Practice & Play

Somewhere along the way, health became serious business. Not serious in the sense of important — it is important — but serious in the sense of grim. The language around it hardens into obligation. You have to. You should. You need to be better. The gym becomes a place you go to pay a debt to your body rather than a place you go because movement feels good and you’re curious about what you’re capable of. Food becomes a problem to manage rather than one of the genuine pleasures of being alive. The whole enterprise starts to feel like work in the worst sense of the word, and then people wonder why they can’t sustain it.

I think about this a lot, because I’ve been on both sides of it. There were years where my relationship to my own health was almost entirely punitive — showing up out of guilt, restricting out of fear, measuring progress in ways designed to remind me how far I had to go. It was exhausting, and it produced exactly the kind of cycle you’d expect. Effort, burnout, collapse, shame, repeat.

What loosened that was bringing two things back into it that I’d let go of somewhere along the way — practice and play.

Practice, in the way I mean it, is borrowed from traditions older than the fitness industry by several thousand years. A meditation practice, a martial arts practice, a spiritual practice — none of these are about arriving somewhere. They’re about the quality of attention you bring to the process of showing up, again and again, without demanding that each session be a breakthrough. There’s a humility in that framing that I find genuinely useful. You’re not performing. You’re practicing. The bar is showing up with intention, not producing a result.

Play is the other half, and it’s the one that gets abandoned first when health becomes serious. Play is joy. It’s finding what you genuinely enjoy and letting that enjoyment be reason enough to show up. It’s approaching the process with a light heart and an open mind — the way a child approaches something new, with excitement rather than strategy, without the weight of expectations about how it’s supposed to go. That quality of beginner’s openness is something I think adults underestimate badly. It keeps things fresh. It makes room for surprise. And it makes the whole process sustainable in a way that obligation never quite manages, because you don’t burn out on things that bring you joy.

Together they form an approach to health that I think most people are quietly hungry for — grounded enough in commitment to produce real change, light enough in spirit to actually live inside of over a long period of time.