Strength, Power, Endurance, & Flexibility

Strength, power, endurance, and flexibility? Why not just say “stretching and exercise”? Because, as designers know, sometimes summarizing something to make it seem simple actually adds complexity by obscuring key details. In fact, if you’ve been trying to fix a fissure but have yet to see success, you may be bumping up against the same step that often stymies scientists, frustrates philosophers, and eludes engineers. What’s that? Achieving an accurate and actionable understanding of reality. Fortunately, this section can help.

Remember my protocol goal: muscular relaxation is necessary, it can be learned, and I needed to learn it. To achieve my goal, I had to focus on two aspects of muscular movement—making the right muscles work well together, and making them work well in isolation. That calls for a little concentration.

Giving attention to the various muscles and actions that make defecation possible, though, might seem unusual. Regulated largely by the astounding enteric nervous system, most of our digestion is virtually automatic. When it works well, defecation feels like a simple, single process, practiced since birth. So when fixing a fissure, I found that it’s beneficial to sense both the overall process as well as its specific parts and operations in a variety of circumstances. To do that, a little Silicon Valley influence is helpful. How so?

Much of today’s world runs on the electronification of logic, the centuries-old technique of trying to clarify truths, facts, and the best way forward. As I’ve practiced it, using modern logic starts with identifying specific items and their attributes, and then analyzing them together and separately until reality becomes clear—perhaps by focusing on particular effects or taking certain influences off the table. You can then build on that clarity to reap increasingly richer rewards.

You can practice the same clarifying precision with your own body, especially when working with our remarkable musculature. For expert guidance, consider consulting a qualified professional, such as a licensed physical therapist.

Here’s what helped me:

Meet your physique. As a designer, I knew the body’s basic parts and systems, but I had never gotten around to doing a full technical review of human anatomy. From experience, I can say that if you’re not familiar with your complete physical make up, now is a great time to get acquainted with the many parts that make up your entire self. As you do, you might think briefly and logically about each part and its attributes: its shape and composition, how and why it works the way it does, and how it interacts with other items. A quality reference guide will help. What you learn might surprise you.

Find your diamond. Before starting my protocol, I tried to promote healing blood flow by exercising regularly, mostly running. On one particular run in the nearby hills, I deliberately tried to relax my entire pelvic region, which enabled each muscle to move freely. As I followed the slopes of the trail, I soon noticed that several of the muscles responded by flexing up and down slightly with each stride, much like a tiny trampoline. The movement wasn’t very comfortable, and I was already dealing with some pretty intense fissure pain, but that run helped me focus on my pelvic floor in a way that I didn’t recall having done before.

As I later learned, the pelvic floor muscles are arranged in a shape loosely resembling a diamond, and they work in coordination to accomplish a range of activities, including defecation. For me, learning to “find” the muscles in this diamond by sensing their individual and coordinated work had a direct connection to my goal.

Isolate muscles. If you already use muscle isolation, such as when lifting weights or participating in precision-oriented sports, then the sensation of muscular focus may be familiar to you. If not, try this—it’s important:

1. Have an item available with some heft that’s also easy to control while lifting—light dumbbell, partially-filled bucket, backpack with a few books inside, bag of groceries, toolbox, purse—something like that. Next, extend your right arm and grab the item with your right hand. Now raise the item until your elbow is completely bent, like a dumbbell curl, and then lower it. With all your muscles engaged, it should be easy to do.
2. Now perform the same motion, but really concentrate on using only your bicep muscles to raise the item. Do that a few times, and while you do, perhaps think about the remarkable ability we have to initiate a goal in the mind and have it translate immediately into precise mechanical activity.
3. Now perform the same motion a few more times, but concentrate on using only your tricep muscles. Other muscles will engage based on how we’re built, but if you do it right, you’ll clearly feel tension in your tricep area.
4. Now perform the same motion a few more times, but concentrate on using only your forearm muscles. Your bicep might engage more quickly than with the triceps, but you should feel how you’re leveraging two distinct sets of muscles to lift the load.
5. Now perform the same motion a few more times while concentrating on your shoulder muscles. Again, other muscles will engage as you lift the load, but you should feel distinct tension somewhere in your shoulder. Also notice how the position of your arm might change slightly to accommodate being lifted by a different muscle group.
6. For completeness, repeat the above process with your left arm. You might find it interesting to notice whether the two sides of your body perform differently, and in what ways.

If you didn’t clearly sense the difference between coordinated whole-arm movement and isolated muscle movement in the previous steps, you might try using isolated muscle movements as you go about your day; even simple motions can provide a great opportunity to concentrate on specific muscles.

Along with office work, I occasionally do light construction. To keep myself working safely and consistently, I’ve learned to depend on muscle isolation for certain situations. Once it clicked that I could bring the same technique to fissure repair, I found that it translated very well. Details are coming up in The Goal.

Keep blood supply high. Sensing how your muscles work alone and together is a step to achieving the goal of muscle relaxation. But muscle relaxation has its own goal—encouraging better blood supply to the fissure site so that the body can heal itself. This is especially important for chronic fissures in the posterior midline (back middle) position, which tend to have a lower blood supply. So, along with deliberate relaxation, any sport or physical exercise that improves blood circulation could, in theory, be helpful. However, from my experience, please consider balancing any strenuous activity with the next few points.

Evaluate your progress. Use a logical mental checklist to regularly evaluate whether your current level and type of physical activity is helping or hindering your repair. If your attempts to encourage blood flow end up irritating, inflaming, or tightening already tense muscles, you may be working at cross purposes.

Enjoy alternatives. A frustrating facet of fissures, especially for those that have gone chronic, is their on-again, off-again behavior. They can emit engulfing pain for hours and then go quiet quickly, making you feel like things are back to normal. For a while, when things felt “fine,” I’d resume my usual level and style of exercise, including running and light abdominal exercises (sit-ups, ab crunches), but I’m not sure that my “healthy” activities actually had a healing effect. Similarly, I noticed a possible mechanical connection between some exercises and repair progress, as if certain movements were causing an unhelpful physical tug in my pelvic region. In retrospect, I would have lightened up on the running and avoided any exercise that either put my tailbone in contact with a hard surface or placed a high demand on my pelvic floor. My personal data are inconclusive here, so let me just suggest that if your workout routine stresses your pelvic region, it might make sense to enjoy alternative exercises for a while.

Favor flexibility. In my experience, increased stress from almost any source—sports, physical labor, emotions, deadlines, you name it—can find its way into almost any body part, including the pelvic floor. So rather than pin sphincteric tension to a personality type or psychological profile, I found that it’s more logical and productive to start at mechanical effects. In other words, if increased blood circulation is necessary for healing, then favor a cycle of stretching–activity–stretching–rest that will clearly help you keep your muscles flexible and relaxed. If you suspect that stress is coming mostly from a non-physical source (such as anxiety about passing or enduring a crucial test of some kind), then it may help to focus on physical flexibility first, which will give you a more powerful platform upon which to address more complicated concerns.

All that said, it’s time to start bringing everything together. Let’s head for the goal.

Last updated: June 2019