A lot of people start working out once they're past those first few years in the workforce and have saved up a bit of money. Around thirty, in other words. In my case, health problems were what made me decide to take exercise seriously. Not that I'd given it up entirely before that. I'd drop by the gym now and then and do weights, mostly the big three. But that was exercise I did because everyone else did — following a trend, basically.
It started with parkour. One day I was playing Assassin's Creed and the thought struck me that I wanted to try parkour. Moving freely. That looked cool to me. Not so much the backflips and all that. So a few weeks later I went to a parkour gym. A place called Undercover Songpa. After the first trial session I figured I could keep going, so I paid for a month, and... somehow it's been over a year now.
It's rare for someone to stick with a parkour gym for more than a year. Whether they lose interest, or run into money problems (it isn't cheap), or get injured. I'm not someone who handles his body well, so the coaches probably pegged me as a guy who'd quit after a few sessions. But one way or another, I'm still hanging in. Keeping up parkour for over a year is pretty meaningful. Because it means no major injuries. Being shameless enough to play it safe is a skill too.
With parkour as the starting point, I began signing up for all kinds of exercise — climbing, CrossFit, swimming. Normally those would have felt too daunting to bother with, but once parkour had broken through that barrier, the cost of starting something new dropped. And I happened to be unemployed, so I had plenty of time to devote to it. Setting aside athletic ability or health, the person had changed. Into someone who doesn't feel that pressure. First time trying something? Eh, might as well. So what if I'm bad at it. Being a beginner is a state I'm used to. In every world I'm the newbie, and in most groups I've belonged to I was the youngest, so being treated as a pushover is familiar territory.
If you were an athlete from the start, none of this matters, but someone like me, hopeless at sports, needs some kind of trigger. Whether it's health trouble or Assassin's Creed looking cool. What matters, though, is identity. (Atomic Habits also points out that identity matters for changing habits.) I don't have the diligence to show up at a gym day after day without complaint. I skip the gym on the excuse that narcolepsy makes me tired.
So I have to change my identity into that of someone who moves his whole body. Born to Run. Just as there's a famous paper and book by that title — "born to run" — I have to turn myself into born to move. Only by locking myself inside a narrative like that will I keep exercising. For a person like me, anyway. Just doing it doesn't work. I'm a cherry-picker who only wants to suffer meaningfully.
For someone whose body has stiffened up and who now wants to move it, here's what you need first. So this is a piece written for me in October 2024. For the me who is about to run and vault and climb and lift and swim.
Loosening Your Muscles
Rather than doing something painful like weights or running, it seems better to start with something that feels good. Sustainability is the key. For sustainability, I think you can look at three things.
- The sense that you're improving: self-efficacy
- Injury prevention
- The act itself feeling good
To hit 1 and 3, start by diligently loosening your muscles. Done at the right intensity, it feels good. You need some tools: a Rumble Roller, a foam roller, a lacrosse ball, a Theracane, a massage stick or so. If you want a powered massage tool, a Theragun or Therabody Wave should do. You don't need useless stuff like Polio.
You work through the muscles, feeling that good kind of pain. That alone feels good. As the days pass and the pain lessens, you also get a sense that your body is improving. If some spot hurts in particular, you study a bit of anatomy on what's in there. And from there you naturally end up studying rehab too.
Getting into the positions to loosen your body is itself a kind of exercise. The moment you lie face down with your thighs on a Rumble Roller to work your quads, you're doing an easy version of a plank. Just getting into the positions needed to work through every corner of your body means breaking out of the postures an office worker habitually holds. For a beginner, the process of loosening up is itself a simple Pilates workout.
This light exercise part matters especially, because office workers often have collapsed posture from their local muscles going inactive, and if you jump into high-intensity training in the name of "starting to exercise," only the global muscles get stronger while the local muscles fail to develop. Reportedly, when people with movement dysfunction do high-intensity training, there are even cases where local muscle strength decreases.1 Think of how gym bros, surprisingly often, can't do Pilates.
Strengthening Your Ankles
Running, parkour, climbing — the ankles matter enormously in all of them. Two of the exercise veterans I know have had serious ankle injuries. One from parkour, one from climbing. For them it was a single moment of accident, of course, but for beginners the ankle seems the easiest place to get hurt through accumulated damage. Because for all its importance, nobody thinks to strengthen it.
So it's best to start with ankle strengthening. Follow the ankle mobility work from Squat University, then strengthen the ankles with calf raises, jump rope, depth jumps, and the like. I'll sometimes just drop into a squat in the middle of daily life. I do it on the subway. Though once some old crank yelled at me for it, telling me not to sit on the floor. (I wasn't even sitting on the floor.)
Footnotes
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Corrective Exercise Solutions to Common Hip and Shoulder Dysfunction ↩