How now, Horatio, you tremble and look pale.Is not this something more than fantasy?What think you on ’t?— Barnardo On our recent visit to Houston, TX, I had the opportunity to play around with Tonal, advertised as “The Worlds Smartest Home Gym”. I utilized this machine during five of my workouts over a period of…
Author: attensionjoe
Exercise as Story
This writing began as a revision of my website bio. I find the current version to be both intentionally and unintentionally vague. It was written in early ’21 when we were in the midst of a collective bardo and I don’t enjoy reducing myself to labels. Well, we’ve entered into a new phase (Happy ’23…
Expanding Consciousness and Growing our Galactic Family
Karen recently gave birth to our first child. We chose to have a home birth and became well acquainted with our midwife, KB, during the prenatal period. After a few of our checkups, her and I did some work together addressing right side anterior shoulder pain and neck tension; believed to be the result of…
The Scales of Fitness: Sports, exercise, and letting go of progress.
Who is the greatest athlete of all-time? This living question recently found its way among Karen and I. Specificity would no doubt make this a brief debate, e.g., Q: Who is the greatest NBA player of all-time? A: Michael Jordan We chose to leave it expansive and let our imaginations run wild. After some twists…
Exile on Exercise Choreography
About three years ago, the stars aligned and I had the good fortune of experiencing The Rolling Stones live in concert for the first time. Baked into the overall feeling of excitement, a layer of skepticism was discerned before the show started. Would the iconic idea of The Stones mirror their current reality? Could the…
Morning Mobility in the Costa Rican Afterglow
The natural world—which we are not separate from—offers a clear blueprint of what would benefit us upon arising. Even domesticated dogs and cats in the midst of their now pampered lifestyles insist on shaking off the cobwebs with a good morning stretch. Instinctually we would be compelled to do the same, if it wasn’t for…
Isolation–Integration: The potential blind spots created from zooming too far in or too far out.
At first glance, these two words seem to be fundamentally opposed. There’s almost a natural tendency, at least in the exercise world, to assume a “vs.” sitting between them rather than an en-dash suggesting a unified field. This antagonistic predisposition is typically related to a belief system with an attached binary contract that demands if…
Mindful Resistance Training
Exercise in the early stages, is predominantly determined by motion. A likely reason for this being that the conceptual seed of working out is most commonly introduced to us through sight. Whether it’s seeing a laminated dumbbell free weight poster for the first time, watching the Flex Magazine Workout on ESPN while eating your morning…