Areas › Your body › Moving your body
A practice kept up for years stops being something you do and becomes part of who you are. That is when it no longer needs willpower.
People who started something physical as children and carried on often point to it as where their steadiness came from. The early years are the expensive ones, when it runs on somebody else's structure and encouragement. Later it runs on itself. Worth knowing when you are in the effortful stretch and wondering whether it will always feel like this.
Qur’an and Sunnah
He gives you strength, then weakness after strength, together with your grey hair (Quran 30:54). A whole life of changing capacity is described plainly, which is the timescale a lasting practice lives on.
۞ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِي خَلَقَكُم مِّن ضَعۡفࣲ ثُمَّ جَعَلَ مِنۢ بَعۡدِ ضَعۡفࣲ قُوَّةࣰ ثُمَّ جَعَلَ مِنۢ بَعۡدِ قُوَّةࣲ ضَعۡفࣰ ا وَشَيۡبَةࣰۚ يَخۡلُقُ مَا يَشَآءُۚ وَهُوَ ٱلۡعَلِيمُ ٱلۡقَدِيرُ
It is God who creates you weak, then gives you strength, then weakness after strength, together with your grey hair: He creates what He will; He is the All Knowing, the All Powerful
Qur’an 30:54read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Exercise programmes in older adults living in the community produced small to moderate reductions in fear of falling, which is one sign that movement kept up into later life goes on paying in ways beyond fitness. That work was on older people specifically rather than on lifelong practice. It shows the far end of the arc rather than tracking anyone along it.
Kendrick D, Kumar A, Carpenter H, Zijlstra GA, Skelton DA, Cook JR, Stevens Z, Belcher CM, Haworth D, Gawler SJ, Gage H, Masud T, Bowling A, Pearl M, Morris RW, Iliffe S, Delbaere K. (2014). Exercise for reducing fear of falling in older people living in the community.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Once something is part of how you see yourself, you no longer have to talk yourself into it each time.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
A movement practice comes apart into pieces: the shapes, the breathing, the noticing. On a day when the whole thing is beyond you, take one piece.
A hard walk or a run works a little like a small dose of something. Alertness up, mood up, for a while afterwards.
Move just before the difficult task, not after it as a reward. Five minutes of skipping, stairs or running on the spot, then sit down to the thing.