How Moving Kept Me Moving
Always Moving
I’ve always loved the art of moving. I’ve based my entire coaching career on helping others to use movement to discover what is possible on the tennis court; how to be efficient, dynamic and skilful. I’ve often talked to players about both physically and metaphorically ‘getting out of their own way’, without realising it, this was going to be an important lesson for me too.
The Starting Point of a New Gratitude
One day on court in 2017 I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my lower back, followed by searing heat down my leg [I knew inverted planks were challenging but I wasn’t quite expecting that]. The following day I reached down to a plug socket while balancing over the kitchen table in what could be called ‘applied yoga’ but really was just short cut to save me all of 5 seconds from the next email I needed to send. Over the forthcoming days, I began to realise that I’d hurt myself badly – I could just about walk OK, I hoped it would sort itself out, but it didn’t. It got progressively worse and worse.
Not only was my back in pain, it felt like I had broken glass in my hips and I got fixated on visions of crumbling & dusty ball and socket joints in my darkest moods. I was constantly tired but started going to bed later as I became scared of having to deal with the morning ritual of somehow climbing out of bed. It wasn’t a car crash, I hadn’t broken anything but it was draining me both physically and mentally.
I knew there were millions of people in more pain and with bigger hurdles to overcome, but it felt like I’d lost my entire identity. Movement had formed the basis of my life’s work as a coach and had dragged me through some difficult personal times. I’d lost the ability to move and without it I felt completely lost. I didn’t realise why I did what I did and why was it so important to me until that moment. I just did it – that’s what I did.
What I missed
At a real basic level, I missed siting on the floor, lazing on the sofa, getting up from a chair without elaborate rituals, doing my shoes up without thinking and having to be constantly aware of angles and managing pain. In the year that it took me to get back to some form of normality I missed and lamented surfing, ski-ing, yoga, skateboarding, running, cycling, Muay-Thai, Ju-Jitsu, climbing, dancing, canoeing and of course, the ability to move freely at work.
What I really missed
Looking back, I sensed more that we all love to part of a tribe even if we like to think of ourselves as outsiders or rebels. Movement defined me. My search for belonging or non-compliance sent a message out to the rest of the world... declaring “I’m a runner”, “I’m a surfer”, “I’m a skater”. I really missed doing the things that made me who I was “run done, ride done, training done”, it slowly dawned on me why I loved the things I loved. It wasn’t about the physicality, everything I did seemed to feed my soul more than my body.
I missed paddling out surfing to find solace and I missed the views of looking down the line up to see my friends in the water. I missed the deafening silence of being in the mountains, I missed the flumpf sound and the lines made by skis floating through deep snow. I missed the rhythm of the clack, fizz and crunch of ski-touring. I missed catching up with friends on early morning bike-rides, I missed trying to stay on the smooth tarmac by the kerbstone inside the double yellow lines on my bike commute to work [it wasn’t quite like the cobblestones of the Arc Du Triumph but it was close enough]. I missed the immersion in nature of running through wooded trails [I realised I preferred picking mud off my legs than looking at my Strava stats]. I missed the purposeful first step of dawn road runs [if only every step felt that good], I missed the sequences of footwork patterns on the tennis court and leaving the ground, I missed the sweat running off my elbows on to my yoga mat. I missed the languid push off on my skateboard [the sound of maple scrapping the floor before the wheels hit is one of life’s joys and my ears still prick up when I hear the unmistakable sound of uerathane on tarmac]. I missed the steely but relaxed focus of Muay-Thai training and I missed the utter chaos of being an absolute novice at Ju-Jitsu [this will forever remain a mystery to me but maybe I just likened it to having bundles with my dad when he came home from work without the need to “be careful of his glasses” which was a line he always seem to use just when I thought I was getting the upper hand].
Getting fixed
I craved to be free again and bounced around countless physios, doctors, consultants, hydrotherapy and blood tests to find a solution to fix my back whilst stubbornly refusing to take the stock pile of medication I was building up. I didn’t realise it at the time but on reflection while siting down to write this, I found three major sources of inspiration that showed me the path to recovery.
Firstly a medical friend of mine talked about not ‘becoming’ the injury itself. This helped me see beyond the destructive possibilities of ‘I can’t’, ‘I won’t ever be able to’ or ‘I’ll never be able to’ by shifting towards a more positive mindset. ‘I wonder if’ became my starting point to allow recovery in.
I stumbled across the work of Professor Peter O’Sullivan - An absolute game-changer in the field of back pain and it’s treatment and the importance of keeping mobile to keep the pain away. One of his videos still chokes me up seeing the responses from a set of his patients that had seemingly totally eradicated their pain while working with him. I made a commitment to myself to do the same as these people. People that I’d never met but felt an affinity with. I too would get better.
Thirdly, I have no doubt that Mr Chen, the Chinese Acupuncture & Acupressure practitioner who a friend of mine recommended, kickstarted my body to recover. The room he worked from was most definitely ‘1970 Brothel Chic’ and had the whiff of an old petri dish. Our communication was largely based around pointing and giving thumbs up or thumbs down [my command of Mandarin is patchy] and although we didn’t quite agree on what constituted a clean physio table I was happy spending as much time as possible looking at the threadbare carpet through its hole wondering who else had been here before me and what their story was. I totally trusted Mr Chen. He possessed a sixth sense to know exactly how to manipulate my body and to reconnect me with what I yearned for … to move freely once again. I was recovering. Simple actions like getting out of a chair once a day without thinking about it filled me with deep joy. I started to dream about what it might feel like to launch into a serve, to roll my yoga mat out, to skate down the road to get the morning paper or to paddle out at sunset again. I could almost touch these things and I was happy. Very happy.
Reflections
The relationship between mind and body is a road well-travelled. Thoughts > Feelings > Behaviour can be equally powerful and destructive. The high of endorphins after exercise, the sense of calm after time in nature and the tension felt in the body watching your team search for that elusive comeback. The effect of power poses on body Chemistry as so compellingly presented in Amy Cuddy’s TED talk neatly supports the theory of ‘Embodied Cognition’ and the suggestion that ‘thinking’ lies in our entire body. That the part of our brain which has been traditionally viewed as responsible for balance, posture, co-ordination and motor skills (our trusty cerebellum) also has a role in thinking and emotion.
Maybe we’re not just skin and bones being controlled by our brains’ central computer. Maybe our movement can resonate deeper within us. Maybe we can awaken ourselves more by moving and developing our skills. The great thing about us as humans is that whatever we do, we get better at it. When we spend hours in our office chairs hunched over our screens we become experts at sitting in office chairs hunching over our screens. When we spend hours moving, running, jumping, sliding, pedalling, climbing, balancing and experimenting, we can become our own version of an expert at that too.
People that keep me moving
Sitting down to write this got me thinking about all the people that have influenced my search to keep moving throughout my life. Through my work as a tennis coach I’ve always admired the grace and strength of Roger Federer [there is a reason for his longevity and injury free career and it’s not just “talent”]. I’ve been lucky to spend time with some inspirational coaches such as Steve Green & Allistair McCaw in my search to improve knowledge. More recently, the work of Ido Portal and Erwan Le Core has redefined the nuts and bolts of functional movement to me.
My friend Michelle is a dance teacher – she took me to see a Hofesh Schecter dance performance. I’ve been to hundreds of gigs and been utterly mesmerised and connected through the visceral power of music, but it had never occurred to me before that moment that there was another, deeper way of communicating without speech or sound. The echoes of that performance still linger with me.
I’m a pretty average surfer [this can happen when you live in Bedfordshire] but when I surfed I wanted to be like Alex Knost, Honolua Blomfield or Joel Tudor because they were stylish and super fluid. I’ve always loved skateboarding and watching the utter mastery of Tyshawn Jones and Rodney Mullen but I’ve long since swapped my skateboard for a longboard on the basis that I still couldn’t Ollie without shitting myself well in to my forties.
Most of my yoga, all of my Muay Thai and the mystery of Ju-Jitsu has been practiced under the gaze of Kevin Silous. I am greatly indebted to his teaching for showing me a way through turbulence. More recently, David Kam has opened new doors of exploration in yoga and movement in me and installed a daily practise mentality that I was long yearning for but couldn’t seem to find.
Recent slacklining sessions with my old climbing friend Ben who taught me a deep respect and love of the mountains in my 20s have been bringing me back to the relaxed focus of our earlier vertical adventures. I have loved striving to improve balancing on what is essentially a piece of roof-rack strapping and although my new habit of scoping out the distances between trees often outweighs my progress above the ground, it has been an altogether humbling and exploratory process for me.
I love all of this but none of this beats seeing my wife Kirsten walk in to a room bringing everything that she does shining outwardly – just like coming home to a roaring fire on a daily basis … and then there is a bloke doing Qi-Gong from his garden who has brought a new way of slow movement and restorative calm to our lockdown days. He has taught us so much and created a platform to help us keep moving freely forever.
I am grateful to everyone who has inspired me to keep moving, from the small things to the big things, the views, the sounds, the feeling, the process. Onwards.
Neil Frankel
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