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Fear, Fear Avoidance and Strategies to Master Fear

Fear.


This is a topic that has long fascinated me.


It's very relevant to the work I do in helping people overcome their injuries and return to their life before injury.


There's a very real thing we call "Fear Avoidance"

Here's a very real example from when my friend and Wild Geese Fitness Training co conspirator Seba was badly injured in a motorcycle crash.


Seb had really done a number on his knee, I'll save you the gory details, but safe to say, it was touch and go for a while as to how well he'd recover. But recover he did with the help of myself and Dublin based top physio Andy Watson of Raglan Sports Medicine. The recovery got to the stage where we hit the place we we had to get Seb back to having confidence in the knee. He could walk no problem he was doing squats no problem. But we needed trust. So I put him on a block and told him to jump off. The block was 4 inches, around 20 cm. Onto mats. Seb froze. He started sweating. This was fear.


Genuine, subconscious, real fear.


This was the block in the road that needed cleared for him to continue on his journey back to strength. So we stuck with it, put another mat in front of the step to further reduce the jump height. We did some breathing, positive reinforcement and eventually Seb took that step and jumped.


Without hesitation I had him back on the block and jumping again. And again.

Until he realised there was nothing to be afraid of, he was capable, and he started doing it himself.


We had cleared that roadblock called fear and fear avoidance.

And the rest of his rehab and training just leaped forwards from that day on.


Fear raises it's head in many instances. You've felt fear, I've felt fear. It's completely normal. Dealing with it is a vast topic of discussion. We can look at it through the biological / physiological / neuroscience eyes as simply mechanisms. Which helps to remove the very real phycological elements and helps us analyse fear.


The fear response, known as the "fight, flight or freeze" response or better again, Sympathetic Arousal, is in terms of mechanism, the same regardless of the stimulus. Sebs body was responding to jumping off that 20cm block the same as yours might have been going into an important job interview, or walking out into an important sporting event, or suddenly being confronted with a spider in the toilet


This video clip from free running documentarist "Jimmy the Giant" talks about fear from the free running perspective. And if you've ever seen free runners doing massive jumps between buildings or over balconies, you'll understand that in the performance of their sport, managing fear is a very important part of their performance. And Jimmy has done a great job in this short YouTube clip in breaking down the strategies, helped by interviews with tow of the best known big risk free runners. Take 15 minutes to watch this. Don't worry about the free running bias, because the strategies and mechanisms explained are universal principles that you can take straight away and apply to your own situations:




If this helps you, please let me know. If this raises questions, then drop me a line and I'll do my best to answer them in future blog posts on the subject.


All the best


 
 
 

23/10/21 - Chi Gung Washing Away Set


Chi Gung is a practice that came out of the Chinese Martial practices of old.

Usually associated with Tai Chi, which is usually associated these days with the Mindfulness crowd.


I've nothing against mindfulness, it's a useful concept, but in my personal opinion it's a little watered down.


But then so is Tai Chi and most of the associated practices.


I learned this nearly 20 years ago (and no, I don't practice I much as I ought to...) from a martial arts teacher named Sifu Mark Rasmus when I met him in Australia.


Mark taught old school Tai Chi, Wing Chun, Chi Gung and a few other arts. The training was TOUGH! This washing away set, in fact all the Chi Gung sets would leave you mentally and physically exhausted, some more than others. But the adaptation that followed was exceptional, the mind and body just felt sharper and overall health and recovery was second to none.


I fit at the time, but hit new levels with this training.


The inspiration for this session is simply that I haven't been feeling at the top of my game this last while. I'd say the recent treatment from David McGettigan has opened up some really old injury compensations and my system is doing a lot of reorganising. So the goal of the Chi Gung is to aid that reorganisation.

Slow movement allows for a nice awareness of how we're achieving motion, the split stance aids in loading through my old ankle issues that David worked on, the breath keeps the CNS arousal down even though the muscles are working, especially the legs. There's a lot to Chi Gung and the associated practices that stretch way beyond the modern definitions of mindfulness, and I'm not going nearly as deep as Rasmus had us go back in the day.


text continues under this video clip:


If I've whet your whistle with this post and you're curios as to learning more about Chi Gung. I have a video series available for purchased from Vimeo in Demand that leads you through the most basic starting practice for Chi Gung, nothing as involved as I'm showing in the clip above.

Here's the links:


And if you have questions, feel free to ask


Regards

Dave Hedges



 
 
 

Self Image and Story Telling

Have you ever considered the story you tell about yourself?

Have you thought about how you think about you?


In my career as a fitness trainer and movement therapist the biggest steps forward any client has ever made always came about after a shift in mindset.


When a person recognises how they arrived at this point in their life, then they can get to work on changing things to get to a better point in their life.


Is their recurrent back pain a result of operating in a state of heightened arousal all day every day?

Is the knee not healing because we grew up thinking knee pain was inevitable after a certain age?

Are we ignoring that tightness in the shoulder because it'll just go away?

Are we holding back from performing at our best because a Doctor told us we had to?


These are all stories. These stories affect our self image.


We might start thinking we're broken, defective, unable to perform.


Once you start thinking along those lines, it can be a slippery slope, you start getting old pretty fast.

But what if we could change that story, realise that we're tougher than we realise, that the knee doesn't have to hurt that a sore shoulder doesn't have to be normal?#


If we start to question these things, doors open.

We start to grow

We start to live fuller lives

We can become a better version of ourselves.


Have a think about your stories.

Can you tell a better one?


Regards

Dave Hedges

www.DaveHedges.net

 
 
 
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