Athletic medicine is powerful. It might be the best (and most enjoyable) preventative medicine we have available to us. Leaving aside the obvious benefits to physical health, a consensus of scientific studies on exercise’s positive effects on our minds demonstrates that exercise counters anxiety, depression, and cognitive decline with aging. But even these things only scratch the surface of what training and participating as athletes can do for us. On a deeper level, it can help us develop into the people we want to be and help us fill our deepest voids.
We each have a lot to manage in the experience of a fulfilling life. On the surface, we have to deal with bills, work pressure, deadlines, personal conflicts, traffic, chores, family and other obligations, and can be difficult to stay emotionally balanced though all of it. On a deeper level, we work to become more skilled and effective as people and we probably all need to grow in some key areas in order to realize our highest inspirations. We may also confront some deeper voids that we feel in our lives (things like lack of purpose and authenticity, insecurities, never ending chases, unfulfilled dreams, etc.).
Training and participating as athletes in nature can serve us on both the superficial and deeper levels. We can more effectively manage ourselves with a better understanding of athletic medicine’s multiple layers. In many areas of life there is a natural tension that exists between coping strategies, comfort or joy seeking behaviors, and actual developmental effort. Our athletic and exercise efforts are no exception. Being strategic as we manage this tension helps us capture the greatest value from our efforts.
Exercise and training are widely considered to be among the most effective ways to cope with day to day stress. Maintaining healthy levels of fitness keeps our energy levels up and helps keep us in a good mood. Time spent running or training helps balance our minds and our lives. Our athletic pursuits can bring us tremendous joy, adventure, and an outlet in nature to help balance (or even temporarily escape from) our lives. These benefits serve our overall well-being and allow us to feel better in our status quo. When our lives feel like they are on a fulfilling track this may be all we want or need. However, perhaps we are working to address something deeper in our lives. If that is the case, we must manage athletic medicine more effectively to keep it from merely serving as a painkiller to mask wounds that would be benefited by some deeper medicine.
Our athletic pursuits can also challenge us deeply, teach us important lessons about ourselves, and help prepare us for personal breakthroughs. In this way our athletic lives can help us address our deeper voids and develop ourselves as people. This requires us to introduce into our athletic lives more challenge and discomfort that is tailored to the strengths that we seek to cultivate. We may also find it helpful to follow athletic inspirations into deeper aspects of ourselves. If we are willing to go far, this is often where our athletic inspirations will lead us.
Pursuing deeper levels of athletic medicine runs counter to ordinary conditioned patterns of our society. In addition to steering us away from nature, our culture tends to train us to seek comfort and reactive treatments. This often comes at the price of blunted personal development. Western medicine exemplifies this approach, treating ailments with pharmaceuticals and devoting relatively little attention to root causes and prevention. Drugs often mask untapped opportunities for us to learn and become stronger. Ironically, even the most masochistic exercise regimens can in fact have a similar stagnating effect. The endorphins and stress balancing effect we get may help us cope with life but don’t necessarily help us move us forward in deeper ways. Luckily, if that is a trap we find ourselves in, the pain tolerance and disciplined habits that we’ve developed as exercise masochists can serve us powerfully as we redirect our energy towards developmentally stimulating challenges.
The key elements of deeper athletic medicine are discomfort and challenge. These are applied at appropriate intensities and cadences based on our own rhythms that we learn over time. When we push ourselves too hard too soon we crack. When we push ourselves too hard for too long we break down. To build a strength we ultimately need to steer through progressive challenge, but this is seldom a simple linear path. Even something as simple as building strong muscles has its own rhythm that we must learn. Introducing discomfort doesn’t mean no longer having fun. For challenge-seeking people who want to develop, things usually become boring when they are no longer difficult. In this way, our overall levels of fun and fulfillment over time can actually serve as useful barometers. It will often serve us, however, to sacrifice a bit of short term fun for greater long term joy and fulfillment. It helps to be aware of what’s going on for us to make sure we keep steering to the right discomforts and do not find ourselves caught in patterns that are getting boring.
For many of us, most of the discomfort we will struggle with in our athletic lives is actually mental. I’ll cover this further in future blogs, but today our fitness culture has become a bit obsessed with high intensity workouts and calorie burning when in fact most of us would actually be served by physically slowing down to better match our bodies’ developmental rhythms. Not all discomfort is equal from a developmental perspective. It is of course uncomfortable to endure some brief high intensity muscle burn in a sweaty gym. However, the discomforts that may be able to serve us better in our lives involve how far we are willing to go in a challenge, what sacrifices we are willing to make, what fears, obstacles, and uncertainties we are willing to face, what weather conditions we will endure, and the discipline we can maintain during challenging and hectic times in our lives. To fill our voids, we usually need to face the aspects of ourselves that hold us back the most. When we give this some thought, nature usually has a way for us.
Optimizing our athletic healing is a highly individual matter. However, for all of us who spend a decent amount of time exercising or participating in outdoor sports it’s helpful to periodically examine why we doing it and what we are getting from it. Understanding the tension between coping, comfort, and development will help us optimize our time and effort. As we manage ourselves, here are some questions we can ask to help us better understand and focus our athletic and training efforts:
What do I get out of my training on a daily or weekly basis?
How do I feel before a workout?
How do I feel after a workout?
How do I feel when I don’t train?
Am I having fun?
Has this changed over time?
How challenged do I feel?
Is there an athletic challenge that inspires me?
Am I training for it or am I just working out?
Have I been making annual progress?
In my fitness or performance?
In my body goals?
In learning myself?
In a strength or quality that I am focused on developing?
Does my workout help me cope with anxiety or frustration?
What kind of person wouldn’t have this anxiety or frustration?
How can I train to be that person?
Am I using my workout or athletic life as an escape from anything in life that I don’t want to deal with?
What would I need to face it? Who would I need to be?
How I can I use my athletic life to prepare me to face it?
What kind of experiences in nature might force me to confront similar discomforts and fear?
Am I stuck in life in some way?
Who would I need to be to get unstuck?
What mental skills or strengths would I need to have?
How can I challenge myself in related ways as an athlete?
How can I challenge myself in related ways in nature?
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