24 Ways to Move More. Nicole Tsong

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      I also was shifting out of the harsh conversations I regularly had with myself. I would start class stressed about my latest story at the newspaper—what I had written or what I’d potentially messed up. I would leave class feeling peaceful, less critical about what had happened that day at work.

      Other lessons settled in as I pushed myself into one more wheel or a new pose. Every time I did a pose I didn’t want to, just like the first time I’d skated onto the ice to compete as an eight-year-old, my brain was being rewired. Even if a pose looked intimidating or I was tired, I learned to try it anyway.

      My new perspective was simple—I can do more than I think I can.

      If you asked my friends, people would say I already lived this way. I moved to China to teach English right after I graduated from college. I lived in Alaska for almost four years, braving frigid, dark winters. I covered Congress at 26 years old. At 27 I got a job at The Seattle Times, my biggest goal yet.

      Then, I left a job in the only industry I had ever known—journalism—to teach yoga. Before I gave notice, I sometimes felt immobilized by worry about leaving behind a steady paycheck, health care, and security, not to mention an underlying concern that I wasn’t a very good yoga teacher. Finding the inner strength to walk into my editor’s office and tell her I was leaving and then enter a new field where I was reliant on a brand-new skill set radically changed my self-image. I felt I had finally crushed the voice in my head that told me I couldn’t do big, challenging things.

      FIT FOR LIFE

      When the editor of Pacific NW Magazine, the weekly Sunday magazine at The Seattle Times, emailed me to see if I wanted to chat about a potential writing project, the role of a fitness columnist did not occur to me. Why would it? I had left the newspaper a year earlier to teach yoga. I assumed she wanted to talk about a freelance story.

      During our call, she said, “Nicole, we’re looking for a fitness columnist. Are you interested?”

      I was flattered—and baffled. It seemed ludicrous for me to write about fitness.

      “I’m a yoga teacher,” I told her. “I don’t know anything about fitness.”

      A yoga teacher is a perfectly good credential for writing a fitness column, she responded.

      Was it? I knew how to do warrior poses. I knew nothing about taking a barre class or lifting weights. I didn’t even belong to a gym.

      The idea, the editor said, was to try new approaches to fitness, take classes, and see what evolved.

      I researched fitness columns in other newspapers and couldn’t find a columnist who tried a new activity every week; I wondered if there was a reason. I was unsure I could come up with enough ideas to last a year.

      But I missed writing. Though I was still enthralled by my new teaching career, my inner writer clamored for me to say yes.

      I wrote a column proposal, with ideas including paddleboard yoga, barre classes, and hula hooping. The editors named the column Fit for Life.

      The column merged my peculiar mix of skills—writing, a baseline of strength and body awareness, and a willingness to do new things. What I didn’t know then was I had signed myself up for six years of weekly reminders that I could do more than I thought I could. I didn’t know the column would shatter every internal conversation I’d ever had with myself about my body and strength. I didn’t know Fit for Life would redefine my sense of self and reshape my future into one of a forever mover.

      All I thought was: Here goes nothing.

      CREATING A MOVEMENT-RICH LIFE

      Taking weekly classes taught me that if weights or strength were involved, I’d like the class. If there was a competition, I’d want to win. If I was required to run, I’d detest every step, then tell myself afterward it had been good for me.

      I learned that my yoga strength could carry me only so far, like when my brain overloaded from dance choreography in a hip-hop class, or I was sore for three days after bouncing on a trampoline for 30 minutes. For the first couple of years, I was sore. All the time.

      I became a perpetual newcomer. I took new classes every week; I rarely took any twice. It was comical and frustrating, fun and ridiculous. If you haven’t been a newbie in years and are nervous about the prospect of trying something you haven’t done before, you are not alone.

      I learned to be cool with mastering nothing. As soon as I caught on to a technique in an intro series, the class was over, and I was off to the next. I was forced to let go of concerns about looking foolish, because it was inevitable. You aren’t good at something the first time you do it, ever.

      The column became the real-life version of a constant internal practice: Do a new thing. Get over yourself. Repeat.

      Four years into the column, after I had tried hundreds of classes and learned a tremendous amount about how to recover from intense movement and injury, I was—truthfully—a bit smug. I didn’t think there was a whole lot more to discover about movement that I didn’t already know. I had done every permutation of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) imaginable. I’d rowed on open water. I’d learned to breakdance, and I’d swung from a trapeze. I’d smiled during swing dance, and I’d swayed my hips to the hula. I’d gotten up at 5:00 a.m. to go to an early morning yoga class followed by a dance party at 7:00 a.m. I’d returned home at midnight after snowshoeing by moonlight.

      If you met me at a party and asked if I had tried a particular activity, chances were about 90 percent I had taken a class in it.

      ENTER THE SCIENTIST

      When I met biomechanist Katy Bowman, who was introduced to me as an innovator in the world of movement, I presumed she would tell me a more detailed version of what I already knew. By then I was subscribing to the approach that had taken root in functional fitness, that the reason to be strong was to carry your kids and live your life. I wanted to be strong! So I, along with so many others at fitness studios, swung kettlebells, did pull-ups, sprinted, and released СКАЧАТЬ