It’s been almost 6 months since I’ve worked out… like gone to the gym to lift weights. If someone would have told me one year ago that I’d skip the weights for that long, I would have told them they’re crazy.

A couple of years ago, during the peak of physical pain I was experiencing, I started to take up a pretty intense workout, weights and running routine of about 5 days per week. I developed a lot of strength, and my body was looking fairly chiselled, and I learned to do some cool pull up flip things and even how to do a handstand. But no matter how much I worked out, I always felt extremely tense, tight, and my body parts felt tweaked and misaligned.

Towards the end of my workout phase, I started to find myself spending half of my 1 hour weight training time doing extremely slow, almost meditative-like movements. Just allowing myself to feel all of the micro movements within my body. I wasn’t getting my full workouts in, but it felt, good, relaxing, opening and energizing, as opposed to clenching and stressful.

I bring this up now, not because I feel 100% in optimal health with zero pain, but because after 6 months of not working out I’m beginning to feel my body fall into a new alignment. My hips are opening, knees are unkinking, toes are spreading out and my torso is expanding. Sounds sort of crazy to say, but it’s as if my body had been held in this perpetually tight and wound up state… my muscles were getting stronger but in the process, my body was getting further locked into a pattern that wasn’t actually ideal for the flow of energy and blood and breath throughout my system.

Now, it’s not like I haven’t been doing anything with my body the last 6 months. I’ve started training in Bagua Zhang, a Chinese martial art which is rooted in spiral movement. It’s aim is to align with and leverage the naturally occurring spiral patterns in the body for martial power. Rather than rely on muscle strength, bagua develops tendon and fascial strength (although I’m not sure if strength is the right term… springiness, elasticity, bounce, pop, vibrancy?) and gets one in touch with these lines of force in the body system in order to harness their flow of energy using the least amount of physical exertion as possible.

So I’ve been practicing the fundamental movement patterns of bagua, allowing my muscles to de-tensify and even dissipate a bit, in order to create space for a new structure and strength to emerge. It’s absolutely fascinating. I’m still in the beginning stages of the process, and while I’ve started to incorporate some more body weight movements and exercises back into my routine (yes, I am doing these at the gym now, albeit without weights!), I am still largely focused on deprogramming my fascial and nervous systems to allow for the new forms to take hold throughout my body.