The Case for Love in the Gym
…and how it could be the solution to your physical woes.
Does it ever feel like you are taking 2-steps forward and 1-step back with your training?
Always navigating niggles & injuries, feeling burnt out or do you get demotivated and bored quickly trying mainstream approaches to the gym?
If you are anything like I was then it may feel more like 2-steps forward and 2-steps back.
For 5 straight years up until 2 years ago I was really struggling. However since then I have come on leaps and bounds with my body and my training. It feels the best it has in years, I’m moving really well, I enjoy every session and it has taken me zero discipline.
I think I may have identified a few key factors as to how I have achieved this and hopefully by my sharing they could help you too…
COULD LOVE BE THE ANSWER?
Well if you’ll humour me, allow me to share my theory as to how LOVE may have been the solution for me, and could work for you too. Yes that’s right I’m talking L-O-V-E as the answer to your gym and training woes.
And not in some airy fairy hippie way, but logically and rationally understood and applied.
Before I start please know that I am not sharing this as someone who considers myself all loving (trust me I am far from it) or who fully understands love or holier than thou. These are just some ideals that have come to me after years of frustration with my body, years that have been paralleled by lots of spiritual questioning and soul searching alongside my gym life.
I came to recognise that true spiritual principles are multidimensional by nature and so what is true and can be applied for the soul and the spirit has corresponding principals that can be applied to the body and the physical. I know that might be already sounding a bit woo-woo for some so let’s just dive into it.
LACK OF LOVE AS THE ROOT
As I am claiming love to be the answer by power of opposites we could then say that a lack of love may be the ROOT of the issue. And not then perhaps bad posture, sitting all day, evil footwear or poor biomechanics (though these may still be an issue). After all, some people may have all of these ‘problems’ and not have physical symptoms and someone might have none of them and still be injured.
To be clear, I am not saying the problem is a lack of love for what you're doing when you train, but a lack of love being present when you are training.
So, how do we know when love is not present in our training?
Well I have come up with a list of some tell tale signs:
Recognise many? I certainly do.
Let’s unpack a little further…
CHASING WORTH
A lot of us believe our worth comes from our body. For many of us it’s how it looks or how much it weighs and for others it’s what it can do; how fast it can run, how much it can lift, how many muscle ups it can do, how high it can backflip from. And often - it’s both.
My father was most comfortable opening up emotionally and showing me ‘love’ when I achieved athletically and I have a mother who values how I look more then my feelings and what’s in my heart. Because of this I have been deeply programmed to associate looks and athletic prowess with worth and therefore I have chased both for much of my life believing it to be love, when it isn’t. This has led me to a lot of overtraining and self-judgment. I can see that now, intellectually at least, I don’t think I’ve accepted it in my heart yet.
Anyway, this type of programming causes emotional injuries which can lead us to be and feel very SERIOUS when we train. Where we are constantly chasing highs; more plates, faster times, dropping lb’s, seeing new muscles appear, addicted to competing. Now don’t get me wrong I am not saying that any of these are inherently bad, but if on a deeper level we are seeking them solely because we think people will love us more because of them, then in the long run we will only ever be disappointed and stuck in an endless cycle of injury, overtraining and burnout. On the flip side of this we may chastise ourselves or feel a sense of guilt if we are not training or working on our body/weight/looks etc in some way.
NOTE: You cannot earn love (it is a gift) and your value shouldn’t/doesn’t come from what your body can do and if it does to somebody then that isn’t love.
LISTENING TO YOUR BODY
When I look around the gym I see a lot of people moving their bodies but not many in their bodies, often in fact going a step further and attempting to suppress and disconnect from the sensations of the body in order to demand more from it. In my eyes this can be a very damaging thing to practice and demonstrates a lack of love for the body and reason injuries happen and are in most cases not simply bad accidents or genetic failures but something that has been worked on over a long period of time.
When you are training at the gym or in the park you are USING your body, so you should be LISTENING to your body. Just like we feel emotions with/in our soul - we feel physical sensations with our body when we use it, it’s a tool to be honed.
I understand people like the comfort of sticking to a routine or following a program where they can just show up and tell the body what to do, do it, then go home and fingers crossed you will get the results promised by the PT, the influencer, the big guy/girl on steroids. But this purely Mind Led approach doesn’t account for so many things, how you are feeling on the day, your energy levels, your sleep, your recent nutrition, emotional state, stress etc. which all affect what it is capable of.
If you want to have a healthy relationship with your body then just like it is with another human it should be a two way conversation. Where you listen to what it has to say about how it is feeling, and if you truly love it you can then choose to act on the information it is telling you or not but at least be present and hear it out.
A relationship with your body takes years/decades to develop, but it takes shared time together, listening, exploring, learning the language it speaks in. When you go to the gym try to go WITH and BE IN your body rather then act like a controlling partner.
WHEN LOVE IS PRESENT
Onwards then to the more positive aspect and the purpose of this letter.
If you simply reverse most of the previous list this is what you get…
How’s that all sound?
I just want to add a note here that none of this means that you won’t make progress either. I believe you will make extremely noticeable progress, just in areas that are healthier and more holistic in nature then maybe some of the markers you are used to using. Though saying that I would still say most of those markers (weight loss, stronger, more toned) would go up to right up to the point that is healthy for you and not beyond it where obsession has to take over.
The progress you will make that matters the most here will be HOW THE BODY FEELS TO USE, which will soon become more valuable to you then any statistics it can accomplish. Simply look at children and dogs, they know how to enjoy their bodies far more than your average gym goer who dedicates hours every week supposedly for the sake of said body - but in many cases their purposes have been misguided and manipulated societally by their struggles and insecurities.
THE SOLUTION
Hopefully you recognised some of the points noted on that list already present in your training. But these are what I see as hallmarks of love being present, maybe good clues and things to look out for but it doesn’t in itself tell you how to achieve it, so let me share some keys that should give you something to take away…
If you are lost and have a map but you don’t know where you are on a map as a starting point you will stay lost. In the same way if you are lying to yourself about what condition your body is in and what it is capable of you will stay frustrated with it and keep getting injured, burnt out, not enjoying and not appreciating it. So you need to know the TRUTH of your body and admit it to yourself. And by Truth I mean the state of it, all its tweaks and creaks, niggles, stiffness, positions you want to avoid because of the instability you feel there etc. Allowing yourself to really listen to these signs and FEEL your body is the key to knowing the truth.
Once you have begun to acknowledge the truth then you need to have the HUMILITY to act on it. Start from where you have just identified yourself to be on the map. Not from where you were at one peak moment in your life, or where you want to be, where your training partner is or the person you look up to on instagram is.
FEELING is the way out of it, in the beginning you may be fumbling in the dark but your sensitivity will grow and you will begin to learn to see more truth. Feeling is listening.
Slowing down, identifying instabilities and working through them gently and lovingly using regressions and stability work. (This is how I came up with my Swiss Ball Course STABLE).
When you begin to feel you will learn to be PRECISE with your body and its needs.
Copy and paste programs with sets and reps have a tendency to put us in our heads. We can imitate what someone is doing on a youtube video but we are never able to know what they are feeling and what activation is actually happening within their body. Principal focused training though maybe harder to follow in the beginning can do so much more for you in the long run then set programs as they encourage self responsibility, they teach you how to fish rather than having to be fished for.
The Feather Barrier Training I teach in my Online School is all about applying these principles, learning to feel and becoming precise within our bodies.
After some time working in this way most of the physical activities you will want to do will be NATURAL; walking, running, jumping, spinning, hanging, climbing, stretching (intuitively), squatting, crawling, going upside down, swinging (yourself & objects), throwing, swimming and mostly shoeless.
You will find great joy in these. They will develop deep rooted, dense, evenly balanced strength with ligaments and tendons included (not just muscles). They will develop balance, coordination, agility, skills and patterns of movement that crossover between them all. They will develop a relationship with your body and with nature as a playground aka GOD’S ORIGINAL GYM.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Please don’t think I share this as someone who believes I have it all figured out or that I have solved every issue in my body and am in perfect health. The more I use humility and truth as light posts the more work I see I have to do. But I do know the ground I have covered and what hasn’t worked in the past and what is working for me now.
Also there is much to be said for unhealed emotional injuries which tie in with all of this as the cause of physical ailments and are also all surrounding love (or lack of it). As a subject though it would deserve its own letter (or 10). Divine Truth speaks more deeply on this subject and has inspired much of the understanding I have shared in this letter.
Motivation Matters.
As children we were probably all a little more connected to our bodies and had purer motivations to move and play. Following our joy and being inspired by love rather than chasing it or running from our fears and emotional pain. If we can be just a little more honest about our motivations for training, become truthful about where we are currently at physically, and learn to identify when love is and isn’t present during our sessions we can begin to feel our greater health and freedom of expression from there. Rediscovering what we all already once knew how to do effortlessly.
So much of my physical training has been about trying to prove something either to myself or to others, and I don’t think I am the only one. Digging into it, in most cases, the motivation to try to prove ourselves stems from insecurity and fear of not being enough as we are already. The pervasiveness of this fear as the motivation for us to train rather then desiring to understand our bodies, following our enjoyment and desiring a deeper more loving relationship with it, may be playing a big role in the current decline of physical health and high levels of chronic issues that we are seeing today.
The more I focus on allowing love to be present when I train the more my body opens up to me and the more joy and appreciation I feel to inhabit one. The human body truly is a gift but like everything else in God’s kingdom - love is the key that unlocks it.
Your brother,
Tim
P.S. If you're interested in learning what this looks like when applied consider joining my Online School - LINKED HERE
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