The one with belly fat loss, the wild plan and the dry salads

I want to tell you about a skateboard drill.

Specifically, I want to tell you about the moment in my training, when one of our 'looks stoic but is really a mischievous ratbag' coaches stuck his nose in to 'see if we could make it harder'. For harder, read more ridiculous, and yes, harder. I was doing a movement I call the Caterpillar Pushup — a Russian pushup to pike slide on one skateboard, which is exactly as crazy as it sounds, it's a very 'thinky' movement that is coretastic too and frankly that is why I love it — his challenge, casual as ever:

"Can you do that on two skateboards?"

It doesn't take much for me to get on board with a wild plan so, dearest Reader, the ridiculousness began.

It turns out you cannot perform a Caterpillar Pushup on two skateboards when you are laughing so hard that you are essentially crawling along the gym floor one skateboard at a time in a direction that could generously be described as forward.

It ended up being a race against the boys.

I didn't win.

I am blaming the laughing. That is my excuse and I am keeping it.

Here is the thing about that laugh though.

It wasn't just fun. It was, according to an embarrassingly large amount of real proven scientific research (the serious kind), medicine.

I get asked about shifting belly fat a lot. It is one of those topics that ladies sidle up beside me and whisper in my ear like it is their most embarrassing secret and that I have the magic answer they have been waiting to hear. And I understand — I do — because we have been told for years that belly fat is a problem and the solution is some combination of crunches, dry salad, joyless nights out, green tea, crunches, hours of cardio, gazing wistfully at chocolate and well…more crunches.

So I wrote a blog post about it because that secret my ladies are asking for, I have it.

It's called 20 Exercises That Burn Belly Fat — Spoiler: It's Not What You Think.

I'm going to tell you two things that are on the list and let you read the rest yourself.

Number one: laughing.

Not laughing while doing sit-ups. Just laughing. The kind that makes your eyes leak and your abs ache and your carefully applied mascara migrate south. Genuine, unplanned, catches-you-off-guard laughter activates your core, reduces cortisol — the stress hormone that tells your body to store fat, particularly around the middle — and does something to your nervous system that no amount of cardio can replicate.

Number two: crochet.

I know. Stay with me.

The list is here — and I promise it will make you feel significantly better about every walk you took, every dance around the kitchen, every hula hoop you picked up at the end of a Calm Strength class while complaining that your hips don't work like that anymore.

They do. They definitely do.

The thing that connects the skateboard race and the belly fat list and the hula hoop and the dancing in the kitchen is this.

Joy movement — movement that happens because something is fun, not because you are trying to earn something or burn something or fix something — is doing more for your body and your nervous system than most of us give it credit for.

We have been trained to count only the things that hurt a bit (or a lot). The sessions that feel serious. The workouts that look like workouts.

But your body knows the difference between a workout and a skateboard race. One lets you challenge yourself, push harder, find that failure point, build strength, feel great but a bit broken. The other lets you challenge yourself, push harder, find that failure point, build strength, feel great and know you have worked afterward but you didn't actually know you were doing all those things, and you will sleep better because your cortisol is lower, your dopamine got just the right spike and you walked around with your head a little higher for the rest of the day.

One trains you for life, the other trains you to feel alive.

One Thing For You — The Joy Movement Experiment

This week, do one thing that makes you laugh or feels like play.

Not a workout. Not exercise with a goal. Something that has absolutely no business being on a fitness plan.

Dance around the kitchen. Get the hula hoop out. Try something on two skateboards. Lift cooked chicken into your mouth with genuine enthusiasm. It counts. It all counts.

Notice how you feel afterwards. Not in your muscles. In the rest of you.

From the Trail

The full list of 20 exercises — including the ones that will make you feel vindicated about everything you've been doing while telling yourself it doesn't count — is on the blog.

A gift — for you, and for someone you think might need it.

The Way Home Daily is a card deck I built for the moments between sessions. 36 questions across seven categories — Check-In, Needs, Strength, Nervous System, Permission, Walking, Body Wisdom. One question. Answer it, or just sit with it.

It normally costs £9.

As a thank you for being part of Letters from the Trail, I'd love you to share it with someone who might need it.

Here's a code that makes it completely free for both of you: [CODE]

No catch. No expiry pressure. Just a question for you and a question for someone you love who might be ready to hear one.

Until next time, keep walking the trail.

Becky x

P.S. Harley and Flynn were not involved in the skateboard incident, we are still working on their skateboarding skills.

P.P.S. If the belly fat post makes you want to go deeper on what joy movement actually does to your nervous system — and why the things that feel like cheating are often the things that work best — Inner Needs starts exactly there.