So, to continue from where I left off a couple of weeks back and the Rubik's Cube analogy:
Given we (humanity, if not you personally) know the fitness mechanisms of effect, why is the standard fitness experience one of frustration and failure?
We know precisely what levers to pull, so, more pointedly, why are we not — as a rule — all fit?
Rather than add further qualifications, let's acknowledge the obvious in that pulling these 'levers' does take time and effort. Giving us a clear run to the only conclusion that can be reached:
We're not pulling them.
Before we get to whys and hows and try to draw something useful out of this sorry situation let me preface what follows by having me state, on the record, this is not your fault. None of this is purposed to make you look or feel bad, indeed, the very opposite.
Nevertheless, shit is about to get real. By which I mean the reason these levers aren't pulled always boils down to the same thing: a disconnect from reality.
The fact that the achievement and maintenance of fitness is reliable, predictable and utterly unremarkable can only mean that along the way we lose track, either, of where we are, what we are doing, or what is really going on.
And if that's cause for some surprise, if not concern, it's usually all three.
That —at an individual level — we don't know what these levers are is the first mistake, of many.
Instead, in the absence of this education, we've come to rely on a fitness industry that can be trusted to take you on a ride of varying length and degrees of difficulty only for you to end up right where you started. At best.
But the fault for why we don't all know how we work can’t be laid here and stems from a more fundamental mistake.
From being a second-class citizen by comparison to more intellectual pursuits, to now being shunned entirely we've somehow come to view fitness as optional. More unbelievably still, that’s not rock bottom. It continues the slide, now increasingly being framed as pure self-indulgence and the preserve of those with nothing better to do.
I wholeheartedly agree with the fact that if you're fortunate enough to entertain the notion of getting fit, you are comparatively lucky by any measure.
The idea you wouldn't is the bizarre bit.
Because this is about as weird as it gets. Not in a disparaging way, but being on precisely the same spectrum of capacity, competence and utility — oh, and don't forget joy — it's like deciding to be injured. Can you imagine any other creature choosing to be physically compromised? Intentionally not fit for purpose.
Disconnect.
But then we also have a subset of those protesting they do want to be fit, but they either don't have the money or — most commonly cited barrier of all — the time.
To this point, I can usually get people nodding along but this is where I start to get a bit more pushback. Of the — have you seen my fucking diary! — variety. And no. I haven’t, but it's a disconnect all the same.
If you're telling me you don't have time to attend a sufficient number of gym classes a week to move the needle, then, I'm inclined to agree with you. Even without enquiring as to your hours of screentime.
What I'm saying is that what you think is required to be fit and what I know is required are not the same thing at all. And I have not trained a single person in 13 years who was not able to do my version of it — even with the busiest of schedules — that would have got them exactly what they say they wanted in short order.
It’s important to reiterate — I know it would have got them that, because, as I said at the outset, none of this is mysterious. None of it, a roll of the dice.
But, of course, that doesn't mean they all did it. Because some are more attached to ideas of what they think fitness is, or what they want it to be, instead of, you know, being fit.
The ultimate disconnect.
Fitness doesn't demand your presence at a gym. It doesn't require active wear, fit-bits, or water bottles. It doesn't require selfies on the socials. It doesn't even demand its own discrete 'training' time.
To be clear, I'm not saying you can't or shouldn’t do any of these things.
You are saying you don't have time (or money)!
So you should be DELIGHTED to hear that you can achieve and forever maintain a fit-for-purpose level of fitness via sets of exercises snatched in between clearing the breakfast dishes and making the school lunches.
Just for example.
I don't suggest it as an ideal. Maybe you'd prefer fitness as an avenue for social connection, entertainment — any number of other things. And where the 'fitness' part of that equation is not compromised, I'm happy to agree.
I do present it as an undeniable ideal to the alternative: to you not being fit.
When you strip away the hype, the marketing and all manner of fitness conventions that make a lot of sense from an industry point of view but rarely have even a tangential relationship to how and what your body responds to, you are left with a simple set of rules.
And right now, I’ll concede, that doesn’t seem very actionable. But all utility here stems from first demolishing a set of beliefs that are not serving you. That have never served you.
You don't need anyone or anything to be fit. Indeed, anyone or anything you do wish to add is best done after you've realised your autonomy, so they are never a gatekeeper or guru, but an accessory at best.
But, most importantly, if you can entertain the possibility being fit is both your ‘natural’ desired state and you’re brave enough to confront the thoroughly unsettling idea it is always achievable, very shortly thereafter you’ll go running headlong into the hardest reality of all:
The ONLY reason you are not fit is by choice.
And that will hurt. But it’s the final sticky stepping stone to the most useful and most empowering fitness belief of them all:
You can always choose the other.
- OLI