Can Exercise as a Grown-Up Be Fun?

Crane Technique!!

What’s funnier than a grown-up dressed like Daniel-san from The Karate Kid?  Mot much, apparently.  I know this because I recently started taking Aikido.

By “recently” I mean less than a month ago.  I tried it because my friend has been taking it for a year and convinced me to try a class, despite my extreme reservations.  To my surprise, I loved it.  I also loved that there were a number of beginners and all adults at this particular dojo.

Aikido is new enough that every time I go (twice a week at the moment), I’m still sore for three days after and I feel like someone has been beating up on me.  They sorta have been, but not like you’d think.  Aikido is a little different than other martial arts.  There’s no crazy round house kicks (or Crane Technique), or leaping into the air while shouting “HI YA!” Thankfully.  Instead, Aikido was founded by a Japanese martial arts master named Morihei Ueshiba in the early part of the 20^th century who believed strongly in the value of peace and reconciliation.  He wanted to adapt his knowledge to a purely defensive martial art, one which would aim for a more “morally evolved” goal of redirecting attacks–often by moving the attacker off his/her center of balance—without permanently harming or killing them.

The result is a surprisingly dance-like sequence of partnered moves with a lovely flow.  As a former dancer and childhood gymnast, this feels natural to me.  Like dance, Aikido requires memorizing sequences of steps and executing them as cleanly as possible.  This is not to say that it is all pretty and prance-y.  For one thing, there’s lots of throws and rolls, which are very cardiovascular-intensive and take some getting used to (keep your head tucked like a turtle or you’ll be sorry!).  There’s also lots of grabbing people, pinning them to the floor and being pinned, and having wrists and shoulders twisted in pretty painful ways.  I am not an aggressive person, nor one who particularly likes stranger-touching, but I am surprisingly okay with all of that.

The best thing about class is that it requires my full attention, so that the hour flies by and only at the end do I realize how hard I’ve been working, how purple my face is, and how dangerously close I am to hurling.  Being fully engaged in the moment is the essence of mindfulness, which is something I strive for and believe is important to fully enjoying life.  Put another way, I seem to achieve to the state of flow described by psychologist Csíkszentmihályi in his super-famous work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, describing his theory that folks are happiest when they are completely absorbed with the activity at hand, akin to being “in the zone”.

Do you engage in types of physical activities that help you achieve “flow” and motivate you to exercise more consistently?  My own motivation to go to Aikido class is surprising to me.  It’s been awhile since I’ve done a physical activity where it’s as much mental as physical; where the activity itself is the reward instead of some imagined future fitness outcome.  I can’t say that I get these feelings of flow while jogging on the treadmill, or even in the class I took at my gym last week (I kept checking the clock), but I imagine some people do.

If you don’t have a “flow” form of exercise already, how can you find one?  The exercise experts are always exhorting us to find fun physical activities, but what these are for us as grown-ups might not be obvious (or, at least, they never were me).  According to Csíkszentmihályi, a “flow” activity should be difficult enough to command your attention and drown out the other thoughts—I think especially the ones about weight, appearance, self-consciousness, etc.—but not too difficult as to make the activity impossibly frustrating.  For me, recalling my childhood skills and abilities provides a clue to my compatibility with Aikido: I have always been fairly coordinated and flexible, and my dance background makes picking up new steps fairly easy (p.s.- Aikido is still really hard).  Maybe you’re a person who enjoyed roller skating as a child and was pretty good at it too.  Perhaps you could join a roller derby team or an in-line skating club on Meetup, or maybe your innately good balance means you’d have a knack for skiing or cycling.

Even if you have ideas about what activities might be a good match, my experiences suggest that cultivating an openness to trying new things–even if you feel fat, unfit, or old—is key, because it’s unlikely that the first new thing you try will both be fun and fit your schedule, finances, people preferences, and comfort level.  I have been periodically trying new things since I started my blog over a year ago, and Aikido for only less than a month.  Trying new things has reminded me of the pleasures of being a complete novice, which can outweigh the frustrations. When you’re a novice, the fast rate of learning and improvement is hugely rewarding.

“Fun” as a grown-up is much the same as fun as a kid; it’s an unfussy, natural melding of things like effort, novelty, mindfulness/flow and social interaction. As children, the difference is that we are open to the fun of trying new things, before we learn to fear failure and looking silly.  Trying to be more open and child-like can help us find the fun in exercise too.