24 Ways to Move More. Nicole Tsong

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      my

      movement journey

      I couldn’t stop grinning, my hair plastered to my head. I was breathing hard, and I didn’t care. I shrieked with laughter as friends bounced me off-balance on a giant blue-and-yellow inflatable tube. I jumped off a tall platform onto a huge inflated landing pad.

      Splashing around in a lake on inflatable toys, watching my friend Kristen scream as she flew over the water on a rope swing, cooling off from the intense heat in Texas hill country, I had never felt so strong, so trusting of my body, so happy it could play so hard. Not my adult self, anyway.

      I knew, technically, that my strength was above average. For the previous six years, my body had endured long yoga practices several times a week. My legs no longer shook in an extended warrior hold, and I’d made progress on holding a handstand without a wall. For two years, I had taught the sweaty yoga I loved, encouraging my students in a high runner’s lunge or when they attempted a new arm balance. I took teacher trainings where practices sometimes lasted five hours, sweat dripping off my nose onto my mat in downward-facing dog.

      Even so, I didn’t feel like a real mover. Sure, I did yoga four days a week. I felt stronger on hikes than I ever had. But I didn’t think of myself as a physical person, surely not an athlete.

      But that day, playing at the lake, something inside me clicked. Moving my body in ways outside my norm didn’t feel overwhelming or hard. I laughed when other people bounced me off-balance. I raced around like a kid, convinced I could do anything on the inflatable toys scattered across the lake. I was gleeful jumping into the water.

      I felt exhilarated—while moving my body.

      The experience etched itself into my memory. A couple of years passed before the notion that moving my body was an instant pathway to feeling happy and joyful cemented itself—when I knew in my bones that my body was not only strong and capable but also that moving it was an essential ingredient to feeling good on a daily basis.

      Now, I center my life around this fact: moving my body makes me happy.

      If you had told me at age 16, 25, or even 30 that I would love moving so much that it would be a mandatory part of daily life, that I would write a weekly fitness column for The Seattle Times for six years and then turn it into a book dedicated to getting you to bust a move on the dance floor or lace up a pair of roller skates, you may as well have told me I was going to be an A-list movie star.

      But that’s exactly what happened. The fitness part, not the movie star part.

      A WOBBLY BEGINNING

      Perhaps the memory of Dorothy Hamill and her 1976 Olympic gold medal lingered into the early 1980s, so it made sense to my mom that her two girls should learn to fly across the ice. Michelle Kwan was only a toddler then, years away from her Olympic medals. Credit to my mom for being at the forefront of the trend of Asian-American figure skaters.

      At age five, the only reason I stepped out onto the slippery ice was to be like my older sister, Ingrid. I would do anything to keep up with her; I even pretended I wanted to ice skate. I didn’t like falling on the hard ice, so I skated carefully, going slowly as I stepped one foot over the other doing crossovers in the little rink where I learned to skate forward and backward and to perfect T-stops.