Philosophy of Exercise
What is exercise? Why do people do it? Should you do it? Can we make it interesting to think about?
Notes / syllabus from Philosophy of Exercise, a class I taught at SPARC. I’ve made changes since camp ended, so some things are slightly different.
I am not super fit or athletic, but it seemed like something important to convey to the average SPARC student (relatively nerdy, more interested in introspection and intellectualism.)
Please feel free to take these notes and teach this class yourself if you’d like!
I wrote the content for the class, but got some help along the way.1
Philosophy of Exercise
TW: discussions of the human body and health. Intended to apply mostly to able-bodied people. I am aware that people may have various physical conditions that may stop them from resonating with the values I intend to teach in this class. Please take this as a warning to proceed with caution or stop reading if you believe you may be triggered by certain ideas.
All classes at SPARC are optional, and I noted this TW when announcing what my class would be about, half an hour before teaching any iterations of it. Anyone who would have been triggered had the right to opt out before even stepping foot in the classroom. I acknowledge that I probably didn’t handle this perfectly in general, and am happy to take tips from anyone who wants to give them.
I also explicitly avoided the low-hanging fruit when possible. “Exercise is good for your health” is a statement most people agree with by default. Not interesting to think about or teach for me, so I didn’t talk about that.
Central points (to keep in the back of your mind):
Learning transitions from mostly physical to mostly mental over time. Is this the right balance?
There is a sense in which our bodies are what we have the most control over. Thus they make an excellent training grounds in which we can practice agency.
Many people can learn chemical formulae, understand societal structures, and prove mathematical theorems. But due to heterogeneity, I am the only person in the world that can learn certain things about my body. And the same for any other reader, about their body.
Point 1: Learning, Physical vs. Mental
Opening: “Why do some people like exercise?” [2-3 minute silent brainstorm.]
Some answers I received: Health, mental or physical; it’s a social activity and it’s fun; I (and others) feel good after I do exercise; bodily aesthetics; feelings of improvement; turning the brain off; numbers go down (mile time, body weight, etc.); numbers go up (weight lifted); I learned about lactic acid buildup in a biology class, and it’s cool to figure out what that feels like.
Question: “What classes are you taking in school this year, or what classes did you take in school last year?” [Just have students go around and name classes.]
Some answers I received: math, physics, English, history, machine learning, sociology, psychology.
Class hand poll2: “For each person in the class, can they indicate how much they believe the class they named helps with the idea from the opening?”
[Example: “Does the class you named give you better bodily aesthetics? Does the class you named give you feelings of improvement? Is the class you named fun for you? This is intended to be funny.]
Important observation: “So it seems that what you took in school doesn’t exactly line up with why people do exercise. Therefore, exercise != school.” [This is also intended to be funny.] “However, there does seem to be some overlap. Let’s take a look at overlap in terms of learning.”
Question: “Has anyone spent an extended period of time observing a very small child or baby? What do they do?”
Some answers I received: Crawl around; put things in their mouths; make noise and cry; mimic older people; run around wildly and fall down; touch random things.
Important observation: Babies and small children have a very physical orientation toward the world. That is how they learn.
They open and close doors, stick their heads into trash cans, and touch and feel all sorts of different objects.
They have no fear of hot pans or sharp knives (that’s why you have to remove those objects when you have a baby!)
At every given moment, they are learning in a way that we can’t. (Most of us no longer learn anything from opening and closing doors or sticking our heads into trash cans!)
Babies are figuring out what we’ve already internalized — that things don’t disappear when you can’t see them and that trash smells bad.
So therefore we get a graph that looks a little like this. Note that I taught this class to teenagers, so that’s where I set the positive horizontal axis to end.
Question: What do you make of this graph?
I found that the students often wanted to know what learning physically could look like as a teenager. Here are some exercise-related ideas that other students and I generated3:
Learning how it feels to be at mile 1, or 4, or 10 of a run. Which muscles are sore? How is your breathing?
Understanding the difference between the feeling of hitting a tennis ball well or badly. How do the vibrations change?
In karate some configurations of hands, feet, and bodies are balanced and some are not. Which configurations are good?
Observing how the easy reps feel vs. the last few really hard reps feel while lifting weights. What does it feel like for the body to put in really hard effort with just a few muscles (for some isolation exercise) vs. many muscles (for a huge compound exercise?)
Is there a similarity between force production in sports and force production in playing piano?
Point 2: Practicing Agency
Opening 14: Let’s say I need to get a bag of rice in a rural Chinese village to a location three miles north of its current location. How do I do this? (Assume I know the coordinates of the village.) [2-3 minute group discussion; assume you will be asked a lot of questions.]
Some ideas: pay a person in the village money to make sure they execute the delivery, get a drone, get a helicopter, coordinate with the local or national government to make sure the drone isn’t shot out of the air, raise funds for the drone or helicopter by working at a quant firm. It turns out that this is a hard problem to solve.
Opening 2: What did it take for me to teach this class at SPARC this year? [2-3 minute group discussion; assume you will be asked a lot of questions.]
Some ideas: be selected as a counselor in the first place, run the class idea by Yan (the director), generate SPARC-like ideas about exercise, buy plane tickets and call United when they lost my luggage. Also lots of moving parts.
Important observation: to get things done in the world, to achieve complex, interconnected goals, you need to interface with other people, systems, and institutions.
Demonstration: What would it take for me to do a bodyweight squat? (Do the squat.) As it turns out, pretty much nothing.
What would it take for me to grab this box of tissues? To do a pushup? To walk outside the room? [Any examples involving body movement are fine.]
[Here I would reiterate the trigger warning from before. The next part very much does not apply to a certain subset of people, including some physically disabled people and people with other conditions.]
Important observation: What I am in most control of, at any given moment, is my physical body.
Not in the sense that I control the way my heart pumps blood, but in the sense that if I wanted to, I could just go out for a run.
We can view exercise as a means of practicing our agency in a controlled system with fewer variables. This is great for practice and confidence-building.
When you learn how objects fall in physics, you don’t start by including air resistance! That’s not a good way to practice getting intuition for gravity. Other examples in other domains exist: you always begin with the basics to get a handle for the concepts.
Obviously, exercise is not unique in providing a way to practice agency in a controlled system with fewer variables. Video games are actually great for this!
Still, the world is big and complicated. Exercise is one way to hold onto some of the things you can hold onto. And sometimes that is really good and necessary.
Point 3: Heterogeneity
Opening: what does this word mean?
Important observation: heterogeneity exists in humans. We are all different. What works for one of us may not work for another.
Question: Ask each student in the room to name a different type of exercise.
Important observation: we’ve named [# of students] types of exercise, and we’re not even 1% of the way through all the different types of exercise out there.
There are many, many types of exercise in the world, and I claim that most people can find at least one that works for them, even for people make the blanket statement “I don’t like exercise.” Climbing is different from running is different from bodybuilding is different from yoga is different from hiking is different from biking is different from—
What I, Andrew, like doing does not have to be what student A likes doing, or what student B likes doing, or what student C likes doing. [This works best if you know the students a bit and know that certain students do engage in certain types of exercise.] That’s the heterogeneity idea at play here.
Important observation: Related to the prior observation, exercise allows you to learn about the one thing in the world that only you can learn about to a certain degree — no one else can tell you how you will feel while doing any given form of exercise.
The world is huge, and there are so many things out there. But most people can [or, have the capacity to] learn the Chinese Remainder Theorem, or learn how the Allies won World War II, or learn about the branches of the United States Government.
Only you can learn how you feel 15 feet high up a rock wall; only you can learn how you breathe and how your muscles ache many miles into a long run; only you can run the experiments necessary to learn these things about the world.
It’s really awesome that there are many, many things out there that anyone can learn. It is similarly awesome that there are many, many things out there that only you can learn!
Closing: it would be bad to teach a class about the philosophy of exercise without any exercise.
Demonstration: do a bunch of different kinds of pushups. [Wall pushups, hands-elevated pushups, knee pushups, standard pushups, diamond pushups, etc.] Emphasize: “This is a pushup. This is a pushup. This is a pushup.”
Then tell the students to do ten pushups. The end!
Thanks to Miles Kodama for support, encouragement, and good ideas; thanks to the SPARC JC team for reviewing my notes; thanks to Yan Zhang for helping me find a working structure for the class.
Use one of your hands as a vertical axis, and use the other hand to mark a “point” on that axis. In this case, a high-up point might be “this class helps a lot with [the idea from earlier]”, and a down-low point might be “this class does not help a lot with [the idea from earlier].” But you can put your other hand at any point, which helps with some sort of continuity between the extremes.
I strongly recommend generating more examples for yourself. There are basically infinitely many of them!
Intentionally a bit vague, could be improved. But people always found it funny so I stuck with it for the three iterations I taught.