When Your Feelings Change, Your Body Changes Too

This post was automatically translated by AI from the Japanese original.

For about two and a half years now, I’ve been going to personal stretching sessions.

Ever since I was a kid, my body has been stiff. In a forward bend, my hands stay about 25 cm (10 inches) off the floor.

(People usually go, “Seriously?!” 🤣)

I’d also always had a slouch and bad posture, which bothered me.

Even when I thought about trying Pilates or yoga, I was too stiff to get into the poses in the first place, and I couldn’t keep up with the people around me 💦

I’d kind of given up, thinking maybe I’d be stiff for the rest of my life.

But recently my flexibility has improved, and my hands now reach the floor in a forward bend ✨✨
I’m so happy 😆

Looking back,

I think this change happened because I got on this track:

something inside me changed → I could act without forcing myself

It went like this:

At first, I wanted to change how stiff I was
↓
I couldn’t do the poses from books or YouTube, so I couldn’t stick with stretching on my own
↓
I thought, “I’ll leave it to a pro,” and started going to personal stretching

For a long time, I believed that being stiff was something to be ashamed of.

When I was a kid, people told me, “If you stretch every day, you’ll get flexible in no time!”
But I couldn’t keep it up, and even when I did it, I didn’t get any more flexible, so I thought maybe something was wrong with me.

But as I kept going to stretching and talking with my trainer, I learned that being stiff isn’t my fault.

I’ve done desk work for decades, so my lower body got stuck.
And because I never needed to move my body in big ways, my range of motion simply got smaller.
That’s what they taught me.

Thanks to that, I started to think:
being stiff isn’t something to be ashamed of.
Maybe even a stiff body can change?

For someone as stiff as me, stretching = pain.

But as I had stretching done at an intensity that suited me, I began to understand the good feeling of my body lengthening.
(It still hurts, but I started to feel the good part too.)

Around then, my body sense began to change, and

stretching = suffering
↓
stretching = hurts so good

is what it became.

And I started to feel how great it would be to touch the floor or do the splits, and I think I could honestly wish, “I want to feel my body stretching out more softly!”

Then my trainer changed, and the new one started giving me all kinds of suggestions, like where to prioritize getting flexible and what to do for daily self-stretching.

At that time I was told, “If you don’t exercise enough, your body gets stiff, so let’s move little by little.”

But I had no exercise habit, so I couldn’t enjoy working out at all, and I had no motivation either…

Then this happened:

Watching K-pop idols on YouTube
↓
They have slim bodies and beautiful abs ✨ and I started to admire them
↓
I got interested in training, which I’d never cared about
↓
I started going to the gym, walking and doing strength training
↓
Moving, sweating and getting pleasantly tired feels good
↓
I wanted to do more
↓
Even while stretching, I could feel by touch that my body was in a different state

That’s how I changed.

What amazed me when I looked back was this:

When your feelings change, your actions change too.

With my first feelings, it was:
Being stiff = shameful.
Stretching = painful.
Exercise = a hassle, not my thing.

If I’d kept going with those feelings, it would have been painful, and I’d have given up before my body changed.

(Apparently it takes at least three months for the body to change, and I could never have lasted that long 💦)

But because I feel that stretching = feels good, I want to enjoy that good feeling even more ♡

And because I feel that exercise = cool and a pleasant kind of tired, I want to move my own body too ♡

Rather than forcing myself through hardship to change, doing it because I want to makes everything go this smoothly.

It was a new discovery for me.

▼ The story of how I started Pilates to move my body even more

My Body Keeps Changing: One Year of Pilates (in Japanese)