Keeping It Real
OH, WELL ALLOW ME TO RETORT
HOUSEKEEPING
After getting straight into it last week, a few notes to kick things off.
First: Happy New Year. I hope you enjoyed a suitably relaxing and restorative festive season.
Second: There are disturbances in the force. Despite not being bound by Australia's new social media law, Substack has adopted it voluntarily—reportedly blocking some Australian accounts until they cough up biometric data to be held by some shadowy US outfit.
That won’t be happening. I’ll keep a collection of pieces here as a public portfolio, but the pencilled plan is to export this list and revert to the old-style newsletter.
I’ll let you know in due course, but, in any case, it bores me to tears just thinking about it.
One final note: somewhere along the way, 2,000-word Saturday essays became the norm. That’s changing. There will still be the occasional deep dive, but to reduce the intimidatory factor from both sides of the writing/reading equation, the average post here— or wherever we may roam— will be shorter.
But not today.
In response to last week’s piece, a couple of misinterpretations surfaced. Chief among them, that I’m dismissive of discipline and willpower. I know this really rankles because these are the heroics many people have built their fitness identity on.
And good on them. I say that genuinely, not least because I include myself among them.
But many more haven’t. And the opposite mistake is the idea that alignment with principles places us in some magical kingdom where, with eternal motivation on tap, discipline, and willpower are irrelevant.
Either way, what I’m offering isn’t a promise that training will always feel easy or that motivation will never wane.
Only that your efforts won’t be in vain.
So let’s continue with the January sabbatical and—still in the absence of physical stress—run another thought experiment that will sharpen our efforts by projecting ourselves into a future that—should you choose to honour your architecture—is one hundred percent guaranteed.
Not for every training session, but most of them. So in that same spirit of accurately perceiving reality, let’s take a look at exactly what we have to deal with.
For the sake of argument, we’ll maximise the upside and assume a well-designed, only-good-things-can-come-from-it, tailored-to-you training session.
On paper, you have every reason to be enthusiastically invested in getting this done
Meanwhile—
IRL
In real life, you couldn’t give two shits what it says on paper.
And because this is purely a thought exercise—with no corresponding downside—let’s dial up the pain. Make this a session you not only don’t feel like doing, but something you’re straight up scared of.
Now that might seem like strange language, especially if you're a beginner. But I'm using it deliberately—both to underline that "not feeling like it" isn't even close to the hardest psychological terrain you’ll face if you train seriously, and that this sort of resistance never ends.
Even so, we do things we don’t want to do all the time. Every day. We just typically do them for other people.
Level 1
In a work (or other team) environment, we easily subordinate the self in service of the bigger picture. Whatever the pain of doing so is less than the pain of being seen to place ourselves above the mission.
The real crime here is letting the team down. An obvious evolutionary trait that keeps everyone from soldiers to siblings toeing the party line.
Level 2
A similar positive peer pressure exists in groups—but even with a shared “get fit” objective, it’s dampened by the lack of a true team dynamic.
Interestingly, this effect is reversed in smaller groups. Not showing up for a single friend leaves them hanging and is obviously more noticeable than your absence from a larger group.
Nonetheless, the judgment of others keeps us on the straight and narrow. So hardwired is this in our biology that mere eye image compliance makes us twice as likely to follow a desired behaviour— an effect compounded when alone.
But that isn’t going to help you here
And while integrity—doing the right thing when nobody is looking—is celebrated, and rightly, it’s a courtesy we rarely afford ourselves.
And now, it’s just you.
Level 3
And it’s here, or sometimes the previous level, where most of us will make our fitness stand. The hill that, for all our best intentions, statistics tell us, we’ll die on.
Absent all eyes, one way to keep yourself on the path is to imagine that everything you do is broadcast: a nightly CNN wrap-up of your actions and utterances. You can imagine how many a ‘hold-my-beer’ moment might have been easily avoided with such scrutiny—the simple announcement to your partner or kids: “I’m doing this, despite you.”
Here, nobody will care. Not because they don’t know, you could shout it from the rooftops — advertise it — still nobody will give a shit.
And in one respect, at least, they will be right.
Level 4
Because if things are not difficult enough already, what if you can summon little in the way of good reason for you to do it anyway?
And this lack of good reason is neither through ignorance, misunderstanding or error, but, in keeping with our theme, is a clear, honest reading of reality.
I know, I know! You hardly need list all the benefits to me, the fit-for-purpose common sense or the absurdity of being unfit, much less the underlying fundamental principles.
Even then.
There’s not an instrument in the world that could measure the effect of a single, solitary workout.
So what then?
Who is going to make you do it? And who is going to notice if you don’t? And, when you can’t even tell whether you do it or not, or even this and the next one, and very likely those two and the one after that?
Accountability is a coaching buzzword, but it quickly spirals into accommodating and validating patterns of behaviour that are the source of the problem: sought by those not seeking change but only to feel better about their not-changing.
And so we end up with the tail wagging the dog, but even in the best-case scenario, accountability is a crutch and only creates dependence on the coach.
As you might have guessed, that won’t be happening on my watch. Because nor does it reflect the reality of the situation:
That the buck has only, does only, and will only ever stop, with you.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, if any sort of sustainable fitness practice is on the cards, you’ll be faced with this level 4 problem to solve, at least 3 times every week. For the rest of your life.
SO WHAT’S MY MOTIVATION HERE?
The same as the fundamental argument for doing so:
The answer: All YOU, baby.
The promised ease comes not from less effort, but from accepting the difficulty. And not adding to it. Speaking of which. If you think that’s hard, consider the alternative and not aligning with your architecture. All the extra effort, the frustration, compensation, pain, medical costs, declining capacity and quality of life.
All YOU, baby.
The best news I can offer is that if you can act here—alone, unobserved, unrewarded, uncertain—then everything else becomes easier by comparison. And this gets far easier too.
Discipline without alignment means burnout. And alignment without discipline means drift. It is, and always will be just us. But we don’t have to be out there flapping in the breeze.
The promise of the 6-pack, other aesthetic or seeking approval won’t reliably help us. In fact, when the going gets tough, we can usually formulate an argument against it.
What is your argument against your architecture—against your foot?
Importantly, this is neither dismissal nor belittlement of our shallower wants. “Shallower” is not pejorative— only acknowledgement of the fact that, by comparison to the fundamentals, everything is more superficial. So, if you truly respected these shallower motivations, you would make sure to anchor them to something solid. Something undeniable.
This doesn’t mean the end of discipline or willpower, only that these are no longer tethered to intangibles of what you might want to be, but grounded in what you already are.
And here too, you can feel your way into alignment.
I don’t mean you are going to feel like it. Forget about feeling like it.
I mean, one hour later, you’ve either done it or you flaked.
How do you feel?
It takes less a leap of faith than a tiny hop. Do you accept (or reject) that acting in a manner that honours your structure is, ultimately, going to be correspondingly better or worse for you? That’s it.
A hammer is for driving nails.
A wheel is for rolling.
A foot is for bearing load and movement.
You are for fitness.
And fitness is for you.
Enjoy your weekend
- OLI