A cool and dry night.
Warmup
- Turn wrists, turn elbows, turn shoulders, use full range of motion
- Go on all fours, put little weight on the hands, push body up with the wrists. Stretch lower arms in several directions. Carefully feel into your wrists, what feels good and what not.
- Swing whole body, feel the blood pouring into your fingertips.
- Swing even more until knees touch the ground.
- Make circles with knees (around hips).
- Make circles with feet (around knees).
- Turn your ankles.
Exercises
- Start running slowly. Cautiously accelerate to jogging speed and above (over 2-3 minutes). Always observe your feelings and your body. If it starts to get unpleasant, slow down a bit, running slower for a while, until you feel regenerated, then accelerate again.
- Now make this waves more pronounced. Accelerate faster and to higher speed, regenerate at a slower pace. Play with the difference.
- Take it higher until the right speed for regeneration is walking.
- Walk up the hill on all fours. This is hard! Again a long monotonous workload. Keep attention to your body, keep couriosity, find a rhythm that keeps you going. Don’t forget
- Tree-loving. Climb every tree in an alley. If one is too easy, try different ways get up the tree.
Tools used
It was a quite simple training we did yesterday. But we already used many tools to enjoy training:
- Waves and observations. During running, we went from an endurance run through a fartlek to interval training. If we did it right, it was not the unpleasant experience that is normally associated with interval training. The constant observation, the fact that we will slow down and allow our breath to catch up as soon as it gets unpleasant gives us the freedom to play in areas that are normally already unpleasant. Don’t forget to deeply enjoy the relax phases.
- “Brain dump”: write everything you ponder about or any unfinished trains of thoughts on a piece of paper. Put it in your pocket. You can continue after training (if its still important then)
- Keep mindfulness: This is a hard one! When you are forced to do something where you can’t stop or do breaks. Your only chance here is to stay in the mode of mindfulness as good as possible. You may have noticed that while it gets difficult quickly, there comes a “second breath” after a while. When you can reach a “stable state” at a higher level of effort. And use your hard breath or the alternation of contraction and relaxation as anchor. Don’t be disappointed if it didn’t work yesterday, it requires practice and depends on daily condition. It is really important here (and an important habit to build) to stay your friend. Meaning use all your conscious attention to care for you, to encourage you, to support you. Sounds weird?
- Ever changing demand, no time nor need to ponder. In the “tree loving” session, there are easy and difficult trees. If one just does not let you climb it, you go to the next, try new ways. Later you come back and maybe the first tree works now. No thinking, just doing. Trust that your body will pick up the hints and both strength and coordination will improve. All you have to do is “don’t stop playing”!
Train Joy 