Athletes, try this one on for size.

You don’t need to warm up. You don’t need to cool down.

You need only to listen, to find that razor’s edge of attention where you are focused both on your internal state and on the task at hand, and really where those two supposedly different realities merge into one experience. And then, from there … why be anywhere else?

This doesn’t mean you don’t likely engage in a progressive preparation of your tissues for the activity you’re about to do. It means you drop the routine-ness of it. You admit you don’t know how this particular movement practice will go, admit that you truly are a blank slate (and that really is a feeling of admittance, in my experience, and not an allowing of a blank slate as people often say; it’s already the case, whether you “allow” it or not!).

We’re closing the gap, the “I’m just doing my warmup and then I’ll pay attention.”

A wisdom of progression exists in the moment of movement. A pre-conceived warmup and cool down can exist only in the past, the one that we remember and apply, to more or less affect, to now.

We might as well pay attention. It’s already happening.

To the journey, LB