Joseph DeBaun
The initial fascination with exercise began at an early age. Mom asked me to deliver a message to my uncle who lived in the back house of our Brooklyn address. Accompanied by the sounds of ‘The Grateful Dead’ and the aroma of a joint that permeated the room, he was in the middle of a set of calf raises. The visual of his lower leg muscles expanding like balloons during each contraction burned into a memory, providing an insight into the malleability of the human body.
Romance novels would be the section of the bookstore where the story of my personal relationship with weight lifting could be discovered—love at first rep. Noting the responses to the stimulus of resistance training provided tangible examples of how energy flows where attention goes. To the world outside these adaptations could appear solely physical, but can be understood to have deeper potential effects if experienced internally by oneself.
Sharing these practices over the last 20 years as a personal trainer has been a gift. I aspire to support those who are ready to do the work, find the inner teachers of their own well-being. Assisting this process has been the study of biomechanics, or more specifically exercise mechanics—the study of structure, forces, motion, and their effects on/within the body. The resulting inside view lends itself to the creation of truly customized exercise experiences, based on but not limited to:
- Individual Idiosyncrasies — how does the length of your limbs effect mechanical ability and the associated muscular contributions?
- Current Activity Levels — through one lens, exercise can be viewed as the implementation of stress on the body. It is an art form to properly progress the amounts of stress that are specifically appropriate to minimize risk and increase benefit.
- Goals — muscles support structure and control the distance between their points of attachment. Here are some examples of what can be noticed with improvements to controlled muscular contractile ability: active ownership over the range of motion the body explores, whether moving through day to day activities or during yoga practice; gaining more access to the muscles around the foot and ankle can refine capacity to balance; a greater felt sense of strength when you pick up a grandchild; enhanced overall quality of the lived experience.
Along with one on one personal training, leading educational workshops for groups of curious colleagues has been a valuable framework for exploring these concepts of resistance training. What previously held beliefs are we attached to about exercise? Are we able to let go to the point where teaching and learning can become co-emergent? The intuitive qualities of exercise sometimes felt to be ineffable, can be more easily articulated in a focused collective space that we can bring about together.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer
Recently, the unfolding of a thought realm into the mirroring interconnectedness of our internal and external worlds captivates me—undesirable sensations in the body paralleled by the growth of weeds in nature. Should these orchestrated solutions be removed or do they serve a healthy system? The mycelial networks of fungi possibly reflecting our own fascial system. Is there space in our imagination where this might imply primordial methods of bodily communication through the living matrix? Our interdependent wholeness lives on the same continuum as the sum of our parts. How do the puzzle pieces fit together?
“Each step that we make in the more intimate knowledge of nature leads us to the entrance of new labyrinth’s.”
— Alexander von Humboldt 1845
Enjoy the mystery!