…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.
Sport was not my category. I filed myself under something else early on — books, ideas, arguments, the life of the mind — and closed the door on the rest without many qualms.
My parents had been sporty in their youth but didn’t particularly push me in that direction. The biggest influence on me was my grandmother (Nana). She taught English literature, loved Henry James, and instilled in me a passion for fiction and is who I credit with my choice to study philosophy and specialise in ethics. She was brought up Quaker — the British kind — and had long since stopped believing in God, but she believed firmly in seeing the good in people. Despite loving watching all sport on the telly, she also had no interest whatsoever in physical activity herself for its own sake. She would only consent to walks with a clear destination — preferably a pub — and plenty of conversation along the way. Even the word ‘body’ made her shudder.
Nobody in my family saw sport as particularly important. There was an unspoken hierarchy: physical activity was fine as a hobby, but the mind was what mattered. Academic success, being clever and well-read was the real currency.
I was actually a fast sprinter, and I loved swimming. But I couldn’t catch a ball reliably, and at secondary school my tennis game suddenly plummeted (probably because I needed glasses) and I simply gave up. I only enjoyed things I was good at. If I couldn’t excel, I wasn’t interested in trying.
So I chatted through PE lessons, got shouted at by teachers, and felt collectively humiliated alongside most of my classmates when we were bussed to a state school to play field hockey in the cold and mud in our terrible PE kits. When sport was no longer compulsory, I stopped doing it.
In my twenties, I took up half-hearted running to keep in shape — thirty minutes maximum. I swam when I could because I loved the feel of my body in the water, but I still lived principally in my head.
In my thirties, pregnancy made it impossible to keep ignoring my body entirely. I realised I was a mammal in a way only breastfeeding can teach you. And I took up yoga, which was the first physical practice that made me connect my mind and body. Having moved to rural Catalonia, I also started running for pleasure in our beautiful surroundings, and running for longer than half an hour because I wanted to.
Then, just after turning forty, almost by accident — watching my son do judo one afternoon and feeling something I can only describe as envy — I started jiu-jitsu.
I was terrible at it. I’m still not good in any conventional sense. I feel slow, awkward, and uncoordinated in ways that have nothing to do with catching a ball and everything to do with a body that spent four decades being treated primarily as a vehicle for a brain. There was also something about being brought up to be a ‘nice girl’ (hello again, Nana!): I had no siblings, had never experienced rough-housing, and rolling around on the floor trying to get someone in a submission hold – particularly a massive man – was new territory in more ways than one. There were sessions where I drove home feeling defeated not just physically but psychologically. My teacher recognised from the beginning that my mind was my biggest enemy and he still says to me ‘Don’t think! Just do!’
But something else happened. I discovered I build muscle quickly. I found that I liked feeling strong — something distinct from feeling thin or healthy or any of the other things women are mostly encouraged to aspire to. My body, which I had spent four decades ignoring and underestimating, turned out to have things to offer that I had never bothered to look for.
Nobody told me this was possible. Or if the capacity was always there, it had been buried under forty years of a story that turned out to be old data. Collected young, never updated, mistaken for fact.
The stories we tell about what we’re not tend to start early and stick, because we stop questioning them. A verdict reached in childhood, on thin evidence, shaped by forces we couldn’t see at the time, starts to feel like a fixed feature of the self.
I work in implicit bias research, which makes it particularly uncomfortable to admit how long I carried an unchecked assumption about my own physical capabilities without noticing it was an assumption at all. The hardest biases to spot are the ones we hold about ourselves. They don’t feel like biases. They feel like self-knowledge.
I’m still not good with a ball. But I’m more careful now about what I let that mean, and about which doors I decide to close without enough evidence.
And I love that my four-year-old daughter wants to be strong when she grows up, does judo, and regularly asks if she can feel my biceps.
Chloë FitzGerald is an academic turned coach and facilitator. She helps people and organizations navigate uncertainty — whether it’s a career transition, cultural adaptation, or learning to work sustainably with new technologies like AI.
Tonight, I begin my 17th year of Taekwon-do training and I am very much looking forward to taking my place in line with my friends, bowing in, and leaning into the muscle memory of all of those years of training.
Last year was a rough one for my TKD practice/progress.
After my injury in October (that I didn’t uncover until April) I found it increasingly difficult to participate fully in class and I struggled to practice effectively and my ADHD was not helping, and, and, and…let’s just say things were HARD on my brain and on my body.
So, it was a great relief to discover that there was a REASON why everything was so hard and that I could find ways to make them easier (not easy but easier) again.
It was wonderful to know that the JOY of familiar movement could and would outweigh the challenge once my injuries healed – and that’s what I know I will find at class tonight.
At this point, being a martial artist is a vital part of my identity.
Putting on my dobok, going to class, and moving through my patterns and drills in the company of my friends helps me feel like myself.
After that, the fact that taekwon-do challenges my mind and my body is just a bonus, really.
See you tonight, my TKD friends!
Image description: My taekwon-do black belt rests on a light surface. The gold embroidery has C. Hennebury IV on one end of the belt and Tae Kwon Do in Korean on the other end.
PS – If you are wondering how I did with my plan to prepare for this first class? Well, as usual, various things conspired against me and I had to rework my plan considerably. However, the act of creating that zine helped me to keep TKD prep in mind so I did far more preparation than I would have otherwise and I feel good about the whole thing.
Since I spent most of the time between October 2024 and June 2025 either injured or recovering from an injury, it was not a great year for me at TKD.
I didn’t really have my usual capacity (and didn’t know why) and it was hard for me to invest the level of mental and physical effort required to properly practice.
Without the ability to practice/participate fully, I couldn’t properly enjoy TKD and I couldn’t get as much out of it as I normally would.
There’s nothing that can be done about last year, of course, but I’m determined to have more fun, do more work, and just get more out of my classes) this year.
While it would have been ideal if I had been practicing steadily all summer, that wasn’t possible for me, so I’m working with the time I have.
Aside from the fact that I was still easing back into my normal activities over the summer, I have to allow for my ADHD brain’s variable sense of time, in particular for something that is primarily related to myself. The start of TKD was in the ‘not now’ up until this week until the time frame suddenly shifted to ‘now.’ Once that shift happened, I had much more clarity around how to set myself up for a fun year at TKD.
Soooooo, once that clarity arrived I made a plan for the next 2.5 weeks and then I put that plan into a zine.
I like the zine format because it’s small and contained and it makes the project feel more doable.*
It’s not a super-structured plan (my brain noped out of that immediately!), I just wrote down all the things I could do to start prepping for class and then organized them onto the various pages with a way to track them (or a space to write notes about them) and it feels useful.
I intend to do some things daily (mobility exercises and yoga), some things almost daily (some focused cardio), and others 3-4 times between now and the first day of class (each of my patterns.)
As I mentioned above, the time frame between now and the beginning of classes is short enough that my ADHD brain will accept that time is real and that it is ok to prep for something happening that soon.
My plan is specific enough to ensure that I don’t have to spend too much time deciding what to do in the moment and, yet, flexible enough to let me choose what feels like the most fun on any given day.
I may not fill in all the little circles, stars, and hearts but I am going to work towards it and then be VERY kind to myself if I ‘just’ get 10 or 12 hearts coloured in. After all, 10 or 12 hearts is waaaaaaaaay better than what I would do otherwise.
Frankly, I’m looking forward to challenging myself over the next couple of weeks.
Realistically, ANYTHING I do to prepare will help me head into that first class feeling more like my old self.
And I really like that idea.
KiYA!
Image description: a photo of the cover of my practice zine. It says ‘TKD Prep Work’ on the top half with spirals behind the TKD, arrows pointing to the word Prep, and dots surrounding the word Work. On the bottom half it says August 21 to September 9. The text at the bottom is surrounded by a black frame.Image description: The photo is in portrait view but the text, etc. is in landscape. A photo of an inner page of my practice zine with the word Mobility at the top with trackers (circles to colour in) for hips, wrists, ankles, shoulders/neck. Image Description: a photo of a inner page of my practice zine with the word Cardio at the top, the outlines of 15 stars to colour in (as a tracker), and thin black lines in the background. At the bottom of the page there is a blank space with the words “Make a list:” at the top of it.Image description: a photo of the middle pages of my practice zine. This page has two trackers for two sets of the first group of patterns on the left side, and the name of the individual black belt patterns I know (or am working on) with circles beneath each one to track my practice for each one. The words ‘Black Belt Patterns’ are in the centre of the page. There are a few stars, some small dots, and a couple of spirals decorating the page. Image description: a photo of an inner page of my practice zine. The word Yoga is at the top and there are a bunch of hearts to colour in to track my yoga sessions.Image description: The page is divided into three sections. The top section is headed by the word Kicks then there is an empty space, the middle section is headed by the word Footwork with a space beneath it, the bottom section is headed by the words Punches and Strikes with a space beneath it.
*My ADHD brain perked up when I typed that. “Consider doing zines for other projects, Christine.” “Let’s make a note and revisit that later, Brain.”
I get a real kick out of portmanteau words. Spork, hangry, staycation, and maybe the best/silliest one I know– turducken– they all convey a humorous approach to efficiency and multitasking in meaning.
We smush words together all over the place, with food and technology terms especially (think cronut and webinar), but also with sports and physical activity. Here are some I found online, of which several the FIFI bloggers have written about or tried for ourselves:
Yogalates (yoga plus Pilates)
Broga (a combo of yoga and calisthenics exercises, with gender stereotype marketing– yuck)
Yinki yoga (yin yoga plus reiki)
Jazzercise (an oldie but a goodie)
Hyrox (a newish one; Sam wrote about it here; it stands for “Hybrid Rockstar”)
Acroyoga (acrobatic yoga, see pic below)
Doga (according to Wikipedia, a variant of yoga done with dogs, or for people, or for dogs)
Smiling while lifting those bags? They can’t be doing it right. Two folks in acrobatic yoga pose.AI dog in Sukhasana, easy pose.
But how many of you have heard of/participated in Ai Chi? Not me, until now.
Ai Chi refers to Tai Chi– gentle but powerful low-impact martial arts exercises– done in the water, generally a pool. One site explains it this way, focusing on benefits for older people:
Ai Chi, a modified, water-based form of Tai Chi, integrates slow, deliberate movements with deep breathing in a physical activity performed in shoulder-deep heated water. Developed to promote relaxation, it builds full-body strength and challenges balance in ways that typical strength training does not.
Unlike lifting weights or other exercises on solid ground, Ai Chi harnesses the natural resistance of water while buoyancy reduces joint strain.
The practice begins with uncomplicated arm and breathing exercises that gradually progress to coordinated, full-body movements. As participants alternate between narrow and wide stances, they continuously test their stability.
When I did a deeper Google dive into Ai Chi classes, I found a variety of different types of Ai Chi-ish workouts. Some look like aquatic therapy classes (done at rehab places for people recovering from surgery or injuries or managing medical limitations). Others are aquatic personal training that combine gentle water exercise with massage. Then there are the regular Ai Chi classes at places like your local YMCA. Mine offers them.
People in a pool, ai-chi-ing with arms out.People in a different pool, ai-chi-ing with arms out.Ai-Chi diagram of walking in water exercises.
The list of benefits that AI Chi-ing confers is very long. So is the list of conditions for which Ai-Chi is purportedly helpful. You can find them here.
One more thing about Ai Chi: according to one Ai Chi blogger, Tai Chi makes dogs more aggressive, but Ai Chi calms them. They cited one Ai Chi class that also soothed a nearby duck and blue heron. Imagine how it might chill us out…
Honestly, Ai Chi seems like a nice variant on Tai Chi movements and also a low-key alternative to water aerobics to make it tempting to try. I will report back if/when I take my Tai Chi to the pool, strip off the T, and add water.
Hey readers– have you tried Ai Chi? Do you like it? How does it compare to its dry land sibling? I’d love to hear from you.
My work doesn’t change much from season to season.
So, the only sign that fall is starting is that Taekwondo started up again on Tuesday night.
I thought it would be interesting (to me at least) to write a little bit about how I felt before class and a little bit about how I felt after and see how they matched up.
Here’s what I had to say beforehand:
My dobok is ready.
I do have dobok pants, they just looked strange when I laid them out flat so I took the photo without them. Image description: my dobok top – a long white shirt with black trim and two logos on the upper left – laid flat with my black belt laid on top of it.
And I’m ready…ish.
My brain is ready to go but even though I practiced a bit over the summer my body will probably be a bit rusty.
Luckily, after over 13 years of training, I know that the key to getting back into the swing of things is to just work through the rustiness until my muscles remember what to do.
Basically, they just need to be reminded of the things they already know.
Fortunately, being in my dobok and lined up with the other students in our training space will give my muscles the nudge they need to do what I have trained them to do.
And it’s such a great feeling when everything ‘clicks’ again.
*****
And here are my thoughts afterwards:
Oh, it’s so good to be back!
It was great to see everyone again and it feels strange to realize that two months have passed. (Sure, two months is not all that long but I’m used to seeing my TKD friends weekly.)
And it was wonderful to work our way slowly through the patterns, gently reminding our muscles that they know these movements, they know what comes next.
I felt competent and focused and purposeful, step by step, movement by movement, reminding myself of the skills I have built over all these years of training.
And while it has only been two months since I stood in that space practicing on that way, that’s enough time for your conscious mind to lose track of the details of those feelings.
It felt really good to revisit those details.
And moving slowly through those patterns on the first day felt like we were warming up for the year of training ahead. Slow deliberate movement, reinforcing skills, getting ourselves ready for what comes next.
And, like I predicted, it was a great feeling when things ‘clicked’ again.
Look how happy I looked after class!
Not my most flattering look but my friend Kevin made me laugh when he took this one and it matches the spirit of our class last night. Image description – Me in my white dobok with my hair pulled back by a green cloth band. I’m wearing glasses and I’m laughing with my eyes all scrunched up. I look kind of sweaty but that’s to be expected at a martial arts class.
I wanted to add a little extra to my daily routine in October so I’ve taken up two challenges for the month – the Action for Happiness Optimism challenge and the Darebee Daily Kicks challenge.
I like following short term challenges because 1) they set out a plan in advance so my brain doesn’t get stuck buffering about decisions 2) they aren’t making me commit to something in a future that is too far ahead for my ADHD brain to grasp.
This is just a jpeg of the calendar, you can print or download one at the Action for Happiness site. Image description: a multi-coloured October calendar full of daily optimism tips, decorated with small cartoon images of people walking, drawing and holding event tickets.
These specific challenges should be straightforward additions to my day because any day’s actions are big enough to matter to me but small enough to fit into nooks and crannies in my still-developing schedule.
And it helps that I am naturally inclined to optimism (this may be a good feature of my ADHD – I’m usually convinced that things are about to get better) and that kicks are not only good exercise but practicing them will have added benefits for Taekwon-do.
Print your own Daily Kicks challenge calendar/tracker and use the timer at the Darebee site. Image description: a screen capture of the header and first few days of the Darebee Daily Kicks challenge sheet which has the words Daily Kicks in large letters on the top right, multiple drawings of people kicking on the right and 5 days of kicks in listed in individual boxes at the bottom.
Will I get to both of these every day? I’m planning on it and I hope those plans work out.
But even my optimistic self knows that sometimes things go awry so I have a backup plan as well:
If I miss a day, I can do two the next day…if that feels doable. If doing two items feels like too much, or if I have missed several days, I’ll skip to the item for the current day.
The key here is to follow the practices for as many days as possible this month – aiming for more days on than off.
The only thing I *don’t* want is to follow the challenge for a few days, miss a couple, and then scrap the whole thing because I didn’t do it perfectly.
As long as the end of October still finds me working away at these, in any form or fashion, I’ll be successful.
During her Move program in January, Adriene (of Yoga with Adriene) emphasized how important it can be to think about how you move.
She invited us to consider the actual movements we made when relocating our hands to move between poses, the way we moved our legs into downward dog, the process of how we unrolled our spines to stand up.
This wasn’t about making us self-conscious, it was about grounding us in our bodies, about considering the movement habits that serve us and those that hinder us. It was about figuring out where we find ease and what parts of our bodies need more attention. It was about figuring out how to work with or work around the unique abilities of our individual bodies.
Even though this process made for a tricky line to walk between being mindful and overthinking, it really set me up well for practicing for my recent TKD belt test.
In the course of learning and practicing my patterns and other movements, I had to think about how I was moving. After all, it’s not just that my foot has to end up in a specific spot but I have to move it in a certain way to maximize my power, to increase my balance, to ensure that I can reach the target that I need to reach.
Even though my TKD skills are a work in progress (and always will be), concentrating a bit more on the specifics of my movements did help me a lot. Recognizing that in one of my patterns, I always place my foot down at the wrong angle gave me the opportunity to correct it and execute my pattern more accurately.
(Sidenote: I actually learned DURING MY TEST that I was getting another movement wrong and the correction from my instruction made a huge, immediate difference in the effectiveness of that technique. Another victory for the ‘how’ of movement.)
My latest stop for this train of thought is a video I did on Sunday. I felt like doing some yoga but I also wanted to do something a bit different so I had my metaphorical cake and ate it too by doing this video from Liv in Leggings.
A video from Liv in Leggings called Yoga & Mobility Hybrid. Still image shows a person in purple leggings and sports bra doing a twist pose on a rainbow mat against a purple background.
I really enjoyed it. She’s an engaging instructor and I found her ‘how’ explanations very clear even when I couldn’t quite execute the movements yet.
Considering the question of how – her explanations and my personal experience – helped me to be curious about even the most challenging movements.
That curiosity meant that I was intrigued rather than frustrated by the difference between the strength of my right arm and the strength in my left arm during a wheelish/bridge-ish pose where we had to support ourselves first on one arm and then on the other.
(I mean, I know that my right arm is stronger than my left and I know that I can be more precise with my right. But the difference was especially apparent on that one movement – and I could feel that I was moving differently as I was getting into the pose and I couldn’t hold myself steady in the same way while I was in it. I could support myself on my right arm for quite some time but my left arm started shaking almost right away.)
And it let me pay attention to my movements when doing twists so I could tell exactly which ones made the tight spot on the left side of my back protest. And I could see how small adjustments could bring some ease.
And, of course, overall focusing on the ‘how’ helped me to be more mindful and present while I was trying this new approach. That just seems like a good thing doesn’t it?
How much time do you spend thinking about the how of your movements?
Do you find it helpful? Does it make you more mindful?
PS- While all that shaking was going on I was really grateful for the various online yoga videos I’ve done from Adriene and Joelle Because they always refer to those kinds of shaking movements in a positive light. In their framework, it’s not about weakness in the shaking body part. It’s about energy flowing and about knowing that you’re alive and about putting the effort in. I think that’s a really encouraging way to look at it.
Remember a few months ago when I wrote about being the very model of a middle aged martial artist?
I’m at it again.
Last week, I had the honour of taking part in a photoshoot with my photographer friend, Amy Cleary.
I really enjoy the process of helping people with their creative projects, whether I am coaching, brainstorming, or participating in some way. So, I was having a great time observing Amy practice her craft while I was trying to create visually interesting movements.
That would have been plenty of fun for one afternoon but my enjoyment was enhanced by how excited Amy was about my TKD techniques and about the ideas she wanted to express with her photos.
While it would be possible to have a photoshoot and keep your subject as a passive participant, Amy doesn’t want to capture passivity, she wants to express the power of the person she is highlighting in her photos.
I enjoyed my afternoon with Amy and I appreciated her goal of focusing on the individual’s power but I didn’t give much thought to the end result. I basically considered myself kind of a prop for her creative expression.
I knew she would take artistic, interesting photos and I wasn’t worried about whether I would like how I looked in them. Whether I looked ‘good’ or not didn’t feel relevant to the project at hand.
And then she posted a photo from our shoot.
See what I mean? Determination, power, strength. This photo feels great! Photo credit: Amy Cleary Image description: an artfully shadowed photo of me in my white TKD uniform (dobok) and red sparring helmet and gloves. I am punching toward the camera with my right hand and I am holding my left hand back by my head. I am staring into the camera and I look very serious.
It was a revelation.
I still didn’t consider whether I looked ‘good’ or not. What I saw was that I looked POWERFUL and that felt GREAT.
It also felt like a surprise.
Because of my ADHD, unless I work to think otherwise, my brain divides time into ‘now’ or ‘not-now.’ Either I can accomplish the thing I want to do immediately or it gets put off to a time in the indeterminate future.
I find it very difficult to do a small thing now that won’t pay off until the distant future and, unless I consciously work at it, I have trouble believing that a series of small actions will add up to a great whole. I’m sure you can see that this perspective creates a lot of challenges around fitness and exercise.
After all, a single session of any type of exercise isn’t going to produce many tangible results so it’s hard to convince my brain to let me expend the energy now for something that can’t be ‘finished’ right away and that may not produce tangible results for a while.
So, when I try to think about my body looking powerful, it is always something that will happen in the future, in the ‘not-now.’
It’s not that I think of myself as weak – I know the ways that I am strong and I often FEEL powerful – but I have this idea of what powerful *looks* like and I didn’t think I was there yet.
So, that’s why the photo was a surprise.
I’m not heavily-muscled, I’m not at peak physical fitness, I’m rounded in places where many athletes are sleek, but my body is powerful just as it is and Amy’s photos showed me that.
I am delighted by my intense expression in this one. Photo credit: Amy Cleary Image description: a photo of me in my white TKD uniform with my hair pulled back in a black bandana. My body is oriented toward the right side of the photo but I am punching my right fist toward the camera and I am looking directly at the photographer over my extended arm/fist.
I don’t have to wait until the not-now.
I am powerful NOW.
And since I am already powerful, that changes my perspective on my current efforts. I am not starting from scratch, I am enhancing what already exists.
