Feminist reflections on fitness, sport, and health
Author: Christine Hennebury
I'm a writer/storyteller/director/creativity & lifestory coach with a black belt in ITF Taekwon-do. I read voraciously and I write like my fingers are on fire.
I'm the founder and Chair of the Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl and I'm a former president of the St. John's Storytelling Festival.
I bake a mean chocolate chip cookie.
Ok, so I am reporting back a little early but since I don’t think there will be a drastic change in my results over the next two days, we’re in the clear.
On September 1, I told you about my experiment for this month – 5 minutes of circle-based mobility exercises each night before bed.
And, despite the fact that I was ‘going in circles’ this whole time, I have definitely made some progress towards increasing my mobility and improving my sense of well-being.
Here are my discoveries:
1) As I suspected in my initial post, doing circles seems to reduce the restless, twitchy feeling I was often experiencing while sitting in bed reading before going to sleep.
2) I feel far less stiff and achy when I get up in the morning.
3) My body feels a bit more mobile and fluid overall.
4) I like having a small physical practice as part of my bedtime routine.
5) If I had trouble settling into sleep in the evening, doing a few more circles was soothing.
Obviously I am declaring this experiment a success!
And I am giving myself bonus points and a gold star ⭐️ for sticking with my experiment even though this month included some travel with friends and coordinating a 10 day arts festival.
Normally that kind of shift in routine would affect any kind of new practice I was trying to incorporate into my days but I guess that my plan to go in circles was just the right-sized practice for almost any circumstance.
And since it has worked out so well, I plan to keep this circular strategy going.
Here’s your semi-regular reminder that you are the boss of you.
Soooooo, it is up to you how to proceed with your plans.
If your current plans feel good and you are getting where you want to go, then forge ahead.
I mean, it’s good to check in every now and then but you are under no obligation to examine every single detail of your fitness plans over and over.
And you certainly don’t have to keep changing them to match trends or to prove a point.
Basically, if your current plan is working for you then… FORGE AHEAD!
But what about if your plan sort of works but there are stil rough spots, friction, and/or you often find it hard to get going.
In that case, it may be time to make a few changes.
You may want to switch up your plans a bit, change the exercises you’re doing, find some company, take on a different challenge, put in some extra effort or maybe dial things back a bit.
Basically, if your initial plan is getting on your nerves you don’t have to keep frustrating yourself (and you definitely shouldn’t be hard on yourself), instead, you can… PIVOT!
But what about if you started out strong but your enthusiasm waned?
Or if you hated your plan from step one?
Or if you love the plan but life got in the way and now you just can’t?
Or if your plan worked when you made it but then your schedule changed?
Well, in that case, the only thing you *can’t* do is be mean to yourself about it. (Ok, I guess you can but I will give you a stern look about being mean to my friend.)
After all, finding a fitness plan that works for you isn’t about doing the perfect thing as your perfect self on your most perfect day.
Instead, it’s is about finding ways to keep doing things that you want to do (or achieving things that you want to achieve) so it only makes to make your plans appeal to the most important person in the equation – YOU.
Basically, if you aren’t doing the things you want/need to be doing then change your plans and …RESTART.
And yes, I know there is great value in starting something new on a significant date (New Years, your birthday, September 1) but there is also value in starting wherever and whenever you happen to be.
(In fact, with a little imagination you can turn anything into a significant date. If nothing occurs to you, feel free to post in the comments and I’ll wrangle any ordinary day into an auspicious occasion for restarting you project.)
So, Team, the key information here is that it is ok for you to do the things you want to do, in the way you want to do them, on a schedule that works for you.
You can work hard or proceed gently or do anything in between. As long as you match your expectations to your efforts, your intensity is up to you.
You can have a strict schedule or something a bit more loose and responsive to your day to day plans. As long as it works for you, it’s a good way to proceed.
Basically, as I said at the beginning, you are the boss of you.
AND your needs are the most important factors in your fitness plans.
So, whether we’re going to forge ahead, pivot, or restart, let’s do all what we need to do to help us stick with the things that help us feel the way we want to feel.
Oh, and please collect your gold star for your efforts below.
…and the other good stuff about heading back to class.
Thursday night was just as good as I hoped it would be.
I thoroughly enjoyed the familiar routine of walking into class, talking to my friends, and doing our warm-up.
My body and brain were utterly soothed by the rhythm of the beginning of our class.
You know how it is – you can be a bit addled or off-kilter and then start some familiar routine and the momentum of that routine (making tea, preparing a meal, working with a partner in a project, following your morning plan) carries you forward and you soon realize that you have left that weird feeling behind.
And when we started our patterns, my relaxed state allowed me to access my muscle memory with ease.
I still made mistakes, of course, but my errors felt a bit funny instead of frustrating.
I swear I made up several new movements – perhaps I should consult with the technical committee? Ha!
And along with my amusement at my mistakes, I was thrilled to discover that my summer exercise plan was making a real difference for my mobility, my strength, and my flexibility.
I already felt encouraged by my fitness progress but seeing how my exercise efforts were positively impacting my ability and capacity at TKD made me even more determined to continue with the Hybrid Calisthenics program.
I’m travelling at the moment (I taught a storytelling workshop in Nova Scotia last night!) so I am missing our second class of the year but I am definitely looking forward to class on Thursday night.
Next step: set some personal goals for TKD for this year.
I’m looking forward to heading back to class on Thursday night.
I’ve missed my TKD friends, I’ve missed my instructors, and I’ve missed being part of a group activity.
But mostly I have missed moving in those specific ways, those specific patterns (literally – we do a lot of patterns), and enjoying the process of remembering and executing the movements I have been learning and practicing for so long.
I know I’ll feel kind of rusty and off-kilter on Thursday night, and we’ll all be a little out of sync with each other.
But I also know that it won’t take long for each person’s muscle memory to kick in and that will lead to the group finding a comfortable groove, and we’ll all feel that ‘click’ as we get in sync.
I have all kinds of goals for myself at TKD this year but for right now I am just focusing on the fun of getting back to my routine and sinking into the familiar challenge of coordinating my movements with the people around me as we move through our patterns.
For the last few nights, I have been doing about 5 minutes of mobility exercises before bed and the practice feels really beneficial.
I didn’t start the exercises with a plan, I just did them one night while listening to the end of a podcast and I liked how I felt afterwards so I did them again the next night.
And since I often find myself feeling a bit twitchy and restless before bed – with an odd feeling or an ache in one place or another – but I haven’t had that feeling in the last few nights so it seems worth exploring if there is a connection between the exercises and the lack of twitchiness.
This may be a coincidence of course but that’s part of the experiment.
I’m referring to it as going in circles because I made myself laugh when I referred to the exercises that way on Sunday night.
And seeing as the routine includes rolling a ball under each foot and then doing ankle circles, knee circles, hip circles, upper body circles, arm circles, shoulder circles, and neck circles, it’s not wrong it just sounds a bit funny.
So here’s my experiment:
For September, I am going to go in circles for 5 minutes each night before bed and note whether or not I feel twitchy afterward and whether I feel more or less stiff each morning.
I’ll report on my experiment on October 1.
These imperfect circles were fun to make and they are a good representation of the imperfect circles in my practice. Image description: a drawing of 8 overlapping, painted circles in fall colours (shades of green, brown, red, orange) with a different pattern in black ink on each one (spirals, circles, grids, lines, triangles, squares) and each circle is outlined in black. The drawing has been cut out of a larger sheet of white paper in an irregular shape that resembles a cloud or a puddle. The outer edge of the paper is trimmed in black and there are gold dots between the black trim and the edges of the circles. At the bottom are the words ‘hello, September!’ written in black.
This time last week, I had to work hard to focus on the good.
At that point, I had spent three days dealing with some lower back pain that had kind of come out of nowhere.*
That was annoying, obviously, but what was really frustrating is that up to the first day of back pain, I was on a 40 day exercise streak with the Hybrid Calisthenics app.**
For the first time in ages (maybe ever?) I was finding it easy to exercise, I was generally enjoying each session, the whole thing felt very purposeful, and I was seeing and feeling some results.
But then I had to break my streak to care for my back.
Part of my brain immediately went into story mode (a professional hazard for storyteller/writer types) and told me that a) I would have a hard time picking up where I left off and I might have to start again b) that I was probably going to put my routine aside and not remember it for ages c) if I did start again, I would have lost my momentum and it would take a lot of effort to convince myself to exercise.
Now, I’m not saying these are sensible thoughts but I have to admit that none of those scenarios are out of the question.
In fact, each of those scenarios is a very familiar groove and there was a definite risk of me and my ADHD brain slipping right into one of them.
This time, though, I was very determined not to let either of those stories come true.
Even though my back pain continued (with slowly diminishing intensity) right through this past week, I kept checking in with myself about when I’d be able to get back to my routine.
On Friday, I could feel clear improvement and Saturday was better again and Sunday was practically normal.
And on Monday morning, I asked myself the question I was asking daily before my back pain started:
“Am I exercising this morning or this evening?”
(A strong contrast with the question I would have asked myself during previous programs: “Am I exercising today?)
And, here’s the real victory as far as I am concerned:
It was EASY to get started.
I didn’t hesitate or try to negotiate with myself.
I didn’t have face any resistance at all – I just decided on morning and got started.
I felt a little rusty and my first set of each exercise was kind of slow.
But I did it. Carefully. Intentionally. With good form and while paying close attention to my back.
And I feel good. – physically and mentally – about getting back at it.
Now my worry is metaphorical – I don’t want to risk breaking my arm patting myself on the back.
😉
This photo is largely unrelated to the text except that I also had to take a break from walking Khalee for most of last week. My back was so uncooperative!
A photo of Khalee looking at some surprisingly abundant mushrooms on a a green space near our house. Don’t worry, I didn’t let her step into the faery ring. Image description: Khalee, my light haired medium sized dog is looking down at a series of large mushrooms amongst the green grass. She is wearing a blue kerchief and looks quite jaunty.
*My lower back is unhappy from time to time but it is usually short-lived and not quite this intense.
**To be clear, my program is two exercises a day for three days, repeat, active rest. I did not do 40 days of intense exercise in a row – it was gradual and had rest days built in.
Here’s the short version of this post: It’s ok to give yourself the movement, the peace of mind, and the rest that you need.
I know this is not the first time I have given you (or myself) this advice but since I always need reminders about this stuff then I assume you do, too.
So, to reiterate:
Whenever you can, please, please, please, give yourself the things you need.
If you need rest, then please get some rest
And please do that in a way that lets you meet your needs the best way you can in your current situation.
Resting doesn’t have to mean taking a nap (but a nap is great if you are able to take one!) It can mean resting in small increments, taking some deep breaths, pausing between tasks, choosing to limit the scope of some tasks, doing some yoga or stretching, or picking a restorative activity.
If your thoughts are feeling tangled and you need to meditate or journal then please meditate or journal.
And please do those things in the way that meets your needs.
Journaling doesn’t have to be pen on paper, it can be typing on a screen or drawing on an envelope or using voice to text or creating a collage or anything else that makes your thoughts more tangible and organizable for you.
Meditation doesn’t have to mean sitting still (but that type of mindfulness is totally cool.) It can mean colouring, or doing walking meditation, or drawing a series of small lines, or doing a task with great care. It’s more about the nature of your attention than the specific activities involved.
If you need to get moving, then please get moving.
And please do that in the way that meets your needs.
If you need intense exercise, then push yourself hard in whichever ways are available to you right now.
If you need slow movement, then take your time.
If you need to lift heavy, lift heavy. If you need to lift light, lift light.
And please don’t feel like you need to limit yourself to doing some sort of established routine. It’s totally ok to put on some music and flail around like a fish that got washed up on the beach. It’s totally ok to head to the playground and swing on the swings. It’s totally ok to do squats while you watch TV. And it’s totally ok to stretch while you talk to a friend.
As long as your movement meets your needs, then forge ahead.
If you need something, then please do what you can to meet that need.
Even if you feel you *shouldn’t* (I still hate that word!) need it.
In fact, ESPECIALLY if you feel you shouldn’t need it.
Your needs matter.
You matter.
And if you need some sort of permission before meeting those needs – in whatever way you are able to meet them at the moment – then consider that permission granted.
I may not be the boss of you but I am perfectly willing to boss you into being kind to yourself.
(Yes, I *am* the oldest sister, how did you guess?)
So, Team, please, please, please take good care of yourselves out there.
And here is your gold star for your efforts to meet your needs – whatever they happen to look like right now.
Go Team Us!
This little gold star cheered me right up. If you have a minute, draw yourself a gold star – you won’t regret it!
Image description: a drawing of a cartoonish gold star with a happy face on it. The drawing is on a piece of white index card and the background behind the star includes a bunch of small marks (some dots and some are a little more like lines) and five short lines that are near each point on the star like it is either glistening or in motion. The piece of index card is propped up between the keys on my computer keyboard which is black with white letters.
I don’t actually speak arm so I am just guessing here.
What am I talking about?
Well, you see, I have been diligently following the Hybrid Calisthenics exercise program since early July and, as a result, I have done a lot of pushups against the wall and leaning against my kitchen counter.
In fact, I have done 705 pushups in total, 90 of which were done (in 3 sets of 30) on Monday morning against my kitchen counter.
I am really proud of myself and I feel powerful and strong as I do each set. (Well, for most of the set anyway!)
And I am also proud of the fact that I am not overthinking the program, I’m just following along and trusting the process. (This is kind of a new thing for me because my brain is always trying to leap ahead and ‘What about…’ every detail of anything new.)
But this weekend I got a little bit curious about whether, after all of those wall and counter push-ups, I might be able to do a single push-up (in good form) on the floor.
I was really hoping to execute it easily and feel the same kind of ‘look at me using my muscles!’ power that I feel when pushing off from the counter.
So, I rolled out my yoga mat on my bedroom floor and got down on my hands and toes, arms extended, and tried to lower myself down to the floor…
That’s when I got a big nope from my arms.
In fact, they flatly refused to bend at all.
See? So stubborn! Image description: a black and white cartoon-style drawing of me having a conversation with my arms while trying to do a push-up. The drawing shows my head, upper shoulders, and arms and I am in plank position on a flowered yoga mat. I have my hair in a ponytail and I am wearing a dark coloured tee-shirt. I am saying ‘Look, Arms, can you just try bending a little?” And a speech balloon at my elbow says, “Nope!” The drawing is resting on a small grey easel-like stand that is printed like an octopus tentacle.
I wasn’t testing if I had the strength, I was essentially trying to figure out how to encourage my elbows to bend and let me lower myself to the floor.
I tried to coax myself into it, tried to remind myself that I had lots of strength now and that I only had to do one push-up but still my arms were having none of it.
Normally, I would find that extremely frustrating but, instead, I felt curious.
I knew I probably had the strength to do a floor push-up but for some reason it just wasn’t happening.
What was getting in my way?
Why couldn’t I get my arms to bend?
I don’t generally have any reluctance about getting on the floor.
I don’t mind lying face down for child’s pose, to start cobra, or to do stretches so it’s not specifically about getting close to the floor or anything.
Maybe it had something to do with not trusting my arms to hold me up?
Maybe I was unconsciously protecting my shoulder or my neck or something?
I’ve been mulling it over ever since and I still have no idea why that mechanical action just wasn’t available.
But in the course of writing this, I realized that I might have had more success if I had started that push-up in a different part of the process.
Maybe my arms would be more cooperative if I started out at the bottom of the push-up – lying on the mat with my hands by my shoulders and my elbows pointing up – my arms would be willing to try pushing myself up to plank position.
So, I’ll give that a try the next time I’m on my mat.
Other than that satisfy-my-curiosity attempt, though, I think I will just keep working through the program and see how I feel about more floor pushups once I get to them.
Perhaps the process of lowering my incline over time and gradually getting closer and closer to the floor will override whatever made my arms so reluctant to bend on this first try.
But if I still find my arms are locked and stubborn at that point in the program then I’ll try digging around in my brain to find the problem.
No need to do that sort of excavation when the problem may yet solve itself, hey?
Whether you call it kindness or you use a ten-cent-word like altruism, the world needs a lot more of it right now and the Action for Happiness calendar for August is a great place to start.
As always, the calendar is full of small practices that almost anyone could try but if you don’t feel up to the practice of the day, it’s totally cool to be kind in a whole different way. I’m sure you have a huge repertoire of kind actions you can take at any time.
In fact, even though this calendar is about being kind to others, it’s also a swell idea to practice being kinder to ourselves – these Self-Compassion Practices from Dr. Kristin Neff are a good place to start.
And the small actions are the most important part.
It’s pretty easy to get caught up in waiting to do a big project or to solve a big problem but to not actually be able to get started.
Doing a small thing right now is way better than developing a big thing that never actually gets done.
So, as you give these small actions a whirl, please don’t worry that you aren’t doing enough right now. It’s ok to take the small steps now and let them build over time.
Here’s the full calendar for this month and today’s action is pretty straightforward, “Ask someone how they feel and really listen to their reply.”
Good luck out there, folks!
An image of a calendar of tips for Altruistic August 2026 that features small cartoon drawings of altruistic along the bottom edge. (for example, someone is putting coins in a tin, someone else is offering noodles to a friend, someone else is picking up garbage. Each block of the calendar features an action for that day and the background of each block is either dark or light blue or dark or light green.
A video from the Action for Happiness YouTube channel entitled, “Never underestimate the power of small acts of kindness.” The still image features Vanessa King, a middle-aged woman with medium blonde hair cut in a bob with a bang. She is wearing a white top with a series of red bead necklaces looped around her neck. Text to the right of the image reads, “Kindness Matters” in red and “3 tops tips with Vanessa King” in yellow.
When I started The Conqueror 2026 challenge in January, I set myself a goal of 730 kms of deliberate exercise* for the year.
For those of you playing along at home, that would be the equivalent of 2 km per day, every day.
Why ‘the equivalent’?
Because I don’t actually care all that much about walking that specific distance.
What I care about is increasing my daily exercise/activity levels and the Conqueror challenge lets me measure everything in terms of distance so all of my fitness activities are adding up to the same thing. *
If that sentence made you say, “Wait, what?”, please allow me to clarify.
The distance was pretty arbitrary in the first place – I picked it to represent the approximate amount of activity I figured I could do most days.
I don’t care specifically about walking that distance, I care about doing that much activity.
The app lets me input other activities – like calisthenics, yard work, or dancing – into the tracker and tells me the walking distance that is equivalent to that activity.
Since my ADHD self tends to struggle with tracking/measuring progress, especially if that tracking is overly detailed or fine-grained, having everything translated to distance is really helpful. AND having everything rolled into one metric reminds me that all of the different types of exercise I do are all part of the same goal – feeling better and moving more easily.
But even though the tracker is useful and has helped me to be way more consistent than I would otherwise be, I am currently behind on my challenge.
a screen cap of my challenge homepage that shows two gray rectangles in the centre the top rectangle says ‘goal distance 730.0 km’ and the bottom rectangle says ‘Reason – to challenge myself to move a lot each day.’ behind the rectangles are two images that will be on the eventual medal I will receive. In the upper right corner is the long neck of a dragon outlines of clouds behind it. The dragon is gold and the cloud outlines summer gold, and some are bronze. In the bottom left corner is a grey silhouette of a howling wolf sitting on an outline of a rock and there are outlined clouds behind it. At the bottom of the image is a circular logo that says ‘Conquer 2026’. And shows two trackers. The top one in gray and black indicates that I have travelled 42% of the distance. I need to travel this year. The bottom one indicates that 57% of the year has passed. Underneath both of those is a sentence that reads 103.7 km behind your planned pace.
Luckily, I’m not fazed by this in the least.
There were definitely times in the past when I would have ditched the challenge by this point because of the focused effort it will take to close the gap between my current position and the ideal position for this point in the year.
But this current version of myself is looking at that gap and thinking. “I can totally close that!”
And guess what?
I’m right!
It may take me until the end of September but I am 100% confident that I will catch up, keep going, and earn a 2026 Conqueror challenge medal.
I’ll let you know how things are going at the end of August.
*And ‘deliberate exercise’ means additional movement that I have chosen to do – i.e. I am not measuring steps that are part of my daily activities.
**Besides fitness, of course, but the idea of being ‘fitter’ or having a good ‘fitness level’ is not even remotely tangible.
