Soft Practice in a Hard World

Make more progress in your workouts. Increase your focus at work. Build stronger personal relationships. Manage your stress & live with less anxiety. The secret might not be trying harder. Read on and consider a softer approach.

What is the cost of success?

Have you ever wanted something so badly that you put your everything into it? In directing all your energy into that one thing, did other areas of your life suffer? Maybe your relationships withered or your health fell to the wayside. The cost of the hard push towards success often comes at a cost.

I’ve learned this lesson time and time again with my training. Trying too hard to achieve a goal I’ve fixated on, while at the same time losing focus of the bigger picture. As a coach, I see this cycle play out in people’s fitness all the time. The fitness industry glorifies discipline and “going hard”. People are drawn into a cycle of chasing fitness at the cost of their health & longevity.

These days I feel compelled to bring a balance to the conversation by being an advocate for a softer approach.

The Stories We Tell

The “soft and slow” approach runs contrary to the usual social scripts. We’re enthralled by the stories of high achievers. We celebrate the grind, the tackling of obstacles, and the triumph of winning.

We downplay the value of failures, introspection, relaxation, and stillness. We know that every endeavor has a process behind it, but we don’t give our attention to the soft & slow elements of this process. This one-sided narrative contributes to a skewed perception of what growth realistically looks like.

Most of our modern story telling serves as entertainment over oral tradition. Social media and reality TV are crafted illusions. We’ve become used to seeing the resolution of complex issues come inside a single season that we can binge on Netflix. The process just is not as sexy. Still, ask anyone who watched Game of Thrones - Season 8…slowing down can be a good thing.

Meanwhile, we are actually playing out our lives in their entirety. Our epic moments are interspersed throughout long spans of ordinary. What we do in these mundane spaces is life and hopefully we’re not just waiting for the next plot twist. Softness is the act of giving ourselves permission to BE in this process, fully immersed.

Movement & Redefining Softness

“How you do anything, is how you do everything.”

I used to beat myself down with these crazy workouts day after day. Every workout was like going to war. In turn, everything else in my life became a battle too. Mentally, I was stuck in a cycle of needlessly doing things the hard way.

Over the years, I started to slow down and ease up on myself. I stopped chasing the next peak. Movement became “my thing” and doing that thing was helping me to understand myself more completely.

“Soft” had always meant weak. Now, it means being receptive and responsive in different environments. Being more flexible and adaptive in different situations. Being poised and collected under pressure.

Keys to Softer Practice

The specific type of practice doesn’t really matter. What’s “your thing”? Do what you love. Do what brings you fun, challenge, connection, and adventure. Life ebbs and flows. A softer practice will keep you grounded and grow with you. It looks a little different for everyone but consider the following keys for softening your practice.

Avoid the (over)struggle.
If someone were watching you, would you make it look easy? Your work should feel challenging but doable. Once it starts becoming a grind you’re tapping into your reserves. When this happens too often, your recovery can’t keep up and your performance drops off. Don’t set the bar at a fingertip grasp. Check your ego and scale back the intensity. Continued growth comes from quality input — avoid the struggle and keep growing.

Create learning environments.
The sweet spot with training is a mixture of quality failures and consistent wins. It comes in spaces where you conduct experiments, interpret feedback, and make adjustments. What kind of environment do you learn best in? Solo or groups? Indoors or outdoors? Structured or open? Use props and tools or leverage what’s around you. If progress stalls, soften and create a different environment.

Practice easier movements, more often.
Don’t take simple movements for granted — they aren’t exercises you’ve mastered, they’re the movements that should make up your way of life. To reach a higher level of skill, blend hard training and easy movement. If you want to be able to do a single leg squat, spend more time moving in a squat position. If you want to be able to do a muscle up, spend more time with light hanging and dipping. If you want to run a marathon, walk a marathon first. Spend more time with simplicity, there’s big value there.

Soften your mindset.
Notice how you talk to yourself. All too often I see people “motivate” themselves with insults and abuse. Failure has a way of triggering our stuff…and we all have our stuff. If we don’t observe and acknowledge our own emotional baggage, we’re likely to be unconsciously controlled by it. We aren’t entitled to movement or health, but neither is a measure of our worth as human beings. Uncoupling your self-worth from your physical ability is a script that takes time to rewrite. Softening your mindset creates the space for self-awareness and then choosing a different narrative.

Turn Work Into Play.
Unpopular opinion: if your heart isn’t in your workout, skip your workout. If engagement is everything, a half-hearted workout a full waste of time. Do something physical where your mind and body connect, instead of battle each other. Go play. Ball, climb, dance, hike, stretch. Quality play beats garbage training 10 times out of 10. There is no race and no finish line. There will always be more work to do tomorrow. Soften up and let movement be fun again.

Soft, Slow, and Self-Aware

In my world, movement parallels life. It started out as just working out. Gradually, it has turned into the catalyst for my personal growth. For me, movement has become the thing that helps me understand myself and make sense of the world. By slowing down and softening on expectations and goals, the practice becomes part of the process of deepening self-awareness.