3 Ways to Awaken Your Astral Athlete.
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Several years ago, I was a strength coach who found herself in the feverish throes of a Wild Woman awakening. With my new senses, I could finally identify, feel and grieve my self-betrayal.
I had allowed the fitness patriarchy to condition my body into a vessel for chronic illness and pain. This story isn’t unique to me. Many women have given up strength work because of various cultural distortions. And this is a tragic loss. I can’t describe how picking up 200 pounds and throwing it down with a terrifying crash can bring you into communion with the roaring Divine Feminine.
It’s time to call our strength back, but on our terms.
Desperate to merge my need to sweat with my new identity, I started an experiment. I designed every training session with the Moon as my muse. I needed working out to have a purpose, even one beyond self-care. I became willing to accept that my body didn’t show up the same, day after day, like the Sun. I embraced that I was a lunar mover. My fitness mantra became: “I am a lunar body in a solar society.”
So, I turned away from popular gym culture, but I refused to stop moving in the ways that fed my power. Strength became my ritual, and sweat my ceremony. I soon noticed the undeniable undulations. My workout performance, energy levels, and symptoms were clearly mirroring the waxing and waning of the Moon.
Committed to uncovering my primal strength, but unwilling to disconnect from my intuitive center, left me with one option: to awaken my astral athlete.
One: Train by the Moon.
Training by the Moon is the astral athlete’s primary tool. We’ve felt our bodies mirror the Moon’s changing shape since we first began tracking it in the sky. The cycle offers deep, applicable wisdom about personal wellness and vitality if we only pay attention. Lunar-informed exercise is like medicine. You want to administer the minimum-effective dose at the right time for the desired response.
You want to expose your body to an exercise stimulus that it can receive and integrate with ease.
When the Moon is waxing and your body is ready to do the same, feed it a waxing stimulus. Waxing stimuli are activities that build the body: heavy weightlifting, skill practice, speed work, high intensity movement, eating more, and a focus on adding lean muscle mass.
When your body is ready to wane, give it what it wants. Waning stimuli are activities that help the body remove what’s no longer serving it: bodyweight strength, longer and lighter sweat sessions, flexibility work, rest, recovery, and a focus on fat loss.
If you sync your workouts with the energy of the current lunar phase, it will enhance your efforts and naturally support you. This way, meeting your goals can be more fluid and aligned with what is. Trust that nature is smart enough to take care of you.
Two: Know your astrological constitution.
If you know your astrological constitution, you hold the key to understanding your body’s innate athletic strengths and challenges. Your elemental makeup is a combination of your Sun, Moon, and rising signs. Some other key pieces, like your natal Mars placement, can also give you information about your specific flavor of athletic prowess.
Astral athletes leverage their strengths, and use their challenges as fodder for self-cultivation.
Fire bodies typically need to sweat profusely. They’re nourished by moving creatively, explosively and intensely. They typically excel at any sport they choose, and often have a competitive streak. Fire bodies perform best when the work is hard, the stakes are high, and the clock is ticking. Their challenge is to balance intensity with the proper amount of rest and flexibility training.
Awakened Fire bodies know to guard themselves against over-exercise and overuse injuries.
Air bodies are nourished by oxygen, and are enlivened by the sensation of being breathless. They’re naturally light on their feet, agile, quick, and revamped by exercising outdoors. Air bodies excel at things like sprints, gymnastics, high skill movements and plyometrics. If they begin to float away, Air bodies are called to balance their cardiovascular gifts with the proper amount of grounding and strength training.
Water bodies are naturally flexible, graceful, skilled, and are usually drawn to all kinds of yogic traditions. Their challenge is to remember how ridiculously powerful and bone-crushing water can be. It’s important for Water bodies to balance their slower practices with appropriate amounts of high intensity work.
Kettlebell training and Olympic weightlifting are just two examples of high-intensity activities that also require the natural skill and flexibility of Water.
Earth bodies are nourished by building structure and stability. They build muscle easily, and often have no problem committing to regular exercise once they get started. They typically excel at things like powerlifting, weightlifting, and endurance activities like multi-day hikes.
Self-aware Earth bodies know their tendency to be stubborn and get stuck in a rut. Their challenge is to prevent stagnation by balancing structure-building work with quicker movements and cardiovascular bursts.
Three: Root, record, repeat.
What sets Lunar-informed exercise apart from the fitness patriarchy isn’t a lack of intensity. The cycle clearly teaches that there’s an energetic place, or rather time, for every intensity of movement the body can perform.
Moon-based movement is distinct because of its root in body sensation and feedback. It’s only effective if you listen and adjust accordingly. If something isn’t working for you, it isn’t working for you. Don’t drown out your body’s voice because you’re attached to an outcome, an image, or a cool idea.
The lunar calendar is the astral athlete’s map for planning out their workout schedule and programming. In time, you’ll be able to mirror the astrological weather not only in the type of movements you choose, but in the number of sets and reps, the intensity, the duration, and the physiological response you aim to trigger.
But to get here, you must first experience how the lunar cycle interacts with your unique, internal terrain. People love to say, “Listen to your body.” But how? And what about bodies that feel hijacked by symptoms, or drowned out by loud stressors? How do you listen to that body? The Moon’s cycle offers a structure from which we can begin to explore our ability to receive and interpret messages from our bodies.
Lunar-informed fitness gives us an opportunity to practice applying these body messages in a specific context. This is a skill that will undoubtedly bleed into other areas of life. We all have this gift. It’s merely a matter of cultivation.
No matter what type of movement you’re into right now, I encourage you to start a lunar journal. The astral athlete asks three questions before any training session: What’s the phase? What’s the element? How does my body feel? With as much or as little detail as you like, jot down the lunar specifics, your exercise for the day, any symptoms you’re experiencing and, most importantly, how you feel.
Doing this repeatedly will give you an arsenal of body-based evidence. You can use this evidence, rooted in felt experience, to plan future workouts and schedule self-care practice. As the cycle repeats, you’ll identify which lunar phases and zodiacal signs conjure up your astral athlete, and which beckon you to rest.
And if you’re dealing with any mysterious symptoms, I have no doubt you’ll uncover some enlightening patterns as well. Remember, the joy of movement is embodiment — of the cosmos, of the elements, of yourself.
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Claire Galloway Gallagher teaches lunar-informed fitness and offers alternative medicine with an astrological bent at The Body Astrologer.
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