New Fitness Culture Scrapbook #14
This is a collection of five things I found out about in the past week that felt relevant to my work.
They can be read as individual curios, or, as I understand them, as waymarkers towards a more interesting and inclusive culture of fitness.
My friend Jack linked me to this Guardian article about “soothing words for troubled times.” Although these lists can sometimes be tiresome I did find some of these pretty comforting, and a surprising number have nice implications for nourishing movement, food, and rest:
Agathism It’s hard to be an optimist knowing that there are tough times ahead. But in lieu of optimism, there’s always agathism – a word coined in 1830 for the belief that all things eventually get better, though the means by which they do is not always easy. It is a word to remind us that though we may be in for hard times, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Bummel Our daily constitutional needn’t be an exhausting run around the block. Derived from a German word for “strolling”, a bummel is nothing more than a relaxing leisurely walk or wander.
Concubium Adopted into English from Latin in the 1600s, the concubium is the soundest, calmest, deepest part of your sleep. “That time of night when all men are at rest”, as one 17th-century dictionary put it.
It made me think about Robert MacFarlane’s work on lost words - how collectively forgetting our nature vocabulary affects our ability to experience the world as richly. Perhaps there is a parallel here with experiencing rest and movement - if we don’t know the word for the concubium, does it make it harder to find?
The BBC has been releasing some archival footage of the fitness instructor Tony Britts leading workouts on an eighties breakfast show. The videos have gone viral because of Britts’ tight shorts and slinky moves but Jason Okundaye goes deeper in his appreciation piece in i-D, ‘What BBC Fitness Instructor Tony Britts Tells Us About Black Gay History’.
Trudi Schoop was an internationally-acclaimed mime and dancer. She would create characters who expressed her own inner feelings and fantasies and later used this technique to pioneer an early form dance therapy in the ‘70s, working especially with people experiencing psychosis.
She feels that it is essential to bring out unconscious fantasies and shape them into objective physical form so that emotional conflict can be perceived and dealt with constructively. Schoop believes that you need to fly with the patient in his or her world for a while and then descend with him/her for a safe landing on this earth…
In the first interview I had with Schoop in 1977, she said, "In spite of all the difficulties and drama, life is something very, very exciting. I try to convey that feeling"
This documentary is a gem:
I remembered this Kanye West quote about sports and creativity the other day:
What I notice about creatives is that, and one of the reasons why I get into trouble, is, not only do I want to design video games, or make music, or ride bikes, I think one of the most important things to my ability to create so much in the past 30 years is my desire to play sports. I approach creativity like a sport, where if I have a drawing I react just like a jock: LOOK AT THE FUCKING DRAWING RIGHT THERE YEAH!
Ba ha ha ha ha ha ha yeahhh!
This 95kg self-loaded leg press with an atlas stone is absolutely terrifying and impressive: