Failing At Your New Fitness Goals Already?
BY JEN WIDERSTROM
I was listening to an interview with Dave Grohl recently (the drummer for Nirvana and the founder and lead singer of the Foo Fighters, in case you haven’t heard of him!). He mentioned something in the interview that really surprised me: it’s his dream to learn to tap dance. It took me aback to discover that he had that interest, because I wouldn’t have thought that tap dancing would be at all related to drumming or playing the guitar. But he made an association between the two skills that really got my wheels turning.
He said that he thought he would be good at tap dancing because it requires the same limb independence as drumming. In order to be a good drummer, you have to work to create new neural pathways between your brain and your hands and feet in order to play the complex rhythms. You burn in these different pathways of movement through a connection that’s both brain to body, and body to body. But while you’re learning, the key is, you have to slow down and master the basics of the skills before you can go faster.
Photo by Nicholas Jeffries
I thought that was really powerful— it was such an in my face lightbulb of how we all learn. If we are going to build new habits, learn new patterns and new skills, then we have to slow down to create those new pathways before we can master them. I thought this analogy of movement lent so well to what we are all feeling as we take on new habits in 2022, because we probably aren’t giving ourselves enough time needed to learn them.
Whatever new habits and skill sets you are working to take on right now, start the journey with an expectation of a different pace of adaptation and acclimation than the end result would be.
Allow yourself a different pace. Babies learn to turn on their sides, then they crawl, then they walk, then they run, then they tumble. If you want to be a better public speaker, runner, or pianist, or if you want to learn a new language or master a new lift in the gym…give yourself the time Dave Grohl took to learn the new neural pathways as a drummer before you judge your performance with your newly learned skill.
Channel the willingness to be a beginner and work on your limb independence. Pieces of your greater health puzzle work separately at first, so that they can then work together. Start slow: beat your health drums very slowly, then you can pick up time and be an expert at whatever you’re learning once you’ve mastered it enough to become second nature.
–Jen Widerstrom, Founder
P.S. Remember that no matter what you're going through right now, you don't have to do it alone! There are others like you in our community, where we interact on a daily basis, fight our demons, share our victories, and watch over each other as friends and accountability partners.
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