Fitness as a Skill, Not a State of Being

Hi Friends!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of fitness as a skill rather than a state of being.

We tend to talk about fitness like it's something we either are or aren't.

I'm not in shape.I need to get back in shape.I want to get fit.

But what if fitness isn't a place you arrive at?  What if it's something you learn and practice?

And here's the strange thing about this particular skill: getting better at it requires you to keep being bad at it.

Once something becomes comfortable, there’s usually another unfamiliar thing waiting for you. Another weight. Another movement. Another skill. Another place where you get to be a beginner again.

Imagine someone tells you that, for your health, you really need to start dancing in Swan Lake.

Wait. What?

Okay. Apparently, to be healthy, I have to dance in Swan Lake.

But no one tells you to buy ballet shoes. No one teaches you how to plié. No one explains the positions or lets you practice the steps.  They just tell you that you really should be doing ballet.

Sometimes I think that's exactly what happens when someone is told, “You need to lift weights.” Or, increasingly, “You need to lift heavy weights.”

Okay…but how?

This is one of the reasons I love teaching people how to lift.

Because sometimes the first thing I get to tell someone is:

You aren't here to work out.You aren't here to lose weight.You aren't here to get skinny.

You're here to learn and practice.

That's it.

If you've been here for a while, you've probably listened to me harp on about being a beginner before. I think being willing to be a beginner is one of the most underrated skills we can develop.

In most areas of life, very smart people understand that when they don't know how to do something, it makes sense to ask someone who does. You learn the process. You make fewer unnecessary mistakes. Eventually, you become more capable of doing it on your own.

Sometimes, though, if you're anything like me and you really enjoy new things, you might skip that part and jump right in with all the enthusiasm in the world and absolutely none of the experience.

In heavy lifting, that can be dangerous.

In the rest of life, it's mostly just wildly inefficient.

Which brings me to something I recently jumped into enthusiastically and have been learning—and flailing—as I go.

I'm part of a community of wellness practitioners here in Asheville called the Be Well Asheville Collective. Earlier this year, we decided to create an event together called Taste of Wellness.

It's part wellness fair, part wellness retreat, and as far as I know, it's completely unique.

We're bringing together practitioners from all kinds of modalities—acupuncture, massage, Gene Keys, neurofeedback, movement, energy work, and many more—to offer attendees miniature experiences of their work.

You can show up, enjoy a cacao ceremony, experience back-to-back 20-minute sessions with different practitioners, hear a speaker, experience a closing sound bath, and hopefully leave with a completely new perspective on health, wellness, and the community around you.

There was just one small problem.

I had absolutely no idea how to build a wellness event.

So here I am, about 8 months into the process, with a looong list of things I would do differently next time and plenty of redundant inefficiencies behind me.

In other words: I'm a beginner.

But something pretty incredible has happened along the way.   This community is full of dreamers. It's also full of very smart, wonderfully far-out people who were willing to sign onto something new because they could see the vision of what it might become.

And now we're actually doing it.

On October 24th, in the beautiful Sun Soo Martial Arts building, I'll be helping host and coordinate this strange, ambitious, community-built experiment.

And you know something electric is going to happen when you put that many energy healers in one room.

Maybe that's the lesson this week:

Being bad at something isn't evidence that you don't belong there. Sometimes it's evidence that you're learning.

Fitness isn't a test you pass.

It's a skill you practice.

And the same is true for a whole lot more than fitness.

I would absolutely love to see some of you there in real life on October 24th.

Early bird ticket pricing ends tomorrow.

xo,

Amy