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exercise averse? outdoors (even a park) is your gym

I used to know a brilliant Reichian therapist who disdained exercise machines. “They make the body stupid”, she said. She believed that physical exercise should take the form of conscious, pleasurable movement that had a reason, not something done mindlessly while watching tv or reading. I’ve thought of this often as I’ve wondered at my…

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skipping as exercise (we dare you to try it)

(Video link here.) The other day I was in the park across the way doing my ad-hoc workout while listening to the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s My Heart, My Life on my iPhone.  (Click to listen while you read.)  There was NO WAY I couldn’t dance to that music. Suddenly skipping seemed like the rhythmically perfect move to make.…

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hula hoop dreams (exercise as play)

A post in Zen Habits echoed what we’ve been thinking lately: I don’t do boring exercise. If I hate doing something, I stop doing it. I don’t have enough life left to waste doing stuff I hate. A big part of blogging is sitting on your ass, surfing thrillingly, but virtually; we don’t get enough…

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“get up off that thing”: improv exercise for home or work

We’ve gotten a little lazy of late, since we dislike going to the gym (yellow walls with black floors under florescent lights) and we spend so many long hours at our desks. We could get stymied by our slide into laziness by comparing ourselves to all those buff self-disciplined people that faithfully climb onto the…

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Dept of X-Ray Vision: How to See Time

Time management educator Marydee Sklar helps entrepreneurs and other scattered creative types develop a kind of x-ray vision to antidote their often inefficient and energy-draining work habits. I’ve found the essential principles of her method mightily useful, in tandem with poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s approach.

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