Contributed by Forever Fit Science founder Grayson Fertig

With this site and the training programs I write I’m very interested in trying to answer the question of what’s the point?  What’s the point of exercise?  Fitness and well-being towards what end?  If you are an exerciser I’m sure you can come up with many reasons as to why You exercise, if you aren’t an exerciser I’m sure you can come up with many reasons as to why You should exercise and whomever You are all of those reasons are important.

As a personal trainer one of the expectations people have of me is that I’ll motivate them to continue to exercise.  Aware of this, in my preparation for classes and sessions, I’m always taking into account the “see you soon” factor.  In the beginning of the relationship it’s easy, I’m good at building trust, making people feel heard and seen, giving people an energizing workout, identifying areas to work on, creating a direction, and so we go.  As we go, to motivate people for the long haul I try to transition them to begin to think about their goals from a We perspective.  The clients who have been with me for years keep coming because what we do together supports what they do with the rest of their lives.  The We that I’m speaking of is not the two of us, instead it is the answer to the question of for whom other than yourself do you train?

I don’t want to be the person for whom a person trains.  I am in service to them so that they can be of service to others.  Yes their physical well-being becomes a source of energy so that they can do their work, but more than that one’s health serves as a totem of their highest self.  For me training is about creating a physical self that exudes and radiates well being.  With that light one can so much more effectively walk their path of action.

These people who have moved to the We still focus on themselves, but mostly they let me focus on them.  I become their housekeeper, their temple sweeper.  To do this I am constantly looking after my own physical peace.  For them and for myself I am constantly in search of who and what will support us.

Barefoot running became a movement when it was launched into the exercisers’ collective consciousness by the book Born to Run.  Starting a few years before the book was published(2009) I had been consciously using barefoot exercise as part of my warm-up routine when I was training as a sprinter.  The philosophy of it made sense.  I was inspired and motivated by barefoot training because returning to a state of barefoot-being gave me flashbacks to my childhood.  I really trust my childhood, it was a time of great joy and freedom for me, it was a time of unending play.

At that point in my athletic career I was seeking greatness as a member of the US Bobsled Team.  Bobsledding had been a dream of mine since childhood and so as I trained for it, I had a childlike mentality that the barefoot warm-ups supported.  I am a generalist when it comes to athletics believing much more in the Jim Thorpe or Bo Jackson model than the Peyton Manning model.  I trust the feeling that I can generate in my body that comes out of an athletic warm-up rather than a sports-specific warm-up.  I wasn’t the fastest member of the US Bobsled Team, but for me to run my fastest I was much better served by juggling a soccer ball as a warm-up instead of doing sprint-mechanic drills.  I did those too, but separately as a practice in and of itself.  Barefooting allowed me to double down on what worked for me, the shoeless warm-up is a playful warm-up and I was playing, living out a childhood dream of racing bobsleds.

I rely on playfulness to motivate my clients today, working on the assumption that at some point each and every person experienced physical bliss through Play.  I believe that as long as the sense of play is there the person will remain open to the possibility of physical change rather than remaining stuck or stagnant where they are.  Doing the work of changing course when it comes to the physical body takes time.  Meaning it takes time to develop a skill, but it also takes time to embody that skill.  I can and will achieve a yoga pose through mindful repetition, but then it will take another period of time of me executing the pose in order to go deeper and embody the pose.  I practice standing on my hands and then I practice being a person who stands on his hands.

This process for developing one skill takes time as well as resources like courage and patience.  As an athlete I don’t respond to being berated by coaches or teachers and he who practices is setting himself up to be berated by Failure.  Playfulness is the only approach that I have found that trumps Failure.  Meaning a child doesn’t learn to swim in an afternoon and so we make it playful as we engage the process of developing this life or death skill.  Playfulness, participating in physical activities with a childlike focus is what I see as our only option in truly moving past the obstacles.

Not only do Play and playfulness trump failure, but they also reduce the harms that we incur in our process of exercise.  What harms are we doing to ourselves, what harms have we done to ourselves, and what harms, if we stay the course, will we do to ourselves.    I’m interested in helping people re-think their exercise patterns so that a new method can emerge that accounts for what’s harming you and what’s not harming you.  This evaluation of your process establishes the course and each time you re-set the course you get closer and closer to the heart of the matter.

As soon as you remove your shoes you begin to relate to the boundary and limitations that your feet provide for you.  With shoes you can run further and faster, but can you run forever?  The barefoot running movement came about because chronically injured runners needed answers to address the harm they had done and the combined forces of Asics, Nike, New Balance and the like were not capable of producing a shoe that could teach people how to find a stride that was less harmful to their bodies.  To me running barefoot is something worth practicing because it allows you to consistently evaluate your process.

Your exercise process doesn’t have to include 5ks and marathons for you to incorporate barefoot running in your wellness strategy.  Barefoot running is a great teacher of Body Logic.  Body Logic is the internal dialogue that occurs naturally in all people where the demand of the activity is overwhelming enough that an effective strategy has to be formed to solve the challenge.  The level of physical challenge that a person is able to solve goes up with consistent exposure to activity that requires Body Logic.  Not to be confused with survival, although related, because we choose activities like rock climbing without a harness so that we can develop a more clear sense of the edge and therefore the strategies that we need to develop in order to succeed.

Barefoot running is a Body Logic Thought Experiment.  Thought Experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things.  Instead of investigating potential economic outcomes with theory, one takes off his shoes and investigates the physical outcomes of running with the action-input of barefoot running.

I think you will be impressed by the amount of bio-feedback you will receive from a barefoot running session.  Because you will not be able to put in the same distance as in shoes the challenge is to learn to trust and listen to that bio-feedback, as if it were your coach.  All of it is there to gently teach you how your body wants to run based on what it can feel.  Consistently seeking that highest form is what your body needs to achieve in order to run and jump forever.  Ultimately that is an End that I am always trying to motivate people to move towards.  My feeling is that the world needs more people who are seeking to achieve their highest physical form so that the generations that grow up watching us have a supply of physical role models to copy and be inspired by.

ps.  The best thing I did when I was starting to run barefoot was to carry shoes with me when I went.