Not smaller, stronger

The Great Pause, I read somewhere, that’s what they’re calling it. Accurate, sort of. Not every part of lockdown has felt slowed down, but now, two months in, there’s a sweet, honeyed slowness to life that has felt really important on every level: mental, physical, emotional... This new slowness has also shone a light on the fact that I usually lean on coping mechanisms and learned responses when dealing with stress, instead of ever actually working through the thing. This time around: not so much.

I've been looking at a lot of stuff I've been carting around for way too long and that I’m hoping to leave as much as possible of it behind, to be swept away with the last vestiges of this pandemic. My relationship with my body and the issues that have dogged it is top on my list of Things I Would Rather Leave Behind. It’s a relationship that has not always been a joyful one and through no failing of its own. I’m not sure when I went from the kid who loved to run about to the teenager who...did not, or when the awkwardness around my body actually set in, but it’s this uneasy tolerance I’ve carted around through adolescence, through my teens and twenties, and even into my thirties.

It is a strange realisation to suddenly have in your thirties: I feel like a visitor in my own home. Being a woman in India does not lend itself to being best buds with your bod. There’s an ingrained sense of shame that so many of us carry around, to cover up, to not show too much of, to just be less visible... it’s not something I ever thought about, because bar one or two girls that I knew in school, we all held ourselves the same way. I noticed it in the time spent living out of the country and was discomfited at first: why wasn’t I as free and at-home in my own skin as the women I saw around me at university? It has nothing to do with how you look, or what size you are, and everything to do with being visible, or too visible, all mixed in with this awful idea of trying to ‘fix’ yourself, all while constantly being reminded of what we’re ‘supposed’ to look like. It's all around us, all the time.

This relentless drive for self-optimisation drives many women, women like me, I have to admit (with no small amount of discomfort). Women who work and pride themselves on their efficiency and ability to get shit done and also invest in our health and hyper-plan our days and by 9am we could already have run through about 17 different tasks.

“The premise of most workouts is to be smaller, thinner. Suddenly the goal wasn’t to be less of anything, but more: stronger. More capable.”

Is it really health that we’re really investing in though? In the most myopic of all ways, yes I suppose. Yes, I will be healthier if I am eating my greens and get a workout in, versus somebody who hasn’t book-ended her days with virtue. I guess. As if there’s any real meaning in just getting stuff DONE and sending email for ten hours a day, punctuated only with wolfing down food designed to fuel the whole fucked-up enterprise. It ‘worked’ though, I suppose. My body looked okay, worked okay, and more to the point, I didn’t have to think about it, so I could focus instead on my hyper-accelerated life.

Now, in my thirties, I’ve come to a new place with my body: I’m done with the hypercritical, hyperfocus that’s dogged our relationship so far, and I’m starting to realise that I need to transition this relationship from a neck-up to a neck-down activity. More gut-led, less head-focussed.

Previously, when I signed up to gyms, yoga, pilates, whatever... it was always with one aim: to change, to be thinner, to be less. In yoga I found presence and peace and pleasure, but I did not find the definition and strength and visual results I was looking for. SO I signed up for pilates, and classes on the reformer gave me core strength, an understanding of the mid-section of my body, and longer, leaner lines. I didn’t leave my pilates sessions sweaty, or spent though, or even feeling particularly clear. There was room enough on the reformer for my looping thoughts and I’d leave vaguely on edge, dissatisfied. At the gym I found weights and I was daunted at first, put off by the reams of Delhi boys with big shoulders and spindly legs waiting in line for the machines, but there was something there. When I started going to Crossfit everything turned on its head.

Those classes weren’t based on the premise of most other workouts: that you come to them to be smaller, to be thinner. Suddenly the goal wasn’t to be less of anything, but more: stronger. More capable. Properly learning to lift makes you regard your body in a completely different way, to embrace your ability and strength and actually marvel at what your body can do.

I was introduced to the box that I go to by an ex-colleague (thank you Alice), who lured me there with promises of abundant parking, really good showers, and great trainers. The trainers are great. I speak of them often and recommend them near-daily and it’s because that small group of individuals (co-founders Nakul and Akash and their two additional trainers Z and Manali) have given me something no other form of fitness or studio ever gave me before: the ability to stop hyper-focusing on the bits of my body I don’t like, and in its place, an appreciation and awe for what it can do.

There are no mirrors at the box. It’s an unusual choice for a fitness destination, and I didn’t notice the first few times I was in there, but I did notice when I next went to a class somewhere that did have the usual wall-to-wall mirroring. I noticed that I watched myself instead of paying attention to my form, or that it bothered me how my arms looked, or that I wasn’t really enjoying the movement and music and sweat in quite the same way, because my brain pivoted back to it’s most well-worn pathways: ‘ugh I hate how...’

When we were pushed to set goals for 2020 (little did we know at the time how different training would look come the summer) we were told in no uncertain terms: do not list a weight loss goal. List a food habit if you must, a strength or distance goal by all means, but make it tangible and nothing to do with what size your body is, or you want it to be. My three were to run 5k, to do a 100-kilo deadlift, and hold a minute-long handstand. I haven’t hit any of them yet, but I read them back now and I am in awe that these are my goals, so radically different than they would have been one year ago.

It doesn’t look like gyms are opening any time soon; they’re the very last in all the plans across the world so this new world of digital fitness looks like it is it for a while. I’ve managed to procure dumbells, and so there’s a familiar rhythm that I’ve managed to get into with it, but lockdown triggered a cascade of that familiar shit. Obsessive loops around how my body was changing (um, it had to, I was scarfing down a Nirula’s hot chocolate fudge per day and soothing anxiety with cheese and meat) paired with hypercritical thoughts around how ‘i’d worked so hard for so many months/years only to let it all go to shit in weeks’ and just that old familiar tone to it all that suddenly felt really unwelcome.

Akash and Nakul both have talked me through a few things that I’ve taken to heart even outside the box. To improve a lift, don’t do just the lift, over and over. You support the network, the muscles around that lift. You do the accessory work and think about your body holistically. You rest. you stretch. You do the boring, microscopic mobility movement that feels like it doesn’t have any point, but suddenly, the next time you attempt to pick up the big, heavy thing that eluded you previously, up it goes. It involves mastering your own energy, and the shitty internal chatter that says ‘oh I can’t lift THAT’, when actually, with a different track running through your head, you really can.

My purest moments at the box haven’t been about lifting at all, but about letting go. The weightlessness that comes with getting out of your head, and letting your body move and do what it does best when we’re not getting in its way with our if’s and but’s. Crossfit gave me a sense of that possibility, that I have untapped reserves of strength and ability that I didn’t even know, and that really I can get out of my own way, which has been my biggest lesson in this lockdown. This isn’t a natural state for me; every single one of those trainers have ignored my voluble, whiny protests and plaintive bleating that no, that one is definitely not going up, not today at least, and have coaxed and cajoled me into these euphoric moments where you have a sense of what really is possible when you get out the way.