I’ve always been attracted to simple, logical ideas. In fact, this need to understand how things work created the person I have become.
If you’d met me in my 20s, you would have encountered a committed physical education teacher who ran around the oval with every class, trained teams before school after school and then went to the gym for at least two hours everyday!
In my 30s, I worked long hours and I’d run at least 10km a day and no Sunday was complete without a 30km run. (Obssessive, moi? Maybe!)
I stretched regularly and headed off to meditation retreats to find calm.
Did I find calm? NO! I didn’t think I was fit enough, I never felt calm throughout the day and I wasn’t happy with my body shape.
I have a clear memory of one day noticing my posture was suffering and my neck and upper back was almost always sore.
Then it came to me – my exercise program wasn’t working.
Suddenly, I had this image in my mind that’s stayed with me. I’ve come to call it the ‘cake’ syndrome. I was slapping a lot of icing onto a suspect cake. My skeleton was the cake and exercise, and all the other things I was doing, was the icing.
Hmmm I thought, how illogical. Fast forward 20 years, and The Invisible Exercise program is the end result of hunting down that insight.
I learnt my moving or ‘trying’ muscles had become completely dominant and were pulling my bones away from their original position so my posture was suffering.
As a result, this was increasing the compressional forces in my skeleton and that was why I was experiencing chronic neck and shoulder tension.
It took a lot of questioning and learning but I eventually figured out how to create a beautiful cake – a truly happy, healthy skeleton. And, YES, this is profoundly important as simple and as logical as it sounds.
These days my posture is always good and I don’t have to try. I do a sensible amount of exercise (much, much less than before) to ice my cake. I’m calm and strong and happy with my physique and the way I feel inside.
In a quiet moment check in with yourself. How do you sit? Can you stand comfortably? Do you have a suspect cake/skeleton? Would you like a beautiful cake/skeleton? One that holds all that icing in its correct places?
I’d love to share my simple, logical approach to getting, and staying, in shape with you via The Invisible Exercise website. It will last you a lifetime, I promise.
DM x
www.theinvisibleexercise.com.au