Turn up the volume

A true fact about me: I’m terrible at watching another person move and then moving in the same way. My coping mechanism for this limitation is that instead of doing what ordinary people do—watching and then doing the same thing—I go through an intermediate step of describing the move in words, and then executing my verbal description.

It’s a slow process. First I have to watch enough times to figure out what the verbal description is, and then I have work through the move very slowly, executing my verbal description while (slowly, and with difficulty) comparing what I’m doing to what I’m supposed to be doing.

Because of all this, I’ve always found it hard to learn things like dance moves and martial arts moves, but it also makes it hard to learn even just ordinary exercise moves.

I mention this, because it has a lot to do with why I’m only now starting to turn up the volume on my exercise: Over the past year, I have added a lot of new exercise moves, drawn from Katy Bowman’s Move Your DNA, from Ben Musholt’s Parkour Strength Training, from Erwan Le Corre’s MovNat videos, and from other sources. For a long time, I’ve felt awkward doing a lot of these moves, and am only now starting to feel like I’m doing them well enough that it’d be safe to start doing them in higher volumes.

One thing that Julie Angel’s book Breaking the Jump reminded me of was that the early parkour practitioners pushed the volume way up in their training, doing hundreds of push-ups, thousands of sit-ups, and covering long distances balancing on a rail (or hanging under a girder, or jumping from rock-to-rock or post-to-post) every day, often multiple times a day.

Of course I can’t do hundreds of push-ups or thousands of sit-ups. What I can do—what I’ve started doing this week—is add sets. I can do 40 meters of quadrupedal movement, and then do another 40 meters later in my training session. I can do 4 negative pull-ups, and then another 4, and then another 3. And so on.

In between sets, I can do the more flexibility oriented restorative exercises. (Right now I’m working on getting the ankle, knee, and hip mobility I need to do deep squats.)

I started upping the volume on the pull-ups and quadrupedal movement a while ago. Now I’m adding some of the newer exercises, such as lunges and squats, that I hadn’t done before, and that felt awkward enough that I wasn’t inclined to add volume.

So far it’s feeling really good.

Oh, and to bring things full circle, it turns out there is an upside to my coping mechanism for my inability to mirror movement—it has made me a better tai chi instructor. When I’m teaching a move, I already have a verbal description of how the move goes. I already have a vocabulary out of which to build descriptions. And I have a lot of practice at producing a verbal description of a movement. These things have turned out to be very helpful.