“That flow where nothing else matters; Nothing else is important other than what I am doing in this moment and time, and it’s a beautiful feeling.”
— Kobe Bryant, NBA basketball professional with the Los Angeles Lakers
|
Fitness As a Contest
Bruno Cooke reached out for comments about an article he was writing (Cooke 2024) on the use of fitness monitoring devices. He wanted to know if there was a downside to constantly monitoring your progress. I said there was.
According to Bruno, everyone who trains uses monitoring devices to measure their progress. They walk, run, ski, train, or otherwise exercise while measuring their time, steps, distance, blood pressure, oxygen content, heart rate, and whatever else some device strapped to their body records.
As with everything we do, there is a perceived reward. The information provided by these body monitors taps into our psychological reward system. Higher measured performance is perceived as greater reward, but it may not be the reward we’re looking for.
“It’s easy to become fixated on numbers and lose sight of the actual joy of running, instead of tuning into how your body feels. You can end up chasing stats, which can undermine the mental benefits exercise provides.”
— Jim Richard, Certified Personal Trainer
When I rock climbed, I was fairly obsessed with climbing at increasingly harder grades. The harder climbs were not just physically demanding, they were steeper, and more dangerous, sustained, and frightening. Mastering the technical difficulty could be done with physical strength, but mastering the psychological difficulties brought greater rewards.
In all sports, there are challenges other than strength. Often, the greater obstacles are mental. As pertains to rock climbing, and as has become clear over the decades, people now climb at higher levels of difficulty with the same amount of training as we had in the past.
Over the same period there has been an increased focus on the body and a decreased focus on the mind. In climbing, you could see this in the creation of climbing gyms, where harder climbs were otherwise identical to easier climbs except that they had fewer and smaller holds. This focus on sports’ physical aspects is reflected in the pervasive use of fitness monitoring devices which only provide objective measures.
What’s Missing?
Cooke’s article talks about a deeper aspects of sport and exercise than are measured by a machine. He quotes me saying, “Coming into synchrony with yourself leads to an entirely different state of mind than winning the race or beating your best time. It depends on what you want to become, enlightened or addicted.” But Cooke doesn’t go further than referring to this deeper experience. An experience that’s more “in tune” with your body.
Exercise can be more than achievement on an external standard. Exceeding external standards is the nature of competition. Gaining strength is a weak motivation for exercise, though it might be the reason most people give.
The deeper reasons for physical health lie in how exercise, or sport, or competition make you feel. It’s a similar feeling in each case, but some people gain the benefit by focusing on one activity or the other. It might be called “flow,” but it’s more than that.
The term slow, introduced by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1960s, is “A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter” (Csikszentmihalyi 2008).
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flow is a temporary, ecstatic experience. One can train oneself into this state, but the goal of training is more than temporary. The flow state is an indicator but not a metric. Achieving a flow state is no assurance of stability, satisfaction, or meaning.
Neurologically, flow is seen as a state of balanced immersion. It involves immediate feedback and leads to clarity and an expanded perception. But it does not mean this state is constant or will occur in other circumstances. The goal of exercise is both to find consistent, immersive rewards.
We learn through a combination of challenge and skill. There is a mental kind of relaxation in struggle. Even pain shares elements of relaxation if we achieve absence of mind. Both challenge and pain can train our ability focus involving the exclusion of some things and the amplification of others.
This skill does not happen unintentionally. We need to make it happen and engage in the process. This distinguishes the person who’s pursuing a goal from someone who’s going through the motions.
“Discipline is doing what you hate to do, but nonetheless doing it like you love it.”
— Mike Tyson, heavyweight boxing world champion 1986 and 1996
We like the but most of us don’t like the work it takes to get there. We opt for easier work and the purchase of low-grade ecstasy. We few of us appreciate is the state equanimity that lies beyond ecstasy, and which requires extra effort.
With enough practice, the foundations of the flow state become habit. You are not constantly ecstatic, but your equanimity becomes enduring and pervasive. It can be disturbed, but it tends to return of its own accord. It becomes neurally ingrained.
The metric for exercise is physical, such as biometric devices provide. The metric for sport is performance, and the metric for competition is winning in contests. But behind all of these are person feelings of self-worth, vitality, equanimity, and greater focus. Life gets easier when you’re at your physical best, and your mind gets sharper as well.
Your physical best is not the same as your highest biometric score. Your physical best is where your metabolic functions, internal rhythms, mental focus, and sense of purpose are best aligned. This is the state of equanimity.
Equanimity involves sleep, digestion, relationships, thought, feeling, and states of mind. Exercise helps bring these into alignment, but it’s alignment that’s the measure, not a quantitative measure on a biometric score.
Body Building
Body building is the sport of creating a visually sculpted body. It involves the apparently vain and narcissistic presentation of men and women with muscle-rippled bodies, oiled skin, false smiles, and skimpy garments. You might think body-building is all about strength and appearance, but it isn’t. The goal of body building goes beyond the body to the spirit. It is an exercise in overcoming the limitations of your mind.
“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.”
— Arnold Schwarzenegger, youngest winner of the world’s top body building title, Mr. Olympia
Biometrics might define part of your physical limits, but they won’t take you beyond. Nor does the collection of all your biometrics define what limits you. Body building is about connecting with your muscles, joints, and fascia, and also with your discipline, determination, focus, and commitment. In body building, as in rock climbing, the people who achieve the most accomplish this by developing exceptional minds.
The Mental Piece
Biometric devices support coping strategies, they are not tools of empowerment. Those who measure satisfaction according to their metabolic scores are trying to gain through physical struggle what they cannot otherwise achieve in life. Unless physical strength is combined with mental refinement, it’s pointless.
Those who rely on measurement devices will have difficulty regulating themselves. If you run to win, you’re running against your body. If you run to gain, then you’re running with your body. Meeting a metric is an arbitrary theory imposed on your body. Balance is about hearing your body. Your body that tells you how well you’re doing.
Beyond achieving balance, physical strength doesn’t offer meaning or self-worth. Achieving balance is essential, hard to find, and difficult to maintain. Physical health provides a foundation for a balanced mind, but extra strength does not lead to greater strength of mind.
Body builders, along with all serious athletes, find deeper meaning through exercise, but the meaning we find is not the result of exercise. Like playing scales for a musician, the exercise is a means of focusing your mind. At some point, the exercise becomes an art, but art cannot be measured biometrically.
“You can’t grow unless you watch yourself do the work. You can’t get better unless you judge your effort against what you know it should look like, in your heart and in your mind… it means not being afraid to stand in front of the mirror, look yourself in the eyes, and really see.”
— Arnold Schwarzenegger (2023)
References
Cooke, Bruno. (2024). “Ditch the Fitbit and ‘Listen to Yourself’ to Get the Most Out Of Your Run, Say Experts.” the Focus (September 24, 2024). https://www.thefocus.news/lifestyle/ditch-the-fitbit-and-listen-to-yourself-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-run-say-experts/
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (2008). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper.
Schwarzenegger, Arnold. (2023). Be Useful; Seven Tools for Life. Penguin Press.
If you’d like to know more about the states of flow and equanimity,
then schedule a free, zoom call at:
Enter your email for a FREE 1x/month or a paid 4x/month subscription.
Click the Stream of the Subconscious button.