e!ortless exercise

A Guide to Fitness, Flow States

and Inner Awareness

Grant Molyneux

First edition

Copyright © 2008 by Grant MolyneuxFirst Paperback Edition – November 2008

ISBN: 9780981145303 (trade paperback)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro-duced in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information browsing, storage, or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information on bulk orders contact orders@frontlist.com or fax 403-253-5642

Distributed to the trade by Ingram Books

Disclaimer – Client’s names have been changed to protect their privacy.

A!"#$%&'()*'#+,As I reflect on those people I owe a debt of thanks to, I’m

reminded of the adage, “All is one.” No truer words have ever been spoken. These words point to the universal truth that every atom and molecule in our universe is intimately linked to every other atom and molecule. In this way everything influences everything else in an exquisite balance and interplay. So it follows that this book is simply an outflow of all the positive interactions I have had with the hundreds of clients I’ve had the opportunity to work with over the past 30 years. This book is really their story. It was born out of a desire to communicate the practice of e!ortless exercise and to share this vision of movement with others who value quality, integrated and sustainable fitness. I have had the good fortune to witness numerous personal transformations and peak athletic performances. My deepest thanks go out to all my clients who have trusted my methods, found the courage to take the path less traveled and embraced an e!ortless approach to fitness.

Thanks also to Wendy, my wife and alchemical editor. She has transmuted coal into diamonds, taking my often rough and disjointed concepts and weaving them into a cohesive whole. Without her, this book simply would never have made it out of my computer. I can still here her shouting from her upstairs o"ce, “Listen to this …!” followed by wails of laughter. She toiled endlessly over this manuscript and to this day knows it more intimately than I do. She often catches me up on details I have long since forgotten; she truly has been the wind beneath my wings.

Lastly, I would like to thank Judy McCallum, Peter Neiman, Keith Hanna and Lee Coyne for critiquing the manuscript and providing me with invaluable insight, connections and suggestions. They too have shaped the final product to a point of inclusion and refinement that makes me feel confident of the final product. Again, and I can’t say it enough, many thanks.

CONTENTS

F#$%&$' -

C(&)*+$ ,: D+-././0 E--#$*1+22 E3+$4.2+ ..The E!ortless Exercise Vision ,5Intuition and Inner Awareness ,6A Personal Journey ,7Health and Fitness Pyramid 58Sustainable Exercise 55E!ortless Exercise # ,: Listening to Inner Body Energy 59

C(&)*+$ 5: I/2).$+' M#*.:&*.#/ /0The Passion of Play 56Permission versus Prescription 5;Staying On Track 57Putting Fun Back into Fitness 9,Creating Resonant Experiences 95E!ortless Exercise # 5: Practicing Awareness 96

C(&)*+$ 9: C$+&*./0 F1#% S*&*+2 12The Power of Warm-Ups 9;The How to of Warm-Up <,

Check-In Phase <,Warm-Up Rule <5Hydration <9Fuel <<Breathing <<The “Itch” <6

Monitoring Heart Rate <=The Crucial Cool-Down <7

Check-Out Phase <7Short Sessions 68E!ortless Exercise # 9: Entering E!ortlessness 6,

C(&)*+$ <: E--#$*1+22 E/'>$&/4+ 01The Push/Pull Concept 69Finding the Flow 6=Nasal Breathing =8

The Heart Connection =8Respiratory E"ciency =,Parasympathetic Calm =,How to Nasal Breathe =,Darth Vader Technique =,Upper Limit =5Breath and Pacing =5Tips for Runners and Swimmers =9

E!ortless Training Heart Rate =<Aerobic Intensity =6

Determining your E!ortless Training Zone (ETZ) ==Method ,: Exercise Experimentation ==Method 5: Nasal Threshold =;Method 9: Blood Lactate Testing =7Max VO5 Test =?Setting your Lower Limit =?ETZ Adjustments ;8ETZ is Sport Specific ;8ETZ Tips ;,

The Rejuvenation Zone ;5Beyond Heart Rate ;9E!ortless Exercise # <: Discovering Zen Experiences ;6

C(&)*+$ 6: S.@)1+ F1+3.A.1.*B &/' S*$+/0*( 22Pursuing Integrated Exercise ;;E!ortless Flexibility ;7

Stretching and Injuries ;?How to Stretch E!ortlessly 7,

E!ortless Strength 79The Strength Curve 7<The One-Set Strength Process 7=Progressing E!ortlessly 7;One-Set Summary 7?Generic Weight Training Schedules ?8

Multiple-Set Training ?,The Rest Requirement ?,

E!ortless Exercise # 6: Valuing Relaxation and Rest ?5

C(&)*+$ =: E--#$*1+22 P$#0$+22.#/ -3The Forward Training Plan ?6The Ten Percent Tip ?=Exercise Anchors ?;Mind Games ??Sustainable Change ,88Measuring Fitness Backwards ,8,Walking Experiment ,8,The Magic of Consistency ,85Changing Perceptions ,8<Marathon and Racing Tips ,86Effortless Exercise # =: Progressing as an Intuitive Process ,8=

Beginners Progression – the one minute solution ,8=Training Progression – the 68 percent solution ,8;

C(&)*+$ ;: I/C>$.+2 &$+ & G.-* ..4The Injury Epidemic ,,8“Mind Over Matter” Thinking ,,,Avoid Injury Through Intuition ,,5How to Mend Injuries ,,5Eight Healing Steps ,,9Illness as Injury ,58

Health and Fitness ,58Resuming Exercise ,5,Light Weight Lifting ,55Tips for Swimmers ,55Environment ,59

The Overtraining Trap ,59Less is More ,5<Recognizing Overtraining ,5<Freshness Question ,56

E!ortless Exercise # ;: Healing Practices ,56

C(&)*+$ 7: T#%&$' & L.-+ T.@+ #- E3+$4.2+ ./5A Typical “Workout” ,57Internal versus External Focus ,98Distractions ,95

Media ,95Conversation ,99Group Training ,99Group Training Guidelines ,9<

Setting Goals ,96Pacing E!ortlessly ,96The Heart of Exercise – Enjoyment ,97E!ortless Exercise # 7: Enjoying Each Session ,<,

R+-+$+/4+2 .30

AA#>* *(+ A>*(#$ .32

9

FORWARDThirty-three years ago, as a first-year physical education

student, I questioned my physiology professor about what might be the ideal kind of exercise. His immediate response was, “The kind that you do!” As I was learning about self-discipline, this was wise counsel at the time. However, as my life has evolved, I have come to understand that although the best kind of exercise may be the “kind you do,” the exercise you continue to do must eventually become “e!ortless.” Grant understands this. Self-discipline and e!ort may get you started, but they won’t get you healthy.

Although “e!ortless exercise” would have been inconceivable to me as a university student, I understand today the message Grant shares in his book. When exercise is incorporated into the unique needs of your mind, body, and spirit; when it becomes integrated into your creative authenticity; when it shifts from being a “workout” to a “practice” aligned with who you are as a person, exercise can, indeed, evolve to a place where it becomes e!ortless. The body knows what kind of exercise is right for you and how much is enough. However, it requires that you stop exercising and go within to discover this. Many of us need rest, quiet time, and relaxation much more than we need exercise. As you listen closely to your body and its ever-changing needs, you access all the wisdom required to create an exercise practice that will not only be life-changing, but will be with you for life.

For twenty-five years, as a nationally-ranked competitive runner, running was e!ortless for me. This didn’t mean that there weren’t days that I hurt from the training. It often took discipline and e!ort to get my running shoes on and get my feet on the trail. But being e!ortless meant that I was intended to run in my life. It came to me like swimming to a swan. Even when I started running in junior high and I couldn’t run a mile without walking,

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it was still e!ortless because it felt authentic. My particular body and psychological makeup were meant to run. I knew this without even knowing that I knew it.

After running competitively for nearly three decades, my consciousness began shifting. I was running nearly six-minute per mile marathons, but I couldn’t sit still for six minutes. I began to understand that even though running was natural for me, I had used running as a way of running away from myself. As my consciousness shifted, so did my relationship to running. As I began growing into a new awareness, running evolved into an e!ort, and I knew then it was time for less running. It was time to start doing other forms of exercise that deepened my connection with my emerging authentic self.

As I age, I have become increasingly respectful of the diversity of the human experience and the diversity of the ways of getting beyond mere physical health to an authentic life that integrates the physical, mental, and spiritual sides of our nature. I give credit to Grant for being a major contributor to starting me on this path almost fifteen years ago. The first thing I learned from Grant was the di!erence between health and fitness and how much of my competitive experience compromised my health in an e!ort to get “fit.” As he slowed me down and helped me tune into my body, I began to connect with my authentic desires. As I learned to listen to my body, I emerged into exercise that was integrated with my whole life. As I continue to adapt and re-align my habits with who I am, exercise continues to be e!ortless.

If you are curious about transforming your relationship with exercise; if you are finding that exercise is merely a “discipline” to squeeze into a busy life; if you find yourself pushing and injuring yourself in your exercise regime; or if you feel guilty when you don’t meet self-imposed, unrealistic expectations of yourself; and if you want to develop a relationship with exercise that is authentic, holistic, and e!ortless, then this book will change your life as you discover and honor your own unique path. I wish you all the very best on this journey. It is well worth the e!ort to make it e!ortless.

David Irvine,Author, Becoming Real: Journey To Authenticity

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CHAPTER !: DEFINING EFFORTLESS EXERCISE

Learning To Go Within

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you felt great every time you exercised – every step of the way? What if you could consistently reach a flow state, where time stands still and you move along e!ortlessly, where you experience the bliss of the runner’s high and benefit from all the positive health benefits of exercise without any of the downside of pain and injury. Ask yourself, “What part would exercise play in my life if I experienced heightened vitality during and after each session?”

Wouldn’t it also be motivating if the process of exercise was always enjoyable and positive? Consider how you’d view exercise if you didn’t have to push through physical pain and worry about becoming injured. What if you were able to reach your goals harmo-niously without the struggle and strain of stressful workouts? Imagine what your life would look like if it became e!ortless to maintain your ideal weight, play with your kids, climb a mountain or participate in a triathlon on any given day, at any given age.

If you answered a resounding “Yes!” to the above questions, then this book speaks to you. Its content focuses on the quality of the exercise experience. Whether you’re a beginner or wanting to win an Ironman triathlon, the quality of your exercise ultimately determines your outcome. And it’s the quality of the experience that keeps you coming back for more. The ideas in this book help you to go within for a deeper, richer experience of your body in motion. E!ortless exercise focuses on quality training, beginning by listening to your inner body sensations and integrating this energy

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with simple scientific tools to create sustainable lifestyle fitness or peak athletic performance through meditative flow states.

Because this book is a paradigm shift for many fitness partici-pants, certain key ideas are restated from chapter to chapter to act as a reinforcement of the e!ortless exercise vision and to illus-trate how it di!ers from traditional thought and habitual behavior patterns with regard to various interrelated fitness topics. In this way, some chapters such as Injuries are a Gift can stand alone and may be approached in this way. Give yourself permission to read this review material if it speaks to you or e!ortlessly read on.

T6' E77$8+&',, E9'8!:,' V:,:$#It is true that an energetic flow state can be dialed in with each

and every exercise session. You simply require a new vision of exercise to guide you toward the e!ortless state and teach you how to prolong this experience. E;ortless exercise runs counter to the “no pain, no gain” paradigm so common in our culture today. Also training e!ortlessly doesn’t require expensive technological bells and whistles or complicated criteria based training charts or hiring a personal trainer – it’s about getting in touch with a calm, balanced and highly conscious state of intuitive fitness that lies within you.

Learning to find the e!ortlessness within exercise frees you from having to motivate yourself to “do” exercise ever again. You’ll be drawn into fitness like a magnet and experience the life giving power that is fundamental to movement. Here’s an example of how one runner discovered that a marathon can be an exhilarating experience rather than an exhausting one:

I recall a first-time marathoner who agreed to train in the e!ortless flow state. When we started, I asked Dean to wear a monitor during all of his training runs. In the first week, on each run, he wouldn’t warm-up and he’d let his heart rate jump to "#$ beats per minute every time. Once I explained the e!ortless vision to him, he was able to bring his heart rate down to the mid "%$s and run e!ortlessly. Dean “plodded along” as he called it for months but gradually his

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times got faster and his experience of e!ortlessness became deeper. We both witnessed his body unfolding and developing in an unforced and natural way.

After a year of consistent injury free training in a state of inner harmony and flow he entered in the NY city marathon and ran this first marathon in the absence of any stress or pain. He asked me before he left what pace would ensure he had a successful overall experience. I responded by telling him: Let your body be your guide, keep it aerobic, keep it below your threshold, breathe through your nose and enjoy New York. After finishing the race, Dean called me from the plane on the way home and his first words were, “When can I race again?”

I reflected on this comment deeply because most people view a marathon as a goal that, by nature, must involve pain or su!ering of some sort. This marathoner’s experience was one of enjoyment and pleasure, and he couldn’t wait to sign up for the next race.

Training e!ortlessly works for the young or old, competitive athlete or weekend participant – for anyone wanting to approach exercise in a sustainable way. This book examines a di!erent way to exercise. How di!erent you ask? It’s for those of you who are discouraged by the “mind over matter” approach and are seeking a graceful approach. It is also for those fitness participants who are interested in maximizing their exercise experience every day through experiencing that “runner’s high.” And it’s for those who simply want exercise to bring them enjoyment, vitality and longevity as a lifestyle activity.

The e!ortless vision of exercise calls for a shift in your external expectations and traditional thoughts about exercise and asks that you give yourself the permission to honor your body’s inner process first and foremost. Once beginners and experienced athletes alike learn to listen to their body’s energy they can integrate this inner wisdom with scientific knowledge to create a unique personal training program. E!ortless exercise represents a dynamic balance that draws on the best of both worlds. Where science is concerned

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within the e!ortless experience, it’s all about balance, integration and sustainability.

I use the yin/yang symbol as an illustration: You need a balance between the two opposing energies of light/dark, male/female, objective/subjective or science/intuition to create an inter-dependent and unified whole. The same goes for exercise. If you train solely with your intuition you may find yourself under training and unsure about measuring your progress properly; if you train only scientifically you may find yourself over training or injured and confused about technological complexity. I like to think of the line between intuition and science as a sliding scale. It moves in one direction or the other depending on your age, experience, aerobic base, health, injuries or athletic goals. Sometimes more intuitive listening is needed to heal an injury, and during race planning a greater need for scientific prediction may be helpful. But most importantly, the balance is specific to your unique physiology, and your intuition can best predict that specificity with accuracy.

It’s my hope that this book helps you explore the power of exercise as a tool to reshape your training from within as opposed to training being only the exterior force of having to accomplish exercise as a means to an end. Because there is no shortage of excellent research, books and magazine articles on scientific training programs, the main focus of the contents will be on understanding and strengthening the often overlooked intuitive side of the exercise experience. We’re going to flip the experience of training upside down and embrace a process oriented mindset to bring a deep richness to each and every moment you move your body. It’s from this place of ease and e!ortlessness that most world records are set.

After watching Usain Bolt easily shatter the world record 100 meter dash time at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it was clear to me that he was e!ortlessly engaged in a process that went well beyond a simple physical experience. We all witnessed his enjoyment, his elevated and e!ortless energy and the sheer magic of his perfor-mance. There was an absence of stress and strain and pain. He embodied the e!ortless experience. This book points towards a similar integrated fitness experience. You may have had that same experience when a race felt easy, or you were floating along during training or you were caught up in the moment and accomplished

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a personal best you thought unattainable. This book teaches you how to dial that powerful experience in and capture the deeper, inner experience of exercise.

The e!ortless exercise experience guides you graciously around the athletic “wall” rather than insisting you crash through it with more hard work. My thesis remains that if I teach you how to reach a meditative flow state during exercise that you’ll want to exercise every day for the rest of your life. I won’t have to motivate you to do it; you’ll want to do it because of its intrinsic value. All the outer benefits we fitness professionals profess come from this place of vital inner energy, but it has to start from within to be truly authentic.

Developing this passion for movement is at the core of the e!ortless exercise practice: Learn to exercise in an empowered, sustainable flow state and you’ll never become sedentary again. Many clients have remarked upon how easy and great it feels when they exercise in this fashion. They reflect on the joy exercise brings them and how they are drawn magnetically to do more. It’s immensely rewarding to see their fitness develop naturally from within.

Each and every one of us has a unique physiology and is equipped with an inner wisdom that is often neglected. Tapping into this inner wisdom and freeing its power is the key to developing an e;ortless exercise program that’s right for you. This book and its exercises and stories are invitations to listen to your inner body energy; it’s from this intuitive place that you learn how to avoid injury, progress without strain and coax your body to greater physical heights. You’ll exercise in harmony with your unique physiology, and you’ll be equipped with tools to develop your physical talents in the direction of your choosing.

It’s exciting to feel yourself gliding along in that flow state, it’s exhilarating to experience the ease of movement that your body was designed for and it’s downright empowering to experience the full depth of the exercise experience. If you’re ready, let’s go within.

I#+<:+:$# =#( I##'8 A%=8'#',,Before you sign up for that running course, hire a coach to help

you lose weight or even buy a heart rate monitor, begin by getting in touch with your inner body energy through becoming aware of the link between your intuition and your physical body. E!ortless

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exercise requires first and foremost that you listen to the unique energy signals of your body before, during and after exercise. The e!ortless exercise experience begins by cultivating awareness through alert stillness.

The real art of fitness – the skill, the proficiency through practice, the miraculous creativity and the unique personal evolution – develops through a conscious inner connection with your body. This deep connection to your individual physiology respectfully takes into account your age, weight, strengths, injuries and illnesses. This way you ensure that you are consciously driving technology, rather than technology unconsciously driving you. Fitness experts can measure your chemical parameters, gifted athletes can share their training protocols with you, but only you can truly listen to the internal signals your inner body energy sends you. Everything else is your intellect rationalizing and analyzing input from the external world. A mind game, really.

When you give yourself permission to quiet your mind and focus solely on internal signals and cues, rather than being driven deeper into stressful training situations by analytical thought, over time and guided by a deeper intuition, you become your own Master Coach. It’s from this place that world records are set, where time stands still and the true potential of each person’s body is realized. It’s here that exercise becomes an e!ortless art form. Over thinking drops away and you become one with the vital energy of exercise.

By way of example, let’s consider the cheetah, one of the world’s fastest animals. The cheetah follows his instinctive cues: he hunts when he’s hungry, runs with purpose, conserves his energy, rests when he needs to, and licks his wounds when he has to. His energy is naturally in balance. You’ll never see a cheetah over thinking his run program, comparing his hunting split times to his spouse’s times, or limping around with an overuse injury because he over trained trying to keep up with the younger alpha-male cheetahs. The cheetah stays in balance and harmony because he listens to his inner body cues or to what his instincts tells him.

Instincts are inborn survival behaviors, and animals simply react without thought. For humans, intuition is more complex. It represents a pre-thought knowledge or a deeper wisdom of the organism. We are di!erent from animals in that we possess free

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will and can choose to act or not to act on our intuitive impulses. Where fitness is involved, athletes often cloud the big-picture by over thinking every detail of a training program and by valuing scientific knowledge over their own intuitive wisdom.

Given appropriate training time, an attitude of trust and oodles of patience your body’s inner energy signals will guide you towards optimum health and fitness. The greatest barrier to athletic success and a contributor to injury is Western society’s impatient, “fast track” attitude and our need for instant gratifi-cation, quick results and the constant need for progress. Initially, e!ortless exercise sets aside external expectations, future plans, past failures and competitive egos. Instead, it begins with a total acceptance of where each person is at this moment in time rather than where he or she desires to be sometime in the future.

Rather than beginning with a scientifically tested exercise program, charts created in laboratory situations, magnificent technological tools or expert advice from the latest fitness guru, begin by simply learning to calm your intellectual mind and sense the energy signals your body sends you. In this way, the e!ortless exercise experience flips the usual training process upside down and begins by asking you to trust your intuition – call it what you will: gut feeling, first impressions, or higher consciousness – and give yourself the essential permission to become alert to your life energy as it animates your body. Committing to the idea of permission, which supports implementation of the entire e!ortless exercise process, your fitness potential gradually opens up as you experience a deeper personal empowerment.

This is because your intuition remains in tune with every blood cell, nerve fiber, muscle, tendon, ligament, and organ in your body. It’s an excellent internal monitoring system. At any moment this subtle awareness can sense if you are in pain, sti!, well rested, dehydrated, getting ill or full of energy. Highly intuitive athletes are capable of letting their intuition direct their actions, they harmonize with the environment and aren’t afraid of facing challenge and change.

Working to rehabilitate exhausted and injured athletes, I’ve found their intellectual thoughts are conditioned to detach from their inner body energy fields and that they thrive on second guessing the intuitive process. Their mentally tough egos also get

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involved and further override this patient voice by driving their bodies toward their goals through “no pain, no gain” training and a “win-at-any-cost” attitude.

When our competitive egos take over or we obsess about meeting the schedule of an externally generated program, we become unbalanced through excessive anaerobic stress and eventually run into problems. Here, potentially successful athletes are left prematurely injured, exhausted, immune suppressed and unable to fulfill their plans when they rely exclusively on external goals, a short training time frame and generic scientific training programs. Without the permission to allow a deeper sense of intuitive wisdom to come into play, this type of training scenario can truly be described as “mind over matter.” My past training challenges certainly illustrate the need for balance and integration very well.

A P'8,$#=& J$<8#'>It’s human nature to resist what we know is good for us and

to have to learn life’s lessons the hard way – through pain, trial and error. Su!ering seems to bring our experience more drama and meaning. We feel as if we have won against all odds. It’s also human nature to keep looking outside ourselves for that “magic bullet” training program that carries us directly to our future goal. Let me share my personal story with you:

A few years after I graduated from University with my Physical Education Degree, I dabbled with running. Then in "&'(, I saw the Ironman triathlon on Wide World of Sports. I immediately felt drawn to the sport of triathlon. Something ignited a passion within me and sparked a desire to embrace this multi-sport. In triathlon, I saw a way to stay fit in three di!erent disci-plines. I thought, “What a great all-round physical developer.” I was hooked.

The first ten years of training were all about competing – an egoic outward focus. I was young, strong, and had time to train – so train I did. I experi-

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mented with every known scientific exercise program on the market. I raced as much as possible and focused my attention on going faster. And my times got quicker, but I was overriding my inner body energy. Through those ten years I accumulated "% leg injuries, was frequently sick and often exhausted, and, for the most part, felt unhealthy. I always complained about how this or that felt wrong and found racing stressful.

Eventually I got married, my son came along and I started the inward journey of listening to my intuition. I was sick of being tired and tired of being hurt. Over the next ten year period a deeper learning began. I slowly started becoming aware of my inner body energy.

It was tough at first, having been schooled in the old “no pain, no gain” mentality and strong habits are hard to break. In fact, I even returned to University for my Master’s Degree in Kinesiology seeking further intellectual answers from the scientific approach, without realizing that “all that data” was cluttering up my brain and silencing my intuition. Somewhere within me I must have still believed that science held all the truths and answers.

Over time, through listening to my intuition, my body healed. I started to feel well once more. Eventually I discovered the joy of exercise returning, and, like a kid, I became magnetically drawn into exercise again. But I found I had to be diligent in the intuitive listening process. With each step forward I had to remain conscious every second of my training, because slipping back into my old habits, while easy, resulted in my body sending me two steps backwards with yet another ache or pain to deal with.

It then occurred to me that my injuries, though driven in deep, were my greatest teachers. They kept me honest, ensured I listened to my intuition and

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coached me on the path toward healthy fitness. It is true that my injuries lead me toward the e!ortless exercise experience and made me into the coach I am today – and I’m deeply grateful for that.

Today my exercise experience remains focused on participation and realizing how well my body functions in harmony with my health. My fitness sessions remain diverse and ever changing, but at the heart of training reside these simple intuitive truths:

Always seek the flow state quality of e!ortlessnessBe diligently alert – remain inner body aware during each exercise session and act on these cuesGive yourself the permission to exercise in harmony with your health and intuitionRemain integrated in your exercise approach – involve body, mind and spiritBe totally present in the moment, and reap the enjoyment of the process todaySimply stay consistent with exercise frequency, and tomor-row’s goals unfold in powerful ways

H'=&+6 =#( F:+#',, P>8=*:(If you honor your body’s prompts of sti!ness, pain and fatigue,

your body will keep your fitness program in alignment with optimum health and wellness. In the health and fitness graphic outlined below, greater levels of fitness are progressively possible, provided they are built upon a solid foundation of health. You simply cannot achieve greater fitness if you are unhealthy.

When asked, many athletes admit that there were subtle clues along the way to becoming injured or ill, but they ignored them and continued to train through the strain. It’s best to error on the side of patience and only add progressive building blocks of duration and intensity if you have a solid foundation of health to support this growth. Be alert to your inner energy and you’ll sense if your body is healthy, energized and ready to go forward or if it needs to maintain the current level of activity or even rest and rejuvenate. Pain is your body communicating to you that the activity is harmful or at the very least unsustainable in the long term. Pain represents

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a call for deeper listening, greater awareness and a change in your current training process.

If e!ortless exercise resonates with you, then you’re ready to follow your inner prompts and trust that your intuition provides the holistic choices and the right course of action for your physi-ology. Allow your intellectual mind to be guided by your intuitive impulses and create feelings of motivation, inspiration and flow. Simply listen to these inner impulses and then act on them. This type of exercise is always healthy, promotes growth and is pleasurable. We all know this intuitively, but often allow our rational minds and the pressures and expectations of the outside world to talk us out of taking the appropriate action. At times like these, the best Coaches become energy conduits by helping clients realize and act on the validity of their inner strength and intuitive wisdom. This type of awareness is the birth place of positive change. Once established as the foundation of their exercise process, many individuals find that the simple skill of intuition can be used as guidance in other areas of their lives. It is a profound truth that all answers lie within.

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Often people don’t realize that they can be fit and unhealthy. I was a walking example of that. I call this state the “walking wounded.” Many athletes live in this ironic state, and couch-potatoes fear its pain and suspect its mixed messages. In today’s atmosphere of fast food and quick fixes, competitive, mentally tough people drive their bodies into unhealthy stressed states in pursuit of the immediate rewards of goal oriented success.

However, you can choose to enhance both your wellness and athletic performance through sustainable exercise. You can compete in a marathon or Ironman triathlon with this e!ortless approach, all it takes is the mindfulness to remain present as you train. It also requires more patience and an investment of a greater portion of training time to reap the benefits than conventional exercise regimes would have you believe. With e!ortless exercise, you enhance your performance by aligning your life energy with healthy, progressive exercise, allowing your body time to adapt at its own unique rate. It’s pleasurable and injury free. It’s the bigger picture of fitness for life and it’s sustainable in the long run.

S<,+=:#=?&' E9'8!:,'All resonant flow experiences are simply energy working in and

through you. Trust that when an activity or exercise feels vital you are working in a positive state of inner and outer harmony. This type of exercise doesn’t lead to injury, but instead promotes an abundance of health and vitality deep within you. It also provides sustainable training that guides you toward higher levels of fitness and eventually to your greatest physical performances. It’s from this flow state of e!ortless ease, when all your energy is positively aligned, that miraculous athletic endeavors occur.

As each day unfolds, I am convinced that scientific training programs cannot alone substitute for my intrinsic wisdom. Born out of consciousness itself, intuition is immediately accessible and limitless. The e!ortless exercise vision provides athletes with an exquisite balance point supported by intuition, inspi-ration, creativity and consciousness. Exercise becomes more process orientated and less goal orientated. It is more about direction than outcome. The synergy created is incredible when you practice inner body awareness and then follow your intuitive

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prompts with action. You may even find yourself achieving goals and performances you had not thought possible. Begin with the following e!ortless exercise and let it guide you toward a new way of exercising in joy, health and harmony.

E77$8+&',, E9'8!:,' # 1: L:,+'#:#) +$ I##'8 B$(> E#'8)>To get in touch with your intuition by way of being aware of

your inner body energy, begin with the following listening exercise. Dress in comfortable clothing and find a quiet room where you will not be disturbed. Sit in a chair or lie on the floor. Experiment with both positions until you find the one that works best for you.

Relax. Begin the process by closing your eyes and relaxing your entire body.

Breathe. Take three deep nasal breathes and direct your focus deep within your body. Feel the rise and fall of your chest and abdomen as the air enters and exits your lungs.

Calm your mind. Now cultivate open awareness versus intel-lectual thinking. Relax your rational mind. This means letting go of all preconceived thoughts formed out of critical, analytical, or rational reasoning. Rather than focusing on thinking, open yourself to awareness, an awareness of your body. Do not allow your mind to wander over thoughts about your outer appearance or athletic talents – tall, short, inflexible, strong, fast or slow. Instead, focus your awareness of the vital energy that animates and is alive within you.

Focus. If you currently have an injury, imagine a cell in that part of your body, if not start with a cell in the index finger of your right hand. Focus your awareness on the life within that cell. See the cell glowing with white light and vibrating with life force. If your mind wanders, bring it back to this receptive, open awareness and continue to take deep breathes.

Sense your body energy. Allow the light and energy to transfer to the surrounding cells in your finger. You may experience heat or a tingling sensation. Now, allow this heat and light to travel to

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your whole hand and eventually to your other body parts. Feel it animating your entire body with heat and light and energy.

Be aware. Remain in this glowing state while allowing the energy to radiate out from your body in all directions and breathe into this state of energized “Being.” Relax, breathe and be aware.

Perform this exercise as often as possible until you gain a profi-ciency for connecting to you inner energy state. Soon you’ll find you can reach this meditative state quickly and maintain it with your eyes open. This then creates a conscious state of awareness. Besides feeling relaxed and blissful, improving your immune system, and increasing your body’s healing abilities, it quiets your mind and brings you powerfully into the present moment where you can act from this vital energy with intuitive wisdom. This exercise assists you when you start to move your body and creates exercise that’s “meditation in motion.” Try practicing this exercise before your next training session and be alert to what follows or try this meditation on the starting line of your next race and note the di!erence in your athletic experience.

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CHAPTER ": INSPIRED MOTIVATION

Finding The Passion Within

Let’s start with children. Kids have a natural desire to move and play. They’re a great illustration of motivation that comes from within. Watch them play hide-and-seek or tag, and you’ll notice their ease of movement. Without working on it or even thinking about it, children naturally have great running form. They work with gravity rather than against it; they seize the moment and wrap it in joy. For them, as for the cheetah, movement is instinctive. They focus entirely on the passion of their play and truly live in the moment.

T6' P=,,:$# $7 P&=>In our early years movement represented play and freedom.

Somewhere along the line trainers turned it into work – or more specifically, a “workout,” which by definition became hard work. In our quest for greater levels of fitness, all the joy, spontaneity and flow of exercise have been replaced by hard work, pain and strain. Indeed, exercise has become grueling work instead of passionate play. Sadly, for many people, fitness becomes only a means to an end: to lose weight, to look thinner, to race faster, to beat your opponent. Western society seems to have lost touch with the joy of exercise.

How many times have you heard the adage, “Train through it.” This training demands that you disconnect from your intuition and override your body’s internal energy signal of pain, illness, injury, sti!ness, or frustration – let’s just call these prompts negative energy. This training advice usually leads to stress and greater physiological problems.

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Imagine if we went into schools, recreation centers and obesity clinics and replaced the demand to “train through it,” meaning pain, with the invitation to “train with it,” where “it” represented the passionate flow state of permission, play and pleasure. Exercise could then carry with it a positive rather than a negative impulse. We’ve all had experiences where we felt like going for a walk, climbing that mountain or hopping on our bike, but instead we ignored this inner motivation and fell back on our prescribed training schedule because the coach, our competitors or that recent magazine article told us to “workout” di!erently.

To transform “workouts” into passionate play, listen to which direction the positive energy current is flowing in your body on any given day, and then follow that creative flow with passion and enthusiasm. Consider taking a week and following where your inner energy takes you with regard to exercise.

My wife is a great example of following her exercise intuition. She has never aspired to become a competitive athlete, but enjoys a variety of cross training activities. The only activities she schedules are two weight training sessions per week. She also remains aware that she must remain consistent and lengthen the duration of some of her aerobic workouts over time for her fitness level to grow. The rest of her program remains flexible. What this means is that on any given day she can wake up and go in the direction of her energy, intuition, and passion. If she feels the need to stretch, she attends a yoga class. Or she may say she feels like a run in the sunlight and fresh air of the forest. The key here is that she’s in touch with the present moment and what her body intuition tells her at that point in time. And in over 30 years, she has never sustained a chronic injury. For her, fitness is about the joy of movement, staying strong and functional, and connecting with her friends and the cycles of nature.

While competitive athletes do have disciplined schedules to follow, many athletes also follow this motivational technique, allowing their intuition to act as a guide in the training process. Remaining flexible and free to make intuitive training adjustments sustains and extends long term athletic careers. It allows the positive energy of choice, recovery, cross training and adventure to infuse their training program and redirects negative stress.

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Consider adding some passionate play to your program. Whether you are a beginner, recreational or competitive athlete, your body’s unconditioned intelligence remains in a constant state of flow; learning how to direct that flow in the area of your passion is the central motivational theme of e!ortless exercise.

P'8*:,,:$# @'8,<, P8',!8:A+:$#The first step in the e!ortless exercise experience is to reconnect

with what motivates you and pursue that movement with passion, with all your life energy and commitment in the present moment. Give yourself permission to follow the prompts of your inner body energy field on a daily basis.

If you love a particular sport and have a prescribed scientific program to follow, don’t toss this plan out altogether. However, keep every day open to explore a di!erent direction. Tune in to your inner body energy in each session to confirm if this schedule is aiding you in building fitness and health in a positive way or if you need to make intuitive adjustments. There are subtle benefits derived from following our intuition that we actually cannot perceive or even detect on a scientific level. One of my favorite coaching encounters illustrates the artful use of body wisdom:

Sixteen year old Luke was a provincial level triathlete and a master of body awareness. I remember checking his log on many occasions and I’d see numerous ) and "$ minute runs. I asked him what these seemingly short sessions were all about. He said that he would go out for a run and if it just didn’t feel right, he’d walk home.

This told me that he was aware of his inner energy and had the courage to turn around, even though he had pressure to perform competitively. I then asked him what he would do on those days. He said he simply went home, rested and would continue his training tomorrow. Now that’s mastery of being self-connected! He, in fact, was never injured in the years I

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coached him. He simply never pushed himself to that point because he paid attention to his body’s signals.

I remember remarking on his performances, which were outstanding. He won the provincial junior triathlon championships many times on one-third the training volumes his other competitors were involved in. It is interesting to note that Luke also never concerned himself with what others were doing in their training. He’d found success in the process of inner body awareness and he masterfully maintained that marvelous balance between science and intuition for one so young.

On days where your prescribed training schedule becomes a stressful “workout” follow Luke’s example, and based on your intuition, cross train, shorten or stop your workout, or rest. Ask yourself what you’d enjoy doing instead of your prescribed training, move in the direction of your passion, then be totally accepting of your decision and honor your unique physiology. As much as possible, aim for comfort and balance in each exercise session.

Like the example above, competitive runners and triathletes often use scientific training programs as guidelines, but first and foremost they follow the warm-up process outlined in Chapter 3. Warm-up slowly and if you feel vital and want to proceed with your scheduled program – go for it. If, for good reason (e.g. I’m experi-encing pain, illness or exhaustion - not I’m too lazy and would rather lie on the couch, eat chocolate and watch TV), you don’t feel the energy to follow through, adjust your training for that day and don’t feel guilty. Forcing athletes to follow strict scientifically tested regimes leads to burn out, drives added stress inward, impairs growth and leads to injury; while allowing athletes the time and permission to develop their unique talents in an intuitive process fosters both improved health and sustainable performance.

S+=>:#) O# T8=!"Once you’ve found an activity you enjoy, staying motivated

relies on your ability to create positive exercise loops. This involves

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engaging in exercise in such a way that the whole experience is positive, playful, and draws you back for more. Once you’ve created a positive experience, the vital energy generated returns and strengthens your motivation to seek out that experience again. This energy binds and regenerates all levels of your being: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. You’ll feel empowered.

Most Westerners, however, approach exercise in the exact opposite fashion – through force. Just look into the faces of people at your local gym and what do you see? Strain, su!ering, grimacing or some form of discomfort. Experiencing negative energy pushes you away from exercise. The experience of su!ering and struggle creates a negative motivation loop and eventually leads even the hard core exercisers to the side lines due to a plateau in results or mental burn out.

Sedentary individuals have figured this cause and e!ect situation out already. They look at those who exercise and, for the most part, see struggle, discomfort and competition. When the training experience doesn’t appear to have an intrinsic up side they ask, “Why would I put myself through this?” People beginning or returning to fitness find themselves sore, discouraged and most at risk. And why is that? Because they place all their faith in scientific programs and will power; instead, view science as a marvelous tool in an integrated exercise process. Remaining solely focused on external, generic exercise programs interrupts beginners from listening to their inner body signals and doesn’t encourage the permission needed to act on their intuitive cues.

Traditional approaches to exercise prescribe a scientific training schedule, based on the standard fit formula, which outlines the frequency, intensity and time needed to gain a certain external result. And these results are often driven by a future oriented goal and therefore short-circuit process oriented training. The programs in fitness books and magazines are designed in cook-book fashion by scientists or coaches from the event backward, whereas e;ortless exercise is designed from where you are today forward. While these experts have good intentions they create an experience that, for the most part, turns out less than optimal for most participants. Canned programs are generic in nature and don’t take into account your fitness background or lack of conditioning, age, weight, genetics, past injuries or illnesses.

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The overreaching aspect in these generic programs turns exercise into hard work.

Ultra-endurance athletes who at one time or another have crossed over the line talk about the energetic debt to be repaid. They tell me, “You can’t escape it. If you’re going to push your body, it will eventually push back.” Don’s training story surely illustrates the benefit of e!ortless exercise and how it created a healthy, positive training loop for him.

Don was an avid ultra-marathoner. I asked him to conduct an experiment to experience the di!erence between two training methods. He performed two # hour trail runs a few weeks apart. In the first run, he allowed his heart rate to climb and average in the "%$s, breathed through his mouth and basically ran as he usually did. I asked him to report how he felt after that session and in the following days. Basically Don felt tired, took about four days to recover and even needed a nap on the afternoon of his “big” run.

On the second run a few weeks later I asked him to cap his heart rate at "($, breathe through his nose, warm-up and cool-down for at least %$ minutes each and pay very strict attention to his natural environment, being present and enjoying the trail as he ran. He reported a completely di!erent experience. Don said he felt invigorated after training, he didn’t need any recovery days and, in fact, went running the following day. He loved the experience and wanted to repeat it again the following weekend.

In his own words: “There was no comparison, I recovered much quicker and felt as though I hadn’t even worked out when I breathed through my nose. When I breathed through my mouth, it took me four to five days to recover!” I saw a new excitement and enthusiasm within him; he was fired-up for more. Don created his own positive exercise loop and was drawn into becoming an e!ortless ultra-endurance athlete.

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For fitness to become a lifestyle it is important to create and maintain positive exercise loops. You can find that balance where your body grows stronger and exercise is enjoyable. I’ll cover the specifics of heart rate, nasal breathing and warm-up/cool-down techniques later in the book. For now, in your daily training process, begin to let go of the obsession with time and future goals, and view exercise as a process of daily enrichment and vitality. If you exercise as if it were meditation in motion, a quality of calm presence enters your life, and you welcome your next training session.

P<++:#) F<# B=!" :#+$ F:+#',,Over 93 percent of North Americans list “good health” as their

number one priority. If you ask a hundred people at random if they think exercising is a good idea, all of them will answer with a resounding “Yes!” Yet less than 15 percent of North Americans actually exercise enough to accumulate any health benefits, and the average American spends less than two percent of his or her waking time exercising. Why is this? The answer is simple: We do not ENJOY exercise. If people enjoyed exercise, we’d all but eliminate many of our current sedentary lifestyle diseases.

Look at other activities that our population engages in: watching videos, watching sports, going out to dinner, smoking or drinking. At the core of these behaviors is a basic attraction to the activity because we perceive it as pleasurable. Most people seek out pastimes that bring them pleasure, that’s only natural. If schools and fitness professionals embraced a method of exercise that made the experience of movement enjoyable, motivating participants to continue would become much easier.

The largest jump in health benefits occurs when we leave the sedentary state and simply get moving. Yet it’s not enough to simply sell people on the health benefits. To be successful, Western fitness professionals need to alter peoples’ perception of exercise by making it attractive, fun and exciting – in short, a resonant experience. Many of us might find the motivation to get o! the couch and less reasons to avoid the pain of the next “workout” if we were given permission to exercise in harmony and well-being. Performed in a flow state, exercise becomes a powerful

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motivational magnet and provides for both a rewarding athletic career and an enjoyable lifestyle pursuit.

Most people exercise for outer reasons: to lose weight, improve their health, live longer, accomplish a goal or set a personal best. These reasons always involve delayed gratification, hinge on future events or o!er external, material rewards such as a better body or a race medal. On the other hand, if you consider an exercise experience that emphasizes the process in the present moment – enjoyment of movement – exercise becomes play or at the very least you take the “work” out of your workout. Each training session becomes a positive energy experience where physical results and performance become natural by-products of this inwardly guided health oriented process – and over time, the goals take care of themselves.

C8'=+:#) R',$#=#+ E9A'8:'#!',The key to getting people involved and keeping them motivated

for a life time hinges on creating a positive energy experience. Here are some tips to help you get started:

engage in exercise that you are passionate aboutexercise when you experience that excitementexercise in such a way that it always makes you feel vitalized each and every moment during the entire sessionmonitor that exercise leaves you feeling refreshed and invig-orated immediately after the session and also the next daybe aware that pushing to exhaustion drives additional stress into your body and ultimately leads to physiological breakdown

The e;ortless experience remains attainable regardless of where you find yourself on the fitness scale, whether you are sedentary, overweight or a seasoned athlete. Seeking a flow state is the in-tent of each practice session. A state where you spend time slowly warming-up, listening to your inner body energy prompts and then allowing your intuitive knowledge to guide you to ever increasing intensities without strain. Michael’s story illustrates how this pro-cess worked in a beneficial way for him:

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Michael came to me frustrated and confused about how to get started on an exercise program. He had been sedentary for many years, was afraid of getting injured and didn’t know where to start amid all the confusing media hype. He was also overweight and uncertain about joining a gym.

I resisted putting him on a typical program to get fit and lose weight. Instead, I asked questions and listened carefully. I queried him about what he enjoyed doing the most and he immediately said he felt his best walking. He said it was easy – something he felt successful about. He especially enjoyed being in nature and that this didn’t require a trip to the gym! He could walk when away on business and he had no fear that the activity would injure him. Walking made him feel great. I sensed enthusiasm. Walking repre-sented a resonant experience for Michael because it helped him avoid his fear of the gym at this time and instead allowed him to connect with nature, which was a positive and renewing activity for him.

Next I asked him exactly how long he could walk without feeling any discomfort or any negative stress. He quickly replied "$ minutes. And so we started there. A year later and %$ pounds lighter, Michael enjoys his hour long walks daily. He knew where to start; all he needed was the encouragement and permission to trust and follow his intuition.

If fitness goals are perceived as daunting, many people won’t even get started. However, one e!ortless step in the right direction creates momentum for the next one, and so on. With a trimmer body and a firm exercise base, someone like Michael could start hiking in the mountains, add a walking trip to his European vacation or ultimately plan to climb Mount Kilimanjaro if he so desired. Regardless of where your fitness is today, positive energy pervades e!ortless training, sessions are enjoyable, injury is

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avoided and peak athletic performances can be realized without added stress.

For the amateur, the magic of staying active and physically fit for a lifetime centers on discovering this resonant experience: a physical activity that you’re drawn to, that you enjoy, where time seems to fly by when you’re engaged in it. Think of motivational energy pulling you toward an activity you love rather than pushing you away from an activity you dislike. It’s about becoming internally process oriented and following that passion with enthusiasm.

Positive exercise loops create greater health and fitness. More importantly, exercise progression is guided from within. Your body naturally makes the subtle adjustments necessary for greater fitness. If you are aware of your inner body energy, this subtle vitality tells you exactly what exercise is best for you, when’s the best time and how long and how hard to exercise. Your job is to simply become aware, stay connected and then take action. If you seek resonant exercise experiences and remain consistent with your training, the marvelous organism that is your body takes care of the progression for you.

Still, many people remain di"cult to motivate and ask, “Why exercise in the first place?” Let’s consider a mystical answer to that question: Exercise allows your body, mind and spirit to vibrate at a higher level. It encourages you to ultimately sense this inner energy field and allows that energy to grow within you and regenerate you. However you define that feeling of life, that internal force you feel when vital energy flows through you, exercise is simply a tool that increases that vibrational flow. Like the word “recreation” states, we re-create the vital energy of life every time we move.

Ask any 25 year, five-day-a-week exerciser and they’ll tell you the fundamental reason they exercise is because it makes them feel vital. It’s a positive energy experience, during and after exercise, and it’s a natural high. The health benefits and performance enhance-ments are all by-products of your body, mind and spirit in action. At the core lies the fundamental truth that exercise is enjoyable when undertaken in the harmony and balance of e!ortlessness.

Through e!ortless exercise we experience the power of our life force. It doesn’t matter about age or ability level, we all possess the wonderful gift of movement; and through this positive activity we become much more internally energized, empowered and

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connected to our authenticity. Find your passion and re-connect with resonant energy experiences.

E77$8+&',, E9'8!:,' # 2: P8=!+:!:#) A%=8'#',,Here are some tips to keep you focused on your passion and

ensure that exercise motivation is being created out of a sense of inspired positive energy.

Re-connect. For the next week become aware of the subtle inner body energy clues pointing to the desire to move. Don’t judge these signals, simply sense them and if you have the opportunity to act in the moment, do so. Follow your exercise inspiration with enthusiasm. If you don’t have the opportunity, simply take note of the impulse and when you have the time allow yourself to be drawn into this type of exercise. Try exercising for a week without a schedule but in total body awareness and see where this experi-ence leads you in your training.

Seize the energy of the moment. If you are having di"culty starting an exercise program, first become aware of any ideas that come to you and seem enjoyable and easy to take action on. What did you enjoy as a child? Don’t spend time thinking about this intellectually; in fact, don’t think about it at all, simply act on playful inspiration. If you find yourself drawn to these ideas try them out as soon as pos-sible. Don’t set any criteria around your exercise, start moving, be alert and allow your inner body energy to dictate how far and how fast you go. The key is to experience the e!ortless state. Be sure to under do it and thereby create a resonant training session so you’ll remain drawn into more exercise in the near future. If you have a positive experience you’ll want to embrace it again.

Motivation. To assist in your motivation to exercise reflect on the answers to the following questions. If you find an immediate desire, pay attention to the energy and follow it in that exercise direction.

Do you feel drawn to nature?Do you like music?What inspires you about exercise?

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What is it about movement you enjoy?How do you want your body to feel when you move?Do you experience more energy from movement?Do you enjoy working out with people?

Pay attention to these details and try to incorporate them as much as possible in training. Work with your strengths and capitalize on the energy created in positive exercise experiences.

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CHAPTER #: CREATING FLOW STATES

Being Drawn Into Exercise

Think of the e!ortless exercise process as being akin to an airplane in flight. I don’t think anyone looks forward to a plane trip filled with turbulence, fuel shortages or crash-and-burn landings. Everyone hopes for a safe round trip. One where the pilot arrives and checks all the working systems, then once everyone is on board he slowly taxis down the runway and makes a gradual climb to cruising altitude. The trusty pilot maintains this steady state for the length of the trip, making adjustments if need be, and then begins a long, slow decent into the destination city, followed by a soft touch down.

E!ortless exercise follows the same progression: check-in, warm-up, training pace, cool-down and check-out. To produce this meditation in motion, you begin by first finding a sense of calm through nasal breathing, next becoming aware of your inner body energy, feeling the pull of your resonant exercise experiences, and then from there you finally start to move.

If you create a seamless bridge between rest and a flow state, then you become drawn deeper into exercise. What’s even more important, you’ll find the exercise experience extremely enjoyable. With time and practice, you’ll also be able to access the “high” of peak performance that many athletes find elusive and which only seems to occur by chance. Here’s how to create the meditative and intuitive Zen experience of e!ortless exercise.

T6' P$%'8 $7 W=8*-UA,Dialing in to the flow state requires that you warm-up. Always. I

can’t over stress the importance of this critical step. Over the years,

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I have conducted a secret survey. I’ve asked countless participants: “How long does it take you to ‘feel good’ when you exercise?” Most answered around 30 minutes and some said they never felt great. I then asked them about their warm-up protocol. Most said they skipped the warm-up altogether so that they could spend more time training intensely and maximize their workout time. Others said they began slowly, but after a few minutes they would take o! at their normal training pace. In fact, many athletes confessed that they experienced a negative “I want to stop” feeling in the first few minutes of exercise and mentally pushed through this sensation.

What I’ve rediscovered is the value of a proper warm-up; and it is crucial when creating an e;ortless exercise experience. There is just no way around it, to warm-up takes a significant amount of time. You are asking your body’s systems to make a seamless transition from a resting state to a dynamic flow state. It takes time to turn on those support systems and reach the internal body temperature needed to function optimally during exercise. If you begin your workout in a stressed or agitated state with an elevated heart rate, you will continue to drive your heart rate even higher into your anaerobic zone during exercise. This type of high intensity exercise is stressful to your body and di"cult to recover from. It’s a physiological truth that the harder you intend to exercise, the longer you need to warm-up. I advise clients that before a 5km race they should run for an hour to warm-up. That’s right; it takes an hour to be physiologically ready for such a short, high intensity race.

If you carry over a relaxed meditative internal state into your exercise session, then you discover your body becoming more comfortable and relaxed as the session unfolds. This allows the rested and calm feeling of your warm-up to spill over into the dynamic motion of your workout. Being calm internally means you can create greater motion physically, all in the absence of negative stress.

Let’s consider man’s best friend – the dog. If each time you took your dog out for a walk, you strapped his leash to your bike and rode o! at break-neck speeds pulling him along behind your back wheel, it wouldn’t take long before he’d be hiding under your bed licking his skinned foot pads when you invited him for his next “walk.” Certainly dogs love to run, but they also like to do it at a pace they can sustain, and they integrate it with other activ-

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ities such as sni"ng the wind, stopping at the odd pole or two or tracking the scent of a rabbit. They enjoy exercise because the experience is one of comfort and balance.

The actual parameters of a proper warm-up can vary daily, based on temperature, time of day, how rested you are, etc. You wouldn’t turn on your car and race out of the driveway at high speed and expect the engine to purr along either. On a cold day it often takes a considerable amount of time to allow for all the engine parts to become lubricated and heated to the point where they perform smoothly. The same principle applies to your body. By easing into exercise, allowing only the feeling of e!ortlessness to guide you, you’re able to access the flow state every time you exercise.

That’s why it’s important to follow your inner signals and allow yourself the flexibility and permission to make daily adjust-ments to warm-up duration as you seek your normal exercise pace and heart rate. Over riding this key practice creates unnecessary physiological stress and pushes many athletes away from the quality experience they seek.

There are many physiological benefits of a proper warm-up, but the single most important function of this transitional phase is the sensation of flow and the heightened experience of the exercise “high.” This state can only be accessed if you allow your body to determine the pace every moment of the session right from your first step. And this is where the skill of inner body energy awareness is such an asset. Robert found that a proper warm-up improved both his run distance and speed without any additional training:

Robert was a long time triathlete who regularly trained hitting his pace in the first few minutes of every workout. After fully explaining the e!ortless vision and outlining the benefits of a proper warm-up he decided to give it a try.

One weekend, when he had no commitments he started his workout with an extremely slow walk and allowed his body to prompt him toward his training pace. He spent the first 10 minutes calming his mind, walking slowly, checking-in with his body energy and allowing his physiology time to adjust. He focused on

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his form, relaxing all of his non-working muscles and waited for his body to give him the impulse to pick up the pace. He didn’t set any parameters, expectations or time around the warm-up. He simply went with the flow of his body’s systems.

Once he felt like running, he began with a slow jog – all the while listening for discomfort. If he sensed this he would walk again. His short warm-up run phase started to lengthen. Robert’s one hour run became a three-hour quality e!ortless experience. He described the feeling of floating along and never experiencing mental or physical stress of any kind.

When we discussed it later, he mentioned it took a good 45 minutes until he hit his normal pace and felt fully warmed-up. He also shared the fact that he never experienced that stage in the beginning where he often felt poorly. During the middle of his run he said he found himself running faster than he had ever run in training and was astounded that he was traveling so fast without any additional e!ort. With a proper warm-up, Robert constantly runs farther and faster with none of the down side he used to experience.

To further explain the process let’s return to the analogy of an airplane getting ready for take o!. Rarely would a pilot jump into the cockpit, rocket down the runway and climb vertically to 30,000 feet as quickly as possible. Before the plane has even left the airport the pilot has spent up to an hour checking all of the gauges, dials and systems and ensuring that all passengers are on board. The same applies to exercise participants: Spend five minutes and preferably .4 minutes in the check-in phase of the warm-up. Begin exercise very slowly while you remain calm and listen to your inner body energy. Once all systems are a “go” and you’ve taxied down the runway, you are ready for take o!. Still, you only pick up the pace slowly. Remember it takes a good half hour at a very slow assent rate to reach cruise altitude. You’re not in a risky rocket pulling G forces and worrying about blowing apart.

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You’re in a passenger plane where getting to your destination safely is most important. The same applies to exercise, if you’re seeking comfort and balance while in a dynamic state of flow then it’s important to warm your body up very slowly.

Certainly this warm-up practice is health building for first time or lifestyle exercisers, but competitive athletes report that they are more often able to reach states of peak performance through maintaining an internal feeling of calm, comfort and flow. Many have commented that a proper warm-up puts the enjoyment back into training and competition.

Another benefit of the slow warm-up is that it encourages fat burning. Our bodies naturally want to burn sugar as soon as we start to exercise. In fact, many of us have conditioned ourselves to burn sugar from the first step we take because we ramp-up quickly into a stressful anaerobic state. We’ve trained our bodies to expect this stress.

Turning on fat burning metabolism takes time. If we don’t spend enough time warming-up or we go out too fast, we’ll switch to sugar burning and default to sugar burning mode during every training session. Once in this stress induced state, it’s very di"cult to reverse this condition during exercise. That’s why it’s critical to warm-up slowly. If you were a pilot on a long-haul flight, you’d certainly want to have enough of the right kind of fuel to reach your destination without any additional engine wear.

When you start exceedingly slow, your body has time to match the energy demands moment to moment by utilizing oxygen and burning fat through aerobic metabolism. It takes at least 20 minutes to fully turn this fat burning system on and the pace must start at a slow rate and build very gradually to ensure the desired outcome.

T6' H$% +$ $7 W=8*-UA

C6'!"-I# P6=,'Begin with the check-in phase. Just prior to the exercise session,

get in touch with your thoughts and feelings regarding the activity you’re drawn into. To flow e!ortlessly from a rested state to an exercise state you must first be drawn into an activity that you’re passionate about. If you feel enthusiasm and anticipation before

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you exercise, then you’ll benefit from this positive energy. If not, consider whether you should workout. Don’t be fooled by your thoughts, often temporary and transient feelings of tiredness or low blood sugar mask a deep down need to exercise and rejuvenate your body systems. Eat, hydrate and then spend a few minutes in meditation, calming your breathing and connecting with your inner body energy (as outlined in the exercise at the end of Chapter One) before you write a training session o!.

Some clients also find that music creates a mindful state both before and during your check-in phase. The atmosphere created by the right rhythm, beat and vibration invites calm and relaxation and brings a certain inspirational energy to your check-in. Soon you’ll be able to hum this tune in your head and re-capture this grounded energy at will, such as at the start line on race day.

W=8*-UA R<&'Next, practice the warm-up rule. This is also part of your motiva-

tional strategy. Often, if we don’t make exercise a priority in our lives, it simply gets overlooked. Be sure to create space in your life to exercise and make going out for your warm-up non-negotiable. A multiple marathon finisher expressed this fundamental rule in his own words:

My own experience is that on days when I do not feel like going out, I still do, but I give myself permission to come back home if I do not enjoy the run after ") minutes. In ten years I have yet to come home! When I ran Boston in "&&&, Grete Waitz, ten time winner of the NY City marathon, gave a workshop the day before. She said what I am saying above; only she limited it to "$ minutes, instead of my "). Put it this way, I have never stood in the shower after a workout and said; “Now that was a mistake going out.” The hardest part for some is to tie their shoelaces – after that it is a piece of cake. Few people have to enter in their day timers “take a warm shower,” “eat desert,” or “make love.” Whatever we enjoy becomes easier to do and remember.

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This means that if you have any mental excuse, except illness or injury, you must go out and at the very least complete your warm-up. On lazy days action the push energy of your will power to help you get started. Once you have chosen your activity only plan to warm-up. Continue inner body listening during the warm-up phase, where you remain body alert and go out extremely slow, then you have the pace right.

It should feel so easy that it’s absolutely e!ortless and almost di"cult to go that slow. If you’re planning a run, then it starts with a slow stroll, not even a walk. If you’re riding your bike, then put it in first gear, ride with the slowest cadence possible to maintain balance. The trick is to start e!ortlessly and to maintain this sensation as you progress throughout your entire exercise session. As you move along at this slow pace your body sends you signals. Your only task is to simply listen to these signals. This is also a good time to learn to relax all your non-working muscles, especially the muscles of your jaw and face. Practice this experience of letting go of all inner tension both physically and mentally. Soon you’ll find that as your body warms-up the feeling of laziness disappears and is replaced with the pull into energy and vitality.

In fact, under the e!ortless exercise experience the only primary criteria that you need place on an exercise session is that you simply go out and warm-up. The other parameters such as intensity and duration all become secondary. Let your body’s energy determine where it wants to take you. Let this transition phase pull you through the experience and if the feeling improves go into exercise further, if it worsens consider quitting or slowing down to recapture the feeling of comfort and balance. The key to warm-up remains: Be aware, listen and take appropriate action. Let go of expectations, judgments, comparisons, future goals or negative self-talk and enjoy the movement and the moment. Many people discover that once they have tied their shoe laces and warmed-up, the negative thoughts and low energy levels have disappeared and they go on to enjoy a revitalizing exercise session.

H>(8=+:$#There are a number of other practical items to pay attention to

before you begin exercise. First, make sure you are well hydrated. How do you know if you are hydrated? Simply by the color of your

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urine. Yes, that’s right. It should be almost clear. If it is dark yellow it may take a day or so until your fluids are replenished. Would you take your car on the highway without checking the fluids and the oil? Of course not. Once you feel thirsty, it takes your body 35 hours to rehydrate completely. Make sure you are well hydrated, and carry a water bottle with you at all times.

F<'&Also about a half-hour before your exercise session, eat a snack

that contains quality protein and fat. A whole wheat peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk is a quick combination. This balance of macronutrients helps give you the sustainable energy you’ll need for prolonged exercise. Be mindful of over consuming sugar before you exercise because the energy rush and subsequent crash will occur while you’re exercising and become an obstacle to reaching the e!ortless flow state. Also, by eating sugar before exercise you’ll encourage your body to prefer sugar during exercise and this naturally shuts down your fat burning metabolic pathways.

Try eating consciously as well. This is a simple and natural way to help with weight control. Eat your snack slowly and allow your body to tell you when you’re full. Savor every bite and enjoy the taste. Practice this at all meals and you’ll be surprised how often and how much you actually over eat. This way you can enjoy smaller quantities of those foods you love, rather than experi-encing the scarcity that dieting engenders.

B8'=+6:#)The last and most important pre-exercise item is to practice

conscious breathing. Take some long deep breaths through your nose to help you relax your body and calm your mind. Breathing through your nose entirely on the inhalation and the exhalation stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system and lowers your heart rate, thereby giving you more reserve for exercise.

Many world cultures have expounded the benefits of paying attention to your breath as a tool for becoming present. Use this simple tool before and during exercise to keep your body/mind/spirit matrix unified and able to support the e!ortless experience. Being conscious of your breath anchors you in your inner body

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energy rather than becoming lost in your busy, intellectual thoughts or other distracting, external stimuli.

Pay attention and feel each breath: Enjoy the sensation of air moving in and out; be aware of the energy this creates. Your heart rate is intimately connected to the quality of your breath, if you have calm, slow, rhythmic breathing, then your heart rate will be lower and your overall feeling of comfort at any exercise intensity will be greater. As you warm-up, sensitize yourself to hold on to this feeling of calm and allow the slow, relaxing breaths to become a rhythmic guide-post during your exercise.

The technique of nasal breathing will be covered in depth in the next chapter, but su"ce it to say that even competitive athletes can run intervals all the while practicing nasal breathing. They experience greater comfort, recover after each interval faster and have much lower heart rates at varying intensities during the intervals.

If at any point your breathing becomes labored, especially during warm-up, slow down to re-capture the feeling of rhythmic, easy breathing. Let breath be your guide for ramping up the warm-up, especially in the initial stages of e!ortless exercise training.

T6' “I+!6”During this slow warm-up stage your body may send a signal

that you’re tight and need more time to loosen up, it may send a sensation that your knee is hurting and you should stop this session or it may send you a cue I call the “itch” – the impulse to speed up. Your job is to honor all of these signals and respond to what your body is telling you. If you receive any negative signals alter your pace, breathe deeper and see if you can quiet your body’s stress; if you can’t, it’s time to stop for the day.

Sti!ness is the precursor to pain, and pain is the precursor to injury – don’t force yourself to push through these sensations. That’s a mind trap. Listen to your body, not your mind. Your body knows better; honor this intuitive knowledge as it guides you toward well-being. Instead, alter your pace, become conscious of your form and allow your body to slowly adapt to what you’re asking of it. You’ll find you can circumvent aches and pains and finish most exercise sessions in an e!ortless fashion. It simply takes time, patience and a conscious e!ort to break with old training habits and expected outcomes created by pre-set workout criteria.

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If you’re able to diminish the stress, you can progress deeper into the exercise experience. When you experience the “itch,” that’s your first cue to pick up the pace. When you feel this sense of energy and flow, slowly take your pace up a notch. Stay with the experience of your body’s desire to go faster. At this point do not be distracted by external signs such as your watch or heart rate, simply be patient and alert and act on your internal impulses. On your first time out, you may not experience a flow state, that’s fine, but be assured that you’ve started the process of e!ortlessness.

How long should a warm-up last? This depends on many factors. It can last up to 30 or 40 minutes or longer depending on the weather and the event. Every day is di!erent and each person’s physiology is unique. If you’re in a warm environment, it can happen quickly; and if you’re in a cold environment, it may not happen at all. That’s why when exercising in the cold it’s paramount that you dress in layers to keep warm, otherwise you invite injury. Listening for the “itch” is the best internal indicator that your body is warmed-up, ready to increase your exercise intensity and enjoy an e!ortless exercise session.

M$#:+$8:#) H'=8+ R=+'There are a number of body generated signals you can listen to

as you warm-up and level o! into the aerobic portion of exercise. One of those is heart rate. The details and how-to of training heart rate zones will be covered in detail in the next chapter. For now, let’s examine the scope of heart rate as it pertains to the warm-up only.

Before you start to exercise you should be both relaxed and as alert as possible. This calmness within, as measured by heart rate (HR), should be well below 100 beats per minute (bpm) for most people. If your heart rate is above this, then you are already in a stress induced state and the likelihood of reaching a flow state or burning fat as a fuel source during exercise is greatly dimin-ished. It follows that the lower your starting heart rate, the lower your heart rate remains during exercise with greater e!ortlessness being the result. Healthy exercise progressively trains your body to accomplish greater work loads at LOWER heart rates. If you start your session with a low heart rate, you will stay low and you will

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finish low. This helps to release stress and tension both physically and mentally.

Try this experiment with your heart rate. Begin your session in a meditative state. Dress slowly. Then sit quietly for five minutes. During this period breathe through your nose only, slowly and rhythmically, become aware of you inner body energy. While continuing to relax and breathe, monitor your HR. At whatever low rested HR you establish, begin moving toward the “check-in” phase of your warm-up. Try to stay within 10 bpm of this rested HR during the internal check-in phase.

Over time, you’ll find that if your HR was 75 bpm while sitting, then as you start to exercise you’ll be able to note yourself moving along around 80 or 85 bpm. By repeating this process before exercise you’ll learn to capture the feeling of meditative calm, which then carries over into your exercise session. You’ll also access fat burning as an energy fuel and be able to access the zone of peak performance on a regular basis. Ross’s triathlon story illustrates the benefits of nasal breathing and a low HR in creating meditative calm at the beginning of an important race:

Ross was standing in the water at the start of an Olympic distance triathlon. He had begun his pre-race ritual of wading into the water, swimming a little and then positioning himself so that he could meditate for at least five minutes before the gun went o!.

Halfway through his meditation, crammed in with other swimmers, he heard the beep of his neighbor’s heart rate monitor. Aware of this he quietly asked this competitor where his HR was. One hundred twenty bpm was the response. Ross was comforted to acknow-ledge the reading on his monitor was solidly in the 70s. He took the swim start in stride and went on to have a race experience that was smooth, comfortable and relaxed. Ross couldn’t help wondering throughout the day what his fellow competitor was experiencing, as he had started out in an entirely di!erent fight or flight, sprint-to-the-finish adrenaline state.

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Practice warming-up in this way, and you’ll soon find that you’re able to exercise or race from a new place of calm, presence and empowerment. You’ll also find that the enjoyment of both exercise and competition skyrockets as you’re drawn into this positive exercise loop. Honor your body with a proper warm-up and it will open up to the Zen of peak performance.

T6' C8<!:=& C$$&-D$%#If we continue the analogy of an airplane trip, then after the slow

assent of the warm-up you level o! and complete your training session in a flow state of e!ortlessness, ending the trip with the gradual decent of the cool-down. Just as the warm-up is crucial in creating e!ortlessness in peak exercise, completing an adequate cool-down is essential for your body to make a healthy transition back to a rested state.

C6'!"-O<+ P6=,'The overlooked and often neglected check-out phase of exercise,

which is often truncated early, directly contributes to the epidemic of injuries in exercise participants. Because our society values the intensity of the workout and we’re often forced to fit fitness into our busy schedules, once our main exercise session is over we rush o! to our next commitment, leaving our bodies to try and re-balance the stress. Without the graceful transition to a rested state, our bodies are left sti! and sore. These symptoms are a function of skipping the cooling-down. Post-exercise soreness (myositis) may also be the result of excessive exercise: pushing your body too long or exercise that is performed at too high an intensity.

A progressive cool-down following your main exercise set allows the body to gradually re-distribute blood flow back to the internal organs, allows muscles and tendons to return to their pre-exercise state, encourages proper removal of waste products from muscle tissue and allows for a return to normal homeostasis after exercise. Joyce’s story testifies to the greatest benefit of a proper cool-down – that it circumvents feelings of pain or sti!ness and leaves you refreshed and rejuvenated:

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Joyce liked to lift weights. However, one of her common complaints was that it always left her sti! and sore. She would push herself because she liked the muscle development, but never cooled-down, thinking that squeezing the last possible moments out of her weight session would benefit her more. After suggesting that she ride the bike easily for ") minutes after her leg day and swim slowly for ") minutes after her upper body day, she reported she felt great for the first time. The post-exercise soreness went away; and she found that she was ready to train again the next day, instead of requiring rest or struggling through a painful weightlifting session. Joyce discovered that cooling-down consistently allowed her to flush her muscles of the wastes accumulated through high intensity exercise, and it allowed her to transition gracefully into a rested state.

By properly cooling-down and allowing the body to flush the muscles of waste products and cleanse itself through movement, we dramatically reduce post-exercise discomfort. This benefit makes intuitive sense, as active recovery has shown to be more e!ective than passive rest in the reduction of post-exercise sti!ness and soreness.

Many top professional hockey teams require their athletes ride stationary bikes post-game for 15 to 20 minutes at a low level of intensity to speed recovery and allow for better game performance the next day. At the end of your exercise sessions try progressively reducing your heart rate to below 100 bpm and keep it there for at least five minutes before you stop. This is the final check-out phase of your exercise session. Everyone who has embraced this process says it allows them to dissipate any discomfort, leaves them feeling terrific for the rest of the day and fully recovered for subsequent sessions.

It’s similar to the airplane taxing down the runway post landing with everyone still clipped into their seat belts until coming to a full stop, engines o! and the “fasten seat belt” sign turned o! as a last precaution. Proper cool-downs take anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes and may take even longer for some individuals. As a guide, use your heart rate, which should be below 100 bpm for at least 5 minutes

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during the final check-out phase. Your breathing rate should be slow and entirely through your nose, providing a feeling of calm, ease and well-being. These tools indicate if you have made the successful recovery necessary for a healthy resting state.

S6$8+ S',,:$#,With that said about the time it takes to warm-up and cool-down

properly, what can you accomplish if you only have a short time to exercise? This scenario is very common in modern culture. The first mistake in attitude or perception is to try and “cram” what you can into this time space. An e;ortless exercise experience within a .0 or /4 minute time frame would consist of only a warm-up and cool-down. In fact, with only 15 minutes to exercise you may only accomplish a check-in and check-out phase.

On stressful days give yourself the permission to get in touch with your inner body energy, relax, limber up and enjoy stress reducing movement. I still encourage clients to hop on their stationary bikes or head out on a run with very limited time. In these cases start slowly as with any other session, leave the stress of the day behind, breathe and become totally aware of your body and the exercise process. Allow the session to unfold until you need to start slowing down again in order to finish on time. Often clients only reach a heart rate of 100 or 110 bpm and never break a sweat. But in these cases the mental break from routine and the aerobic activity leaves them refreshed and vitalized. Here’s how one client was able to develop her running on limited time:

A few years prior, Kaitlin had participated in the Ironman triathlon. Now, time had passed and with two little children in tow, she was worried about maintaining her fitness. After much discussion we found that ($ minutes was all she could realistically fit into her busy day, either during the kids’ nap time or later at night. Since Kaitlin was motivated by concrete goals we set up the challenge of running for (" days for (" minutes each day on her treadmill. She had heard that it takes (" days of repetition to develop a habit – so o! she went with this in mind.

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Well, her (" days turned into many months of running. What was most interesting was her increase in fitness. Through this process her speed at her aerobic heart rate increased from *.# miles per hour (mph) to ).* mph in three months. Her new speed was equal to the pace she had attained during her Ironman training, and she felt more comfortable now than back when she was running only three days a week. Kaitlin’s an example of a little goes a long way; her secret - consistency.

These short sessions reinforce my belief that the number one objective of exercise remains the cultivation of a healthy body and the reduction of stress. I used to try and cram a session in, shorten or skip the warm-up all together and forget the cool-down, all the while trying to race out the door and hit my target heart rate as quickly as possible. These sessions left me sti! and sore and were the root cause of many of my injuries. Exercise was viewed not as a process but only as a means to an end – a future personal best or a race goal.

Now, exercise represents a chance to become present and enjoy each resonant session. Once I let go of the expectations, stress and strict criteria around my workouts, no matter how much “clock time” I have, I’m still able to create a quality exercise session.

Provided one is consistent, future goals unfold e!ort-lessly, without worry, discomfort or injury. These short sessions now become an extension of every other session and a further opportunity to transform movement into meditation. Honor the warm-up and cool-down process, and in turn your body will grant you greater strength, speed and vitality.

E77$8+&',, E9'8!:,' # 3: E#+'8:#) E77$8+&',,#',,Here are a couple of simple exercises to practice over the next

week that will help you make the transition from rest to exercise, all the while creating e!ortlessness from within.

Create an inner stillness. For one week suspend any expectations or hectic energy around getting to your workout. Drive to the gym slowly, put your clothes on consciously, sit for a few moments and nasal breathe to calm your heart rate before you head out for your

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session. Focus on creating an inner stillness. Now as you start to move, it’s imperative that you move at the slowest possible rate. This pace for runners will be a slow walk, for cyclists a very slow spin perhaps a 40-50 cadence in a very easy gear, 1st , 2nd or 3rd. Resist starting on an uphill. If you’re exercising indoors, at the pool or on a machine set the numbers to the lowest level and simply start to move. Perform the check-in and warm-up, re-lax all of your non-working muscles, breathe through your nose and establish inner calm. Let your inner body energy signal you to pick up the pace. Be patient and wait for this to happen. Don’t put any mind generated expectations around your experience simply listen. When you feel the “itch” to do more, progressively and slowly build your speed and maintain the feeling of e!ortless-ness throughout the main set of your workout and the cool-down. Don’t let outer stimulus distract you, maintain an inner focus and enjoy every moment.

Cool-down exercise. Once your body has signaled it’s time to quit for the day, initiate the cool-down process and progressively ramp down your pace. Take time to do this; don’t simply “jump” to a slower pace. This may take 20-30 minutes. Now, spend five min-utes exercising (if you were running this will be walking) at a level below 100 bpm on your heart rate monitor. Let your senses take you into the present: look around, feel the breeze on your skin and hear the sounds around you. Now, go inward and breathe through your nose, calming and relaxing all of your non-working muscles. Spend the full five minutes relaxed and below 100 bpm and then stop if you wish. Notice how you feel for the rest of the day. Pay close attention to any di!erence in discomfort, sti!ness or soreness. I’m sure you’ll feel great and ready for tomorrow’s exercise session.

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CHAPTER $: EFFORTLESS ENDURANCE

Maintaining A Flow State

If you’ve ever watched an inspired athletic achievement there is fluidity and ease in the performance. They make it look easy, as if they’re at one with the activity. This is the true artistry of great performers, be they an athlete, musician or dancer. Attaining just such a flow state during performance occurs when you are relaxed and drawn into a resonant experience. There’s a deep desire to continue; in essence, you are being pulled into doing more. In fitness, this “pull” comes from creating an experience where your body progressively opens up to exercise. Think of it as tapping into authentic power rather than using external force. To help further clarify this experience, let’s examine the concept of push/pull.

T6' P<,6/P<&& C$#!'A+The push/pull concept applies to energy – life energy. Exercise

is all about creating more of this vibrant energy. An awareness of how this energy flows within your body is critical when creating flow states of heightened experience and performance. Understanding when you cross over into a push state rather than being pulled along in energetic synergy is the key skill in attaining an e!ortless exercise experience.

What do I mean by push/pull? Simply put, it is the direction that energy flows within you. If you were leading a stubborn donkey up a hill, it would be easier to pull it toward a tasty carrot dangled in front of its nose rather than trying to push and whip its backside up the steep grade.

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Ask yourself are you swimming upstream or downstream? Are you working against something or flowing with something? Are you being intuitively pushed away from an activity or intrinsically pulled into an activity? These questions outline the nature of the push/pull concept.

I’ve compiled a list of adjectives below that best describes the energies involved in the push/pull concept. Carefully review the list and consider which side more accurately describes your exercise experience.

Pull Push Comfort and Ease Fatigue and Exhaustion Play Hard Work Inner exercise –body energy Outer Exercise–intellectual mind Intuitive Scheduled Emotional/Spiritual Mental/Physical Stress Reducing Stress Inducing Alert Awareness Mental Toughness Engaged Disengaged Non-Criteria Based Criteria Based Integrated Physical Enjoyable Painful Empowered Forceful

A review of the descriptive words shows how often times the push energy comes from outside you: that new training schedule, the coach you’ve hired, group training or competition goals. It represents what you feel you should be accomplishing and usually represents stressful energy created through will power or mental force. Here, your reasoning mind disconnects from your body’s energy cues and drives you toward your goals. This type of training is often painful and exhausting.

On the other hand, pull energy originates inside you: your passion for and enjoyment of movement, resonant exercise experiences and mind/body/spirit flow states. It represents an empowered energetic experience occurring in the present moment, where the experience is motivating, liberating and life sustaining. It’s synergistic and e!ortless.

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That said, it takes a certain amount of will power or push energy to get us moving sometimes and at some level this energy works. It gets things rolling and helps us to take action. However, it also requires sacrifice in the short term or the reliance on others for support or motivation. Careful listening is the key and mindful integration of these energies keeps training sustainable. I encourage clients to be conscious of the balance between push and pull energies and to focus on amplifying the pull energies.

To illustrate this point, let’s consider the example of an aerobic exercise session. Let’s say you have an impulse to go for a bike ride. You’re energized, have free time and look forward to the summer sunshine. Before you’ve even mounted your bike you’ve already experienced the pull state without any intellectual analysis, a criteria based program to meet or a future goal to shoot for. Go with your intuition. This non-criteria based exercise session is then designed from the inside out. Expert advice is great, but listening to your inner body energy is the soundest starting point for any exercise session. It’s like dangling a carrot before a donkey and lends enjoyment and enthusiasm to your training.

The opposite scenario might occur if it’s raining and you’re tired from yesterday’s weight lifting session, but your training program charts a bike ride – so you’d better go, right? Even in this guilt-producing situation listen to your intuition and do not push yourself into a negative energy workout. Instead, spend a moment attuning to your inner body energy and consider which activity, if any, you feel intuitively pulled toward. If your health or fitness is border-line, I would go so far as to say that any exercise you are not drawn into has the potential force to create negative energy and result in additional stress that contributes to further break down. If you choose an alternate activity, then give yourself permission to focus only on the warm-up process. If you’re having continued di"culty achieving e!ortlessness, pack it in for the day and give your body the solid rest it requires.

However, if the slow warm-up produces the “itch” for more, you have become one with the exercise. If you stay alert to you inner energy cues and don’t allow your competitive ego or intellectual thoughts to force the session into a “workout,” you’ll experience the “high” of exercise. You’ll reach that zone where time seems to slow down and the session flies by in e!ortless ease. Often

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you’re able to exceed what you thought you could accomplish that day. Again, it’s like swimming downstream. Also you’ll rarely need to force yourself to exercise, as this now occurs naturally from the inside out. Spontaneity and permission are great cures for boredom and burn out.

F:#(:#) +6' F&$%In non-criteria based training it’s important to calm the voice

of intellectual analysis and follow your deeper intuitive knowledge. Learn to trust your inner body signals, so that as messages become clearer, your intuition grows stronger. Internally you’ll feel comfort and ease, while externally you’ll notice that you’re creating progressively greater dynamic motion. Healthy development occurs and little downside exists with this type of exercise, and miraculous world records are created here. These achievements occur when preparation and flawless execution align with the higher consciousness of intuition and find expression through a great internal calm. Watching such performances it is evident that there is more at work than mental toughness and physical e!ort. The athlete’s fluid movement, facial expression and calm breathing appear to be functioning on a higher plane than those of his or her competitors.

In my years as a coach, I’ve noticed that a greater portion of clients tend to train solidly on the push side of the energetic equation. Many turn exercise into a struggle of will power. They push right past any sensations of discomfort into stress and pain and rarely experience the bliss of an e!ortless peak performance. I believe there is a delicate balance between pushing a bit harder or backing o; a little to experience the e;ortless pull back into comfort and ease. The push/pull pyramid graphic below illus-trates the integration of energies required to reach peak exercise experiences.

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And if the ultimate goal of exercise is to experience a positive flow of energy within our bodies, then getting in touch with this energy that pulls us into exercise should be our primary focus. However, allowing ourselves the permission and flexibility to go with this flow is counter-intuitive to our Western attitude toward exercise. With all the best intent, many participants continue to shape themselves to rigorous criterion based schedules, short training time frames, excessive anaerobic workouts, little rest and recovery and eventually discipline themselves into overuse injury.

When we over engage our thinking minds in dynamic activity, we actually short-circuit the natural flow of energy and become pushed out of the e!ortless state. Have you ever tried to “think” your way through a golf stroke? This approach almost certainly creates disaster. No question, practice on form is required to improve; however, natural movement is the goal, where your body’s sense memory knows instinctively what to do. In fact, that’s the ultimate goal of practice: To allow your body to rehearse skills to the point where movement becomes automatic and your body moves with

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grace and energy conservation. And so it follows that since our goal is to deeply entrain the feeling of e!ortlessness, we must progressively condition ourselves to experience greater e!ort-lessness rather than teaching our minds and bodies to expect and perform in stress and pain.

When giving presentations, I often say the word “exercise” and then ask the audience what their first thought or emotional reaction to that word is. Sometimes to drive my point home, I use the word “marathon” instead. The majority of people’s response can be boiled down into one common denomi-nator: PAIN. And being a proponent of e!ortlessness, I have to ask, “Why is that?” And most people confide that their experience with exercise has been on the negative push side of the equation. They bandy about old adages like “no pain, no gain” or “mind over matter.” And again I am reminded that the prevailing exercise attitude remains that one must su!er while exercising for it to be of any value. If it’s not painful, you’re not progressing.

Then I ask these participants, “What if you could experience exercise that was wholly positive in nature, e!ortless and still meet your goals?” I go on to show countless marathoners and Ironman triathletes that through non-criteria based exercise have finished these events e!ortlessly, with solid times and many with personal bests. It is possible. It boils down to consciously balancing the push/pull energies every time you lace up your shoes, strap on your helmet or snap on your nose clip. Most people’s experience of the Ironman triathlon is one of fatigue and exhaustion. I recall one client who didn’t make the race a daunting goal, but used non-criteria based training to embrace exercise for the joyous experience it can be in and of itself:

Emily embraced the concept of e!ortless exercise as she trained for the Ironman. On every bike ride she listened to her body and adjusted her pace, and she only ever watched her heart monitor occasionally to ensure she wasn’t going over her aerobic (e!ortless) threshold. When I asked her what HR she rode at she said it would average as low as ""$ bpm. She wasn’t

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driven to push harder as she knew that on any given day her body would tell her exactly how hard she needed to train.

Emily was a master at inner body energy awareness: She always kept her experience in comfort and only allowed herself to go faster or work harder when she felt the pull energy to do so. She didn’t speed up her training when other competitors did so, but only when her body gave her the signal “let’s go.”

Emily went on to have a successful Ironman finish in under ") hours free from the pain and hardship most would assume occurs from racing that distance. She wasn’t even sore the following day, because she had learned very early on to listen to her body and follow its infinite wisdom. The good news is that Emily has gone on to enter many more Ironman compe-titions because she enjoys the training and the race experience equally well.

If you find yourself heavily weighted on the push side with tradi-tional training protocols, try the non-criteria approach for a month. Experience exercise in such a way that you put no parameters around each session. You simply allow your intuition to point you to a particular activity and then allow your body’s energy signals to dictate the intensity and duration of your session. Give yourself the freedom to explore the experience in the present moment, all the while seeking comfort and ease.

At the end of the month evaluate your energy, health and fitness. You may find yourself soaring to new heights of performance – e!ortlessly. What you also discover is that this system ensures you have an automatic, guiding system that protects you from over exercising and injury. Long before you have driven stress in too deep, your body will have given you signals to slow down, change direction or stop.

When we exercise in balanced e;ortlessness we pull negative stress out of the body and become not only fitter but healthier. Instead of dealing with fatigue and injury, exercise becomes rejuve-

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nating, refreshing and life enhancing. Once you are aware of and can listen to this inner energy it’s possible to re-integrate scientific protocols back into your training program and create a unique, balanced sustainable exercise practice.

N=,=& B8'=+6:#)Every time I pick up a book based on the philosophies of the

Eastern cultures, I am reminded of the benefits of breathing exclu-sively through your nose. For millennia humanity has known about this health enhancing habit, but in our Western, fast paced society it has become a forgotten piece of wisdom.

Can you picture being in comfort and ease when you are panting and your breathing is frantic? Can you picture fluid execution while you are gasping for breath? It is impossible to remain calm physically if your breath is not also calm. One skill that creates the calm flow state of pull during exercise is nasal breathing. Once mastered, low breath rates during exercise greatly aid accessing e!ortless states.

At birth we naturally breathe through our noses. Babies switch to mouth breathing in response to stress: we want food, so we cry. Later, we learn to breathe through our mouths to remain competitive during exercise, forcing ourselves past the point of our current conditioning. Needing to open our mouths to breathe during exercising is one of the first cues that we are entering the push state and exiting effortless exercise. Shallow, mouth breathing eventually becomes the norm in our day-to-day lives, and we carry this over into exercise. Mouth breathing is also a clue that you are experiencing stress even at rest.

T6' H'=8+ C$##'!+:$#Did you know your nose is intimately linked to your heart? Short,

shallow mouth breaths promote a faster heart rate. This reduces your e"ciency and ultimately lowers your exercise potential. If the goal is to go farther, be stronger and go faster with less e!ort, then training to become a proficient nasal breather during exercise surely enhances performance, reduces heart rate and improves

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recovery. It also creates an internal calm and peace – the place where you reach a Zen-like flow.

R',A:8=+$8> E77:!:'#!>Because the nasal passages are small, when you breathe

through your nose you’re forced to breathe longer each cycle and that causes more oxygen to go deeper into the lungs, hence creating greater respiratory e"ciency. Also, nasal breathing enables you to use your diaphragm more. This movement exercises the diaphragm muscle and massages your internal organs.

The nasal passages are also lined with tiny hairs, which filter the incoming air. This enhances your immunity to viruses and reduces the susceptibility of becoming ill. Nasal breathing also warms the air as you breathe, protecting your lungs from the shock of cool air and allows your lungs to work at a higher e"ciency.

P=8=,>*A=+6'+:! C=&*Perhaps best of all, breathing through your nose stimulates

your parasympathetic nervous system, the system responsible for calming you down. So if you train yourself to breathe through your nose, you can literally pull stress out of your body while exercising. Conscious stimulation of the parasympathetic system promotes greater levels of vitality and better health. Nasal breathing is one of the most important skills you can learn to perform before, during and after exercise.

H$% +$ N=,=& B8'=+6'To encourage a meditative state, each exercise session starts

with your breath. Begin by paying attention to your breathing during rest. Establish a practice of deep, slow, rhythmic, nasal breaths while simply sitting still. Allow yourself to be conscious of your breath, this quiets your mind and brings you into the present moment. This process creates the inner calm needed to experience e!ortless exercise.

D=8+6 V=('8 T'!6#:B<'One technique used in Yoga practice is to inhale, then exhale

all of the air through your nose slowly while constricting the back of your throat. If you’re doing it correctly, you’ll make the same

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sound that Darth Vader made in Star Wars, that deep raspy hiss. Again, let the air fill your lungs naturally; don’t force it in. As the air flows inward, don’t breathe with your chest, instead let your stomach distend. Think of deep, belly breathes, and focus on the vitality this creates within you.

UAA'8 L:*:+During exercise it is easy to teach yourself this technique,

provided you start slowly and give yourself time to adapt. Your goal is to establish this calm breathing at the beginning of your exercise session while warming-up (i.e. between 8-12 breaths a minute). As you progressively pick up your pace hold onto this calm, breathing deeply as long as possible, and pay attention to the point where you start to breathe through your mouth. This point corresponds to the upper limit of your current e!ortless training zone. Going beyond this takes you out of comfort and balance and induces stress. In this way, nasal breathing becomes a simple form of monitoring your exercise intensity.

B8'=+6 =#( P=!:#)Keep in mind that nasal breathing, like any skill, improves over

time. One of America’s leading ultra-marathoners uses nasal breathing exclusively to pace herself. She often starts in the middle of the pack, walking up and cruising down hills, allowing her nose to determine her pace. By half way she has caught most of her competition, and by the end of the race she often finishes first – even first overall. She finds herself much fresher than the rest of the pack, invigorated and able to continue if she so desired.

I have coached many endurance athletes who now run intervals all while breathing though their noses. Be patient with yourself. When your nasal breathing threshold expands, know that you have expanded your e!ortless state to a higher level as well.

Many people experience di"culty at first. You may have feelings of too little oxygen intake or experience nasal drip. These are signs that you’ve been pushing your exercise experience out of the e!ortless state and into the stress zone by breathing through your mouth. At these times it’s important to slow down, have patience and continue the nasal breathing practice. Seek to find the upper limit of comfortable nasal breathing. One of my clients described

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how he eventually completed a nasal breathing exercise session and how he experienced great pacing and didn’t experience post-workout stress:

Jason, an avid triathlete, remembers one particu-larly break-through bike ride. Over time he was able to continually pick up his pace while maintaining a steady nasal breathing rate of "( breaths per minute (he has a resting rate of "'). On this memorable ride his heart rate remained in the "%$s no matter how hard he pedaled. He also reported that his physio-logical parameters remained calm throughout the session. Jason was conscious of the fact that he was in a flow state and felt a sense of elation as he zoomed along. He said he felt great – both e!ortless and connected.

Nasal breathing takes practice and can take a few years to fully develop the habit. Give yourself patience when acquiring this new skill; it’s worth the e!ort.

T:A, 7$8 R<##'8, =#( S%:**'8,Runners find it best to practice this nasal breathing when

walking during warm-ups and cool-downs. Your goal should be to take 7-9 steps per inhalation breath and 7-9 steps per exhalation breath. This ensures that you have good control of ventilation and remain extremely calm. Work towards this slowly, and focus on making your breathing as fluid and rhythmic as possible. When breathing out through your nose, practice constricting the flow of air in your throat by making the Darth Vader sound mentioned earlier.

For swimmers, it’s necessary to sip the air in through your mouth and use nasal breathing on your exhalation. Pay close attention to your breathing as you swim, and endeavor to make it as calm and relaxed as possible.

Don’t force yourself to breathe through your nose, rather allow yourself to pace your training properly so that nasal breathing becomes relaxed and rhythmical. The main downside to nasal breathing is developing a runny nose. Carry some Kleenex and refrain from practicing too much nasal breathing in extremely cold

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weather. Over time your nasal passages open up naturally and you find your runny nose disappears. Remember that your mission is to seek e!ortlessness and your breathing should be a natural extension of this practice. After awhile you’ll notice that you don’t need to focus strict attention on your breathing anymore, as it becomes part of your body’s intrinsic sense memory. You’ll also notice that this form of breathing eliminates facial strain and eases your perception of exercise stress.

Just like the runners who can perform intervals while nasal breathing, with time, you too can train yourself to breathe through your nose and extend your e!ortless experience into progres-sively greater exercise intensities. Many athletes have been able to reduce their exercise breathing rate to a lower count than their resting rate. Think about exercising for an extended period of time all the while allowing your respiratory system to relax and your body to actually de-stress. Nasal breathing remains pivotal in creating a unified body/mind/spirit connection and producing a calm flow state. I enjoy telling my clients that in time your nose will out perform your mouth!

E77$8+&',, T8=:#:#) H'=8+ R=+'The science of heart rate technology can become complicated

and many people find it overwhelming. Others simply wear a heart rate monitor to see their heart rate level during training with no idea of how to use it as a tool in tandem with their intuition. Many coaches use multiple zones with workouts becoming mental/technological distractions where athletes’ entire focus is on their watch and detached from their bodies. Over the years I have simplified the use of heart rate monitoring during exercise. I use the KISS principle (keep it simple stupid) because I’ve seen many clients struggling to succeed.

The main purpose a heart rate monitor serves is setting the upper limit of your e!ortless zone. Once you’ve experienced what this feels like, actual monitoring becomes secondary. Don’t over monitor. Simply use this tool to reinforce what your intuition tells you. Learn to trust your body first and use your heart rate as a secondary check-in device. Seamlessly integrate this piece of science, and always default to what your intuition tells you

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based on your inner body energy signals. Occasionally you may find yourself either below or above your prescribed zone due to temperature, hydration or the onset of an illness. As long as you feel e!ortless, stick with that.

Begin by finding your flow state and determining the corre-sponding heart rate zone for your unique physiology. So exactly what is your e!ortless training zone (ETZ)? Scientists have attempted to answer this question for decades, using a variety of prediction formulas and various tests. All of these methods do work, but only for some people and only some of the time. Why? Because heart rates di!er from person to person and can fluctuate from day to day. I’ve seen a 40 beats per minute (bpm) di!erence in training zones between two people of the same age and fitness. In situations like this, science sometimes fails us and intuition helps to individualize training zones based on each person’s unique inner body energy. With this integrated approach in mind, fitness and health can develop simultaneously.

The e;ortless training zone (ETZ) is the heart rate range that provides the greatest gains in both fitness and health. It’s where you experience flow states. There exists a balance between devel-oping your fitness and improving your health, and often individuals step over this line, sacrificing their health for minimal or even negative returns in fitness.

Once you’ve determined your upper ETZ limit, your monitor aids you by providing additional internal feedback. It alerts you if you’re under stress and helps you slow down on those days. Monitors also help you to pace yourself properly on days when your intuitive skills are clouded and when you’re having trouble connecting with your inner body energy.

A'8$?:! I#+'#,:+>Scientists have proven that aerobic exercise yields the

greatest health benefits and provides the best foundation for all endurance sports and supports our quality of life as we age. In the e!ortless exercise vision, intensity only increases providing it remains aerobic during training – remaining relaxed, balanced and comfortable. Even if you are training for high levels of compe-tition, e;ortlessness remains your number one objective. There is no need to exceed this zone except during the final training phase

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before a competition, while preparing yourself for the specific race intensity anticipated. Experiencing how fast your body can go is exhilarating if you maintain internal calm and presence. That’s the key to e!ortlessness: calm inside, dynamic motion outside.

D'+'8*:#:#) >$<8 E77$8+&',, T8=:#:#) Z$#' (ETZ)So how do you determine what is the optimum zone for you?

In working with athletes, I’ve developed ways to help clients determine their upper limit of their e!ortless training zone. These simple methods take into account body cues and signals during exercise and focus on maintaining an aerobic state of maximized health and fitness, hence the term E!ortless Training Zone.

There are three methods used to determine the upper limit of your ETZ. You can use a combination of these methods or simply go with the one that suits you best. I find that through using all three approaches while coaching, I have been able to accurately determine what’s best for my clients. In the final analysis, the heart rate zone you choose should always bring you to a balanced place of e!ortlessness. Always default to your experience and use this science as guidance and back up information.

M'+6$( 1: E9'8!:,' E9A'8:*'#+=+:$#The first and most important way to set your upper limit is

through your sensation of comfort, balance and e;ortlessness. In the ETZ you should feel as if you could continue to exercise all day in this manner. In other words, you experience no need to stop at any time, that your pace is even and you are in balance with your e!ort. Experiment with a variety of heart rate monitored exercise sessions to see just where you are most comfortable. Adding five beats to the HR number where you feel the greatest flow state approximates your upper limit nicely.

Then ask yourself two critical questions:Could I repeat the same workout right away without any rest?Did I have the sensation of e!ortlessness the whole time I was exercising?

If you answered “yes” to both of these questions and, for the sake of example, you were exercising at an average of 125 bpm, then set your upper limit at 130 bpm.

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I have enjoyed cycling for years and have found that the mid 120s feels absolutely e!ortless for me. Using this method for my cycling, I have set my bike upper limit at 130 bpm. I exceed this limit on occasion, provided I still feel e!ortless. Keep the push/pull concept in mind in these cases: It’s okay to work at a faster rate or speed, but it’s not okay to struggle.

Experiment with a variety of sport-specific workouts over di!erent time lengths to determine if your zones di!er in various situations. Be sure to use the warm-up and nasal breathing techniques. Keep a journal or chart these activities, speed, distance and heart rates. Through this self-knowledge you’ll learn where you experience the greatest flow state and over what distance or duration. This is a trial and error method, but it gets you in touch with the state of e!ortlessness most accurately and in the process teaches you which heart rates are linked to certain internal body states and sensations. Your monitor reveals to you when you are tired, getting sick, having a drop in energy or when you feel invigorated. If you notice low heart rates with great speeds, it’s an indication that you have an e"cient aerobic system and have increased your body’s ability to handle exercise.

How do you know if you’re exiting the ETZ? You start to struggle and push mentally and physically. You feel the need to begin to breathe rapidly through your mouth. Also, your legs start to burn and you have the desire to slow down or stop. All of these sensations pull you away from a heightened flow state and lead to discomfort and pain. Prolonged training in this fashion eventually leads to injury.

Once you’ve experienced these anaerobic conditions, set the upper heart rate limit on your monitor below any of these stressful states. With conscious practice you may not need a heart monitor to exercise in your zone. I have found experienced athletes can guess their heart rates to within five beats without looking at their watch. They have become masterfully in tune with their bodies and developed an inner awareness about the upper limit of their ETZ.

M'+6$( 2: N=,=& T68',6$&(The second way to determine the maximum limit of your ETZ

is the point at which you lose your ability to breathe comfortably through your nose. When your ventilation is rhythmic and relaxed you are truly in an aerobic flow state. Once your breathing becomes

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labored and you start breathing through your mouth you’ve become partly anaerobic and are starting to experience exercise induced stress.

If your break-over nasal breathing heart rate point is lower than the number determined in Method One, then use this lower number to determine your e!ortless exercise zone. If the nasal breathing heart rate is higher, stick with your Method One number. Either way, use the lower number. One tip: If you’re an experi-enced athlete try breathing through your nose on several training sessions before you determine at which heart rate you break over into mouth breathing.

If you’re accustomed to breathing through your mouth during exercise this method records a far lower heart rate than you would expect. The reason for this is that shallow, fast breathing has conditioned your body to expect exercise stress. This translates to higher heart rates and in turn drives you out of the zone of e!ort-lessness far quicker. If you start using your nasal threshold heart rate for training, eventually your nose, heart rate, nervous system and body recondition and you’ll be able to attain e;ortlessness at higher speeds and lower heart rates. In other words, you’ll be able to increase your pace without going out of the flow state of e!ortlessness. Fundamentally, this change in training method and physiological development becomes an extension of your ETZ and indicates that your fitness is improving and your body can handle more exercise intensity in a natural way.

M'+6$( 3: B&$$( L=!+=+' T',+:#)The third way to determine the upper limit of your e;ortless

training zone is through a simple blood lactate test. This test is best reserved for endurance athletes who want another objective measure of their zones. Use a blood lactate level of 2mmol/L to set the upper limit of the e!ortless training zone. As a coach, I look carefully at these results for the point where the resting values start to increase from the baseline. This point corresponds to the intensity where your body has started to become anaerobic. Also take into consideration the previous two methods. Intuitive data is just as important as the levels of lactate that accumulate, because lactate levels can vary day-to-day and session-to-session. If you

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have access to this testing, use this data in conjunction with the other two methods to determine which zone feels right for you.

Here’s how lactate works. When lactate begins to accumulate in your system this is a sign that you are starting to access your anaerobic energy system to keep exercising. It’s a signal that your body can’t maintain homeostasis or balance and that it has to dip into its emergency energy stores. This creates internal stress, makes the muscle environment slightly acidic and pulls you away from healthy exercise. While small amounts of anaerobic exercise are necessary to prepare you for competition, remember that this is a stressful exercise state and prolonged training requires signif-icant body resources to a!ect proper recovery. If you need to train your anaerobic system for competition, then do so in as e!ortless a manner as possible, holding onto nasal breathing and inner calm for as long as possible while you increase intensity.

However, if the goal of exercise is to maximize fitness while enhancing health, then exercise performed in the absence of accumulating lactate leaves you refreshed and vitalized. This is the central theory of the e!ortless exercise training system, which is based on always staying in the health building aerobic state of flow. Not only do you maximize your endurance and minimize injury, but the training becomes positive and extremely pleasurable.

M=9 VO2 T',+Some clubs o!er what’s called a max VO/ test to determine

cardiovascular fitness. If you have access to one of these tests pay particular importance to the upper limit the tester gives you for your aerobic zone. Most clubs use a five zone method. Usually the top of zone two – the aerobic threshold – is noted on your test results. Use this heart rate number in conjunction with the other two methods in determining the upper limit of your ETZ.

S'++:#) >$<8 L$%'8 L:*:+The lower limit of your ETZ should be set /4 bpm lower than

your upper limit. This 20 beat range gives you enough flexibility to pace a variety of workouts. It’s not necessary to “red line” your zone and always drive your heart rate up to the top, as the benefits of fat burning, health development and e"ciency are actually greater in the lower portion of the zone. Let your focus on inner

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body energy, nasal breathing and the sensation of e!ortlessness guide your training within this range on any given day.

ETZ A(C<,+*'#+,Begin by using the lowest heart rate any of the above methods

give you, especially as you learn more about your unique body. Reserve exceeding this number until the time comes when you are pulled into the activity. That way you’re guaranteed to stay aerobic and e!ortless. As you become more comfortable exercising and breathing, you’ll find that your heart rate beats per minute may decrease, that’s an indication that you are becoming fitter and are more able to handle the stress created by exercise. Always let your intuition guide you in choosing the method and zone that works best for you.

When setting your upper limit heart rate it’s important to use a number that you feel comfortable with, rather than an intellec-tually or scientifically predicted number. If you find that over time you are always five beats higher, then perhaps it’s time to adjust upwards if you’re healthy and improving physically. You could also find that you are always in the bottom of your zone and need to adjust downwards.

Still, remember the experience of e!ortlessness remains the primary focus of every exercise session. Default to your intuition first and use your monitor as a secondary guideline. Don’t become a slave to technology. If on any particular day you feel best training 30 beats lower, stay there, and perhaps on other days when you can charge up the hill in a flow state, go for it!

ETZ :, SA$8+ SA'!:7:!Your ETZ is sport specific. Also it is individual and changes

over time as you become fitter. You could have three di;erent zones if you participate in three di;erent sports on a regular basis. Also, your ETZ numbers will di!er from your workout partners and competitors, so don’t be tempted to compare training heart rates with those of your friends. With consistent training, your body becomes stronger aerobically and this allows you to exercise at increasingly faster tempos with progressively lower heart rates. When this occurs, it means that you may adjust your

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zone downwards over time. Then congratulate yourself – you are becoming both healthier and fitter!

ETZ T:A,Here are some special circumstances where you may adjust the

zone upwards or downwards, depending on your overall exercise status and health. Make these adjustments after you have deter-mined your ETZ based on the methods above. These tips are used for special circumstances and are arbitrary adjustments to ensure that you exercise in an e!ortless state, free from exercise-induced stress.

Lower the zone 10 beats if you are currently sedentaryLower the zone 10 beats if you have been recently ill or are on any medicationsLower the zone 5 beats if you become ill often and exercise sporadicallyKeep your zone if you have consistently exercised 3-4 times a week for more than 2 yearsRaise your zone 5 beats if you are an athlete that has trained injury free for more than 2 years

Many individuals like to fine-tune their zone based on the follow-ing more detailed questions:

Can I exercise all day in the middle of this zone?Does this zone feel e!ortless all the time?Is my form/technique impeccable in this zone? This partic-ularly applies to runners. If your zone forces you to run too slow and fall into poor form adjust the zone upwards slightlyIs my breathing unconscious, or is it labored?Do I feel the sensation of comfort and balance?Can I talk easily at this exercise intensity?Do I find recovery is quick and complete after a workout in this zone?

If you answered “yes” to all of the above questions, then you are squarely in the middle of your ETZ. Provided you can hang on to the feeling of flow, it’s alright to exceed your ETZ. This, in fact, becomes an extension of your body’s ability to exercise at ever increasing external workloads while remaining in an e!ortless state internally – the experience of any peak performance. So

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remember the practice of e!ortlessness consists of intuitive flow, nasal breathing, activity in the absence of struggle, flawless form and enjoyment.

T6' R'C<@'#=+:$# Z$#' Many clients come to me with chronic injuries or su!ering burn

out from the anaerobic intensity of generic training programs. On these occasions I prescribe exercise that is wholly rejuvenating in nature. This exercise gives you nothing but health benefits and restores balance to your body quicker than full rest. The upper limit of this Rejuvenation zone is set at the lower limit of your e!ortless training zone (ETZ). In other words, you exercise at a limited intensity that is far below your capabilities.

This zone is used for recovery from illness, injury and full recovery from any increased training period. It is also used for easy sessions when you’re not feeling your usual energetic self. I recommend all runners and triathletes walk once a week for recovery and profit from the rejuvenation this training provides. Don’t underestimate the power of this form of training and its health benefits. Walking leaves you refreshed and ready for your next day’s training:

Jodi is an avid triathlete who trains following the E!ortless Training Zone concept. Over three years she developed her e+ciency to the point where she can cover the same distance that took her %$ minutes in year one, down to ($ minutes by year three. She also regularly practices the habit of taking a recovery week every three weeks. During this week she completes all of her workouts at )$% her normal training distances and drops her intensity down into her recovery zone. Jodi has been injury free and fresh; her performances have improved every year.

She has always said that she looks forward to the recovery weeks as they keep her motivated, rejuvenated and eager to get out there for more training. Jodi has learned to keep the positive energy flowing forward.

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What’s more interesting is that she feels excited to exercise every day and drawn to do more as her goals become more ambitious. It’s exciting to see someone get healthier as they engage in progressively longer endurance events year after year.

Exercising in the Rejuvenation zone is also excellent if you are new to fitness. Using these lower parameters ensures that you avoid injury, which is a very common fear among the sedentary. Also, this zone allows the non-exerciser to experience all the vitalizing aspects of movement in the absence of any pain or discomfort. You only experience the pull of exercise, which creates a greater desire to want to repeat the session. This zone promotes resonant fitness experiences and encourages habitual lifestyle exercise for those not interested in racing and competition.

It is here, in the Rejuvenation zone, where the positive pull state of exercise germinates. Think about that statement for a moment. If we eliminated the negative stress associated with exercise and turned fitness into an invigorating experience, we could inspire a whole generation into becoming more open to activity and that would have a dramatic impact on society as a whole. Most partici-pants’ experience with exercise remains negative in nature. People dislike exercise because they perform it too strenuously, driven by the perception that this is the only way to get results. Try a few sessions in the Rejuvenating zone and see how it makes you feel during the activity and for the rest of your day. I guarantee you’ll be hooked!

B'>$#( H'=8+ R=+'For some people, heart rate monitors are a great place to begin,

providing biofeedback for those of us who are no longer connected to our intuition, inner body signals and the fullness of the present moment. Once hints of e!ortlessness are experienced, scientific technology (such as a heart rate monitor) become a transitional tool. In this case, the specifics of science aid us in understanding more about the mind/body/spirit connection, a"rm our intuitive wisdom and encourage us to develop a healthy aerobic e"ciency. The monitor can assist us to look within and become present in

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each exercise session. To rely too heavily on technology, however, becomes an unconscious act of looking for answers outside of ourselves. Remember, a heart rate monitor tells you one thing: your heart rate. Your intuition tells you an abundance of infor-mation simultaneously. Such tools are great learning devices or benchmarks that tangibly demonstrate what our intuition already knows – through conscious inner awareness.

Over time, you’ll be able to exercise in integrated balance without the aid of the heart rate monitor. Body awareness is something that is built up through direct experience, and then conscious practice of movement in your unique ETZ finally becomes intuitive wisdom – the Zen of e!ortless exercise. Once the art of inner exercise has been assisted by heart rate technology, a return to training through intuition is needed to reconnect on a deeper level with your body’s energy. Remember you carry with you the wisdom to make conscious choices while you are exercising, always listen to the subtle feedback your body sends you.

Becoming a slave to your monitor actually pulls you away from your e!ortless exercise zone and may contribute to injury. Take, for example, a day when you feel terrific, but your monitor is holding you back to the point where your pace feels labored. Training here could lead to injury, because you are over-riding your natural feeling and intuition and following the monitor too closely. In this situation, it would be better to seek your e!ortless training pace through body energy feedback plus nasal breathing and allow your heart rate to drift upwards.

The opposite can occur as well, perhaps you’re running and every cell in your body is saying that you’re going hard enough for today, but your heart rate is low. Stay where you are, seek comfort and ease and don’t force your heart rate upward in your zone. Your inner body energy is signaling you to enjoy a rejuvenation session or perhaps you are dehydrated or becoming ill. At times like these, keep outer expectations in perspective and remember that heart rate is simply one variable in the complex system that makes up your body.

Complicated heart rate zones force you into your intellectual mind and out of touch with your body’s signals. Much of this type of coaching also requires that you begin working intensely before you are properly warmed-up and for too extended a time period.

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In many cases, the root cause of injury can be traced back to an intense workout where mental toughness in the short term was used to shoot for a long term goal. Integrating non-criteria based exercise could have prevented the negative stress and circum-vented the injury. Instead of ending up in rehab, the athlete could have enjoyed a rejuvenation session and been fresh on race day. Enjoy the permission, freedom and diversity of non-criteria based training and use the monitor and the ETZ methods as guidelines to attain e!ortless flow states.

E77$8+&',, E9'8!:,' # 4: D:,!$@'8:#) Z'# E9A'8:'#!',Finding that floating sensation during exercise is an experience

that most athletes crave. Wouldn’t it change how you perceive exercise if you could experience this heightened state each time you exercised? Here are a few tips to help you define and discover the meditative and intuitive Zen of e!ortless exercise.

Find your e;ortless training zone. For the next two weeks make a mental note of your heart rate whenever you feel the sensation of e!ortlessness. Take note of your sport, the external conditions (weather, heat, workout surface, etc.) and your average heart rate. Over time, you’ll notice a pattern and a common heart rate aver-age will become evident. Use this number as the middle of your ETZ and add 5 beats per minute to this number to set the upper limit ETZ. Don’t judge this number and don’t compare it to your friends or competitors. This becomes your individual e!ortless training zone, as unique as your finger prints.

Experience meditation in motion. For a week try experimenting by setting no goals around your exercise. Simply set time aside in your schedule for exercise and then when you get there let your intuition and enthusiasm determine what you will do. Once you engage in movement let the workout unfold naturally and let your inner body energy pull you into the session. Listen for body feed-back every step of the way and let this determine the length and the intensity. If you routinely exercise on a treadmill drape it with a towel so you can’t see the readout – silence the mind distractions

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of time, distance, pace and intensity. Create a movement medita-tion with deep breathing and being present in the moment.

Train in the Rejuvenation zone. For two exercise sessions this week set your maximum heart rate 20 beats below your ETZ upper limit. For example if your ETZ is 120-140 bpm, set your monitor to beep at 120 bpm. Set the lower limit at 15 bpm or as low as it will go on your monitor. The watch will then be silent except when you are going over your maximum HR. Follow all the pre-exercise routines discussed in the warm-up chapter. Keep this session extremely easy and note how refreshed you feel afterwards. This is a great exercise for ultra-endurance athletes to perform on long workouts. For example, Ironman triathletes can go for a 5-6 hour bike ride in their Rejuvenation zone. This is also an excellent exercise for ultra-runners who train and race on trails; it teaches them to walk up the hills and pace themselves properly for events that are often longer than a day. Both athletes typically return refreshed and en-ergized for their training sessions the following week.

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CHAPTER %: SIMPLE FLEXIBILITY AND STRENGTH

Developing a sustainable practice

The e!ortless vision applies to all forms of exercise. Consider putting your intuition to work when it comes to strength and flexibility training. In the West we tend to separate the elements of physical development into cardiovascular, strength and flexi-bility and then pursue developing these qualities separately in our programs. O! we ride on our bike to get our heart pumping, o! to yoga for our flexibility and o! to the weight room to “pump-up” those muscles. While this physical development approach does work, it can be disjointed and complex. And depending on what advice you receive, weight training and stretching could well be counter-productive to your specific sport. Flexibility and strength gains can be made simply and sustainably, through relaxed stretching and a one-set weight approach.

P<8,<:#) I#+')8=+'( E9'8!:,'Ideal, integrated exercise would combine endurance, strength

and flexibility in one exercise activity. While a few of these holistic activities like dance and gymnastics actually exist, not many adults are capable of trading in our running shoes for the fluid grace of a pair of point shoes or the strength needed to master the pummel horse. However, we, none the less, need to remain conscious of body development and balance in our training choices. It’s important to incorporate strength and flexibility into our cardio programs or vice-a-versa. I have witnessed participants in Total Immersion" swim classes gain shoulder flexibility just through

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practicing the drills with ease and impeccable technique. And one ultra-distance runner has used Chi Running( techniques to gain hip flexibility and add the element of relaxation to her training.

In seeking fitness activities, always look for integrated training sessions whenever possible. But if you must separate flexibility or strength sessions, bring a calm awareness to each specific activity and follow an e!ortless execution approach, including a warm-up and cool-down.

If you feel the need to develop your strength or flexibility, then you are right. Follow this intuitive call. And more importantly, follow the subtle specifics of what your unique body seeks. Honor its uncon-ditional guidance. Say, for instance, you feel tight in your shoulder area, that’s the cue for you to pursue a flexibility program for this particular area. Or perhaps you feel you lack leg strength, then focus on leg development through a specific sport or in the weight room. The key focus remains: Listen to your inner body signals, follow this intuition, and build your program from the inside out. Also continue to tune in as these specific programs develop to ensure that flexi-bility and/or strength is supporting your e!ortless experience both energetically and physically. If you are experiencing continued pain, sti!ness, soreness or an inability to recover, then consider if you are pushing the training and seek instead an energetic pull state.

What follows in this chapter is a description of how to approach e!ortless flexibility and strength development. The choices of exercises are as diverse as there are readers of this book. Work with qualified professionals to find out what exercises are available and seek their advice regarding your form, but remember to listen to your inner body cues. If any exercise remains overly stressful and you must mentally push yourself to perform it, discard it and move on. Just as you would develop your cardiovascular system e!ortlessly, any gains in flexibility and strength should evolve and complement your training in a natural, integrated way. Following the suggestions below allows for development of these fitness qualities in a positive way.

E77$8+&',, F&'9:?:&:+>The pros and cons of flexibility training have been debated

endlessly. And the debate continues with each new article. For the

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purposes of e!ortlessness, su"ce it to say that flexibility is a needed quality as we age. There’s an old saying in the yoga community that states: You are as young as your spine is flexible. It’s true, we lose physiological parameters including strength and flexibility as we age, our movement becomes tight and restricted and we lose general functionality. However, decline can be minimized through regular flexibility practices, undertaken in a progressive and e!ortless fashion.

Place your main focus on the quality of your experience. It’s far more important to be aware of how you stretch rather than what exercises you perform, because you can develop high levels of fitness in any area provided you go deep enough into the experience. Most people always push too far and stretch to the point where they feel pain. They think, “Now I’m getting somewhere!” But stretching the muscle to this extreme range actually tightens the tissue as it contracts to preserve its integrity.

So what have we been doing incorrectly? Two things:Trying to stretch a muscle when we are loading the muscle and therefore creating tension instead of relaxationPushing too hard during stretches, which creates further tension and risks injury

Paradoxically, this type of stretching becomes counter-productive because the critical relaxation phase essential to permanently change the resting length of the tissue is missing. For stretching to be e;ective, you must relax.

S+8'+!6:#) =#( I#C<8:',Let’s examine why stretching has been linked to a higher

incidence of injury in athletes. Many sports require that muscles shorten during the event, and then athletes or their coaches seek to lengthen them with a flexibility program. It’s like trying to mix oil and water: you run for an hour and shorten your muscles, and then you take five minutes afterwards to stretch – sometimes with disastrous results. It’s this counter action that contributes to injury.

The practice of stretching should focus on relaxing the muscles while you elongate them. The key here is to become aware of how a proper stretch feels, through developing body sense memory. If you place your alert concentration on the muscle you require

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to stretch, breathe deeply and focus on the sensation of relax-ation, you can then allow for progressive opening, benefit from a new resting length and ease existing tension. The more force, strain and e!ort you put into your stretches the more resistance you create. This may seem counter-intuitive, but with flexibility training, less is definitely more. And in the long run, consistency is more important than end range.

Be aware that the further you push a stretch, the longer it takes the muscle to relax. Gyms are full of people holding extreme, end-of-range stretches, creating few flexibility benefits and possible ligament and tendon damage. Many people also end their stretch before the muscle has had a chance to relax. In this case, all they have accomplished is triggering the muscle defense mechanism, which shortens the tissue in an act of protection. I’ve had clients report that they become tighter even though they stretch religiously, and without honoring this knowledge, they redouble their stretching e!orts. If these individuals continue to stretch in this way and over ride body signals they become injured, which is simply the body’s way of forcing them to stop an unhealthy practice. The alternate solution is a relaxed method of stretching – an e!ortless approach. One of my clients, James, found that relaxation was much more powerful than force, when it came to remaining a limber athlete:

James was an avid triathlete who always battled injuries. His illiotibial band (the muscle and tendon on the outside of his leg) was always tight and sore, and he stretched it to relieve the pain. After working with him for a few months I realized that this was a chronic problem and asked to see his entire stretching routine. He would hold his stretches to the point where it required a lot of e!ort and only backed o! when he felt excessive pain. He also would end his stretches after an arbitrary time period, failing to sense if the muscle had relaxed. As soon as I had him stretch e!ortlessly, in a non-weight bearing position and with relaxed muscles, his chronic pain dissipated. He’s injury free today and significantly more flexible. He now prefers to call his stretches limbering!

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Finally, many people find that stretching can also become a very empowering spiritual practice. The entire field of yoga devotes its teachings to this end. It can become more than a simple physical task for an external benefit; it can become a window into relax-ation, wisdom and healing.

H$% +$ S+8'+!6 E77$8+&',,&>How do you perform a relaxed stretch? Begin with all of the

practices learned so far: body awareness, nasal breathing, a low heart rate and a meditative calm while moving slowly into exercise. Before you begin stretching perform a warm-up, ensuring that all your muscles have the proper heat and blood flow available for stretching e!ectively. I don’t recommend stretching before your warm-up as that would only contribute to further muscle contrac-tions or at the very least you’d have to wait much longer for your cold, short muscles to relax into each stretch.

Posture: Pay attention to the starting position of your stretch. If it requires your muscles to contract to hold the position, then you are probably engaging in a stretch that’s counter productive. If the position allows you to relax the muscle that you intend to stretch, then you’re correctly positioned. Seek out non-weight bearing po-sitions that allow maximal muscle relaxation; after all, it’s hard to relax when you’re struggling to stay balanced.

Awareness: Once in your optimum stretching posture, instead of unconsciously going through the motions, analyzing your work-out, thinking of your presentation at work or even making out a grocery list – become present and focus your awareness inward on the muscles you wish to lengthen. Feel NO tension in these muscles. This step of connecting deeply with your body is impor-tant and becomes your beacon for sensing the di!erence between relaxation and the development of muscle tension.

Point of Tension: Slowly and gradually move into your stretch until you experience your very first awareness of tension, and stop there!

Relaxation: Now wait in perfect calm, breathe through your nose and remain alert until you feel the muscle relax back to a point of

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no tension. You’ll feel the muscle letting go. Instead of using force, you have switched to surrender and once again are flowing in pow-erful alignment with your body’s energy rather than mentally fight-ing against your physiology.

If you resist relaxation, go too far, and don’t allow the surrender, tension persists. If you let go, the tension dissipates and disap-pears. It’s ironic, but there is greater flow and natural power in surrender than in force. As a footnote, many clients report they have used flexibility training as a metaphor to learn to let go in challenging life situations as well.

Be prepared and patient as the relaxation phase might take a long time. If you’ve gone too far into the tension range, the muscle may not relax at all. Remember the intention of stretching is not to be able to do the splits in two weeks, but to allow your muscles to relax and change length. If you barely approach the sensation of tension and stop here, you may find the muscles relax quickly, which allows you to then move further into the stretch. This enhances your range even more, provided this second deepening movement occurs through relaxation.

Being conscious of relaxation when you stretch helps you avoid injury. In fact, the more you feel the positive energy of relaxation, the more you become pulled into greater ranges of motion. Since you’re now working within your body’s unique parameters and not pushing your end point, you gradually witness a lengthening of the tissue, without stress, e!ortlessly. Additionally, you create a permanent change in the resting length of the muscle and develop a motor and muscle memory of relaxation while exercising. The practice of awareness, calm, balance, ease and flow reinforce behaviors consistent with healthy exercise.

Example: Let’s work through an example of stretching. Take your hamstrings. By bending over from the waist to stretch, they’re actually trying to support you in this upright position. In e!ect, you are asking them to contract to hold you up and simultane-ously stretch by bending forward. If they are contracting in this way, they can’t relax and change their resting length. Therefore this posture does not provide the maximal relaxation needed to make the greatest flexibility gains.

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Instead, isolate the muscles you wish to stretch in a non-weight bearing position in order to allow them to relax. When stretching the hamstrings, this means lying on your back with your feet up against a wall so they are not used for stability during the stretch. Take it to the position of first tension then rest here without an arbitrary time frame until you feel the muscle group relax. Be aware that the farther you push into a stretch, the longer it takes the tissue to relax. Take this time in stillness to simply breathe deeply through your nose and be totally alert to the play of tension and relaxation as you consciously change the length of your muscles.

E77$8+&',, S+8'#)+6In our society, fitness remains largely defined by an outward

show of strength. You can see and admire well developed muscles, and so the focus of most fitness programs remains the devel-opment of the muscular system. Weight training and weight lifting programs have proliferated and we have gotten stronger, but are we healthier? Unfortunately strength training can be unhealthy, if performed too intensively and too often.

Anaerobic exercise such as strength training creates a slightly acidic condition within your muscle cells. This temporarily upsets the acid/base balance within your body and leaves you in a stressful state. Hence you feel pain, or you feel delayed pain after exercise. Many times this pain lingers for up to a week as your body re-balances its chemistry, recovers and repairs. Re-balancing is paramount for long term health and is a natural rejuvenation process following exercise. However, dipping into anaerobic exercise too far or for too long creates long term damage, leads to overtraining and accumulates fatigue.

Most of us have experienced muscle soreness after exercise at some point in our lives. While mild sti!ness is normal after strength sessions, this is not a normal or healthy state to be in consistently. Muscle soreness is delayed in onset and can last for a few days with the peak usually occurring about 48 hours after exercise. Any new movement, high intensity exercise or rapid, powerful muscular contraction may bring on this soreness. Also, any negative contractions called eccentric muscle contractions (lengthening of muscle tissue while resisting the lengthening

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process) such as running or hiking down hill contributes to the most intense muscle pain.

Soreness is your body’s way of telling you that you did too much and becomes your cue to adjust your training back into the e!ortless, pain free zone. Let pain guide you to adjust your program to an energetic, healthier state, which allows your muscles the recovery needed for maximal development.

The quickest way to discourage a beginner is to have them experience soreness post weight training week after week. Most people avoid exercise because of perceived or real pain, and even the most committed athletes develop feelings of avoidance in the face of constant pain. I once worked with a triathlete who came to me seeking e!ortlessness, he said the first six months of his weight program left him in constant pain – and he had big sti! muscles to prove it too.

Extreme muscle damage, especially at the beginning of an exercise program, is a very powerful anti-motivator for participants. When beginning and maintaining strength programs, a gentler training approach hooks both young and old onto the pleasurable benefits of exercise and keeps them exercising in the long term.

You can develop strength without strain or struggle using a one-set process. Once again, follow your body’s internal cues and signals, progressing when your body is re-balanced chemically and ready to do so. Couple this with adding weight increments that are as small as possible and this ensures that you remain on the pain and injury free side of fitness. What this requires, however, is greater patience, conscious choices and diligent consistency when learning which loads and repetitions work best for your body. I’m going to limit the scope of the strength training advice under the e!ortless exercise vision to the one-set process because it maximizes gains and minimizes workout time, injury and soreness.

T6' S+8'#)+6 C<8@'Once you’ve lifted weights or performed strenuous training the

first stage your body experiences is the recovery stage. After anaerobic activity recovery leaves you feeling sore and lasts from one to four days in length. After an intense e!ort like a short race, hard lifting session or a downhill hike, recovery can last as long as a week. To

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train again with anaerobic intensity while sore invites problems. Mild active aerobic recovery in your Rejuvenation zone or complete rest is what’s required now to re-balance your inner chemistry.

After the acute recovery period, and as the soreness dissipates, you enter a second stage of growth usually characterized by sti!ness. This is the stage where your energy returns and your muscles begin to lay down new tissue and strengthen. You feel better and eager to resume training once more. This stage also lasts anywhere from one to four days and represents the time when your body is laying down extra resources to better prepare for similar stress in the future. In the growth stage, it’s imperative to be aware of your body’s signals of lingering sti!ness as this is where rest is paramount. Training again during this upswing only limits your gains. It’s not until the sti!ness has dissipated that you are physi-ologically ready to train again. Wait until you feel limber and fresh to exercise again.

The recovery and growth process is unique to each person’s physiology, maintaining arbitrary “cook-book” training schedules often interrupts the full benefits gained through inner body listening. Strength training programs designed with a frequency of greater than twice a week are counterproductive, unless the loads are small and the sets and repetitions are held to a minimum. Since strength is developed through the application of intensity,

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this type of training benefits from being performed infrequently, especially as you advance in your training.

In a beginner’s program you may train three days a week. As you advance you may switch to two days a week, and then in an advanced program one training session a week per body part is su"cient to bring maximal gains, provided you continually apply the appropriate intensity and listen for the point of full recovery. Here are some simple guidelines to follow:

If you are sore at all, don’t trainIf you are sti! at all, don’t train Only train when you feel fresh

These sessions will feel e!ortless, and you’ll be using your maximum available resources for training. What’s even more empowering is that when you train refreshed, you’ll find yourself wanting to add more weight. That’s exciting because you’re witnessing a dynamic, healthy increase in strength, without forcing painful and often counter productive growth to meet the expecta-tions of external programs.

T6' O#'-S'+ S+8'#)+6 P8$!',,For beginners, here’s a step-by-step guideline to develop an

e!ortless strength practice:

Step .: Pick a light weight. That’s right, a ridiculously light weight. If you’re new to strength training or re-starting, begin with a load that’s very low for each exercise of your first session. This becomes your starting weight. Since most people feel pretty strong on their first time out, it’s easy to over estimate what you can lift, and this may leave you with an inability to comb your hair! Give yourself the permission to consciously under-do the first session.

Step /: Limit yourself to one set per exercise and do not lift to any-where near failure. Remain aware of how each exercise feels; if you sense any discomfort, stop. Lift with comfort. Perform each repeti-tion slowly and breathe through your nose. On every repetition ask yourself, “Can I easily do the next one?” If not, stop there. All you are seeking to accomplish in this first session is to stimulate the muscle to grow a small amount. Since this e!ort is more resistance train-ing than you have been doing in the past, only the smallest amount

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is required on your first session. You’ll leave the weight room re-freshed and minimize muscle soreness and sti!ness. In fact, you may not feel anything the next day; that’s your body’s signal that you have done it correctly and will be able to lift more next time.

Step 1: Use proper form and technique. It’s paramount that you perform your exercises with impeccable form, smoothly and slow-ly, paying attention to the ease of movement. Lift to a count of two going up and a count of two going down to ensure that you use muscle force to both lift and lower the weight. Record the ex-ercises that you resonate with. When others create struggle, ask a professional for alternatives. There’s no end to the variety of exer-cises that you can use to train all the muscles of your body. Also be patient. In the first few weeks your body will be making all the nec-essary neurological connections to basically re-wire your mind/muscle connection. You want this re-wiring process achieved in an absence of pain and through brilliant form. From form follows function, and from function comes the strength you desire.

Step 3: Recovery and growth. Once you have completed your first session, you now need to wait and sense your body going through the recovery process. Some mild sti!ness may occur, but you shouldn’t be sore. If you find you are sore you need to wait until the soreness has dissipated (phase one complete) and then the lingering sti!ness has left (phase two complete) until you re-engage in your next weight lifting session. This could last up to a week if you’ve over exerted yourself or chosen too heavy a weight. If you’re sti!, wait a full day after this feeling has gone to re-en-gage, that way you’ll be back at it again fully recovered.

If you under did the first session, you may not feel any discomfort post-exercise. That’s great, and a signal that you can train again soon. In this situation, wait one day until you resume training. Basically train every other day if you feel comfortable and refreshed after your sessions. This also signals that you are capable of adding one more repetition to each of your exercise sets.

P8$)8',,:#) E77$8+&',,&>After your first session keep a record of the weights lifted and

how many repetitions you completed for each exercise. Next session

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your only objective is to seek the sensation of e!ortlessness. Repeat the same number of repetitions you completed last time. If you cannot and experience discomfort, leave it there for the day and return again for another attempt once you have recovered. If you are successful and find that your body is able to lift more, increase by the SMALLEST possible increment – one repetition. That’s right, one e!ortless repetition. This then becomes your new standard; be sure to keep a record of these progressions. Remember that the weights and reps are simply a guideline and never a substitute for awareness and intuition on any given day. During every workout and every repetition seek to focus your mind on the movement, don’t let your thoughts wander and don’t disconnect from your body’s sensations. Remain in comfort, exercise slowly with good form and breathe through your nose. Enjoy the sense of energy, strength and well-being in each session.

Once you can complete 15 repetitions of any given exercise with proper form from a position of e!ortlessness and feel fresh post-exercise, you are ready to increase the load on your next weight lifting session. Add the SMALLEST amount of weight to each exercise – that’s right, the smallest amount available to you. Lift this new weight in alert attention, listening for any discomfort. Once you feel any strain, stop and record your repetition count for this new weight. From here, build up to 15 repetitions once more before adding your next small load. One of my clients came to me in middle age concerned about osteoporosis and how that would a!ect her activities and vitality in old age. Here’s an example of how the one-set process helped her:

Christa was into her forties before she started her strength program. She intuitively felt she needed to become stronger. Concerned about her bone density and becoming frail, she started a full-body strength program. First we selected eight basic exercises that suited her. Before she even lifted a weight I asked her to consider what weight she felt she could handle with ease for ") repetitions. She experimented picking many o! the rack until she felt comfortable with her selection. Once she selected a weight I asked her to use

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the next lighter weight on the rack. This guaranteed that she would stay in the e!ortless zone.

Christa started with the one-set process and the guideline to stop when she started to feel any sensa-tions of strain. She reported being sti! the next day and the following day when she was scheduled to lift again, so she performed a light cardio session instead and waited until she was pain free the following day. Within a few weeks she was able to increase her starting weight and experienced an increase in strength and body awareness. Today she has increased her load on every exercise by over ($$% and is still exercising in a pain free e!ortless state.

Provided you stay within these one-set parameters and remain sensitive to the internal process, you’ll be able to guide yourself towards greater levels of strength development injury free. And in the absence of constant muscle soreness, you’re able to enjoy all aspects of your fitness experience.

O#'-S'+ S<**=8>Hear are summary questions and answers to consider following

your weight lifting sessions:Are you sore at all? If not, wait one day and lift again.What muscle groups are sore? Wait for soreness and sti!ness to dissipate then lower your weight and/or repetitions during your next session. Pay particular attention to the sensation of comfort on these exercises and be alert for any discomfort, then stop.Which exercises are linked to this soreness? If you struggle with a certain exercise, discard it and start with a new one next time. When has the soreness ended? Now you are in the growth phase experiencing sti!ness, wait for this to go away, add a day and train again.Are you sti!? If so wait for this to disappear, give yourself a bu!er day and repeat your session listening closely for discomfort. You may need to lower your weights.Are you fresh and ready to train again? With any sensation of sti!ness wait, if you feel limber you’re ready to train again.

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Plan your next session around recovery and muscle growth, not by the calendar and wait until you have passed through both phases before you exercise again. Strength gains are retained for many days after the sti!ness phase has ended, so you won’t lose conditioning by waiting an extra day if you are unsure. In fact, as you progressively increase intensity, you’ll find the frequency of needed sessions, decreases. Most experienced lifters train each muscle group only once a week because they have learned, often through painful trial and error, that this amount of recovery and growth is needed to continue to see progress.

G'#'8:! W':)6+ T8=:#:#) S!6'(<&',Most generic strength programs based on two or three

arbitrary sessions a week simply don’t allow for adequate recovery between sessions. If you religiously follow these schedules, you end up training again while you are either recovering or growing from the last session. You’ll find you have to disconnect from the physical pain and mentally force your way through the session. By truncating the muscle growth process you drive additional stress into your body and diminish the full strength gains of this cycle.

Individual response to the strength building process cannot be predicted or planned. By following your inner body cues you’re guided toward the optimum strength progression that’s tailor-made for you. This brings to mind Ryan’s story. Many years ago, I remember asking this young triathlete, who had the body of a Greek god, about his strength training secret, and I was astounded at the simplicity of his approach:

Ryan was a solid age group triathlete who spent considerable time building his aerobic base. What struck me about this particular athlete was his fabulous muscular development. When I asked him about his program he remarked that he didn’t have much time for strength training, so he kept it simple. His strength routine consisted of push-ups, curl-ups and squats – that’s it. Exercises he performed at home, without the need for specialized equipment, in the evening before he went to bed. He remained consistent with this simple strength set and had done these three exercises

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for years. Ryan said he felt this program gave him the strength he needed for his sport and he had the physique to prove it.

I recommend beginners and fitness enthusiasts stick with one-set per exercise for an extended period of time to allow their bodies to fully adapt to the load increases. For beginners the muscle development process could take years to unfold. In fact, many clients have found they experience gains for a considerably longer time by following this simple one-set method.

M<&+:A&'-S'+ T8=:#:#)Reserve multiple set training to sport applications and muscle

building sports where the primary focus of the entire program is on muscle development. For most general fitness needs the one-set process is su"cient. If you find that you have no soreness or sti!ness and cannot break through a plateau in strength, then it’s time to add a second set to your routine. This adds volume to your training program and allows you a second chance at exploring your failure point, which stimulates more muscle fiber recruitment and growth.

Much has been written about the optimal number of sets needed to receive a training e!ect. Many programs use multiple sets, pyramids, super-sets all designed to stimulate more muscle fibers into action and increase the training e!ect. While these techniques all work, they are all designed for the advanced lifter seeking to maximize his or her muscle development. If you’re at this phase of training you can benefit by simply adding the intuitive guidelines of the e!ortless approach to your process.

That said, since most of the strength benefit comes from the intensity during the very first set and one-set minimizes your residual muscle soreness post-exercise and avoids overtraining, I only prescribe single-set strength training for fitness oriented clients. That’s all you need, unless you want to explore your ultimate strength potential.

T6' R',+ R'B<:8'*'#+Post-exercise, we build muscle through rest. In relaxation and

stillness our bodies become stronger after any endeavor. As I have already mentioned, the frequency of most advanced strength

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programs actually minimizes rest and puts the participant in the recovery or growth phases on their next session, which prevents maximal e!ectiveness.

The optimal period of rest between sessions should be three to seven days. Most weight lifters tell me they can lift more and are fresh during their next session if they allow for this level of recovery. The more weight you lift, even if you lift from an e!ortless perspective (i.e. the heavier the weight you lift and the closer you train to failure), the longer you need for recovery. Since you’re limiting your intensity as a beginner, resting between two or three sessions a week may be fine. However, later, when your weights become heavier, you become stronger and your ability to hold on to comfort and e!ortlessness increases, you’ll need to lengthen your recovery time between sessions. As you progress, pay particular attention to the duration of the rest phase to avoid overtraining.

Always rest if your body is sore, sti! or if you feel fatigued. This is the body’s innate wisdom communicating that it still requires recovery and needs to remain in the re-building process. You want to weight train when you are fresh and supported energetically by a flow state. Without having to spend time analyzing this or planning ahead, your body recovers beautifully and always takes the precise amount of time needed to ensure the greatest beneficial change. It’s automatic and fool-proof; simply bring awareness to your strength training process to maximize your gains.

E77$8+&',, E9'8!:,' # 5: V=&<:#) R'&=9=+:$# =#( R',+Here are a couple of reminders to fit seamlessly into this week’s

sessions that may alter the way in which you approach flexibility and strength exercise. Be sure to warm-up as described in Chapter Three before you stretch or lift weights.

Flexibility. For the next few weeks whenever you stretch become present as much as possible. Start your stretch from an un-weighted, relaxed position. For example you could stretch your hamstrings by lying on the floor with your legs up a wall, or you could stretch your calves by standing upright, your weight through your heels and the balls of your feet on a book. If you can’t relax

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the stretching muscle try a di!erent position or movement until you are capable of starting in a relaxed position. Now, as you move into the stretch, pay very close attention to the tension within the muscle. This sensation comes on slowly and very lightly at first, and as you get better at paying attention to this feeling you’re able to find the point of tension sooner and relax quicker. Once you feel any tension at all simply hold your position and breathe calmly, relax and listen for any feelings of pain or stress. Wait for the ten-sion to relax and subside. This may take some time so be patient. When you feel the muscle relax, you may repeat the process taking the muscle to a slightly greater range of motion.

Beginner’s Strength. If you haven’t already started a strength train-ing program, try this simplest of practices. Pick four simple exer-cises: squats, shoulder press, push-ups and curl ups. Now pick a light weight (or simply your body weight) and complete four easy repetitions of each exercise, paying strict attention to your form. Rest for two days and pay attention to how you feel. If you didn’t feel any discomfort, simply add a repetition to each of your ex-ercises. If you were sore at all or in any of the specific exercises, back-o! to three repetitions of these exercises next time and re-peat the process until you can do 15 repetitions comfortably.

E;ortless Strength. If you are already on a strength program con-tinue your protocol; however, make sure to warm-up longer and more progressively as outlined in Chapter Three. Then pay par-ticular attention to lifting slowly, breathing thorough your nose and being in comfort the whole time. Once you reach the repeti-tion where you feel the comfort fading away stop the set there. Do not go any further. Now evaluate how you feel immediately post-exercise and rest a full day after any sti!ness has dissipated before your next session. Repeat this workout and see if the dis-comfort point moves further away and if you are capable of lifting one more repetition next time. Enjoy this process and see if you have more energy to weight train with appropriate rest.

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CHAPTER &: EFFORTLESS PROGRESSION

Unfolding The Future From Today

Clients often ask how to get started on a program? How much exercise is ideal? How to progress and become fitter? When training to run a marathon or an Ironman, what program should I follow? My answer to all these questions is simple, “Create your own program from the inside out.” I’ll help to guide them, but the single most important realization about any exercise program remains: Seek your unique optimum balance point. Let your intuition act as your master coach, and then integrate scientific knowledge, technological tools and training advice in a sustainable way.

For years, like other coaches, I put clients on external, criteria driven programs that didn’t take into account the primary driving force of energy within their bodies. These mapped-out schedules didn’t leave room for intuitive feedback before clients engaged in exercise, during any of the thousands of moments during the session when they received signals from their bodies or post-exercise when they were recovering. Clients didn’t have to listen; they just had to do what they were told. In fact, it was better if they turned o! their body/mind connection and simply used will power to push their workouts through to completion. These prescriptive models only point to the surface expectations of the exercise – meet your future goal.

I wanted clients to explore the depth of every experience so that exercise became richer, more enjoyable and impec-cably matched to each person’s unique needs. I no longer wanted to tell clients what they should be doing, but have them experience and gain knowledge through inner awareness. I

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wanted each session to become a resonant experience. And so we used science and external programs as rough guidelines, remaining alert and not allowing the desires of competition or ego to drive their training out of balance. In each moment they stayed present, aimed for effortlessness and let the future unfold from there.

T6' F$8%=8( T8=:#:#) P&=#E!ortless exercise programs are built from today forward, not

from your future goal backwards – thus the name forward training plan. If you artificially put yourself on any program, the interface is always less than ideal. Future goals don’t take into consider-ation your unique starting point and how your body responds to each session. Getting to your goal can be e!ortless, provided you train forward, practicing inner body awareness and giving yourself permission to intuitively alter each day’s session.

Most exercise programs are constructed starting with the finish line in mind and working backwards to today. They don’t address these fundamental issues that are impossible to predict:

Exactly where is your current level of comfortable exercise right now?When you start to expand your program, how exactly will your body adapt to these changes as you move forward? Will the adaptation always be constant, and if not, do you have the tools to correct mid-stream?

It’s natural to measure ourselves against the future: that exciting goal we want to attain. We’ve been schooled from a young age to look to the future for solace and success. Remember that the future only ever exists in your mind. So don’t get caught up over thinking the future and forget to enjoy the moment. Having goals, however, provides you with enthusiasm and direction. The missing puzzle piece is allowing your body to dictate the timing of change. Goals set your direction and give you the framework; your body sets the velocity and creates the quality experience.

Most people train backwards, always looking at their goal first and where they’d like to be or what they should be achieving. Consider reversing this and train according to where you are

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right now. Basing your program on what you can currently handle ensures acceptance and gives you permission to begin a program that lets your body dictate a healthy progression. Do not allow your intellectual mind or scientific programs to overwrite this intuitive hard wiring. Allow the infinite wisdom of your body to unfold and protect you when it needs to recover and rebuild.

T6' T'# P'8!'#+ T:ATo improve your fitness level by using this forward approach

is simple: Increase your distance or intensity when your body allows you to do so, all the while retaining a state of comfort. If you need a concrete guideline use the 10 percent tip: You can add up to .4 percent to any week of training or any given exercise session, but not more and only when your body feels fresh. Never add just because your mind thinks you should. Always capitalize on that invigorating inner body energy and practice intuitive listening to know when it’s the optimum time to increase. If you’re in doubt, maintain your training and don’t add distance or intensity. Only increase on those days when you feel the pull of an e!ortless flow state.

Also don’t subscribe to a rigid schedule either, use it as a basic plan and add distance and/or intensity to sessions on the days you feel vitalized. In this way, your program evolves naturally from the inside out and is constantly aligned with your present health and fitness foundation.

The first step is to establish where you are right now. Begin by reflecting on what an e!ortless program might feel like. Ask yourself:

How many workouts can I accomplish per week?How long and at what intensity am I capable of exercising?Do I feel invigorated post-exercise?

For example, let’s say a thirty minute session is your current comfort level. It makes you feel great and you can do it any day of the week. Now, allow yourself to use this as your anchor or benchmark, with the caveat to go further only when you feel energetic and e!ortless. On days when you’re tired or in pain you can slow down or stop exercising, but don’t stop a session

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because of general laziness. You’ll honestly know when it’s right to pack-it-in for the day and later often catch yourself saying, “I know I should have gone home.” Let these situations become your classroom to learn about your physiology, strengthen your listening skills and protect you from injury.

Progressing in this way minimizes all the detailed intellectual analysis and leaves you in harmony with your current abilities and comfort level. Your progression occurs at mother-nature’s own rate or the rate of your body as a unique organism, if you will. All of the commonly manipulated variables in a training program change in accordance with the innate inner body vitality as communicated through intuitive wisdom. In e;ortless exercise sessions you match your intensity and duration seamlessly with your physiological abilities. In e!ect, the more adept you become at developing the depth and interconnectedness of each session, the better you’ll become at unfolding your body’s strength and potential over the course of time.

E9'8!:,' A#!6$8,Here’s another way to look at your program, given that you are

already exercising and have some history to work with. Reflect on your existing schedule, and how these workouts leave you feeling post-exercise. If you feel energized with no residual sti!ness, then simply plan to repeat the same sessions this coming week with one caveat: Allow yourself the flexibility to do more if your session feels e!ortless.

For instance, if last week you completed two runs of 12 minutes, this week plan on doing the same two runs, but let yourself add an extra run if you’re drawn to do so. Or add some additional time to the run if you feel fresh. Now this new week becomes the exercise anchor you have grown into naturally. Avoid being swayed over by impulsive thoughts that come out of ego, competition, scientific schedules and future goals. Only increase when your inner body energy and its internal signs are positive.

By using exercise anchors you create a grounded place that reflects your current standard of physical development based on your inner wisdom. That’s the key, being solidly present to inner body signals in each moment in every exercise session, rather

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than disconnecting from your body and pushing yourself toward your future goal. Here, you’re allowing your body’s potential to unfold in a natural way, in the absence of over thinking or artifi-cially forcing the progression:

Barry came to me out of shape and "$$ pounds overweight. I asked him how far he could walk without getting tired. He said ($ minutes. I suggested that he start walking "$ minutes each day, and once he could string at least three days together he could add two minutes to his walk. That was the external guideline or exercise anchor.

I was careful to suggest a get fit plan that was well under his current abilities so that at the outset he would feel this was easily do-able. And so he started e!ortlessly. I also ensured that the amount I asked him to increase was ridiculously small, which again facilitated inner listening and allowed his body to guide the progression.

This gave Barry the confidence he needed to follow through each day. I cautioned him that to add two minutes he must have completed three consecutive walks at his last anchor point and to add time he must feel e!ortless and remain in comfort and balance. A year later he walks *) minutes daily and has lost '$ pounds in the process. Now he’s even considering a running program.

When you train in this way your mind is not in control of the progression, your body is. You’re not saying, “I did a three hour bike ride last week, so this week I must do a four hour ride.” What you’re saying is last week’s three hour ride is banked and felt fine, and you plan on repeating it and will give yourself the flexibility to do more if it feels e!ortless. If not, you’ll maintain your anchor and stop at three hours. By continuing to repeat your anchor session your body becomes stronger, you’ll never backslide and your fitness grows naturally at a healthy sustainable rate. Also, you don’t force yourself through illness or into injury. You’ll find

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your body changes in waves and often never when you anticipate it’s going to change. Life is organic, and often di"cult to predict. Feel free to use your schedule or program as a loose guideline and allow the e!ortlessness inherent in each moment to inspire you to greater levels of fitness.

M:#( G=*',Many clients find it di"cult to re-tool their habits and belief

systems about fitness and struggle to find the trust to follow their internal energy and intuition and not rely on thoughts generated by external stimulus. Most people become injured or fatigued when their minds get ahead of their bodies’ devel-opment. It’s usually driven by an external goal and the anxiety gap created in your head by comparing your present fitness level (where you are now) to your expectations (where you think you should be now). When these thoughts appear, consider repeating the exercise at the end of Chapter One. Calm your mind and become present within the energy field of your body by allowing your body to dictate the progression of each session. Patience and presence are the mantras of e;ortless exercise progression.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: That’s not much change or development! Or how will I really know if it’s right? The problem here is that you’re thinking again. Stop the mind games, seek e!ortlessness and trust your body’s energy to take over from there. As long as you feel fresh each week and as long as your body sends you positive signals, keep exercising farther. Over time you’ll develop to a level you never dreamed possible, and it will all be created from within, e!ortlessly.

When you actually look at what kind of change is needed in each session to make big changes over the long run, this change is only a small increment. I always encourage athletes not to run the race until race day; instead, take care of each session, seek the flow state and the race takes care of itself.

Using forward training over time, you naturally find the training distances, frequencies and intensities that work best for your body. You become your own best coach. It’s natural to experiment with

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other methods, but remember to match your choices with what resonates with you and trust your intuition.

S<,+=:#=?&' C6=#)'The most important reason of basing each exercise session

on where you are right now and not on the needs of your future goal is that you capture immediate success. This week you can better last week’s training. You can be just that little bit stronger. Long term, sustainable change occurs in this way. Additionally, this helps you feel great, gone is the guilt, stress and worry, not to mention the sti!ness, soreness and injury. All of your positive energy is focused on each exercise session where you remain calm, balanced, and comfortable. The out-flow of benefits returns to you in the form of regeneration, vitality, sustainability and healthy progression.

Should you insist on pushing your progression to match an arbitrary program, you may end up over reaching, which creates an energy backflow needed for recovery and often results in regression. With e!ortless progression, you rarely over reach your current physical potential because it’s based on present moment training. It’s beneficial to carefully integrate external criteria and allow yourself to be intuitively guided toward greater fitness.

Scientists have been searching for the optimal dosage of exercise for years, and this training specificity actually lies dormant within each of us. While many exercise participants still seek the external “one size fits all” training program, I encourage you to become internally process oriented. Take the responsibility to hone your awareness, trust your intuition and find the courage to follow the e!ortless experience.

Work with the forward training plan, establish your anchor and practice impeccable body awareness. It’s a useful skill many clients use to stay fit, healthy and progressing injury free. It’s also a practice used by individuals who compete in the Ironman triathlon or who run marathons or ultra-marathons. These athletes base their training on current, established anchors and by progressing slowly and only when their bodies’ signal them to do so. Through the quality of their exercise experience

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they expand their fitness to meet their competitive goals in an integrated and sustainable fashion.

M'=,<8:#) F:+#',, B=!"%=8(,Now if we train forward, we need to measure our fitness

backwards. I teach clients to measure their success based on their exercise history and the positive increments of change they have made in the past. Take, for instance, losing 100 pounds. If you look at this project every day measured against the goal, you’ll get very depressed. But if you look at the week you’ve just lived through and you’ve exercised 5 times and lost two pounds, you’re already better than you were a week ago, and that’s something to get excited about! This way you’ll always feel great about the present moment.

You can also train for a marathon or triathlon in this way. Start with today. Go out and swim, bike or run e!ortlessly. Stay in present moment awareness and enjoy every second. Note the time frame you could stay e!ortless and when fatigue set in. Note how fast you traveled and how you felt. Take these parameters, determine the length of time and intensities where you experienced a flow state and set out to duplicate them in your next session. Let the training grow from there. Increase your distances when you feel recovered, fresh and pulled into your sport. Soon you’ll be at the start of the Ironman assured by just how simple this process was to achieve.

W=&":#) E9A'8:*'#+ I have found through experience that five minutes of running

turns into ten, and then ten into twenty, and so on. Try this exper-iment: Go out for a 15 minute walk and plan on going out for a walk every day. Pay attention to breathing through your nose and staying present to inner energy signals. Allow your body to dictate the pace and stay in comfort and balance. Your only objective is to seek e!ortlessness as you walk. Now, take note at the end of 15 minutes of how many times your inner body energy actually has said, “Let’s keep going.” Most people report that over 04 percent

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of the time they felt like going further. After a week of applying the Ten Percent Tip see where this permission has taken you.

Usually after a few months of walking, clients report that they have felt an inspiration to run. So I respond: Try 20 steps when this happens and every time it happens run 20 steps. If at any time you feel like doing more, take a few more steps. I have had many beginning exercisers seamlessly start running in this way – easily, e!ortlessly and when their bodies are ready to do so. Some have gone on to complete marathons. Further guidelines for this type of e!ortless progression are summarized in the exercises at the end of this chapter.

T6' M=):! $7 C$#,:,+'#!>You can’t talk about progression without talking about consis-

tency. If you’re not consistent your body regresses, and you’ll notice you need to slow down and shorten your workout time. On the other hand, if you’re consistent, your program expands naturally. It’s also easy to be consistent when exercise is perceived as e!ortless. Since the exercise itself is enjoyable and the feedback to go out again is positive, less motivation is required. This creates a positive exercise loop where you not only feel revitalized but build a solid health foundation as well. I like to imagine how fit our population could become and how the burden on our healthcare system could be alleviated in this way. This type of training also wouldn’t require screaming personal trainers because intuition, acting as a master coach within, would be gracefully making the changes needed.

If you’re an endurance athlete consider using the same approach for your weekly long workout. On your next long session set out with no specific time in mind, warm-up, nasal breathe and seek e!ortlessness, holding onto this feeling as long as you can. Slow down and walk when you lose that feeling or experience pain or discomfort.

Let’s say you ran for 90 e!ortless minutes and then started to feel tired, you walked and cooled-down. Afterwards, you felt great because you didn’t push yourself to the point of fatigue. Take this standard 90 minutes and plan on repeating it next week. Then over the next few weeks you’ll find days where you’ll want to keep going, perhaps another 15 minutes, and before long your anchor will change

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to 105 minutes. On other days you may stop short of your anchor time. Over the long term and on many days your body will e!ort-lessly run farther, and when you capture those flow state moments you’ll find you expand your athletic abilities into new territory:

Graham, an avid triathlete, tried this approach one weekend where he simply focused on warming-up properly and staying in an e!ortless state. Since he usually worked out in groups, he decided to go it alone for this experiment.

He found it took him about %$-*$ minutes to properly warm-up, but once he felt warm he simply did not want to stop. He ended up running for two hours in a pain free flow state. He set this as his new anchor, even though his training program had him at three hours for his upcoming marathon. Every week he set out in the same patient way seeking e!ortlessness and within three months was up to three hours again. Graham remarked how easy these three hour runs felt now and that they were a world apart from his old “got-to-hammer-it-out” group e!orts. He reflected that his other long runs with his friends always became competitions and drove pain into his body.

He ran a personal best marathon later in the year when he was ready and completely enjoyed the experience. Now, with this renewed sense of energy he really looks forward to his weekly, long workout.

Provided you keep up with your long, e!ortless sessions (and you’ll want to because you’ll feel excellent), the fresh days where you’re ready to add progression exceed the days you remain at your anchored standard. Working within the permission of the present moment your distances change, and they change at the appropriate rate your body can assimilate them, all the while preventing overtraining.

Don’t allow yourself to be caught up in the time wars between what you should do based on a future race or event. Also don’t get caught up in losing weight by a particular date, simply set out to lose constantly.

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Honor your body, listen to it and allow it to steer you towards your higher goals at its own internal rate. Rather than worrying about the future, focus on and dedicate yourself to each day. As the saying goes: If you take care of today, tomorrow takes care of itself.

C6=#):#) P'8!'A+:$#, I also use this approach to progression with people who have

never exercised. I always ask them, “What do you consider a really short workout?” Let’s say the answer is 10 minutes; I’ll start them with a 5 minute workout. Why so short? Because from the outset I have aligned their mind with their body, I have set positive internal energy in motion. They think about if for a minute and I hear them say, “That’s easy!” Perception is everything.

Now they set out to accomplish what’s easy, or what’s e!ortless. They repeat this over several weeks and, sure enough, I find they end up asking me when they can lengthen their sessions. So we do, bit by bit, and it always feels like the increase is achievable. Exercise engaged in from the pull side of the equation allows beginners’ bodies to make all the necessary internal changes easily. That’s the key in progression success.

You know your training standard has changed when your perception of your workout changes over time. I have asked many marathon runners what their perception of a 30 minute run is after their training program is over. Their answer: “Short. Not even a warm-up!” Then I ask if there was a time when a 30 minute run was long? Their answer: “Yes!” What has changed? Not the actual 30 minute time frame, but their perception of the experience, because their level of e!ortlessness has expanded to swallow up the time frame. Time becomes relative. The 30 minute run session is now perceived as e!ortless, just as the 5 minute walk is easily do-able to a new exercise participant. This natural adaptation process can unfold for anyone, simply be consistent and allow your body to guide the progression. I encourage you to train forward and train from within.

Working in an e!ortless manner, you’ll find as the weeks tick by that you have added extra time to half of your workouts and possibly added an additional session each week. The majority of my clients have experienced wanting to add time or sessions to their program. This is an exciting outcome and brings nothing but

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positive energy to the whole training experience. If you are always in the state of desiring to do more, you know you’re under training, and that’s a better position to be in than pushing, overtraining and becoming exhausted or injured. Progressing in this way ensures that your energy always flows in a positive direction – it’s analogous to swimming downstream.

Your body eventually finds its equilibrium from within and sends you signals when it needs a break. With this approach you find progression easy, simple and e!ortless. It’s also fun because there’s no stress. It really is a “no-brainer,” you don’t have to think about it – simply listen and add on when your body is fresh and brimming with energy. Don’t limit your progression. Allow yourself to develop and see where you can go.

As a word of warning, do, however, limit the upside. Some clients have felt so euphoric after the first month that they arbitrarily go out and double or even triple a workout, thinking more is better. While this longer workout may feel e!ortless, sudden giant leaps forward violate the principle of gradual progress and can lead to regression in the ensuing weeks. It’s probably better to add the smallest increase to each week, that way you’re guaranteed a natural, built-in governor for overtraining.

If you are thinking about where your body should be and how fast you can push it there through rigorous, short term training you’re creating a great deal of stress to meet your goal. On the other hand, by following your body’s intuition and remaining in a state of flow, stress simply falls away and e;ortlessness fills the void. Here you are constantly matching your exercise dosage to your current capabilities and expanding it from a position of balance instead of from a position of struggle. Progression occurs in the absence of exercise induced stress, as this type of devel-opment is perfectly matched with each athlete’s abilities.

M=8=+6$# =#( R=!:#) T:A, Many runners who thought they could never run a marathon

have followed this process and found themselves completing many events. They tell me the interesting part about the process is the absence of struggle. The key is consistency. The hard part is having faith. The system does work; it simply takes a bit longer.

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And since you have the rest of your life to enjoy a lifestyle of fitness, isn’t it wise to take time with your progression, rather than risking the start/stop syndrome many fall into. Clients often tell me that they have learned the important lesson of patience through the process of e!ortless progression.

Where racing is concerned, I council athletes to enter races when they sense that the race distance ALREADY feels easy. I encourage them to wait until they are conditioned to handle the task easily before they sign up, not the other way around. They focus on each day’s training and only use the future oriented goal as direction. You’ll know intuitively when you’re ready, and the energy around the race will be positive because you’ll be confident in your abilities. You’ll be drawn into the race, eager to get out there and aligned with the energy flow of the day.

When I ask any 20 plus year exerciser about their training they invariably answer in simple terms, “I train almost everyday, as hard as I feel like going, and as far as it feels right.” Many don’t wear watches or heart rate monitors anymore. They have naturally found their place of optimum exercise. They are masters of inner body awareness and intuition. Take a lesson from these long time athletes, train forward and eliminate all the negative stress exercise may be causing you.

E77$8+&',, E9'8!:,' # 6: P8$)8',,:#) =, =# I#+<:+:@' P8$!',,

With a non-criterion based training approach it may be di"cult to figure out where to get started and just how to add proper progression. Below are two approaches, one for beginners and one for those who are already exercising regularly. Both are simple but powerful approaches that help you create structure around your exercise. Many people struggle without the boundaries and direction of structure, if you’re one who likes guidelines, here are a few tips to put the practice into motion.

B'):##'8, P8$)8',,:$# – +6' $#' *:#<+' ,$&<+:$#First, pick an activity you enjoy. I’ll use walking and running as sample activities, but you can choose any sport you enjoy. Seek activities that you are passionate about, activities that pull you e!ortlessly o! the couch.

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Determine a duration and frequency that ensures success and com-fort. Pick a duration that you feel you can comfortably engage in consistently 3-5 times a week. Let’s say 10 minutes is your anchor session. If you’re overweight or have been sedentary for a long pe-riod of time cut your estimate in half and begin with 5 minutes.

Each week add . minute to your base time in each session. Week one, you walk 10 minutes; week two, you’ll walk for 11 minutes; and week three, 12 minutes, etc. Follow the warm-up, nasal breath-ing and e!ortless exercise guidelines as outlined previously for each session. Soon you’ll ask, “Could I run?” I suggest that you honor that question in a simple way.

When you get the impulse to run, take /4 running steps. Don’t worry about the speed, simply jog. Bring alert awareness to your sessions and listen internally as you seek e!ortlessness. Then walk and re-establish the calm and ease if you feel it took you out of an e!ortless state. Once you feel the urge again, 20 more steps. I suggest that you try 3x20 steps in each of the sessions for the first week you feel like running. In week two you can extend this to 4x20 steps. That’s about 1 minute of running during each session.

Next progress by I minute per session per week. So by week 3 you’re doing 2 total minutes each time out. Divide it up any way you like. One day that might be 4x30 seconds, the next day it might be 2x1minutes. Let your inner body energy determine the details of when you walk and run and use the minute guideline as just that – a rough guideline. If you keep progressing at this rate, in a year you’ll be running an hour each time and ready to try a 10km race. In 2 years, 2 hours; and 3 years, you’ll be signing up for a marathon, all e!ortlessly.

T8=:#:#) P8$)8',,:$# – +6' 50 A'8!'#+ ,$&<+:$# If you have a specific sport you’re already involved in, here’s

some guidelines to ensure you bring intuition and e!ortless flow to your training program.

Focus on an activity you’re already involved in. Take some time in stillness to reflect about those aspects of your sport that you enjoy

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and those that create stress or negative energy. What part of your training leaves you sti! and sore? What pulls you into exercise ac-tion? Then answer the following questions:

Am I happy with my current program?Do I feel fresh and excited to exercise each session?Do I perceive I can accomplish more without any added e!ort?Do I sense I need to back-o!?Is the current program an easy and e!ortless fit for my lifestyle?What changes would I make to the sessions to fit them into my daily schedule?Are there any times when I have free time to exercise? Can I create some?What would be my ideal training week?What one small change would I make to my program to move towards my ideal week?

Commit to spend more time in the aspect of your sport that draws you in and creates vitality and e!ortlessness.

Determine an easy duration based on your current fitness and a frequency that ensures success and comfort or start with 04 per-cent of your current training base. Use the past few weeks of your personal exercise history to help you arrive at a successful predic-tion of what suits you. If you are having a di"cult time determin-ing a suitable anchor session, I suggest you take your last week’s schedule and do about 50-70 percent of your current frequency and duration.

Follow this activity anchor for two weeks without change. Always seek to create comfort and ease during all of your anchor ses-sions. Follow the warm-up, nasal breathing and e!ortless exercise guidelines as outlined previously for each session.

After the first two weeks add no more than .4 minutes to your an-chor and limit yourself to adding no more than one extra workout a week. Otherwise stick to your standard anchor where duration and frequency are concerned. Bring alert awareness to your sessions and listen internally as you seek e!ortlessness. If your exercise an-chor is easy and do-able, you’ll perceive and experience your body becoming revitalized and stronger with each passing day.

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Finally, review the bulleted questions above once again. Be mind-ful and note both your body’s and your mind’s response to the experimental two week plan. Act on what you have learned.

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CHAPTER ': INJURIES ARE A GIFT

Reframing Negative Experiences

Many of the clients who seek out my services do so because they have become injured through traditional training methods. They come looking for alternate ways to reach their goals. Healing their bodies is often an easier task than re-tooling their belief systems about exercise. And many once the injury is healed go back to their old ways of training once again. As they say, old habits die hard. The shift in attitude begins by reframing injuries and seeing them as a gift. Injuries are the voice of our inner body energy telling us to stop what we are doing because it is unsustainable, stressful and unhealthy. And injuries, if honored, allow us to develop a greater body connection and heightened sense of awareness. They become our greatest teachers.

T6' I#C<8> EA:('*:!Over the past 30 years an unprecedented number of people

have taken up exercise. During this time we have also experi-enced an upswing in scientific knowledge with regards to physical training. With all of this available expertise, why then are athletic injuries an epidemic among the physically active? The answer is simple: We view exercise in an intellectual way. Scientists create training protocols in their laboratories, coaches push us to meet these external goals, and in the end physiotherapists analyze what went wrong and try to heal us. We continue to engage our intellect in a “mind over matter” approach where we train right past the first sensations of physical discomfort and rarely act on our intuition. Or, if we sense our inner body energy, we ignore these subtle distress signals, push through them and injure ourselves.

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If, on the other hand, we were to first teach participants how to listen to their bodies’ signals and give them permission to seek e!ortlessness when exercising, then the vast majority of injuries could be prevented. And why is this? Because at the heart of every injury lies a disconnection from your inner wisdom – a failure to be conscious of and honor your unique vital energy. When you allow this intuitive inner wisdom to act as your compass, you prevent injuries before they happen.

“M:#( O@'8 M=++'8” T6:#":#)Taken at its most basic level injury is simply stress driven into

your body to a point where you experience intense pain, damage and dysfunction. Pain is the messenger. If not heeded, injury becomes nature’s way of putting a stop to unsustainable activity since you were unable to stop yourself sooner through awareness of quieter body messages. Long before anyone gets injured there are always inner energy signals of impending failure: fatigue, sloppy form, aches, tiredness, lack of motivation and depression. It’s the Western culture’s mantra of “no pain, no gain” that keeps both beginners and mentally tough athletes exercising through these clues and eventually becoming injured.

Being present during movement and learning to make subtle corrections the moment something seems amiss remains the key to circumventing injury. Once you’re able to practice inner energy awareness you’ll discover a world of opportunity to enhance your training. The single most important step in your athletic career is mastering the skill of being fully present and conscious during exercise.

Geo! Galloway, one of the world’s leading running coaches, maintains that the critical element in any running program is staying injury free. However, to change your training habits, your analytical thinking, and your fitness expectations takes an immense amount of personal courage. It’s a challenge to renounce the “canned” training program, let your buddies go, contain your competitive ego and do what’s right for your body in each exercise session.

Exercising outside of an e!ortless state creates trouble long before you encounter a full blown “got-to-stop” injury with acute swelling and pain. Any commitment to pushing too hard and for

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too long creates stress and eventually results in an injury. It’s easy to overdo any training program. We all know that intuitively. A commitment to seek e!ortlessness keeps us out of the injury tent and fit for a life time.

A@$:( I#C<8> T68$<)6 I#+<:+:$#So how do you prevent an injury from ever happening? Simply

exercise your intuition; practice awareness and then act. Your main job in the e;ortless exercise experience is to listen to your body’s cues and signals. For example, perhaps you find yourself warming-up for your run one day and you just can’t find that e!ortless sensation, every step hurts and it’s a struggle. Let go of your expectations and walk home. Or perhaps you’re gliding along one moment and the next moment you find that blissful feeling gone. Slow down and try to recapture that flow state; if you can’t, walk home.

In these situations perhaps your form had deteriorated to the point where your stride was o! and you were struggling to maintain your pace. The rational choice would be to push on and meet your goal, the intuitive choice would be to adjust your pace, check your form and try to recapture the feeling of e!ortlessness. The greatest hurdle to overcome in these situations is not your body but your mind: its expectations, guilt, analysis, over thinking and criticism. It’s really your mind that is out of sync with your life energy and its intuitive impulses. Remind yourself to stay connected during these exercise sessions. What‘s important is that you keep listening to your inner body energy and hone your skills by repeating e!ortless training experiences. Above all else, seeking this flow state is your greatest injury prevention ally. Had you not tuned into your intuition, twenty steps of bad running form could create an irritation that leads to a future injury.

H$% +$ M'#( I#C<8:',That said, what do you do when an injury occurs? First, bring

the pain into full acceptance and open awareness, and then let it guide you. If you have swelling, ice the area and take a few days o!. I find a short period of complete rest always helps the healing process and gives you time to reflect on the energy signals that you

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may have been ignoring. Taking this time o! to relax, rebalance and rejuvenate allows you to find the stillness and calm you need to reconnect with your intuition.

Next, take an inventory of the weeks leading up to the injury. Here’s a place you can use your intellect to good purpose. Ask:

How did you feel?Were you engaged in the e!ortless process?Were you training on new shoes or equipment?Did you become ill, sore or run-down?Did you get adequate sleep?

Think of every possible question you could ask and undertake a complete inventory of the weeks preceding your injury. Usually you’ll find clues, subtle messages that were sent to you through your intuition, which you can learn from, act on and make wise training adjustments. These clues help you mend the injury and, more impor-tantly, teach you to become a more conscious, intuitive athlete.

It’s from this position of attunement with your inner body energy that healing takes place. What’s more, the injury guides you to seek pain free methods of exercise – if you let it. See your injury as a gift, and avoid the temptation to override the wisdom of your body and go with the competitive rational of your mind. Feel the answer in your bones and follow it. Listen. Don’t judge, don’t superimpose external solutions, simply let the pain guide you toward wellness.

Most injuries are not serious and with internal work and reflection you can find the root cause of the problem. But don’t get caught in the symptom treatment trap – this is a band-aid approach and not a solution to the situation. Always look for the root cause; that’s the true key to mending any injury. Once you correct this imbalance, it’s a simple matter of progressively ramping up your training again while staying aware of your inner body signals.

E:)6+ H'=&:#) S+'A,Here’s a simple self-mending checklist of items to consider

when you’re injured and want to return to e!ortless, pain free exercise. Many clients use these eight steps to help them reframe negative training experiences in a positive light. While this list is not all inclusive, it describes the internal journey and aids you in

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illuminating the cause of your problem. Also, this list teaches you the key steps needed to prevent injuries from reoccurring.

Step .: Don’t Name the Problem. Our society is obsessed with naming and categorizing problems and providing band-aid solu-tions. By naming your injury you solidify it, make it your enemy and give it power. Simply recognize your experience of pain, its severity, location and expression and let it guide you towards heal-ing. The journey begins by listening and making unique adjust-ments to your training behavior that minimizes or eliminates the pain and maximizes the feelings of vitality. Accept the pain and own it. It will lead you into healthy activities and teach you how to exercise again pain free.

Of course, if you are in pain while at rest, then you should cease exercising until you are pain free once more. This allows for acute recovery to take place and creates time for you to assess the problem. During this acute phase, it’s not a bad idea to ice the area, as icing reduces inflammation. Pain signals that your body is healing and still requires additional rest. However, many people continue to exercise through pain, overriding their bodies’ natural wisdom. This strategy rarely works in the long run. It either worsens the injury or prolongs it. If the area is sore or inflamed, you need to honor that signal and rest.

Step /: Keep Exercising. Once pain free when at rest, re-engage in exercise, but in ways that are entirely unassociated with the af-fected area. Find an alternate activity that rejuvenates and doesn’t aggravate the injury, and perform this exercise to the full extent of your current training program. For example, if you have a running injury, consider swimming during recovery. It’s very important to keep training for both psychological and physiological reasons. Fit bodies heal faster and circulating blood heals the injured area more e!ectively, while ceasing training often results in discourage-ment and a loss of conditioning, which further complicates the retraining process. With certain minor adjustments you may find you can perform your chosen sport in a way that doesn’t aggra-vate the injury. The necessary awareness you bring to the process leads you to develop new skills needed to prevent the injury from

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reoccurring and may very well add a dimension of balance that prevents new injuries from developing in the future.

Step 1: Avoid Stretching. This next piece of advice may fly in the face of traditional science, but it’s my experience that injuries heal faster if you don’t stretch them. Many injuries are a direct result of pushing soft tissue through a greater range of motion than it’s accustomed to in daily exercise. As stretching is an inflammatory activity, it may prolong the healing process. Let the area heal at its own rate within a comfortable range of motion. I instruct recover-ing runners to reduce their training intensity by lowering their heart rate and shortening their stride, this allows the injured area to work well within its comfortable range of motion.

Sports such as running, cycling and swimming that are repetitive in nature don’t require extreme ranges of motion. While coaching these types of injured athletes toward recovery this is what I’ve discovered: Those athletes that don’t stretch, rarely become injured. Ironically, those that do stretch seem to be injured more often. The reason I believe this may be occurring is that they are requiring their muscles to perform a flexibility movement that is contraindicated to the natural conditioning e!ect of their specific sport. In e!ect, they are trying to develop two opposing qualities at the same time, often with disastrous consequences.

While this may be possible for gymnasts, figure skaters and ballerinas, it does, however, leave many of us at risk for muscle and tendon tears. Stretching is actually counter intuitive for many sports. If you feel you are sti!, that may be a direct result of not warming-up gradually, exceeding the e!ortless state and/or not cooling-down properly. I advise many athletes to simply cool-down very slowly and they immediately feel fresh and limber. So when injured, don’t stretch; instead, refocus on a proper warm-up and cool-down.

Step 3: Heat the Injured Area. Heat heals and increases the vibra-tion of all the molecules and atoms in the a!ected area, which speeds the recovery process. Ice, on the other hand, prevents over inflammation of an injured area yet doesn’t contribute to the body’s natural healing process. Use ice in the acute injury stage to keep the inflammation process in check and dampen the pain,

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then switch to heat in the chronic stage to allow the body to in-crease its healing rate.

Bringing heat, nature’s feel good remedy, to your injury not only speeds recovery, but it allows you to move again in a fluid fashion. Also, if you are accustomed to training in a cold environment, the value of warming-up is critical because the body requires heat to flow e!ortlessly. This freedom of movement allows you to regain normal ranges and patterns of movement faster and prevents you from creating a secondary compensatory injury due to poor form or technique. So find a heating pad and wrap up that injury.

Step 0: Post-Recovery Adjustments. Once the pain and swelling have abated, start your training by making two adjustments.

Begin by lowering your training heart rate by 10 beats per minute. This advice may seem strange, but the mechanism is elementary. By lowering your heart rate you shorten your stride and reduce the mechanical stress produced by exercise. Additionally you also lower the forces that you are generating through and over your joints, often enough to allow the injured area to recover. You also oxygenate your body to a greater extent, which brings needed nutrients into the injured area and promotes e!ortlessness. Here’s a place where the integration of heart rate monitor technology acts as an excellent objective indicator. This downward adjustment allows you to experience exercise well below your limits, experience the sensation of movement in the absence of any exercise induced stress and stay injury free in the future. Since all injuries are a direct result of training and/or overtraining in one form or another, this governing step goes a long way toward healing and is often the only action athletes need take to become healthy again.

Next, focus on increasing your warm-ups and cool-downs by at least 50 percent. Here you smooth out the transition between rest and activity and greatly enhance the health benefits of exercise – this helps you heal faster.

Both of these adjustments are subtle ways of teaching athletes that they were too close to their training limits. By making changes and implementing them over a month or two, many individuals experience a heightened sense of health all the while continuing to train. Many times this subtle care is all that’s required to tip the scales and allow the body to rebuild itself.

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Step D: Discontinue Anaerobic Exercise. While injured, cease all forms of anaerobic exercise including weight lifting until you feel better. Many health practitioners prescribe strength training because logic dictates that this keeps the injured area strong. However, the strengthening and tightening caused by weight training is often the root cause of injuries, and once discontinued, the injured area rests and recovers faster. The white, fast-twitch, anaerobic muscle fibers are usually the ones injured through train-ing; it’s rarely the aerobic, slow-twitch, red muscle fibers. When you’re injured, stick to aerobic activity only, and allow your body to rebuild around this health enhancing exercise.

And specifically why is anaerobic exercise so stressful to your body? There is evidence that the oxidization stress raises free radical production within our bodies. Eating fresh fruits and vegetables with their balancing anti-oxidants and training aerobi-cally helps to keep this situation in check.

Also anaerobic activity upsets the acid/base balance and pushes you into an overly acidic state. Normally we can recover from this state fairly quickly because our bodies have a natural mechanism to do so; however, this requires energy, often the energy needed to recover from an injury or even the energy required for growth in your program. Aerobic exercise, on the other hand, promotes good health because it doesn’t upset this chemical balance and allows you to train in a natural basic state.

By removing added acid stress and ensuring your body trains in a stress free environment, injuries subside or disappear altogether. It’s simply a matter of balance. Remaining conscious of aerobic versus anaerobic training and how it a!ects body chemistry you learn to allow recovery time to outstrip the tearing down process of high intensity training. This allows existing injuries to heal and guards against old ones from reoccurring or new ones from appearing. Also, aerobic exercise encourages greater blood flow and improves healing, promoting a quicker return to your former activity level.

Step 2: Allow the Pain to Guide You. If your body feels better as you warm-up, then continue to exercise. If you feel fine during your exercise session, continue. However, if you feel the honest sensa-tion that you should not exercise, then discontinue or modify by

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slowing down. Relying on your intuition in this way is the key to mending your injury. We often override these body signals, allow-ing our minds to take over and push through the pain in search of our external expectations and short term goals. Let pain be your training compass.

Listening to the subtle cues of your inner energy puts you in touch with your body and opens the door to intuitive wisdom as you chart your way through the exercise maze. Most injuries are caused by a disconnection in this listening process. To heal completely and remain healthy we must stay in touch with the energy flow within our bodies. Let pain be a warning sign that all is not well. Honor that pain the moment you feel it.

Also, monitoring how you feel after an exercise session is paramount in sustaining a healthy approach to fitness. This is sometimes di"cult because it requires patience and a keen sense of awareness with regard to your symptoms. Be sure to give yourself the time and permission to heal. Think of pain as a friend, rather than an enemy. And, of course, always let the problem teach you about your unique physiology and training needs and then inter-nalize this wisdom, as it will be valuable information in the future.

Just as you don’t name your problem, don’t allow pain to become your prime focus. If you get caught in the trap of monitoring your pain sensations too acutely you’ll drive yourself crazy. It’s a good idea to assess your level of pain on a week-to-week basis. If it’s improving, then you are under training and allowing your body to heal in the long term. If the pain remains the same week-to-week, then you are prolonging recovery and your training level is too high to sustain. Back-o! a degree, and assess the situation next week.

Step 5: Work on Your Form. If you find yourself constantly battling injury, consider changing the way in which you exercise. Most in-juries result from a loss of form. Whether it’s becoming tired on a long run or a missed turn on the ski slopes, almost all injuries can be traced back to a mistake in technique. Vow to become a student of good form. Go back and examine your skills, get some upgraded instruction, but above all practice flawless execution.

With running, many injuries are a direct result of impact forces and occur from excessive training on hard surfaces. One of the most beneficial training alterations is to switch to a softer surface.

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Concrete is the hardest surface followed by asphalt, dirt, cinder and wood chips. Whenever possible, seek out the forgiving nature of grassy trails. These nature-made surfaces cause small changes in gait and foot strike on every step, which minimizes chronic overuse and repetitive strain injury.

Shoes also a!ect your form. Check if you have excessive wear or need a new pair, as the impact forces may have become too great for your body to absorb. Shoes whose soles are too thick, too long or too short or any gear, for that matter, that does not fit well or is unsuitable for your body can be a root cause of injury. Examine your favorite activities and the training tools you use and decide if they are up-to-date and the best match for your physi-ology. And remember, less is often more. Don’t fall prey to market-ing’s latest technological fad. Some of the best marathoners are born in Kenya where they run barefoot most of their lives.

By following these eight steps and paying close attention to the presence of pain while seeking e!ortless, you’ll be back on the road to fitness in no time. Lynn’s story shows how these tips helped her to find balance and achieve her dream:

Lynn was )$ years old and running a marathon had been a lifelong dream of hers. She and a friend trained regularly, and they followed all the “expert” advice they could get their hands on. She came to me experiencing a painful left knee and a perpetually tight hamstring. I asked her to run with a heart rate monitor for a week and come back and tell me exactly what she observed. We found she ran between ")$-"#$ beats per minute, often reaching that in the first few minutes of each run. Also she loved to sprint to the finish and then attempted to stretch away the lingering sti!ness.

I suggested that she lower her training HR to the "%$ range, warm-up for at least ($-%$ minutes and cool-down with a post-run ") minute walk. I also advised that she discontinue all stretching and adjust her training mileage based on her sensations of e!ort-lessness and flow. After three months of this type of

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training her pace had quickened by over a minute a mile, and when asked how her leg was doing, she couldn’t recall which leg was injured. Now Lynn looked forward to each run and attained her goal of running the New York Marathon a year later.

By backing o! and allowing the body ample time to regen-erate itself, you harness the power of nature to heal your injury from within. Injuries are often the end result of overuse or a lack of balance. More importantly, you learn something about your unique energy in the process. Seeing your injury as a gift allows you to reframe a negative experience and re-learn how to exercise in a pain free fashion. This is how injury often points the way to becoming a master of e!ortless exercise.

I&&#',, =, I#C<8>No one anticipates getting sick, but from time-to-time we all

come down with some illness. You catch a virus, get run down or your immune system fails in warding o! environmental pathogens, and the next thing you know – you’re sick. So the question often asked is how does one approach exercise during illness?

First of all, illness is a chemical injury to a healthy body. It’s a stage when your body works overtime to regain its balance. Illness presents an excellent opportunity for you to practice your intuitive listening skills. Begin by listening to the state of your inner energy. If you don’t feel like exercising, don’t. Listen to your intuition even though your mind might be chatting away saying you need to get out there or you’ll lose your fitness gains. What many people don’t understand is that if you do exercise, you’ll lose even more, because exercise drives added physical stress into an already energy taxed, ailing physiology. Exercise strenuously and it takes you even longer to recover. Instead, listen carefully to the wisdom of your body and proceed only at the rate that a return to full health dictates.

H'=&+6 =#( F:+#',,As explained in the health and fitness pyramid in Chapter One,

you can only build greater levels of fitness on top of good health;

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you can’t make fitness gains on top of poor health or sickness. Therefore illness signals a time for rest and recovery. Here’s a simple rule to follow: For every day of fever, take one full day of recovery after the fever has subsided. If your body increased its temperature to fight o! a virus, then the illness has taken hold, and even after the fever has broken, your body is repairing and recov-ering its balance – give it adequate rest time. In fact, returning to exercise too soon after illness and/or working out at a high intensity is the single largest mistake made by most athletes. Don’t fall into this trap, be patient with yourself and take the appropriate time to recover completely. If in doubt, always choose rest over a workout. Don’t worry about set backs, that’s your mind and ego getting involved in the impatient demands of future competition. Follow your intuition and listen to your body’s wisdom.

I’ve also heard people say, “I’ll sweat it out.” Know that increasing your body’s metabolism gives any virus an added opportunity to spread. On the other hand, you don’t want to get chilled while you’re sick, as this too deepens your illness. In those first days, when your throat feels sore or your stomach is upset, if you take added care, sleep more, rest, drink lots of water and take vitamin C, you’ll have a better chance of truncating the illness and returning to exercise sooner.

R',<*:#) E9'8!:,'Once a cold or flu has run its course and you feel your energy

returning, you’ll be motivated to exercise again. This represents the danger zone, you must listen carefully during this period as you’re not one hundred percent healthy yet and any setback guarantees a longer time to full recovery. During this post-illness period cut all workouts in half, warm-up and cool-down longer, and drop your training heart rate by 10 beats. If you do exercise, go out for a ridiculously short, easy session and evaluate your recovery from there. If you’re fine the next day, you have the go ahead to repeat the session. If not, you need more rest; however, since you didn’t tap into your energy resources you won’t have lengthened your recovery time.

If your cold is above the neck and you have the energy to exercise, it’s probably fine to go out for a light session. If you have bronchitis and still have the desire to exercise, go easy. However,

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if it’s below the neck and you feel lethargic or weak, don’t force yourself to exercise; it will only get worse. The most important rule to follow if you’re fighting a chest cold remains ONLY BREATHE THROUGH YOUR NOSE. Nasal breathing warms the incoming air and minimizes respiratory stress. Let breathing in and out through your nose govern if you should be exercising at all. If you’re unable to breathe in this manner, then don’t exercise. This is your body’s way of telling you to stop physical activity until the illness has subsided.

L:)6+ W':)6+ L:7+:#)All talk of healthy rest aside, one of the negative aspects of bed

rest or being sedentary is that our muscles deteriorate very quickly. If you know of anyone who has been in a cast, you can see this atrophy in just a few short weeks, and six weeks in a cast may leave the muscles unable to ever return to their original strength and size. An easy and non-energy draining activity to engage in when you’re sick is light weight lifting. Since weight lifting is primarily localized in specific sets of muscles, you can keep the systemic or whole body stress down, while keeping your muscles working. For example, you could do one set of push-ups on day one, a set of curls on day two and a set of leg presses or body weight squats on day three. This should only take a few minutes each day, but it goes a long way toward keeping your muscles strong. This amount of exercise is insu"cient to create an acidic chemistry and worsen your illness, yet it provides muscle maintenance and minimizes atrophy. Don’t consider weight lifting if you are bed ridden, forcing exercise in this situation is counter productive.

T:A, 7$8 S%:**'8,If you happen to be a swimmer, stay out of the water till you’ve

recovered, as swimming involves being immersed in a cold environment and requires a fixed breathing pattern through your mouth. Both of these elements make an illness worse. Mouth breathing creates stress and makes a sore throat worse and getting chilled weakens your immune system, allowing viruses a chance to set in. Instead, if you feel well enough, stick to light cardio sessions and some limited weight training. Only return to the pool when you are fully recovered.

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E#@:8$#*'#+If you exercise in hot or cold environments, exercise with caution

and dress accordingly; you want to keep your body temperature constant rather than getting over heated or chilled. Long distance runners should avoid long runs in the cold as they risk becoming further chilled as their sweat evaporates. Overall, take extra rest time, stay attuned to your intuition, and allow the illness to run its full course. You’ll come back quicker and avoid driving the illness into a chronic phase.

T6' O@'8+8=:#:#) T8=AI have found that most athletes over train. That’s a very bold

statement. However, I’ve come to this conclusion by simply asking athletes how they “feel.” The majority answer that they are tired, beat-up, fighting through pain or they’ll be happy when the race is over – all signs that they have tapped too deeply into their bodies’ natural ability to tolerate exercise.

Over all, athletes tend to be competitive and goal oriented; many fail to embrace the ongoing process of exercise. They focus specifically on the future results of an event rather than allowing the event to be the outflow of a vital, sustainable lifestyle or training program. In other words, their minds are ahead of their bodies.

If you train and progress in the absence of any goal, then you are truly a process oriented athlete and likely providing the right duration and intensity of exercise for your body’s development and well-being. If, on the other hand, you are goal fixated, then you are probably in an over reaching state of disharmony that can’t be sustained in the long term. This, by definition, is overtraining.

It’s easy to fall into the overtraining trap because our outwardly focused society constantly reinforces us to look outside ourselves for success and solutions. When we buy into this belief, our competitive egos get caught up in the latest training program and our minds plough forward dragging our over stressed bodies along behind. We disconnect from balanced exercise in pursuit of external, future goals. Failing to be present as we exercise, failing to follow our intuition, failing to be patient with our progress and failing to give ourselves permission to recover properly results in

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over trained athletes that become disillusioned, injured and often never reach their desired goals.

L',, :, M$8'Fortunately, my filing cabinet overflows with case histories of

athletes performing very well on less training. I recall one ultra-marathoner who ranks well in competitions all over North America, who only runs three days a week. When asked why he trains on low volume, he told me it’s because he learned through experience what feels sustainable for his body. He uses a scientific program as a guideline and planning tool, and he honors his body’s internal messages as well. Intuitively fine-tuning scientific programs in this way has kept him healthy and competitive where others, lacking this fine balance, have been side lined. In his case, the old adage of “less is more” applies.

Also many triathletes and runners improve on less mileage and intensity. What’s even more important is that exercise enthu-siasm returns, the aches and pains disappear and the competitive spirit flourishes again when you err on the under-done side versus the over-done side of exercise. It’s better to show up on race day under trained and fresh, rather than over trained and tired. I’ll put my money on the under trained athlete every time.

R'!$)#:E:#) O@'8+8=:#:#)But how do you recognize overtraining? Simply ask yourself

how you feel. Feeling vital is your body’s natural state. And the training process should leave you feeling fresh the majority of the time. If you’ve been battling an ache, pain or fatigue longer than a week, take a serious look at your exercise program and give yourself permission to experiment with the e!ortless exercise process. For a refresher, go back and answer the bulleted questions in Exercise # 2: Training Progression at the end of Chapter Six. I also suggest benching your ego until you need it for the next race, because it’s usually not a good ally during the healing process.

Exercise acts like a double edged sword: It can pull stress out of your body or it can drive stress inward. Overtraining drives stress into your body and results in your system directing all of its available energy toward recovery. Nothing is left over for growth. Once you step back to the point where the need for recovery is

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minimized new growth can occur and you become fitter, fresher and stronger.

Remaining sensitive to the level of stress your training creates is essential. Many people wrestle to break with tradition, which is often a di"cult task, but to heal and progress it’s essential to find the courage and inner strength to break damaging long term habits. If healing is to occur it’s critical to back-o! exercise intensity or volume, disconnect from your ego, put the future race expectations aside in the short term and develop an awareness of what your body requires today so that you can access healthy flow states.

Exercise should leave you feeling invigorated and enthused about training, instead of exhausted. If this is the case, then you are exercising in the growth zone. However, most athletes live in the recovery zone, rarely experiencing growth and constantly flirting with injury.

F8',6#',, Q<',+:$#One quick way to get into the growth zone consists of asking

yourself the freshness question every morning and following it with an honest answer. Ask yourself, “What length and intensity of workout can I accomplish today that will leave me feeling fresh and invigorated tomorrow?” Next, to circumvent expectations and ego, cut this workout by /0 percent and start there. Within a short period of time, usually a week or two, you’re chomping-at-the-bit to do more. That’s when it’s right to add training – not a moment before.

At this point, when your body has caught up with your intel-lectual expectations, you’ll experience mind/body synchronicity in each moment of each exercise session. This is the essence of intuitive fitness. The Kenyans are masters of this process, they run every day, but their motto remains, “Run today, so you can run tomorrow.” Some of the most accomplished lifestyle athletes use this approach as well, and it’s interesting to note that they remain injury free because they have mastered the art of listening to their bodies’ inner guidance system.

E77$8+&',, E9'8!:,' # 7: H'=&:#) P8=!+:!',Here’s a list of self-mending practices to follow when you’re

injured and want to return to pain free exercise. These healing

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steps help you reframe negative training experiences in a positive light. While this list is not all inclusive, it describes an internal process and aids you in solving the root cause of your injury. More importantly, this list teaches you the key steps needed to prevent injuries from reoccurring.

Find the Root Cause of Your InjuryRecognize the pain, feel it, be present with it and let it be your coach and teacherIf there is swelling, ice the area and take a few rest daysReview your training in the weeks prior to the injury for body clues and signals of discomfortHave you been ill or run down?Has your sleep pattern been disturbed?Are you using new equipment?Have you suddenly ramped up your training or begun a new sport?Are you practicing a balanced form of exercise or are you focused on external advice alone?Have you begun training with a group?Are you forcing yourself or are you engaged in the process?Is your anaerobic training excessive?Are you focused on an external goal?Could weight training be exacerbating the injury?When and how are you stretching?Are you allowing for adequate rest, recovery and growth?Do you warm-up and cool-down adequately?

Eight Healing Steps SummaryDon’t Name the ProblemKeep Exercising and TrainingDon’t StretchHeat the Injured AreaMake Post-Recovery AdjustmentsDiscontinue Anaerobic ExerciseLet the Pain Guide YouWork on Your Form

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Exercise During IllnessFor every day of fever, take an extra full day of recovery post-feverPost-illness, cut workouts in half, warm-up and cool-down longer, and drop your training HR by 10 beatsEnsure short, easy exercise sessions and evaluate your recovery from therePractice nasal breathing, and if you can’t breathe through your nose – slow down or rest and recover

Freshness Question

To ensure you stay in the growth zone, ask yourself the freshness question every morning.

What length and intensity of workout can I accomplish today that will leave me feeling fresh and invigorated tomorrow and ready to train again?

Then cut this workout by 25 percent and start there. Within a week you’ll feel revitalized and that’s the right time to add training – not a moment before. When your body has caught up with your mind, you’ll experience the e!ortlessness of mind/body synchronicity.

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CHAPTER (: TOWARD A LIFE TIME OF EXERCISE

The Journey Never Ends

When considering fitness as a lifestyle, let’s examine the classic noon hour workout, which is the touch stone of many people’s exercise program. Again, I call it a “workout” because that is exactly what it becomes, more work in your already busy, action packed day.

A T>A:!=& “W$8"$<+”See if you relate to how this rushed and somewhat unconscious

experience drives you to squeeze every benefit out of your training time and leaves you stressed and sti! for the remainder of your day. Here’s how the scenario usually unfolds:

You take a last minute call at the o+ce and find yourself leaving late for the fitness club, so o! you rush. You arrive and your anxious buddies are looking at their watches and waiting for you just outside the club. You change quickly, join your friends and tear o! down the running path. The first few minutes feel horrible; you realize you’re dehydrated and you’re out of breath just trying to keep up. From here it gets worse.

You continue to hu! and pu! as the pace quickens and the conversation heats up and turns to competitive race plans. Now you notice that everyone seems to be jockeying for the lead position, even though it’s agreed upon that you’re just out here for a leisurely training

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run. You know deep down that talk of racing has just released a good dose of testosterone. Your thoughts race between rival comments and your body tries to pace itself as a worthy opponent in this must-keep-up scenario.

Finally, as you near home, you notice the conver-sation stops and the pace quickens yet again; it becomes an all-out sprint to the finish. Next, you follow this “workout” with some quick stretches because you have to get back to the o+ce. While showering, you’re thinking about racing and your upcoming afternoon meeting. As you bolt down a quick sandwich and settle in behind your desk, you wonder why you are already sti!ening up and continue to tighten up the rest of the day. You make a mental note to stretch more deeply tomorrow after your next “workout.” Then you rush o! to your meeting.

If this describes your experience, then you engage in stress inducing exercise sessions. I’d even argue that you are doing yourself more harm than good. This type of “workout” is more common than you think. It’s part of the old logic that if a bit of exercise is beneficial, then intense exercise is even better. Once again it’s the classic “mind over matter” approach: The mind is busy driving the body forward, but it is disengaged from subtle body sensations. An out-of-body-experience of sorts.

Most people approach exercise by doing their best every time out, always exercising to their limits and pushing the envelope each time they tie up their shoes. I know many hard core runners that approach their noon hour runs week-in and week-out in this way. Often complaints of injuries and pain dominate their conversa-tions while they streak along the running paths.

I invite clients to view exercise instead as connected play: where they take time out of work to de-stress, have fun, enjoy some relaxation, and escape from the concrete jungle into the world of nature. Your number one training partner is your body, listen to it first and then listen to your buddies’ banter second. Enjoy the inner calm created during dynamic movement. If you

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cultivate e!ortless flow states and harmonize your movement with present moment energy, with enough practice you’ll even find group training becomes e!ortless.

I#+'8#=& @'8,<, E9+'8#=& F$!<,Group exercise programs that focus solely on external or

scientific criteria don’t take into account each individual’s current fitness level or allow for any intuitive feedback and the need to act on this input. Here, short term goals or race performances take priority. These programs start many participants o! too intensively and ultimately a!ect their health parameters over time. They decrease your energy, lower your immune system, generate pain and sti!ness and decrease your exercise enjoyment. Future planning and coping with pain rob you of the pure pleasure of the activity itself and undermine intuitive feedback.

Activities performed for the intrinsic value of exercise itself ensure long term success. For example, when I think about snowshoeing, I’m like a dog – my tail starts wagging. I get jazzed just thinking about the wonderful day in the mountains with friends and clients shoeing along in the fresh air, sharing good conver-sation, enjoying the movement and drinking in the surroundings. Now that’s my idea of fun. We exercise in comfort and ease, take frequent scenery breaks, and break trail through some of Canada’s most pristine powder snow. Last year six of us snow shoed up to Chester Lake in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, in beautiful sunshine, absolute silence and spectacular scenery! We were the only ones there.

Snowshoeing isn’t arduous because I have engaged in fitness for many years. My physiology has adapted to exercise and is therefore fit enough to handle the activity and pace. I continually check-in with my inner body sensations and pace myself carefully to ensure I stay in a flow state. And because it’s not intimidating mentally, I look forward to the experience.

By placing greater awareness on an integrated pleasure-driven model we can shift from the position of “do I have to go and exercise?” to a grounded and self-rewarding position of “I look forward to exercise!” Now we are drawn to exercise because it

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gives us greater energy and vitality. It’s a small dose of “feeling good” every day.

Great fitness gains can be realized through e!ortless exercise, it just may take a bit longer. It’s akin to the fable of the Tortoise and Hare. Externally focused programs rocket you down the road faster, but you may fall short of the finish line due to exhaustion or injury. The upside of moving along at a sustainable and consistent pace, however, is that the changes remain permanent and the journey reinforces a healthy lifestyle.

I also use the rubber band analogy: Stretch a rubber band, and it snaps back. That’s the way most people try to get in shape. They’ll re-start a program time and time again, constantly stretching their elastic band and allowing it to snap back. If they sought out a gentle approach, patiently creating resonant experiences that were pleasurable, they would soon find permanent change occurring entirely through sustainable flow states.

Elite athletes know this zone experience all to well and many runners often talk about the “high” they often experience. Once experienced, this high becomes a powerful motivator that draws you into exercise, provided this high is not a false high produced when you push yourself too hard. You’ll notice the di!erence in the experience as the permanent and subtle high lasts longer and vitalizes you all day long.

When you train intensely and push into pain your brain produces powerful neurotransmitters that mask the pain and create a false high. This high is short lived and further inhibits your ability to listen for body signals of discomfort. Your survival mechanism kicks in and tricks you into thinking you’re okay so that you can endure the stress. A false high is then followed by a crash into soreness, sti!ness, moodiness and many days of decreased vitality. Instead, watch for the first sensations of discomfort and avoid pushing to the point where your body has to survive negative stress through a false high. Instead, be ever present and adaptive and discover the sustained true high.

I believe exercise should be wholly rejuvenating, pulling stress out of your body. If you’re going to exercise for the rest of your life why not have an abundance of “feel good” sessions. With a properly designed warm-up, which allows you to ease into the session and get in touch with your body as it prepares for exercise,

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you can access a flow state every time out. Then, when you have attained this zone, exercising in this e!ortless state allows you to reach a natural high. It opens you up to a world of possibilities. It’s exhilarating experiencing powerful, dynamic physical movement, all the while being in total relaxation and calm on the inside. This is truly meditation in motion.

D:,+8=!+:$#,That said, many of us still enjoy double tasking and believe it is

a better use of our precious time. However, if you are a beginner, are injured or working on re-tooling some of your exercise habits, beware of the e!ect that distractions have on your mind/body connection. Here are some situations that interrupt the e!ortless exercise process.

M'(:=Reading and/or watching TV while exercising is like sending

your body out for some exercise while your mind detaches and gets into the magazine or screen drama. Think of it as losing your individual focus and tuning into the collective hive-mind of media. It’s not always wise to separate your mind and body in that way. Certainly in the initial phases of the e!ortless process you need to be conscious of your body and pay strict attention to its energy signals in order to make the right pacing choices.

My wife is an X-Files fan and received the entire nine seasons on DVD as a present. At first this sounded great; she planned to walk or run for 40 minutes each day while watching an episode of alien abduction or government cover-ups – and there were no commercials either! However, she noticed that as the action and intrigue spiked in the show, so did her heart rate. Watching the show also masked her ability to listen clearly to her inner body signals.

We found it interesting to witness how the show’s content a!ected her thoughts and emotions, which in turn a!ected her inner state of calm, breathing and heart rate even though her pace remained steady. She told me she had to consciously focus inward on her breathing to bring the heart rate back down. What she learned was that she needed to remain connected to her body’s

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systems and sometimes consciously detach from the adrenaline boost of the FBI action sequences.

She still enjoys the exploits of the X-Files, but ensures that she employs a heightened inner awareness while working out with media. As far as the experience goes, running on a hamster-like treadmill in a basement while tuned into TV is no match for the sunshine, vitamin D, fresh air and awareness that a run in nature provides, with all due respect to Mulder and Scully.

C$#@'8,=+:$#Like media, conversation also pulls you out of your body, but

provided you are aware of this fact, you can carry on a conver-sation while exercising. The trick here is to constantly check-in with your inner body signals and with your sensation of e!ort-lessness. Don’t get carried away in thought, lost outside of your body and end up pacing your session beyond the comfort range. Always maintain the mind/body link, breathe through your nose and stay present. Check-in often and listen.

G8$<A T8=:#:#)As the story at the beginning of this chapter illustrates,

group exercise sessions tend to cause each member to exercise with added e!ort and overextend themselves, because they are exercising at someone else’s pace. Only when all the members agree to never put anyone into a push state will group training work for ALL the members. Of course, the group members need to understand what that entails and agree to exercise at an e!ortless pace for everyone. What I have found through experience is that group sessions usually turn into competitions or races and, if not all, most members end up pushing too hard and are unable to listen to their internal cues.

If you find yourself seeking group exercise, that’s fine, just honor your internal feeling of e!ortlessness and communicate this to your group members. If they are worthy training companions, they’ll adjust their pace to be in line with everyone in the group.

The e!ortless group sessions I coach start with a very slow warm-up and have set guidelines we follow to allow everyone to exercise at their own pace. We pick an out-and-back route based on

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time so everyone can enjoy meeting before and after the training to compare notes on how they felt during the session.

G8$<A T8=:#:#) G<:('&:#',I employ these three simple practices when leading group

exercise sessions:First, regardless of sport, everyone takes a moment before we

begin to calm themselves and lower their heart rates to below 100 bpm. Often, many individuals are excited and stressed even before they start to warm-up. Taking a few moments before we start to re-ground our bodies and calm our nerves gives everyone a chance to neutralize the excitement of socialization, focus inward and initiate the listening process.

Next, the group begins at a extremely slow pace. That means everyone follows the coach, and they must not pass me for the first half hour. I start very slowly and gradually build the pace over the first half hour. There is no cheetah-like racing or speedy rabbit egos allowed, instead we begin as a pack of turtles would – slow and steady. If we are biking, that means starting in first gear. If we are running or walking, we begin with a slow stroll. Regardless of the form of activity, I start ever so slowly and ensure that everyone warms-up gradually.

Finally, we agree to a set time with an out-and-back route, that way everyone has the opportunity to see each other and finish together regardless of individual pace. (If we pick a distance or a loop route this socialization doesn’t occur.) Also, and this is most important, everyone must exercise squarely in the pull state. No one is permitted to push themselves or their partners out of their e!ortless flow state. In this way, small groups of equal abilities naturally form. They sustain, encourage and respect one another, and intuitive listening is enhanced.

By following these simple guidelines, overtraining in groups is greatly diminished and the enjoyment and optimization of the training e!ect is enhanced. Permitting everyone to go at his or her pace allows each participant to focus on optimum development rather than directing that energy into constant competition and its greater need for recovery. Once this type of sound base training is achieved, it becomes easy to sign up for a race, focus on the

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specific requirements and remain confident that you’ll achieve your goal – e!ortlessly.

S'++:#) G$=&,You’ll notice a shift from enjoyment to heightened enthusiasm

by the sense of purpose a future goal brings to your training. The e!ortless process is now fueled by an added intensity. This intensity has nothing to do with stress and is more akin to creative energy. Participants who put more importance on arriving at a goal than enjoying the daily process of exercise create unnecessary stress. You diminish not only the enjoyment but the quality and e!ectiveness of your training. Remaining aware, connected and in a flow state as you pursue your race goals ensures you’ll become one of those perennially fit people who are always energized, drink in life and reap all the benefits that vitality o!ers.

Most long term exercisers, for the most part, enjoy the process of exercise and no longer engage in fitness solely for future oriented goals and their ensuing outcomes and egoic rewards. Alert exercise becomes a celebration of health and energy, rather than a see-saw between elation and disappointment, which remains dependant on the achievement of a desired external result. From time to time they may focus certain aspects of their training on a competitive, external goal, but once the event is over they continue to exercise in a sustainable manner for the joy of its intrinsic value alone.

P=!:#) E77$8+&',,&>There are three possible choices available to you at any given

moment during your exercise session. Maintain your pace, slow down or speed up. Allow yourself to be open to making these changes based on present moment body cues and signals. If the activity is becoming work, check your form, pace, breathing, hydration and training time, and make adjustments to seek that e!ortless feeling. Perhaps slow down, or walk if you are running. Adjust your style, take a break and experiment to find that sensation of e!ortlessness again.

As your body temperature begins to rise during a slow progressive warm-up and you feel your muscles loosening up, you find that

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you’re drawn into the session further and further. When exercising, you are either pushing the pace through will power or being drawn along by the pull of flow state energy. Here is where the true fun begins: playing with the dynamic balance of push/pull energy.

Most individuals use their will power to push their bodies forward. You know those days, when a workout feels heavy and sluggish, or you’re tired and you’re forcing yourself to finish it. Or your schedule says you have to complete intervals today, or the instructor is shouting for one more repetition while your body is protesting. We have been taught that this is normal to push, that without it you won’t get any stronger or progress. If you use will power exclusively you will become stronger, but you will also pay the price. Remember the Hare story and the rubber band analogy? You can sprint toward your goal and stretch your rubber band to its maximum, but it will snap back and if it suddenly breaks, o! you go to physiotherapy, recovery and re-starting your training once again. That’s the world of pushing too far into stress. Like many fad diets, high intensity fitness programs carry with them the risk of a yo-yo e!ect.

When pacing yourself, by backing o! the smallest amount, you suddenly feel as if you are floating, being carried along energeti-cally – that’s capturing the pull state. Staying predominantly on the pull side of the fitness sliding scale is the art of pacing and flow. Practicing this art requires presence; it requires that you listen to your inner body energy. Learning to train within the flow of pull energy allows your body to adjust to sustainable stress that is in alignment with the energy of your body, mind and spirit. You’ll experience less strain and more gain, and you’ll marvel at how this all came about.

The more time you spend in the pull state the better you feel and the closer you come to a true e!ortless exercise session. Seeking this high, this state of oneness, is the objective of every session. Each person’s journey into the pull state will be slightly di!erent and can be opposed to what our intellects tell us or what we have learned in the past. Sean was a client who overturned past coaching and training habits to meet his marathon goal from a fresh perspective:

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Sean had been running for ") years. As a university track team member he had competed in and won many State titles. Eventually work and family life took up his time, but it didn’t dampen his love of running. He had the dream of running a marathon, as he had tasted the runner’s high back in his university days. When he started training he was *$ years old and #$ pounds over weight. We started with some very short walks, and I explained the process of e!ortless training. Sean wore his heart rate monitor, breathed through his nose and always exercised in the zone of comfort. The first few months consisted of walking and then it progressed to walk-running. The pounds came o! and he was able to run for "$-") minutes at a time. As his body once again remembered the freedom of running, he remained mindful to always listen to his inner body signals and only increased his runs when he felt e!ortless. We never put a detailed schedule together, I simply gave him the e!ortless guidelines and we monitored his progress.

About two months into the journey we tested his aerobic speed at his aerobic threshold of "*$bpm. He ran about a "( minute mile. To make a long story short, he kept at it for about a year and a half, lost the #$ pounds and when we tested his aerobic speed a few months before his race, he was down to a ,:""minute mile. Sean now ran almost * minutes per mile faster than "' months prior, all while remaining e!ortless and at the same heart rate!

He entered the Royal Victoria marathon, and the day before the race he tested his speed again and found it had shifted downward to a #:)(minute mile. He called me that day from Victoria and asked what pace he should hold in the race. I suggested he shoot for a (:*):$$; he finished in (:**:$', placing third in his age category. Sean accomplished his

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goal without stress, struggle or injury and without a rigid training program. It is true that he was disciplined and did have the advantage of being a former runner, but to this day he still remarks on how enjoyable and inspiring the training was and how he didn’t miss the shouting coaches from his university days.

T6' H'=8+ $7 E9'8!:,' – E#C$>*'#+At the heart of the e!ortless exercise practice lies the truth

that behavior will be repeatable if the intrinsic value of the behavior is greater than all the forces repelling it. Creating this pull or attraction toward exercise is central to a lifetime of fitness. Once you experience the joy, vitality, functional fitness and flow that exercise provides you’ll be hooked for a lifetime. Motivation becomes secondary as you’re drawn in to do more, and as you feel more successful, you’ll crave this heightened energy experience.

All of the practical and scientific reasons we engage in exercise become secondary to the full experience of enjoying the present moment and the bliss of moving in a resonant activity. The central driving force that motivates us remains that we are more fully alive when we exercise. Accessing e!ortlessness through inner calm creates a desire to exercise that keeps fitness participants coming back for more.

Vibrant energy is the ultimate reason long time exercisers continue to exercise and embrace an active lifestyle. We re-create the vital energy of life every time we move our bodies and experience the power of life through a heightened metabolic state. Scientists tell us that everything in the universe is in vibratory motion. At whatever age you find yourself, movement allows you to become more internally energized and younger. Exercise vibrates every cell in your body at a higher rate and creates a greater life force.

View exercise as pleasurable – enjoy movement for its intrinsic value rather than simply as a means to an end. From this totally process oriented lens, weight loss and a bu! body become by-products of a sustainable process. Positive exercise loops create a life long desire to exercise because stress, overtraining

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and injury are side-stepped as you naturally evolve toward your fitness goals.

Becoming aware of the positive, energizing sensations during exercise teaches you to move your body in the most e"cient ways and leads to the enhancement of skills and the development of athletic abilities.

The ancient health system of Ayurveda states that one can reach their potential of athletic ability provided they train at 50 percent of their capacity. That’s right, work at half of your capacity and you can develop all of your potential. This has been a universal truth for over 5000 years and it’s only lately that the College of Sports Medicine has recognized that a reduction in training zones from 70 percent to 60 percent is better for participants on all fronts.

I feel that soon you’ll see this estimate coming down again. This is an interesting paradigm: Do more on less, create more output with less input, and become strong and fast physically all the while remaining calm and balanced on the inside. As consciousness, integration and sustainably become the focus in the new millennium, more and more fitness participants will embrace a healthier way of approaching exercise as part of a vital lifestyle, e!ortlessly. Here’s a great summary story of how a client reached his e!ortless zone and realized a dramatic di!erence in his output:

As a seasoned triathlete, Je! had never experi-enced an e!ortless training session before, but he was convinced he was ready for a shift in his training dynamics. He always rode his bike at high heart rates and worked extremely hard. We started his first session by meditating and relaxing before he got on his bike. His resting HR was now down to #)bpm. In a state of calm body awareness I guided him through the check-in phase and asked him to focus on nasal breathing. This process took about "$ minutes, all while cycling slowly and holding onto the sensation of e!ortlessness. We observed his heart rate climb into the mid ,$s. Now Je! wanted to go faster; he felt the itch, so we started to increase the intensity. He took it up a notch.

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Slowly over the next ($-() minutes we coaxed his body through faster and faster cadences toward his goal of &$ revolutions per minute and through "$ gears on the way to his normal gear for indoor riding. His HR managed to reach "") bpm. He was still breathing through his nose, and he felt e!ortless. Then his knee started to hurt, a very mild pain, he felt a bit of discomfort. So I suggested he drop a gear and back the cadence o!. Slowly, about ) minutes later, the pain dissipated and he returned to his harder gear and normal cadence.

Next I asked him to pay attention to when his body sensed the session was over. That took another half hour, all the while cruising along feeling great. Finally he started the slow descent and cool-down. The cool-down took about %$ minutes; at that time he had been on the bike for almost ( hours. Cycling at a cadence of *$ with no tension, he managed to get his heart rate back to '$ bpm.

Je! remarked that during the mid-point of the session he was cycling in a gear and at a cadence that would have given him a heart rate of "#$ bpm the week previously. During this e!ortless session he never broke "($ bpm – that’s a savings of *$ beats per minute at the same output. Incredible! Je! was also amazed at how easy the session felt and how great he felt afterwards. The next day he emailed me after his run saying he felt so good and was so excited that he couldn’t wait for his next “workout”. I smiled. I guess it may take a few more sessions to get that word out of his vocabulary!

Physiologists continue to predict heart rate formulas, propose ultimate training systems, and devise numerous theories, but in the final analysis, your body is the finest coach you’ll ever hire. The solution to pushing, overtraining and injury issues can be found in an exercise practice that promotes fitness as an experience of

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pleasure, inspiration and vitality. E!ortless exercise is a lifestyle system that integrates simple scientific tools, is process oriented, creates constancy, promotes inner listening and follows each person’s intuitive wisdom. Fitness and weight loss become secondary by-products of this sustainable flow state.

Adopt the e!ortless exercise process and you can design a balanced, individualized exercise program. Let your inner body energy and sensations lead the way, like a guide taking you up a mountain. Follow your intuition and trust its feedback. Explore the limits of e!ortless exercise. You’ll find that every training session builds on the next and becomes self-perpetuating because you’ll give your body exactly what is required on any given day.

E77$8+&',, E9'8!:,' # 8: E#C$>:#) E=!6 S',,:$#The following exercise encompasses everything discussed up

to this point in time. It represents a journey into enjoyment, e!ort-lessness and peak performance. To get there you’ll need focus, permission and presence. Here’s the step-by-step process for reaching and exiting the e!ortless state of blissful movement.

Plan. First, create ample time and space for your session in your day timer.

Fuel. Pay attention to all the pre-session details, make sure you’re hydrated and you have had something to eat that contains a bit of carbohydrates, fat and protein. (I prefer a peanut butter sand-wich.) Eat this slowly, savor the taste and enjoy eating.

Start in a calm state. Make a leisurely journey to your exercise ven-ue and arrive calm yet alert.

Get changed slowly. Begin to pay attention to your breath, feel the air coming in and out through your nose. Put your clothes on easily, without any tension, try to remain as meditative, relaxed and calm as possible. Tie you shoes lightly and make sure to have comfortable, loose fitting clothes that don’t restrict your move-ment. Take your water bottle to the session with you.

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Breathe and meditate. Now take a few minutes before you start to create an inner calm and peace. Do this by sitting quietly and simply focusing your attention to your breath. Feel how easily and freely the air moves in and out of your lungs. Breathe through your nose entirely and allow your diaphragm and belly to expand naturally. Keep the breaths calm and relaxed. You may pause after expiration if you like, this helps to calm you. Note this base line heart rate, and keep it as low as possible once you start to move.

Check-in. Now it’s time to start moving. Start with a slow stroll if you’re walking or running. If you’re swimming, you’ll want to “float” your way down the first few lengths going as slowly as pos-sible. On the bike make sure to have no tension and start with a very low cadence. Your goal for the first 5-10 minutes is to get in touch with your body, check-out all the systems and hold on to the calm, relaxed sensation you created in the meditation.

Practice warm-up awareness. Take this time period to listen to your inner body energy. Listen for aches and pains and allow your body to unfold into movement. You want to keep your heart rate as low as possible, perhaps only 5-10 beats above your resting level. Don’t rush this process and be aware of any anxious thoughts that come into your mind, observe them, note them and let them go. Also be as fluid as possible with your form and technique. Note any tension in your body and envision breathing air into that area. Relax, listen and be calm.

Pacing up. Pay particular attention near the end of this warm-up period to any sensations that you want to pick up the pace; I call this “the itch.” If you do, honor that energy and take your bike cadence up a notch, change your stroll into a walk or your jog in to a run. Only speed up a small increment and be aware of hanging onto your feeling of inner calm and physical relaxation. The key here is to create more speed with less e!ort.

Pacing down. If you feel any tension, discomfort or pain creeping in, back-o! a notch and re-establish comfort. Play this cat and mouse game as you slowly dial up your warm-up pace. Have fun finding your e!ortless balance point. Pay attention to any tension in your

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non-working muscles, like your face or during the non-working phase of your activity, like your recovery arm during the swim. You want all movement to be as relaxed and fluid as possible.

Find your flow state. Continue taking your physical intensity up-ward until you feel uncomfortable breathing through your nose and want to begin panting through your mouth. Make note of this heart rate point and back-o! a notch to regain e!ortlessness. Throughout this process stay present, focus on your body’s sen-sations and remain calm. Enjoy the energy of movement. Allow physical comfort to dictate your pace and intensity. Listen for any feeling that you have had enough for the day, if not, keep going.

Practice cool-down awareness. As soon as you get the body cue that it’s time to end your session, dial back your pace and ease your way into the cool-down. This is the exact opposite of your warm-up. Keep your nasal breathing deep, relaxed and calm. Again, don’t rush your cool-down and be aware of any thoughts that are leading you into the future, stay present with your body, you are not there yet, you’re still exercising. Be one with the process.

Check-out. See if you can get to within 10 beats of your meditative, starting heart rate. To do this you’ll need to dial back your pace a great deal. Spend at least 5 minutes at the end of your session go-ing extremely slow. During this time practice being totally aware of your breath, see how internally calm you can become, how physi-cally relaxed you feel. Once you have gained this state it’s time to end your session and resume your daily activities.

Maintain a meditative calm. Carry this peaceful, alert, energized and relaxed state over into the rest of the day and enjoy the vitality that e!ortless exercise has brought to you and those around you.

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REFERENCES

.. Total ImmersionTotal Immersion is a method of swim instruction that focuses on

developing a fluid, e!ortless stroke in any body of water. Developed by internationally acclaimed swim instructor Terry Laughlin and refined through 20 years of ground breaking workshops, Terry has brought the vision of true e!ortlessness to swimming through his books and seminars. His method teaches clients how to swim e"ciently using any stroke and focuses swimmers on improving their skills over a lifetime to capture the joy of swimming as a sport or recreational activity. For more information about this technique; to find a coach; check out his books, courses, and DVD’s go to www.totalimmersion.net.

/. Chi RunningDeveloped by master coach and ultra-marathoner Danny

Dreyer, Chi Running is a new technique that combines the ancient principles of tai chi with modern physics and results in e!ortless, injury free running. This method is easily learned and once mastered leaves you feeling fresh and invigorated. It reduces the impact on your body and teaches you how to glide over the ground with ease and navigate hills e!ortlessly. Endorsed by top runners, medical doctors, and lifestyle participants, Chi Running is beneficial for all ability levels. This technique helps you focus on your form and transforms running into a refined, meditative practice. For a detailed description of this technique or to order books and DVDs go to www.chirunning.com.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Grant Molyneux, Mkin, has coached athletes and fitness enthusi-asts for over 14 years. As an avid triathlete with over 71 races to his credit, he has pioneered alternate techniques and refined his craft to incorporate concepts of e!ortless exercise into his coaching practice. He runs a practice called Vitalize Inc. in Calgary where he o!ers fitness, swimming, running and cycling programs for all ages and abilities.

The scope of his practice includes:One-on-one private instructionTotal Immersion swim classes and a swim clubChi Running classesIronman for mortals training programYear round spin (cycling) and running classColleague of the Childhood Obesity ClinicColleague of Calgary Weight Management CenterSeminars and workshops on E!ortless Exercise

Grant divides his time between helping others achieve a greater level of health and fitness through seeking e!ortless exercise and family time with his wife Wendy and son Scott. You may meet him on the running path enjoying an e!ortless run.

You can email Coach Grant at grant@vitalize.caor visit his website at www.vitalize.ca

Watch for Grant Molyneux’s scientifically integrated companion books…

E!ortless IronmanE!ortless Marathon

…coming in the near future.