I’ve spent more years of my life training than not. 

I’ve made plenty of mistakes in the past – from eating disorders to the point of missing my period for 5 years, obsessive cardio sessions (spinning, jogging, sprinting), training for hours at a calorie deficit, using fitness competitions to maintain an unhealthy relationship with food, getting my body fat under 8%, performing nightly at fancy Las Vegas clubs (including doing split drops and elaborate tricks off a pole at 5 am), training through pain, starting contortion as an adult because keep on pushing was just the game I was married to.

My body had relentlessly kept up with me. It has complained and healed, struggled and overcame, adjusted, silently, finding its balance in a life that felt, at times, nothing like balanced, at least physically. 

I’m blessed in a way, because after all I didn’t experience major injuries – thank God – throughout these 20 + years of body building style weight training, pole dancing, flexibility and eventually contortion. 

Once I approached my 40th year of life though, some old pains resurfaced, but this time something felt different: my mindset wasn’t the same as before. 

I wasn’t going to push again. I was going to help my body. 

Not demand, not take it for granted, not expect it will just “get it together” as it always has done.

For so long I battled with my body: be it looks (one day you’re too skinny, one day you’re too fat, one day you pick on your skin, one day it’s your hair) be it always wanting more from it (stronger, sexier, leaner with a fat ass though, and more nonsense). I haven’t been loving to it and now it was time to turn things around.

There is this wisdom that arises from your 40’s, as much as you don’t want to age, it brings beautiful understandings.

I went in and did treatments for my shoulder last year (the only long standing injury I had never fully recovered from). 

It was a long process of rehabilitation. Of humbling down. Of choosing different. Of resting more. Hence the title, “Reverse Discipline”.

I had to learn TO DO LESS. Hardest thing for me on so many levels in life. 

I couldn’t force healing. I couldn’t do more to help it. I couldn’t just modify my training again. I thought and tried all not to stop training but…I just had to get the fuck out of the way, to stop interfering.

Sometimes you love something so much, it’s too much – the same love is detrimental. I never thought I could say that of love, but maybe because it’s not really it: it’s more compulsion, passion, obsession, attachment, addiction. Love is deeper and softer. So if it’s real love, you know what the most loving thing to do is: LET healing happen, or struggle a lifetime with aches. I guess I gave my body more freedom and that makes sense to me, because love is free, also.

I’m still learning to do reverse discipline. Currently I’m recovering from a hip injury happened last October lifting weights, that recently flared up again. My old self wants to:

Train around it

Use the other hip

Modify more

Go lighter 

But as much as those can work, sometimes I hate to admit, you gotta pull away. You gotta let the body rest for a bit. So I’m just doing that for a few weeks: give it time. Doing the barest minimum. It’s all that it’s asking me and I know.

It’s terrifying to lose progress, but it’s more terrifying to train in pain and had to stop one day for good.

So my discipline now is in reverse, I need to listen, to refrain from doing “anything but not resting”. 

It’s hard. My body hurts if I don’t train. My identity, my motivation, my joy is so embedded in training. My sleep goes to shit. My mood too. It is. HARD. 

But I’m here to keep it real. To talk about what others prefer to stay quiet about, even though I understand why.

Longevity in training is also this: reverse discipline. And I’ll do everything I have to do to keep on training, while respecting and loving this body, at last. 

Have you ever had to practice reverse discipline?