Flow

First, a disambiguation, because I have written about something else with the same name and I do not want you carrying the wrong idea into eight episodes.

There is a season in this publication about flow, meaning the psychological state: absorbed attention, time distorting, the self dropping away, the thing Csikszentmihalyi named in 1975 after watching climbers and surgeons and chess players describe the same experience in the same words.

This is not that.

This season is about a rope. A physical rope, eight or nine feet of it, with some weight to it, swung around your body in patterns. The track it points at is called Flow because the movement is continuous and flowing, and the name collision is unfortunate and entirely mine. Nothing in this season is a claim about your mental state.

Right. Now, the rope.

The person most associated with this is David Weck, and he is living and runs a business built on it, so let me set out my handling as I did last season. I will tell the history and describe the movement in my own words. I will not reproduce his material, I will not use his trademarked terms as though they were generic descriptions, and the free track this points at is not named after him.

His story is unusual for this volume, because it does not start in a laboratory or a lineage. It starts with a bad back and a survival job.

He began personal training in 1992 in New York, which he has described as the work that paid the bills while he pursued acting. Then, at some point in the following years, he developed chronic lower back pain and had it for about a year.

The scenes between are imagined: a small apartment, a stability ball, a man in pain trying whatever might help. What is on the record is that he fell off the ball several times, and that his response to falling off a ball repeatedly was to cut it in half.

That is the origin of the BOSU, which he invented in 1999. The name is an acronym for Both Sides Up. The prototype was a stability ball with a flat base so it could not roll away from you, and he used it to rehabilitate his own back before using it with clients ranging from nine years old to sixty-eight.

If you have been inside a commercial gym in the last twenty-five years you have seen one. It became ubiquitous.

I want to pause on that, because there is something worth noticing before we get anywhere near ropes.

This is an invention that came out of a training floor rather than a research programme. A man with a problem, a piece of equipment that was not working, and a hacksaw. Nobody funded it, nobody peer reviewed it, and it went on to be one of the most widely distributed pieces of fitness equipment of its era.

That cuts both ways, and both ways matter for this season.

On one side, practical invention by people who work with bodies all day is a real source of knowledge and this volume has been consistently respectful of it. Jahn built the parallel bars in a field. A dentist took standing practice into a hospital. Not everything useful arrives through a journal.

On the other side, an invention that never went through any evaluation has never had to survive one, and the fitness industry is full of equipment that sold enormously and did approximately nothing. Ubiquity is a measure of distribution, not of effect.

Hold both of those, because they are exactly the tension this whole season sits in.

Five years after the BOSU, he picked up a rope and decided not to jump through it.

Next episode: the decision.