Building Healthy Soil

A metaphor for exercise and life

One of the most frustrating experiences with behavior change is “losing steam” and “falling off the wagon.” After weeks or months of momentum, the progress halts. We regress. Sometimes we stop the activity altogether.

We go from running every day to not at all. From writing every week to barely ever. We forget to floss and never start again. We finish thirty days of Whole30 and immediately revert to old eating habits.

Given it was so easy to see this pattern in myself and others, it frustrated me when I couldn’t avoid it. Until I discovered a new perspective in an unexpected place.

Learning in the garden

When I first started gardening I approached it like I did most things. I dove in. I raced to dig up the grass. I rushed to plant a bunch of vegetables and flowers. I added compost and fertilizer to encourage growth.

Most things died.

I had neglected a key problem. My soil sucked. It was hard-compacted North Carolina clay. There was no drainage. The compost and soil amendments washed away. The struggling plants required constant attention and care. It was exhausting and frustrating.

So I looked for a better approach and found Gia’s Garden, a book on embracing permaculture in the backyard. In it, Toby Hemingway describes the importance of "Bringing the Soil to Life”:

"Think of soil life as the base of a pyramid. Stacked upon this base are the plants, then insects, and finally animals, each dependent on the creature below it.”

So I followed Toby’s playbook to rebuild our soil from within.

I grew tillage radishes to break it up. Planted cover crops to add nutrients. Introduced microbial inoculants with beneficial fungi and bacteria. Mulched with shredded leaves to improve fertility and water retention.

Within a couple of seasons, the soil transformed into a rich dark loam. It became light to the touch and easy to dig. Every handful was full of worms and other critters.

The plants now grew effortlessly. I barely needed to water, even during hot summer days. Instead of adding fertilizer and pesticides, I just fed the soil with mulch, and the soil fed the plants.

By building healthy soil, everything else becomes easier and more sustainable.

Our shade garden of perennials, shrubs, and small trees

A Metaphor for Most Things

This experience gardening led to an unexpected shift. The dominant metaphors in my life slowly changed.

From competition to cultivation. From teams and opponents to environments and ecosystems. From winning contests to nurturing vitality. From chasing goals directly to creating conditions that let intentions unfold naturally.

As George Lakoff says in Metaphors We Live By: “New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities."

Ideas are powerful. Especially once we embody them. They become part of how we see, experience, and act in the world.

With this new lens, I began to see that building healthy soil was foundational to successful behavior change. It was the key to creating conditions needed to sustain an activity and thrive in a domain.

So now I see soil everywhere. Yes, in the landscape outside our new house where I’m starting another garden. But also in how I approach exercise, writing, raising children, building a business, and so much more.

Healthy Soil for Exercise

These dynamics are especially prevalent with exercise.

Many people engage in fitness like corporations engage in factory farming— rushing to optimize performance, focusing on a single output, and rigidly controlling every aspect of the process. They prioritize short-term gains over long-term sustainability. And diminish their vitality in the process.

The alternative is to embrace the lessons of the garden. Spend a few seasons focused on creating a foundation to fuel a lifetime of exercise. Build the soil and let the soil feed everything else.

This process will look different for different people, but valuable components include:

Embrace simple movements. Walk, stretch, dance, push, pull, and squat. These types of foundational moves are the cover crops of exercise. They help rebuild our capacity to exercise from within.

Identify deficiencies. These simple movements surface unique limitations. Perhaps it’s flexibility, stability, strength, or cardiovascular function. These are crucial nutrients needed to sustain exercise over the long run.

Learn the fundamentals. Understanding form, technique, and training principles is pivotal. These ingredients enable growth and prevent injury. Investing in strong movement patterns and knowledge pays dividends for decades.

Nurture your nervous system: Exercise is stress. Your ability to push your body, recover, and grow is dependent on your ability to handle added stress. Supporting this process through things like breathwork, meditation, and sleep is invaluable.

Cultivate enjoyment: An exercise routine without enjoyment is like a garden that needs constant attention. It’s another thing to manage and direct. When enjoyment emerges during exercise it pulls us forward almost effortlessly.

Develop somatic awareness: It’s hard to enjoy exercise if you don’t experience it in the body. It’s difficult to prevent injury if you dissociate from pain. Experiencing the sensations of exercise in your body can unlock a lifetime of curiosity and satisfaction.

Introduce diversity: The health of soil is not in the quantity of any one component. It’s in the breadth and interconnection of all the elements. Exercise is the same. Strong muscles need a healthy heart and lungs. Resilience requires flexibility and a capacity to adapt.

This perspective of building healthy soil is not just a tool to sustainably engage with exercise. It’s also a frame for how to think about why we exercise in the first place.

Just as everything in a garden is downstream of the soil. Everything in our life is downstream of the body. It is the foundation and fuel for all that we do and experience in life.

A healthy body nurtures our sensory perceptions, cognitive ability, and physical capacities. It feeds our mental, emotional, and physical vitality.

The body is the soil for our life.

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Thank you for reading. If you have any reflections or questions, please reach out in the comments or by replying to the email.