Chapter 3: Your Body Is Your Job

I’m going to let you in on something: you actually already have a pledge. You live in your body. The care of your body has been entrusted to you, and only you—like it or not. How well are you keeping this pledge? It’s your choice: do it well or do it badly.

You’ve heard it in one form or another a billion times. Your body is your job. If you don’t work for it, it will not work for you.

The temptation to slacken physically increases with age. Kids just move—all the time. Then, later, we grow up and as stated, begin to hunch over our laptops, slouch on couches, and neglect our cores. Slowly our shoulders curl down, our spines concave, our necks turtle forward, persuading our bodies to constrict and occupy ever-shrinking airspace. Not pretty.

Ironically, the older we get, the more we should commit to physical activity—to slowing down the diminishment of our strength and agility, our bone density, our muscle mass, our elasticity, our recovery time. Getting physical and improving is how we can continue to thrive among the living.

For most people, being physical is something they do to work off restless energy or atone for self-indulgence. It’s as if exercise is not supposed to interfere with more pressing responsibilities, such as making a living. Wrong! This is the universe turned upside down.

Dancers are lucky. Like all athletes, their profession requires them to drive their bodies to the limits of physical accomplishment every day of their careers. However, the rest of us are on our own time and our own dime to keep our bodies in good working order. Like a pledge, your devotion to your body requires daily renewal.

This is hard for many people to accept and even harder to put into practice. I blame this on a cultural bias that pits the challenges of mental acumen against the value of physical striving—and finds the physical to be of lesser value. It’s a prejudice that says a gifted athlete cannot also be a superior intelligence. I’ve worked with elite athletes for decades—from NFL stars to Olympic figure skaters to amazing dancers—and I know this to be a false dichotomy. The greatest athletes are the sharpest minds, not the dullest. Their minds are tuned by physical activity—the way a regularly played piano stays in tune and a neglected instrument does not.

If you look at your body as a job, then gathering the discipline to stay strong and limber isn’t a chore. Fitness expands our social, emotional, and intellectual well-being. It’s how you pay and fulfill your obligations, craft your competitive edge, and elevate your self-esteem. When we make time for physical activity, whether it’s a half-hour walk around the neighborhood, a sweaty workout with a trainer, or playing catch with our kids, we are not stealing from other parts of our lives. We are making it possible to live each day productively.

Let’s not just burn calories. Let’s use our calories. Many people think, “I should exercise because it will make me look better. That’s why I’m burning calories.” No, you’re burning calories to acquire skills, and you’re honing those skills with challenges you set up for yourself, for example, walking four more blocks a day or allowing yourself one more yoga session this week. Your exercising is always connected to a purpose and crafted to accomplish it. You must find purpose and put it to work.

As a dancer, I learned early to regard perpetual body work as spending and investing. I was working for the day at hand, yet also stockpiling my fitness and health for an uncertain future, developing the deepest possible reservoir of skill and conditioning that I could imagine to draw on as I aged—hopefully with compound interest. This has paid dividends. Integrating my body and my job focuses my day. It keeps me relatively energetic. It keeps me relatively in shape. It keeps me so that I can beat up most people. This is very useful. It is a powerful form of confidence.

Quirky billionaire Richard Branson credits his exercise regimen with increasing his productivity and giving him the energy he needs to maintain a demanding schedule. He begins each day with something physical. He is a tennis player, a biker, a runner, even a kitesurfer. His choice of activity is less important than his realization that it is crucial to his mind-set—so crucial that he wakes up at five a.m. in order to ensure that he has the time to include exercise in his day. He keeps his body fit and agile, thus supporting his mind.

When I look around my gym on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I see the routines of the other regulars revealing which elements of fitness matter to them. The burly barrel-chested financier going through his old-school regimen with heavy weights—squats, bench presses, curls—is focused on power. The female police officer cycling for thirty minutes, then attacking the weight machines, then finishing off with twenty minutes of stretching, is focused on flexibility, stamina, mobility, and power because she needs to project authority and readiness when she’s on the job. The young attorney lifting dumbbells while balancing on a Bosu ball is developing coordination and balance for his golf game. The common thread among these people (I’ve been seeing them for years at the same morning hour) is a palpable sense of purpose.

They’re not merely “getting in some exercise” when they can. They are as ambitious about taking control of their body as they are about succeeding at work. Their body is like a second career. Their reasons for being in the gym are as varied as their routines. Some are pursuing a physical ideal: a marathoner’s whippet-thin profile, a dancer’s elegant carriage, a power lifter’s biceps. Some are rehabilitating ailing body parts or addressing health issues. Some seek to excel at a specific sport. All of them, however, are intimately and positively connected with their bodies. They know how to rotate their routines, focusing on different body parts each day, giving their muscles at least forty-eight hours of rest between heavy workouts. Like me, the regulars show up at the gym keeping a pledge to maximize, not squander, the healthy limbs they inherited at birth. They have eliminated inaction as an option.

William Pullen would agree that exercise elevates the mind. An avid runner, this British psychotherapist realized his mind reached a new plane of tranquility when he was out jogging. Finding that movement had much to teach him, he wondered, “Why learn only from the spoken word or thoughts when the body is so informative?” With a technique he termed dynamic running therapy, he was able to integrate running into his professional practice and his therapeutic method. He now uses DRT to help his patients deal with many forms of difficulty—from stress to depression to the ability to handle crisis. He has managed to integrate body and job beautifully.

Yes, I know. Trainers and gyms are expensive. Finding the time to bike or run is challenging. Working alongside others who are more adept and better-looking (everyone sees those around them as more attractive than themselves in one way or another) is intimidating. All in all, it is exhausting.

The fact is, we are all lazy—even me. I try not to beat myself up about it and neither should you. If you’re not getting the exercise you need, you’re far from alone: 1.3 billion people worldwide are not active enough to stave off preventable fatal diseases like heart disease and osteoporosis. According to the World Health Organization, the very minimum of physical activity you should aim for is one hundred fifty minutes of moderate exercise (like walking or swimming) or seventy-five minutes of vigorous exercise (such as running) a week. Before you object that you don’t know how you would fit it in, consider: How much time do you spend watching Netflix? Or scrolling on your phone? This is a no-excuses situation. Your life is on the line.

It is hard work to keep a body taut and trim and in shape as you age. We all have an inherent resentment of the body’s limits. After a couple of decades during which it functions flawlessly, we bump up against the point where it says, “No, thank you, this is as far as I go.” A staircase we’ve climbed for years without thinking about it leaves us winded. We squint when reading the fine print. We develop a sudden affinity for scarves to cover the loose skin on our necks. Some deterioration is only natural, but other backsliding can be traced to our own behaviors, our own laziness.

As stated, I’m as lazy as the next person. But I am by now addicted to exercise. If I don’t exercise, I feel slothful. There are days when I am flat. To be honest, one out of every three or four days I probably would like to say, Okay, I don’t feel like working today. Then I go, Fine. You don’t work today, then you won’t be able to work when you do feel like working. So, let’s just go in and do our exercises, shall we? I encourage you to do the same.

If you think you can’t do it, at least try to imagine it. Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, has been called the greatest athlete of the twentieth century, maybe of all time. He was a gold-medal Olympian, a champion at the decathlon, and a star NFL player, in addition to playing pro baseball and basketball. In 1912 he was on the deck of an ocean liner headed to the Stockholm Olympics. After noticing that Thorpe was sitting still while his fellow athletes exercised on the nearby track, a sports journalist asked him, “What are you doing, Jim? Thinking of your uncle Sitting Bull?”

“No,” Thorpe said, “I’m practicing the broad jump. I’ve just jumped twenty-three feet, eight inches. I think that I can win it.” He was putting himself through his paces mentally to prepare himself physically—and it paid off. He won the broad jump event in the decathlon a few weeks later and was lauded by the king of Sweden, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.” Thorpe replied, “Thanks, King.”

You and I probably will not take up the broad jump—or ocean-liner travel for that matter—but the practice of visualizing yourself doing something before you do it is a powerful way to get yourself moving even on days when you don’t feel like it. Tomorrow, when you are waking up, before you even leave the bed, picture yourself going through an exercise routine—whatever it may be, a brisk walk, a run in the park, gardening, a game of pickup basketball—step by step. Be as specific as possible as you imagine exactly how you will move your body. You will be more likely to follow through with actually working out if you kick-start your brain into an active mind-set.

If setting aside a particular time of day to devote to exercise still feels like too much to you, there’s a workaround for that, too. No excuses, no excuses, no excuses.

When I was just starting out as a dancer, I spent a lot of time on the subway with my fellow dancers. We were not idle on the platform, while waiting for our train to arrive. We were dancers, we moved. We’d be dancing, not full-out, but moving our bodies close to the vest, our movements restrained. The movement was small, and it didn’t have the full blast of energy in it, but we did it in real time. It’s a practice called marking, and we’d do it everywhere, all the time. We didn’t want to waste a moment. Even sitting still, we’d be doing our steps, and the body was profiting as the train took us where we’d be working full-out that day.

MARKING YOUR DAY

Like the dancer, you have dozens of ways to mark your day—creative, substantial ways of integrating physical activity with whatever else occupies your time. Take the stairs instead of the elevator when you’re shopping. Park in the farthest spot in the parking lot. Walk or bike to work. Practice keeping your abdominals engaged and your shoulders back during meetings.

Many of the most forward-thinking and employee-friendly companies offer fitness programs in the workplace—yoga, cardio classes, etc. The outdoor equipment company REI offers its employees two additional vacation days each year, but only if they are used to venture outdoors. Way to go.

Thinking of computer or desk work as one job and then exercise as another seems to me like holding two halves of a card deck in separate hands and then finding they need to be shuffled together. The more proficient the shuffle and the closer the cards cut together right hand to left, the better the deck is judged. So, too, we should think of cutting exercise in to our jobs as frequently as possible. Sitting, squirm more. Stand often to circle shoulders or pelvis. Find excuses to roam the hallways as often as possible. Go on a walk to take your phone calls. Sit less.

Waiting for the bus, bob, bend, and weave. This is also a good time to remind yourself that we breathe. Watch your rhythm: four counts in, four counts out. Allow yourself to increase this to six counts in and six counts out several times a day.

Learn to attach breathing to your work. Breathe in on the preparation for any physical effort and exhale on the actual activity. About to stand, take a deep breath. Exhale as you rise. All physical labor—from lifting ounces to hundreds of pounds—is best handled with this pattern to your breathing.

At work, break to stretch often—side, back, head, neck. Subvert stasis. Get a standing desk so that you can stand at your job whenever possible—all this will help eliminate the division created when we separate exercise from our jobs. Making your job into exercise will not replace the gym, but it will help keep you alive.