How to Think About Exercise

Introduction

Consistency

"The fact that it takes character to get out of your chair," he writes, "is perhaps the greatest benefit to be derived from exercise."

An exercise in a tightly plotted life. And this is not restricted to bestselling authors. By making us less fatigued by self-regulation, exercise provides us with the faculties for a more consistent life story. It is training in becoming whole.

It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, writes Murakami, that we can get the feeling of really being alive – or at least a partial sense of it.

By overcoming pain and tiredness, we are making a commitment to our own consistency, because it is easy to give up when aching or weak. And we are doing so again and again, because this is what virtues are: habits, not just abstract ideas

a stubborn refusal to give up, despite the pain. But its benefits are those of maturity, not youthful urgency: patience, fortitude and the avoidance of caprice. We succeed, not always by increasing our speeds, scores or weights, but by dealing regularly with discomfort and failure, in the interests of a consistent character. The point is not that competition is to be avoided. The point is that the prize of striving – against others, or for a personal best – is a greater capacity to strive, and to make sense of this endeavour, win or lose.

The Sublime

have a near prospect of the Alps, which are broken into many steps and precipices," he wrote in Remarks on Several Parts of Italy , & "that they fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror.’

In short: The sublime requires both enjoyment and fear.

The point is not that the sublime can be reduced to neurones and neurotransmitters. The point is that swimming, because of water’s unique properties, suggests stimulating potency. This is different to the flow we saw in climbing and gymnastics, in which pain or danger direct our awareness. These feelings allow flow to arise, by fixing attention on what’s vital for success or survival. With the sublime, feelings of discomfort and threat are the feeling – they are enjoyed as part of the encounter with power. The water’s fluidity, size, and power encourage a vulnerable aliveness.

The sublime comes from the passions of survival, without the desperate need to survive. "When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible," wrote Burke, "but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be delightful." In other words, the sublime sea is best enjoyed by a strong swimmer in the surf, or a weak swimmer in the shallows or pool.

Great at running, not so good at swimming. This is a recognition of what philosophers call finitude: the basic fact of limitation. To exist at all is to be a definite this , and not something else. However free we are, we cannot escape basic biology – these limbs, lungs and blood, this universe of force and gravity. More importantly, we cannot escape our mortality: pain and death will come to all of us, and no one can die on our behalf. Finitude is the recognition that we are fundamentally limited in time and space: small, easily broken things, whose clocks are always ticking.

Even if we are frightened, this is not abject terror – it becomes a buzz, instead of a warning horror. Meanwhile, gravity is put on hold. We are literally buoyed, and physically united with worldly stuff. We are part of the cosmos and its necessities.

it is the recognition that, for all our weakness and isolation, we are strong, secure, and part of something bigger than our feeble selves.

The sublime is an introduction to the halfway house of human existence. It highlights our unique relation to the world: distant enough to see it from afar as something "other", close enough to be moved and shaken. By threatening us, it stimulates. And, by keeping us secure, it allows us to enjoy this stimulation. Exercise, in this, is a chance to savour the precariousness of life – before we fall out of the world for good.

Oneness

For all their strangeness, meditative exercises like yoga, t’ai chi and sometimes Pilates can offer a distinctive calm. They encourage familiarity with one’s own body, and then transcend this with an impression of "oneness" with the world. They are more than sports to tone bums: they afford a brief liberation from the burden of being an "I".

Confession: While in Corpse pose, my mind wandered. I imagined my whole body, then a chalk outline around it.

This is a physical pleasure, but also a mental one: like coming home after a long holiday, and looking at one’s house anew – only the house is me .

This is "more" in two senses. First, in that I have a heightened sensation of my bodily practices, and the lifestyle they reflect – the habitus of Bourdieu.

Samadhi arises, said Patanjali, because consciousness is moving away from physical nature, toward the ideal self. So the point of the Cat and the Corpse is a unity with myself, only this self has nothing to do with my chubby thighs in compression tights, or the beef salad I had for dinner. This self is transcendent: spiritual, absolute, eternal. In this state, argued Patanjali, I avoid habit and memory – which trap me in material cause and effect – and become a kind of timeless, changeless being, what the yoga master described as "unchanging Awareness". Not all schools of yoga agree with Patanjali’s ideas, which are straightforwardly dualistic: nature on one side, the transcendent self on the other. In fact, most schools of yoga kept his "eight limbs", but committed to what is called in philosophy "monism" the world is one. In many of the medieval yoga traditions, there was no great division between body and mind, self and world. If all is one, then everything in life – food, drink, sex, love – can be transformed to achieve some bliss and enlightenment.

But a clearer idea of the "how" of ecstasy does not require a "what". We need not say exactly what samadhi is in order to describe how it comes about. Indeed, this is what yoga is for: the word comes from the same root as "yoke", in English, and suggests joining, gathering together, reining in. In other words, yoga is a practical philosophy, designed to yoke the self to something bigger. Hindu scholar Georg Feuerstein, in his encyclopaedic The Yoga Tradition , describes this as "the technology of ecstasy"

everyday anguish is caused not by the world, but by our cravings for it – for our rigid categories, fixed ideals and narrow goals. We are needy or greedy subjects, in a world of objects. The point of yoga, in particular, is not necessarily a life of austere renunciation – although many Hindus take up this lifestyle – but one of psychological remoteness: giving up on being subjects (who crave) amongst objects (of craving). "Do thy work in the peace of yoga and, free from selfish desires, be not moved in success or in failure," said Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita , one of the most popular Hindu texts, and an early yoga primer. "Yoga is evenness of mind".

This might seem like shallow consolation: after all, once the feelings of oneness subside, the subject and its objects return. We are again reminded of our own doubts and appetites, and the world’s unreachable joys. But the point of bliss in meditation is not to do away with the world entirely and for good, but to put it in perspective. Having seen the dissolution of our concepts – "out there" and "in here", "me" and "you", "what I want" and "what I am" – we return to ordinary life with a slightly less panicky or harried frame of mind. We realize the contrived or contorted nature of our usual attachments. Meditation, in other words, is like an unpicker in sewing: it allows us to change the shape of our attitudes, by taking life apart at the seams.

The point is not that yoga is dangerous for sanity, but that belief in mystical "oneness" is not necessarily what brings on ecstasy, or eases stress. As we have seen, stretching, breathing and concentrating can be enough. Smith’s study, along with other research, demonstrates that slow, careful stretching and relaxation are themselves kinds of meditation.

However, we do need to pause, breathe and patiently focus, and to do this regularly. In other words, meditation is at the heart of yoga, and other slow or still exercises like t’ai chi, or stretching and breathing before vigorous exercise. Taking up yoga purely for muscles will certainly lead to improved flexibility and strength.

This is only the muscular dimension of the exercise. Without the right mindset, the psychological dimensions – from inner daydreaming, to oneness, to lowered anxiety – will be missed. We will have stretched bodies, but not stretched minds.

Conclusion

but because he does not value intellectual adventure and ethical growth. More specifically, he does not value himself for these things. In other words, Chad’s failure is not because he lacks raw cognitive power, but because his existential ambitions are too low. He does not aspire to a fuller ideal of human wholeness. All his daily toil in the gym is not coupled with reflection, meditation or virtue

the point is to unite physical striving with the moods and mindsets that best give rise to effort, and arise from it. This is intelligent exercise, and it is as fun as it is fulfilling.

To exercise intelligently is to develop an unusual fullness of character within the usual circumstances

This idea of adventure is also a helpful reminder to try new sports and exercises. Of course it is important, for the sake of consistency, to be a regular in the gym, on the footpath or mats. But it is equally important to welcome novelty, particularly when it might complement our character

The idea is to see exercise as a remedy for existential incompleteness, instead of just a way to postpone death or purchase sexiness with sweat

For this reason, the message of this book is not "just do it", with its ideal of thoughtless action. (Perfect for advertisers.) There is more than enough "doing" going on, particularly in gyms. "Just be" is little better, reflecting a kind of bovine quietude. My mantra of intelligent exercise is one that suggests movement, change, transformation: just become it. The "it" is entirely up to each of us.

Homework

Hubert Dreyfus’s Being-in-the-World (MIT Press, 1991) is an excellent start.

Robert Fagles’s translations of Homer’s Iliad (Penguin, 1991) and Odyssey (Penguin, 2006) are exemplary: gritty and graceful in equal measure.

Greek Aesthetic Theory by J. G. Warry (Routledge, 2012). John Boardman’s well-illustrated Greek Art (Thames & Hudson, 1996) complements Warry nicely.

A more literary and idiosyncratic story of beauty and its pathologies is Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel (Kodansha, 2003).

Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void (Vintage, 1998) is a thriller of a story, and an existentialist classic.

Martial Arts and Philosophy: Beating and Nothingness (Open Court, 2010), which I edited with Graham Priest,

On pain and its meanings in ballet, see Darren Aronofsky’s haunting film Black Swan (2010), starring Natalie Portman.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea is less realistic, but gives a fuller impression of the immersion – literal and metaphorical – we feel in water. Laurel Blossom’s Splash! is, as far as I know, the only collection of swimming writing

Andrew Newberg discusses meditation

English is Georg Feuerstein’s The Yoga Tradition (Hohm Press, 2001). Holding up this oversized, encyclopaedic textbook is a workout in itself.