Phyplay
"Phyplay" is a term I invented to mean "physically exhausting play." For years I didn't get exhausted much, and most adults I meet rarely play and never get exhausted. When I started working full-time after college, I feared that would be my future too if I didn't take care.I want to feel more in general, and I want to find deep pleasure in movement. I have these little flashes of pleasure sometimes when I release the deliberateness and the self-control and just move spontaneously.
So over time, my phyplay practice has turned into a combination of solo dancing, especially free-form and belly-dancing, calisthenics, and whatever else I feel like, often wrestling/sparring and tree-climbing. Sometimes, as with dancing, it's free-form, and other things like the calisthenics are more structured, but always I emphasize sensual movement and greater self-awareness without self-consciousness.
I've found some calisthenics guides I really really like:
"Convict Conditioning" and "Explosive Calisthenics" are books by Paul Wade, a person who spent years in prison and learned how people with no access to equipment or money become strong and/or, explosively powerful. He emphasizes lots of techniques and attitudes I really value, for example:
- Use no or minimal equipment, instead use bodyweight techniques. This saves on cost and storage, and makes it really easy to practice wherever I'm at - including deep in the woods. It also minimizes injury and builds functional strength.
- Seek body-awareness and body-wisdom so you can self-train without a coach, knowing when to push hard and when to rest
- Recognize that the body is what does the healing when you get injured. Others, including doctors and your own ego-self, merely help or hinder the healing abilities of the body.
- Use progressions to move from easier to harder exercises over time to maintain motivation and progress
- Move through those progressions slowly to minimize injury and allow the entire body, including little muscles, tendons and bones, to strengthen together. Don't just focus on the big muscles. Wade still suggests working super hard, and also respecting the rest time and savoring the current moment and exercise rather than desiring to move to more difficult movements too soon.
- Use compound, natural body movements to grow stronger as a complete, functional body-unit, not exercising muscles in isolation or in ways that inflame or irritate and risk injury.
- Use a journal to reflect on the next biggest improvement in form, breathing, focus, etc that you could make to progress further and ensure you actually make those improvements!
As an example of one calisthenics progression, the author has students do a series of push-up variants. Step 1 starts with the student standing up and pushing against a wall. Eventually you move to step 5 with a classic push-up on the ground, ending eventually at step 10 with a 1-handed push-up on the ground. Pull-ups take students from pulling against a tree or vertical post while standing (stage 1) to a classic pull-up (stage 5) to a one-handed pull-up (stage 10).
The first book focuses on brute strength - lifting, pushing, pulling, and so on. The Explosive Calisthenics book focuses on powerful movements: vertical jumping, forward and back flips, kip-ups, and so on.
There's a lot more to these books, and I don't intend to write a book review here. But I've followed the strength and a few of the explosives progressions for much of this year, and I feel like I've become substantially stronger compared to just a year ago - and I'd already been living outdoors full time by then! I feel really healthy, have very little body fat and weigh what I did in high school (I wouldn't mind putting on some muscle weight, actually). I run for as long as I feel like it, work hard all day when I feel like it, lift and move what I feel like (though sometimes I wish I could lift and move my truck a few inches, and I can't do that), and I feel way more flexible than I used to - super handy when I'm wrestling!
I really value Wade's perspectives:increase self-awareness and body wisdom rather than relying solely on others for healing (doctors) or training (coaches) or one-size-fits-all rules - and have the wisdom to know when to approach those folks for help. Don't get suckered into spending money on gear and exercises you don't need, but instead do what the best athletes have done for millennia or longer - progressive compound bodyweight exercises. I'm learning to rely on money as little as possible, which means minimal access to equipment, doctors, and trainers, and I'm finding the Convict Conditioning series super helpful for physical conditioning in the woods.
So several days a week, I'm dancing and moving as an animal and doing calisthenics and journaling about it. For much of my life I couldn't do a single pull-up, and a few months ago I made up a challenge and did 100 in a day - and when I called it quits at 100, I felt like I had a few more pull-ups I could have done if I'd wanted. I feel so excited to be moving in ways that felt intimidating and impossible 10-15 years ago; I've cried a few times this fall reading my training journal and considering how much I do now with ease that seemed unthinkable as I grew up.
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| No matter how many hours I spent in the gym 10 years ago, I moved and felt like I had a desk job. Now I move and feel differently. Besides the phyplay, my way of living demands tiring movement, walking up and down hills, carrying heavy loads, and so on. All this leads to a healthier, more vibrant feeling. Here, I'm bow-drilling a coal to start the breakfast fire. |
I'm also continuing to self-train in self-defense, focusing on Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I find training partners where I can...
Doing Laundry
I don't pay for gym membership or mentors, so when I skip a workout or don't push hard, no one notices. Likewise if my form's poor, or I'm not warming up well, no one tells me. I feel strongly I don't want to depend on others to set the container in which I do the things I care about. Said another way: I want motivation from within, not from without. I plan to find a self-defense mentor next spring, and by then I want to already have a many months-old solo training practice.
Maintaining all these movement practices has been such a discovery in self-awareness and self-love. I learned years ago something which keeps coming up: the urge to procrastinate is never unhealthy! It's a signal that something you think you want to do doesn't meet your needs now, either because something else is higher priority, or because something about the task itself concerns you in a way you're mentally unaware.
I used to respond to procrastination by avoiding the concerning task and trying not to think about it (i.e. playing video games instead of doing homework). This avoidance and ignoring one's felt-needs are the unhealthy part of procrastination.
Now, I'm learning to sit alone, breath deeply, and sense what I'm feeling about the task I think I want to do.
As it got quite cold and snowy recently, I felt a major urge to procrastinate on phyplay, and though I danced some, I skipped a few days of my calisthenics. Then I started feeling frustration with me for not wanting to do the workouts, and then fear that I wouldn't keep progressing the way I've been enjoying.
But instead of continuing to feel anxious and upset with me, I checked in and felt through my resistance, and I discovered: I felt fear of sweating all over my clothes, since I only have 2 shirts, and if they both get sweaty when it's snowing heavily out, that's bad news. I hadn't done laundry in my new location and didn't know how to clean clothes here. So above and below are pictures of laundry day in my hut, boiling a few changes of water, wringing clothes out, and letting them dry over the stove.
Presto, as soon as I took care of my laundry the first time, I no longer felt anxious about sweating into my clothes, and I've felt excited for the calisthenics again. This kind of procrastination has happened a few times: I wasn't warming up well because I was having trouble running outside when it snowed heavily, so I researched small-space endurance and warm-up drills (some I found in the books above, and I found some I really like from other sources). Now when I'm snowed in, I'm totally ready to rock in a 5'x8' space (the floor space excluding my furniture).
Sometimes, as everyone knows, if you want to get stronger and more physically powerful, you've just got to train hard even on days you don't feel like it. But since I don't have a mentor, team, or even consistent training partner, when I don't feel like training, I've got to figure out if I'm in a short-term funk that a hard session will alleviate, or whether I'm ignoring a meaningful obstacle to working out hard. So... all this is quite the exercise in self-awareness and self-love in addition to learning to move with grace and power. I'll write more about this self-awareness and self-love in the post on healing.
Truck Maintenance and Upgrades
In mid-2016 I bought a used pickup. It's a hybrid - but not that kind of hybrid!
A previous owner made some major modifications and hinted at them with the hood ornaments. Can you tell what kind of hybrid it is?
This picture shows a 1982 Mercedes 300 turbo diesel engine inside a 1994 Toyota pickup. You also get to see part of a secondary fuel system that got added after the engine conversion so it runs on diesel and vegetable oil. The wool sweaters insulate the veggie oil fuel lines so that the fuel moves smoothly to the injectors. I've never gotten the fabric caught in the belts, and I hear you really really don't want to.
The truck's really nice to have when large amounts of wild food beckon:
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| ~180 gallons was my peak apple haul this year. A 4x4 truck comes in most handy. |
Over the last year, I've gone from not knowing shit about trucks to knowing a tiny but useful amount. I live with a friend with some informal mechanic and metal working experience who gave good pointers, but when my truck wouldn't work several times this year, I pretty much just stood in front of the engine compartment 'til I figured it out. Internet access would have helped a lot! Is the electrical system not working, or only intermittently (my favorite)? Are there air bubbles in the fuel lines? Am I leaking coolant, or is my engine temperature spiking unexpectedly? All these troubles necessitated deep dives into different truck systems, learning about electricity and blowing a few fuses (ok, a lot of fuses), and learning lots and lots of patience.
I also revamped my veggie system, replacing metal tubing in the tank and changing how I heat the fuel lines. It's not photogenic so I've got little to show, but I replaced copper tubing with stainless steel, as the copper would react with veggie oil to create cruft which ruined my fuel filters quickly. As I kept working to improve the fuel system, I found design elements that made simple inspection (i.e. adding gauges) and adjustments unnecessarily difficult, so I got to do my first ever truck mechanic-ing design work.
I felt a lot of stress sometimes, because when my truck broke down, it wouldn't work unless I figured it out and resolved the underlying problem(s). I really want to be able to care for the tools and gear I rely on, and that included the truck. Sometimes when it broke I pulled over to the roadside and fixed it. Once I had a friend tow me home and I spent a week messing around diagnosing the trouble and fixing the it (bubbles in the diesel fuel system, I think due to a blockage in part of the line), and I was stuck at home the whole time. I had few fixed-time obligations for much of the year, a way of life I intentionally set so that I could have this kind of flexibility. And with truck mechanics charging $80/hour, it felt worth it to learn to take care of my maintenance needs on my own.
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This is part of a series of posts describing my living situation (Wild Roots) and projects this summer and fall 2017:
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This post may read like a sales pitch for the books, but I don't actually make any money from recommending them. I'm just a big fan of books that teach empowering attitudes and practices.
