parasitegirl | Body body body and many drops to drink. (Reply)

I’ve been working out 6 days a week, using a variety of those accursed Jillian Michaels DVDs, since May 5th. I know some people loathe her but I do enjoy that she isn’t all smiles and perky talk. I don’t like people being peppy at me when my body hurts. I like it when I feel like my occasional swearing would garner a laugh, not a frowny face, from the lady on the screen. I think she’s just a little too fond of plank variations and high-intensity jumpy shit. Jillian gets a bit guru-ish about this being about changing your life, not just your body, but that’s fairly common in many belly dance teachers and yoga teacher so it seems, well, normal.

In the last few weeks I have gotten better about integrating my dance practice with the work-outs. I put dance practice on hold in the early stages because it took a while for my body to adjust. For the first week I had days where I simply could not un-bend my arms and I believed push-ups to be from the devil, not unlike mayo. My dance practice is now back on and it includes yoga in an attempt to stretch out everything I’ve been working on. I don’t want to lose my range of motion and those Jillian DVDs are pretty barebones in the stretching and cool-down.

I don’t hurt like I did the first week. I am often aware of my muscles due to a low-grade strong/sore sensation that moves from region to region depending on how I’ve switched things up. Today, my left shoulder informs me that something was off in my form, because the tightness is not symmetrical across my back. It doesn’t cause me pain so much as pause. It’s the feeling of what could be pain if I don’t adjust. It feels like work done.

The increase in strength shows as I dance. It’s not that I am more poppy-locky. There is more clarity of purpose in my movements: it's not sharper, it's cleaner. I attribute this to a few things. The quiet awareness that migrates around my muscles now makes me more aware of how it is I create movements. The increase in muscle strength means that when I go to a move, it takes less conscious effort, less wasted energy.

Some of this body focus is, of course, my earthquake recovery. I am returning to that which I can control. I am rebuilding. I have gone deep inside my skin after so much sharing and personal made public. It is part irrational quest to be invulnerable and part rational realization of how much of my mental health is connected to my physical health. I can write about my body right now, but I cannot write about how I feel about Japan and the lingering fears and lack of closure that surround us like a miasma.

These workouts are also on a path that has emerged from teaching dance. Teaching has been redefining how I view myself as a dancer. Prior to teaching I hadn’t much thought of myself as a muscular dancer. I thought of myself as high energy and earthy-soft. Much of what is commented on here when I dance is my stomach: which gets praise as being mother-earthy (not kidding) and organic. When my tummy got patted and called mother earth, I didn’t really focus on the muscles that make it so dynamic, I focused on that pleasing soft layer above the muscles… lovingly maintained by hagendaaz and friends. My disconnect from myself as muscular also comes from the fact that despite being in a very healthy body weight/shape I am always in the curvier range of professional dancers here in Japan due to the narrow range of body types I am performing with.

Seeing only the surface, I tended to wrongly think of “muscular dancers” as those of the more pronounced popping-and-locking styles. This was a bit absurd as I’d first been introduced to “burpies” and other exhausting body drills by Aziza whose fluid motion is deeply and consciously maintained through serious strength and muscles. My primary teacher of many years, Mishaal, was very much of the “all my dance strength and power comes through dance, not through any cross-training” camp, and for her that approach works, but I’m learning that for me cross training provides something my mind and my dance thrives on.

In my first day of teaching I found my students asking questions about why the moves I was teaching looked so different on me…and after a few moments of thought it usually boiled down to “Well, because I’m also doing X with this muscle and Y with this muscle to make it look more Z.” with Z usually being “gooey, smooth, deep.” And then returning to the move to show it in basic form and then to show how, when they gained muscle control, the move could be done a bit more...”oomphy”. I also explained the ways I’ve added certain drills in my dance practice to build up that muscle control.

Doing the Jillian workouts has re-enforced many of my thoughts about where my dance body is weak. My dedication to making abdominal play a regular part of my dance practice for years made the abdominal sections of her workouts less challenging than I’d anticipated. The shimmy work and leg strength-building drills of the last year make all the squatting and deep lunges feel challenging but not impossible. And my dance struggles and my sporadic revisiting of arm-related dance DVDs in which I feel like my arms are on the cusp of being graceful came back to me as the workouts confirmed my solid cardio, my fairly strong legs and abs, and my comparatively pathetic t-rex arms.

Tonight (Monday) I’ll take it easy on my body. Tuesday night I am expecting a possible new student in my Zills & Drills and Turkish Basics classes, so tonight I’ll make sure I’ve thought through the lesson plans so they’re balanced enough for my regulars and not too confusing for a new face with a few years of experience. And I’ve made an appointment for a Thai massage on Thursday. It’s been a few years since I got one and it seems like a good way to celebrate 8 weeks of working out ….and I need one. On Saturday I dance (around 10pm) at a charity event raising money for the less fortunate up north.