Working on Capacity

Life is experienced through the filter of your physical and mental capacity. The most mundane tasks can become dangerous when we lack capacity, while the most beautiful settings can be thickly painted over by pain. Thankfully the opposite is true: stressful, high stakes, physically demanding situations can be handled smoothly and sustainably when our mind and body have the resources to work together.

Exercise is supposed to improve the health and capacity of our mind and body. But for many, exercise has become something to help “blow off steam”, improving the way we feel for a short amount of time until the steam builds again. We use all our capacity again and again, without balancing the usage with activities that give us a higher baseline capacity to start with.

Fitness enthusiasts can get stuck in a cycle of exhausting themselves, resulting in injuries or burnout leading to large decreases in activity until they recover enough to "train hard" again. Ups and downs are inevitable in life and on the road to progress, but we can learn how to ride these more smoothly and stop taking on mountains that are too steep for us currently.

Learning to be active against stress is what drives adaptation, so exercise is mandatory for building capacity. What goes wrong with exercise is that the type and amount of stress applied to the body does not take into account its current state and capacity, and it revolves around learning to do more instead of learning how to do it more efficiently.

The time you invest into caring for your health will yield the most rewards when it’s treated as an important time for self-reflection and development. There’s often, unfortunately, a lack of learning in one’s fitness journey, as the focus becomes exerting sheer willpower in familiar ways to achieve a predetermined outcome. There’s a belief in the myth of a straight line when it comes to both fitness improvements and injury recovery. Many have discovered that to be far from the truth in their situation.

Having access to passive self-care like massage and chiropractic can be great for supporting healing, as they give people the permission and space to lay down and rest. But many end up relying on these to keep their bodies from falling apart and have yet to learn how to build themselves up to have the capacity for independence. The cycle of feeling good after an adjustment for a short time and then struggling to make it to your next appointment is not one you want to be stuck in.

The most sustainable progress will come when you find the right doses of challenge that you can perform consistently, while allowing enough recovery time in between.