Busy Times

Hello All!

I am sitting at my study desk looking out at the big oak tree that spreads over our garden and our neighbors' bee hives. The sun is poking through but there are some very beautiful black clouds bubbling up over the valley. It's quite dramatic!

It's been a busy time over the past couple of weeks; we have enjoyed the delights of Goodwood Revival, I have successfully handed in the last bits of work to Jing for my Advanced Clinical Massage and Sports Therapy course, we danced the night away at our great friends wedding, and this week sees me planing my final presentation for next week. Phew. Oh ... and I've been working as well!

Flying High At Goodwood Revival

David and I enjoying the wedding of the year! 

The other thing is that I started Pilates with Jill Heaton yesterday. She specializes in Body Control Pilates and is one of the most patient teachers I have come across. I did a huge amount of Pilates about 5 years ago (and have now forgotten it all) before I started training in Brighton, juggling work and learning, moving house twice and finding the joy of climbing and starting to see how Yoga and different CV workouts worked out! Needless to say Pilates fell by the wayside as I explored new things, enjoyed moving in different ways and learned  how the body works.

In coming back to Pilates I really hope to learn how I can embrace the precision and control that it can offer to the body and also how I can harness that to enable my body to move ballistically through times when I am climbing, dancing and just going through my daily routines.

I love Tracey Anderson and her workouts to get me out of breath, toned and feeling great, but Pilates is the control that will hopefully allow me to do all that wonderful stuff without injury. In the past I have been a bit of a perfectionist and wanted to do only one form of exercise correctly, which didn't offer me the time or head space to enjoy a whole lot of other great things. I am coming to a place now where I would be much happier to see myself, and my clients, embracing three or four different ways of working their bodies each week. I don't mean this in a serious 'cross-training-must-work-harder-must-loose-weight-must-be-best' way. All I want is for people to move more easily in the bodies that they have and learn how to love who they are in the 'casing' that the inhabit.

Not all of us are blessed with great flexibility (I can't touch my toes), and a lot of us can't move much at all, but that doesn't mean we can't move anything; we just have to be honest with ourselves in what we can do and enjoy that amount and not compare ourselves with people like Tracey Anderson. We can see them as role models, but lets be realistic, we are who we are!

So, as we Rumble, plod, run, dance, swim, stretch, strengthen, walk and embrace life, let us laugh often, smile more and enjoy the fact that we are where we are and all we need to do is embrace today.

Rumbling

As you can imagine, I see a lot of people and hear a lot of things, but yesterday I heard a thought from a client and I asked him if I could share it with you all on the blog and he said; 'Yes!'. I never share things from the treatment room, but I loved his take on exercise so much as it made such sense; it take the perfectionism, the grunt work and the sheer 'I-don't-want-to-work-out-ness' out of moving daily. You guys just had to hear about it.

Exercise is often the dreaded 'E' word, as FLY Lady so often points out in her book Body Clutter. But my client decided that he needed to get up, be with nature, explore his own thoughts before we went off for his busy day in the corporate world, so he goes for a 'Rumble'.

Rumbling is not running, but it's not an ambling walk, it's a cross between the two and it's in the country away from tarmac. So, if you are in the city, maybe you can go for a Rumble in your local park. If you are blessed with a hill in your vicinity, maybe you can Rumble up it and see the sun rise. The point is that you are moving and getting in touch with your surroundings in the morning before the adrenaline has to hit.

I love the idea of the word; 'I go for a Rumble'. I would much rather Rumble than exercise.

Maybe this is part of my departure away from the perfectionism that I was trying to seek in my daily hits of high impact workouts. Sure, they work and you loose a ton of weight in a short space of time, but it can leave you feeling guilty, not 'perfect', drained and if you miss a couple of sessions you feel you can never get back into it. With a good old Rumble you can just pull on a pair of sneakers and cross a run with an amble and know that you are looking after the best thing that was ever created; you!