Studio Schedule Week of 9/27/2026 | Body Economics and The Abundance of Less
Long-exposure light trails in blue, orange, and gold weaving across a dark background, evoking energy in motion.
image by Mahdi Bafande via Pexels
For those of you seeing me this week and asked after our new permanent location, my reply has been along the lines of, “I’m awash in abundance!” Similarly to the celebration of Sukkot, I’m grateful for the opportunity to welcome new movers to our group classes and appointments, loving making decisions on finishes for the new space, and appreciate learning more about the SF permitting process. Thanks for sharing in my enthusiasm!
In my reading this week I learned about the technological potential to recapture wasted heat energy from appliances like refrigerators and using it for heating homes and businesses. There is something so perverse about creating heat while refrigerating, so I’m excited scientists are figuring out how to recapture that energy. It got me thinking about how much wasted energy our bodies generate while clinging to old movement patterns that no longer serve us, and what if we could find better efficiency through our movement patterns, saving energy in the process? In trying to strengthen our hamstrings, how much do we spin our wheels because we’re gripping our hip flexors? What happens when we hold our breath when doing abdominal work — are we really working our “core” efficiently, or are we working against ourselves?
GYROTONIC® exercise approaches this energy loss by seeking more economy of movement. We use rhythm to ride on through the exercise sequences, and imagery to bridge the rest. You’ll hear me say ridiculous things like, “imagine that you are only a skeleton, no muscles,” or “don’t worry — no one has ever crumpled into a puddle from being too relaxed.” But wait. Don’t I teach exercise, which implies increased muscular effort? How can I exercise and be relaxed?
Working inefficiently in the body is a way we trick ourselves into thinking “I’m maxxing” (more on that term in the links below) — I’m working harder, therefore it must be a better workout. Finding ease and efficiency cuts through the noise of body busy-work so purposeful strengthening can start.
It isn't always easy to loosen the reward loop that says hard-equals-better and begin from a sense of ease. You might wonder how ease could ever build strength using this approach. Once we practice shedding the extra noise that can impede our strengthening and reeducation goals, the work can actually begin. Holding on to patterns our thinking minds already know need to go is just us getting in our own way.
It can take a lot of mental capacity initially, but then you start to move better without as much mental energy. The prime example of this is walking efficiency. How much of your muscular effort goes into propelling you forward towards your destination, and how much is spent shifting from side to side, bopping up and down, or limping along due to pain? Inefficient patterns crop up for a variety of reasons throughout our lives, and it takes awareness and maintenance to get ourselves back into an efficient state of being.
On the other side of the coin, hyper-mobile bodies often have less proprioceptive awareness, which can increase their need to learn how to add self-resistance as a stimulus. This addition can help increase the awareness of their body in space, using muscular effort to strengthen joints and have a strategy to support their instability. We start a workout from ease, then fold in the ability to add tension and inner resistance depending on the use case. Even for those of us who are not hyper-mobile, learning to relax our neck muscles gives our trunk and pelvic muscles the chance to support our posture and limbs rather than the neck going it alone.
In reality, economy of movement gives us more energy capital that we can invest in other areas of our life. We can wander just a little further on the trail while hiking, feel free to take the stairs rather than wait for the elevator, or have enough juice leftover to be fully present for conversations with family and friends. When we calibrate our effort and reinvest in ourselves, we find abundance not from doing more, but from wasting less.
