dialogue’ from fluid flux to stubborn stalemate, but — at every point— both parties know what they are trying to do and how to go about it. Depending on their expertise, they have a drop-down menu of options in every situation. And so the menu, too, is dynamic—what is right here is wrong there. And so on.
Options that may or may not work. Evenly matched fighters are searching similar menus to gain an advantage. And further confused by feints, traps and reversals. Who finds the right technique first? Who makes a mistake? That is the ‘fight’.
Modern fitness is like getting one technique and then applying it to every situation. Generic programs and meal plans are about as useful as a one-move martial art. When they do this, I’ll do that. It works fine. On paper.
Life, you may have noticed, rarely does what you want it to. And when you don’t know how to do anything else, cue frustration. So you try something else and learn another ‘move’. Again frustration. And so, on.
The problem is never connecting the dots — the underlying principles. Never even realising there are dots to connect. Because what is not so evident from the clip you were shown, is that jujutsu is never about ‘the move’— the armbar, the wrist lock, whatever, is just the icing on the cake.
Any technique used is the end of a process, not the start, and can only be effective after you get a lot of other ducks in a row. Sure, you can try and ‘force’ a technique without observing these other, more important, considerations, but then you’re just back to a struggle again.
Each skill is nestled within a greater hierarchy, beginning with an assessment—and understanding— of the situation. Only then employing principles of positioning, posture, balance and biomechanics to namecheck the major considerations, all ultimately giving you leverage.
An order of operations ensuring alignment with physiology, psychology and reality. The conventional approach towards achieving any fitness goal has a tick in none of those boxes.
No understanding of physiology: I want to lose weight.
No respect for your psychology (or physiology): I want to lose weight fast.
Or, finally, reality: I’ll end up losing a lot of lean muscle thereby creating the perfect condition to gain more fat when I eat normally again.
And so everything is both forced— requiring great effort— and ineffective. Tell me that’s not the worst of both worlds.
Understandably, many people stop. Others have exercised like this, non-stop, for the last twenty years and now know twenty ‘moves’. Let’s be super generous and say forty. It hardly matters when none allow for even the slightest variable, much less the most important variable of all, you.
Because jujutsu is further adaptive and specific to your body size, shape, height, limb length and flexibility. And different to somebody else’s. Necessarily so, because that too is… reality— inescapably, part and parcel of every possible circumstance.
In jujutsu, everything is achieved via what IS. So not only are you not rejecting a given situation, or unaware of it, it’s all about the situation. Always.
You USE the situation to your best possible advantage.
You are constrained by reality. But if you want your efforts to be effective, so you should be. But then, constrained gives the wrong impression. When you’re operating from principles, in a manner best suited to you, you, finally, have freedom and flexibility.
Understanding movement patterns opens you to every exercise.
Understanding ‘Time Under Tension’ opens every type of resistance training.
Understanding energy balance opens any approach to diet and nutrition.
All of which can then be filtered by goal, preference, lifestyle — or anything else to make it specific to you. And effective.
An understanding of every relevant principle opens you to every possible option. With your drop-down menu of effective techniques for any given situation, you are forever armed with the weapon of choice.
If an understanding of every relevant principle sounds like a lot of hard work let’s depart from our metaphor for just a second. Because unlike principles of combat— even if they do have utility in a far broader sense— the principles I’m referring to are not abstractions.
They are your basic operating instructions.
With no understanding of them, both how you engage with your body and how it engages with the world remains a mystery. And your every trip through the modern fitness cycle only further disconnects and alienates you.
Further reflecting the martial art— only more so— a jujutsu approach becomes a medium of self-discovery. A tool of REAL-ising. It does take hard work, certainly, but you might better reframe it as different work.
Certainly no harder than the alternative. As if there was an alternative.
"Before you throw more time at the problem, throw more focused action at the problem. You don’t need more time, you need fewer distractions." - JAMES CLEAR
Time: the universal obstacle to getting and staying fit. It’s not an excuse, I believe you. I have the same problem.
So we can’t afford not to be learning the well-placed needle-movers. Efficient and effective so you’re doing less and getting more. Employing techniques of leverage instead of myth.
Better still, your hard work pays off in compounding fashion. This brings us to the final point — and again in stark contrast to the conventional. This approach not only manages or neutralises problems, it needs them. It feeds off them. Remember, an attack— a ‘problem’ —is the raw ingredient of jujutsu.
No problem. No jujutsu.
This doesn’t mean you’re looking for fitness trouble it means you’re not merely adaptive to challenge or resilient to it, but, as per Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of antifragile, you gain from it. You’re better for it.
And that’s what we’ll look at next time — spinning the wool of everyday life into the gold of you-jutsu.
Because, of course, you don’t just get to ‘do’ this either. Luke didn’t just ‘do’ being a Jedi, right? No. In a jarring segue from one of the best movie scenes of all time we all had to endure the swamps of the Dagobah System for that.
So that’s what you can look forward to. You’re never going to ‘exercise’ again.
It’s time for your training.
- OLI