The 2012 Olympics are all wrapped up and put away and though there were myriad accomplishments to find inspiration in--the Spanish Synchronized Swim team, Michael Phelps, Lithuania making the US basketball team WORK for their win, Usian Bolt & Shelley-Anne Pryce, seeing Shalane Flanagan hit the ground after crossing the finish line and realizing that she had just give EVERYTHING she had to make it there--what most inspired me was Oksana Chusovitina, the 37-year old, 6-time Olympic gymnast. Most gymnasts' careers are over by their mid-twenties at the latest, similar to dancers and football players, due to injury, extreme training, pushing the body to the breaking point and then still demanding more of it, without much chance to heal. Chusovitina competed with women who weren't even born when she first started competing on the international level.
Most gymnasts and many athletes begin to bow out of professional competition beginning in their mid-twenties through their thirties but the average person feels these changes, too. Often, my pilates students complain of 'everything going downhill after thirty,' or 'age catching up with them' as they become aware of how they take longer to recover from workouts, get injured with more frequency and notice that they don't heal nearly as fast.
I always laugh and tell them to watch their beliefs--I for one, have never felt better. I also know my body so much better and have much more control and precision in how I move and an incredible breadth of knowledge and resources to pull from when I need to heal. I dont think that it's age as much as most people have never had to watch their bodies with care and so haven't taken the time to learn that they need to treat themselves differently as they age to still do the same things that they have always done. I also think that part of what we call the aging process is the accumulation of restrictions built up over a lifetime of activity and which were never taken care of so the accumulation finally causes imbalances and discomfort and sets us up for injury.
To see Oksana perform with girls two decades younger than she was inspiring, yes, but what really resonated with me was to read her say that she "never thought of quitting a sport she said comes more easily to her than it used to."
At 40, Jordan Jovtchev is also an older Olympic gymnast, but when he talks about competeting now, he talks about pain: "It’s very, very difficult for me now because my body is falling apart if I practice hard...Ugh, you get the pain and then you start moving a little bit and then you get used to it, like an engine getting going — chug, chug, chug."
I can't get behind performing in pain. I mean, I get it in Jovtchev's instance. To perform at the level that he does and to have spent his entire life in gymnastics and to reach yet another Olympics? I would, too. For sure. But for the average person, training in pain really doesn't make sense. I have in the past and I understand why people do, but I have finally learned how to allow myself to fully rest and recuperate over weeks instead of a day here or there. We get stronger when we rest. It took a decade of treatment for chronic illness for me to learn this and I learned it mostly through others. I have trained people extensively, people who were training for a major event and were also seeing a personal trainer and doing their own scheduled workouts and they'd plateau and the thing that would move them to the next level was always rest. A full two weeks of eating a lot and not even thinking about working out. Our bodies heal and develop strength when we rest, not when we work out. They'd come back and were suddenly doing work which they'd only been approximating previously.
Chusovitina's coach only lets her train an hour and a half a day, which she admits is difficult for her, but she also says that she knows her body better now and I wonder if she also knows the exercises so much better that she requires less effort and time working on them? I mean, if she has a full two decades more practicing the same exercises, she must do them more efficiently now than she used to and also, probably owns them in a very different way than the young girls.
The body changes as we age, but I think that if we pay attention and modify how we approach all things in life, we can feel strong and powerful, move with ease and keep doing the things we have always done without detriment.
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