Cultivating Organic Fitness Pt. 1: Introduction + Nourishing our Mobility.

Ooh, friend, I cannot wait to explore our next few weeks with you. The new year is here, making it an exciting time to dive into the topic of: fitness.

Fitness…. it’s such an interesting word.

What do you think of when you think of fitness? What comes to mind for you?

When I first met my husband, I was studying exercise science, and he was studying evolutionary biology (both at UNI). I would soon learn that —really— we were both studying fitness, just from two vastly different approaches.

Back in the early 2000s, the exercise science world had very rigid tests and objectives for “fitness”: body weight, body composition, flexibility, VO2 Max, bench press, and so on. We’d run all sorts of assessments and end up with detailed numbers (data! yay!) that supposedly told us how “fit” we were. It’s one approach towards looking at fitness… Buuuuuuuut it’s pretty limited. And it doesn’t really tell you much about the individual’s day-to-day embodied experience.

On the other hand, in evolutionary biology, “fitness” refers to a species’ ability to adapt and survive in its environment. They’re not worried about a salamander’s bench press, of course— they’re concerned with resilience, the capacity to handle what life throws at it, the ability to bend instead of break, to change and flow with life’s demands in order to survive. The fitness of a species has a lot to do with its adaptability. Its pliability. Its ability to continue on.

And I love that approach. I want that kind of fitness.

I want to be able to handle life.

I want to be able to do the things I want to do.

I want to be able to do the things I need to do.

I want to be able to continue on.

• Can I squat down to the floor to pet my cat?

• Can I crawl around playing legos with my son?

• Can I handle a 10-hour car ride to visit my sister?

• Can I shovel the driveway or build a snow fort?

• Can I lift and twist with the heavy boxes to move into a new house?

• Can I help to unfurl giant, heavy rolls of sod in our yard?

• Can I sleep comfortably on the ground in a tent?

• Can I hike through a Costa Rican jungle?

• Can I lift that heavy mixer from that awkward angle in the cupboard?

• Can I dance and jump and flail about with ease & pleasure?

Most importantly, I want to feel really good in my body. I want to enjoy my life. I want to be pliable.

It wasn’t always this way. Back when I was deep in my exercise science studies, I was laser-focused on those objectified fitness metrics. I was running ultramarathons, teaching multiple fitness classes a day, lifting weights daily, stretching religiously. By the fitness metrics, I was incredibly “fit.”

Yet my body, mind, and spirit were suffering terribly. I was pushing, striving, and punishing my body (self) in the gym for hours every day. The result? Pain with every step, overtraining injuries, muscular imbalances, limited functional movement, and a complete disconnect from my own body. I was only 20, but going up and down stairs made me wince with every step. I thought pain was just the price I needed to pay…. but I was miserable. I felt trapped in a never-ending cycle of judgment, self-loathing, and punishment that left me exhausted, ashamed, disassociated, numb, anxious, and dangerously depressed. My fitness scores were high, but my wellbeing as a human was at an all-time low.

Thankfully, I discovered a more loving path back to myself. For me, that path was mindful, soulful, expressive, intuitive dancing. Somatic dance helped me learn how to tune into and listen to my body again. To honor it, respect it, and eventually love and appreciate it. The pure joy I felt while dancing helped me to want to be alive. The mindfulness elements brought me home to the present moment, and helped me take responsibility for my choices. Through practicing dance in this way, I learned to let go of worrying about objectified, measurable data about my body, and instead focus on my internal subjective experience. I learned how to experience (and enjoy) my body from the inside out. It has drastically changed my life. I can’t even begin to put it into words.

And, thankfully, somatic dance is also a powerful approach to fitness. It’s a holistic approach that cares about fostering the integration and wellbeing of the whole self: body, mind, emotions, and spirit. And I love how dance aligns so beautifully with the evolutionary biology perspective my husband taught me. With the ability to move in all kinds of ways (all directions, all planes of motion, all energetic dynamics), Aya is such a great playground for nurturing pliable, adaptable bodies, better able to survive the unknown stresses of tomorrow.

So that, my friend — the power of dance for cultivating organic fitness — is what we’re going to play with over the coming weeks. Each week, we’ll explore how, while dancing, we can intentionally move our bodies to foster different elements of fitness, such as: mobility, agility, flexibility, pliability, stability, cardiorespiratory endurance, balance, etc…. all from the inside out.

Dancing is so great for exploring, stimulating, and cultivating them all. And you know me, I want to talk about them ALL right now… but that would make our focus far too broad to be very helpful. Instead, we’ll take this exploration into fitness nice….. and….. slow…. One thing at a time.

First, let’s focus on: nourishing our mobility.

For this, we’ll focus on moving our joints — the spaces between our bones.

One way to think of it is like this: everywhere two bones come together is a joint, and those joints exist to allow movement. Even simpler? We can think of our mobility as our move-ability (our ability to move). To keep our joints healthy and functioning well, we need to move them. All of them. Often.

Remember that old saying ‘use it or lose it?’ Yep - our bodies are always adapting to the demands (or lack) we place on them. If we don’t move our joints, the body adapts by stiffening: fascia fuzzes up, muscles weaken and tighten, and joint ranges of motion shrink. Eek, right?

The great news is that if we DO use our body’s mobility, we can maintain (or reclaim, or even improve) it! Yay!

Thankfully, mobility training is always woven right into class for us (we don’t usually have to think about it). Every Aya class is intentionally crafted to ensure we’ll move in all directions, all planes, all angles, and all kinds of dynamics. However, this week, we’ll be even more mindful about sensing our mobility as we dance. This’ll help us not only further nourish our mobility in class, but also help us remember to nourish our joints outside of class too.

• We’ll dance the little joints in our feet.

• We’ll move and free up our ankles.

• We’ll hinge our knees.

• We’ll circle and rotate our hips.

• We’ll wiggle, undulate, bend, and rotate our spine.

• We’ll soften and open our shoulders.

• We’ll open and close our elbows.

• We’ll wiggle free the joints in our hands.

• We’ll relax and move our jaw, and free up our head and neck.

Mmmmmm…. doesn’t just thinking about it make you want to get up and wiggle? Me too! Of course, no need to wait, friend. In this day and age, the more movement snacks we can feed our body, the better. Like the lovely physical therapy saying goes: motion is the lotion. Ahhhhh… moving feels so GOOD!

Aaaaaand, get this — we have 206 bones throughout our body! Can you believe it? You have 26 in each foot alone! That means we have a whole lot of little spaces between bones just waiting for some love, movement, and synovial fluid circulation. No wonder we can move and dance in sooooooo many different ways! Neat, huh?

So, friend: mobility. That’s what we’re starting with this week, fitness-wise. We’ll dance. We’ll sense our body. We’ll tune into our joints, and feed ‘em delicious movement.

As always, I can’t wait to see what we discover together. See you soon!

Much love,

💛 Dani

CLASS SCHEDULE

• Sundays, 10 AM central, on Zoom

• Mondays, 5:45 PM, at the Cedar Falls Woman's Club

• Tuesdays, 5:30 PM, at Dani's house

• Wednesdays, 5:30 PM central, on Zoom

• Thursdays, 9 AM central, on Zoom

1st time? Welcome! Please be my guest! Code: FIRST