A little challenge for this week:
The Kill Me Now Extended Dance Remix
One pair of moderately heavy Dumbbells and a length of floor is all you’ll need.
TGU/Windmill 6 per side
Animal Crawl of Choice 100 feet
Pushup Row 6 per side
Animal Crawl of Choice 100 feet
Overhead Press and Walk 6 reps, then 100 feet
Animal Crawl of Choice 100 feet
Burpees (with dumbbells) 9
Animal Crawl of Choice 100 feetrepeat. And maybe again.
Balance… again.
Movement and play are synonymous, or at least BFF’s. One without the other …
But play has three faces – Frolic, Competition, and War – and as we’ve quoted Dumbrowski before, all three need equal screen time to make for a worthy game. Bench one and the fans get restless.
Frolic (Play without purpose other than the purity of fun)
Competitive (Play to achieve a goal through set rules and guidelines)
Warlike (Play to dominate something or someone, winning/conquering being the sole goal)
We’ve discussed balance amongst these e-pages before. BOY have we discussed it. Many times, in many ways.
Through those three categories of play mentioned above we encounter the origins of your challenge today. If Play and Movement are the conjoined twins of our training protocol (and remember, both of those have the footnote of “see also: Strength” in their definitions in the Bodytribe dictionary), then is balance needed between the three faces of play within our training? In other words if our training is decidedly heavy within one of those categories, might we not be achieving a goal of holistic strength?
Did I load that question? Hmmmm…
Thoughts?
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Coming up:
We sort of stuffed our Events page. From our next Strength Camp to Brutal Recess workshops across the country to an updated Tune Up schedule to AJ’s new evening classes, there’s a lot going on. So please take a moment to review the new events, and if you have any requests for upcoming workshops, let me know.
I fully agree with that postulate. I think it’s clear in the way we respond emotionally to intensity during exercise. As it goes up so to do we steady ourselves for battle both physical and mental. The importance of balance in the realm of our experience with exercise intensity is evident when we ignore it and become wracked with acute and chronic injury. But this is the beauty of the Bodytribe model, it is based on an intelligent theory and thoughtful understanding of the limits and potential and the nature of the human body as a whole; the heights we can reach and our responsibility to ourselves in the conquest of goals to be balanced and full of joy. It is this thoughtfulness and the transposability of the spectrum of strength to discussions such as this that makes Bodytribe’s model unique and special and ultimately better than any other fitness model in the modern world.
I can sum it all up on a personal level in three sentences:
Frolic — I do this a little bit of every day, be it typing on a blog during company time, playing my guitar ridiculously loud through a Marshall stack or cracking inappropriate, self-depricating jokes at the gym.
Competition — this is where I really dig into my skillset, focusing every part of my creative being on not using the same adjective in the same paragraph, dragging myself in and out of bed every night to try and finally finish the second verse to the latest set of lyrics I’m writing or pulling out all stops in training for a powerlifting meet.
But walking upright, smiling at strangers and talking straight with people even though all I want to do is lay down at their feet and cry about how much I wish my mom was still alive to reassure me that everything’s going to be ok in the end, that’s war.
If I’m understanding you correctly, warlike play is movement domination, conquering, and winning at all costs, pushing to (and past) physical boundaries. This is serious, real-life stuff. Beat this guy down to the ground before he beats you stuff. Move 15 yards of wet sand across this tank and into these barrels before the day is done stuff. It doesn’t matter if you’re tired or you don’t like it. It has to be done, even at the risk of pain beyond the ordinary muscle soreness.
In my mind, that makes competitive play a simulated war-play. It removes the urgency to push mind and body past its limits to achieve the task while still motivating people to push their limits.
I think that most of us can agree the need to frolic to prepare for the two but how much we need the latter is highly subjective. If you need to use your body to make your living, then the need for competitive play is much less important. Play and movement should be to be geared to prepare and protect. Competitive stuff is more fluff than necessity. There are more important things to accomplish.
For more white collar people, more competitive play is more important. There’s just no real need to push yourself this hard. There is a need to push the boundaries, sure, just in a more controlled manner.
Good points Justin. I’ll offer a small look into my thoughts: Competition is often considered a task against others, but the most revelatory, empowering opponent is ourselves. Agreed, there be some fluff in the external world of competition, especially in the modern concept of ‘sport.’ But one man or woman bettering themselves is a deeper level of competition, and the Greeks would argue that there would need to be Askesis, or a balance between that personal challenge being all-encompasing (War) and being too frivolous (Play). Take it seriously, very seriously, but not TOO seriously. The humble will bring the aggression when needed, but also understand that it isn’t everything and not take it too seriously.
So competition, TRUE empowering competition, might be considered the point where war and frolic meet. Where mind and body hold discourse and have some progressive dialog.
Chip,
Wait, that wasn’t written quite right…. competition isn’t always fluff. It just becomes less important (and more fluffy) to make that bridge you mentioned when you need your body to work hard for a living.
Sorry about that.