Community Concepts (October 2021)
10/06/2021
Dojo Philosophy for Everyday Life
Several months ago I wrote about my hospitalization for COVID-19 in January. Nine months after that traumatic battle I am just now returning to full strength, though it will take a while longer to return my fitness to pre-covid levels. One of Cuong Nhu’s philosophies that we reference after an injury is the Five Re’s of Healing.
Reduce – Relax – Reach – Reevaluate – Remember
Each injury is different, but the path to recovery often veers to places where we forget one or more of these principles. Having the list in front of us makes it easier to balance our recovery and make good decisions about how to most successfully recover.
Reducing my activity level was easy after my hospitalization since I could barely stand or walk, but reducing the speed at which I expected to recover was a challenge. Pushing to increase fitness is very different from pushing to heal lung damage. The first time I managed to walk around the block three times I was incapacitated with nerve pain for about 36 hours and unable to sleep. It was critical to listen to my body’s responses to the work and not set my own schedule for recovery.
Relaxing is about letting go of the expectations, while Reaching is about continually challenging and supplying the body so that recovery continues to progress. This is a critical balancing act since recovery will stagnate without pressure, but too much pressure will cause overload or reinjury. I really didn’t want my recovery to take nearly a year, but too much pressure to move faster would have ended up making it take longer!
Reevaluation is the daily process of measuring progress and determining the best course of action. Setting a schedule gives you a framework for recovery, but it needs to shift and adapt to the results of the work. You may go faster or slower, or change or modify your methods along the way. Measurement is the tool for overcoming stagnation. Come up with a way to measure your progress in units small enough to track slow change over time. Without precise measurement it can seem like you’re making no progress, and progress is our chief motivator!
Lastly, you must remember. The many scars brought to us by age tell the story of our hard-fought wisdom, but they don’t improve our lives unless we integrate those lessons into our behavior. Lessons learned from injury can improve the quality of our future exercise as we perfect our relationship with our bodies, fine tune our actions to avoid future interruptions from injury, and allow us to give better advice to members of our community about their journeys to health and recovery.