So we’ve been looking at the idea of a fitness practice as a prism that rewards (and promotes) virtue while discouraging or, at least, pinpointing sin (not in a religious or moral but utilitarian sense i.e. does this lead to progress in a given endeavour.
One of the other properties of practice is the idea that development is eternal: the North Star of mastery.
But few would see this as anything other than a ridiculous notion where their fitness and nutrition are concerned— the preserve of specialists like exercise scientists and dieticians.
I would agree that muscle attachments and The Krebs Cycle can remain a mystery, but, however you might define mastery, I don't think your basic operating instructions should be outsourced to anybody.
And unless you feel confident in solving fitness, dietary or other lifestyle issues as they relate to you, you are woefully ill-equipped. And can only manage problems in an unskilled way.
Let’s return to where we started: (the metaphor of) jujitsu. Before employing principles of leverage, positioning, and technique, if there’s any ‘trick’ to jujitsu, it's through addressing only what IS. Dealing with the problem at hand.
Such that mastery of the art makes any 'dialogue' look choreographed. It looks like time travel.
And it does so because there is no anticipation of what an attack might be.
If it is. Or isn’t.
No guessing.
Hoping.
Or grasping.
Relaxed awareness unsullied by these or other tensions, it's the no-mind state of mushin. And it means that any attack, every attack, is just right. Perfect.
I'm not suggesting anything mystical here. There are hundreds of micro-cues—mostly subconscious— that further inform the decision-making, but they are courtesy first of a seamless receptiveness to the present helping to redress the natural advantage of action over reaction.
A frictionless accord with the now.
But that was then.
Because from that point, the master does know what you're going to do. Through positioning, posture, balance, and technique, they make some things possible and many more not. Not time travel, so much as making easy predictions about your severely restricted—funnelled— future.
Offered one, or perhaps two 'doors' to go through. Doors you might think of as Bad and Worse, but can also look inviting.
Pick a door. Not that it matters. There are answers for both. But the really weird and scary and effective part is that this illusion of choice, of agency, is all part of it.
Because he that giveth...
Realising you're a passenger, and have been the entire time— and further realising you realised it when they wanted you to realise it— doesn't just take the wind out of your sails. If you're ever in a position to make a decision again, your first will be to curl into the foetal position and be very quiet.
That's jujitsu. Complete physical and psychological control over the unskilled.
When subject to this control you have a choice. You don't play. You get manhandled. Or you get some skills.
But not playing isn't an option when that master I'm describing is life.
Without an all-things-considered fitness practice, as I've detailed these past weeks, your options are equally limited. So forget about goals. Forget about what you want, you don't have the skills yet.
Any ‘decision’ about what to do is decided for you. The first, and most obvious, being— in the absence of exercise— do some.
Exercise is a first order of business both because of our biological reality— you are a skeleton wrapped in muscle and with nervous, endocrine and immune systems all demanding it— but, secondly, because it often goes a long way towards solving other important considerations like sleep and dietary quality.
But ‘exercise’ is a term close to useless.
What do you need?
Strength, hypertrophy (muscle mass), mobility, recovery?
That's right, you need all of them. And more.
But what to do first?
A practice will tell you. But a lack of skills and a long list of other constraints like a lack of time make your options more limited still.
And while the humility of the practice approach helps us to recognise—and accept— this, it's a surrender made ever easier by the realisation that it invariably leads to progress. Such that goals are either achieved as a happy side effect or, when viewed through an all-things-considered lens—which is to say accurately— are revised. A six-pack sounds like a great idea. Not so much when it comes to living it.
The key distinction is that via a practice you never set yourself on getting, but on giving. And only by giving, do you get.
But it's also true that the physiological principles and other realities mean that these decisions are rarely NOT made for us, at least in part - no matter how good we are. And the only way to more options is better skills.
The way to better skills is also how, as promised, we come to reconcile the physiological and psychological realities with the equally relevant— but usually opposing— reality of our respective day-to-day lives.
I say equally relevant to underline that this side of the equation is also part and parcel of what IS.
So how do you make headway when you may not have time for gym workouts and, no doubt, a whole list of other things you might imagine to be required?
Maybe you don’t have a gym membership.
Or distinct blocks of training time.
Perhaps a dietary restriction.
An old injury.
Whatever.
Happily, here too we are bound by reality and your success—developing and enjoying the fruits of a fitness practice— only ever requires you to do what you can.
Noting this is both an acknowledgement of your reality and your responsibility.
That's the deal.
I point out —what your body and mind are pointing me to— a first order of business. Further constrained by all relevant realities we scale it to make it doable by your determination— the best next step.
And you do it.
Certainly, these are small actions that in isolation, do nothing. But when drawn from, and purposed towards the whole, do it all.
As Professor Daniel Chambliss observed in his study of elite swimmers:
"Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole."
There is always something, and you can always make it doable. So you repeat. And through repetition, you get better.
But unlike the conventional approach where you follow a program or meal plan that makes no allowances for life and you stick with it as long as everything keeps fine for it, and then try another one, as long as everything keeps fine for it…
Your practice—like jujitsu— gets stronger from how you negotiate the problems.No problem = no jujitsu. The messiness of everyday life is the raw material. You learn to get things done when you don't have all your ducks in a row, and you get better at it. And better for it.
By administering only what is, you learn when to change the situation and when to change yourself. More importantly, you learn when you can and should no neither. And if that sounds faintly familiar it’s very close to The Serenity Prayer.
And, certainly by contrast to the standard fitness approach, serene it is. By dedicating yourself to a practice that forever points you to the right thing at the right time—and you are doing what you can— what is there to worry about?
A true good ‘school’ shouldn’t tell us only things we’ve never heard before; it would be deeply interested in rehearsing all that is theoretically known yet practically forgotten.
That's Leftfield Youniversity. Lifestyle jujitsu: the skillful handling of what is.
It begins this Friday 28th. Applications close this Wed (26th) at 5 pm.
A sure path to mastery of self. Not in a 'finished' sense— your work never ends—but as the (inevitable) result from the iterative knowledge gained from an ever-evolving fitness practice.
And hey, if you're, I don't know, an astronaut with 15 kids or something, and we discover what I propose really is undoable, then you will (obviously) pay nothing and you can return to your impossibly busy life.
But in over 14 years of coaching, I'm yet to meet somebody who could not do it.
That doesn't mean they did. But then we’re simply back to denial, to resistance. Those other (physiological) realities not only aren't going anywhere, but, in our failing to address them are forever only getting worse.
And indeed the surest sign of non-mastery— in addition to maximising pain, and minimising any chance of success— is resistance.
In jujitsu, as in life, resistance means only pain and then compliance.
So get with the program.
Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI