Show Your Working
Physical fitness is the shoring up of capacities that are —excepting the brief window of adaptation opened only by an effective training stimulus and offset with the requisite sleep, nutrition and parasympathetic nervous system— forever in decline.
The rate of decay varies, certainly, with qualities like strength both hard won and, thankfully, comparatively hard lost. You could do nothing for 3 weeks without losing strength but aerobic fitness is the opposite, gained and lost in mere days.
But that’s only regarding the fitness quality itself —the expression of strength, aerobic capacity or whatever, but behind the scenes, there are countless additional adaptations. And timeframes.
Neurological changes like improved motor unit recruitment and neural firing patterns occur almost immediately with muscle tissue then responding over days and weeks — although not visibly for several weeks or months, but connective tissue like tendons, ligaments and fascia remodels far more slowly.
And while you’ll enjoy (or lose) the aerobic benefits of Zone 2 training over mere days the cellular-level mitochondrial adaptations on offer take many years to fully develop.
Alone, amongst all these variables is a constant: what happens when you stop?
Decay. Decline. Deteriorate.
Depressing, perhaps. But it’s not to be taken personally. Indeed, it could hardly be less personal, because what we’re talking about here is entropy: the general trend of the universe toward disorder. And it always increases over time.
All we can do is expend energy to, not even keep it at bay, but only slow its roll.
Even Sisyphus only had one boulder to push up a hill and just physical fitness gives us multiple training plates to keep spinning. So already we have our work cut out for us. But that’s not the half of it, because novelty will become familiarity then boredom. Motivation will follow the same sure path to apathy and our social, cognitive, nutritional, behavioural and spiritual selves all tend to the same disorder without the same endless investment of energy.
So what do we do?
Well, conventionally, we’d get ourselves a program, a meal plan, a diet or some equally fanciful buttressing of this disorder. Fanciful for the fact they all have one thing in common, requiring one key ingredient that only exists in theory: order.
Or to put it another way, they need time to stop.
Otherwise, you won’t be able to find (another) ingredient at the supermarket so the wheels will fall off the meal plan.
The fridge repair guy will arrive 3 hours outside his 8-hour specified window and you’ll lose half of your newly acquired dietary options.
And because you were yelling at him on the phone you stepped off the curb funny and tweaked your ankle putting a line through any right leg exercises in your program.
So you end up sitting on the couch eating all the ice cream in the freezer because you were going to have to throw it out anyway.
Because that’s what happens. As detailed here in Farnham Street:
Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary.
Let’s fancifully imagine that everything keeps fine for you across all relevant departments for the requisite timeframes as described above and, miracle of miracles— because it is—you make headway in a specific fitness domain, what then?
A very good question. And for many reasons:
Your program or variation thereof has an end date.
So you stop— see Decay. Decline. Deteriorate above— or you start another program, meal plan or diet. And that, wouldn’t be a bad thing necessarily. Except;
You’ve skated across the surface of health and wellness for the last decade all while never realising the underlying principles that unite (or disqualify) them.
You’ve done Zumba, Boxercise, Kettlebells, Spin classes, Pilates, Atkins, Paleo, intermittent fasting, ketogenic, and detox diets but, worse still, your knowledge of why and how they apply to you is equally superficial or mistaken such that, for all that time and effort, you are further from understanding how you work and a fitness practice that addresses your needs and, secondarily, your wants.
At best you have a piecemeal, fragmented, disjointed, inconsistent and superficial approach to combating the all-encompassing and relentless antonym of every one of those words: entropy.
So if there is any truth to Steven Pinker’s view that the “… ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.”
It’s a fantastically piss-poor way of going about it.
And only harder to make the case that our fitness ‘refuges’ are remotely beneficial so the answer is not to look for yet another answer— even the one in the back of the teachers-edition text. As is so obvious to be taken as given in any other area of concern we need to know how to arrive at the answer.
Rarely something you’re ever required to do in fitness, and, not correlative but causative, as to why we have such trouble. We need to show our working, because it’s never the answer but the process that counts.
A process. Not an event. Not a one-off. But a system such that every single day adds to your tally, to your history, to your knowledge, to your practice. Because 6 months of exercise repeated 20 times might take the same time but it’s not the same as a decade of training.
It’s the same as 6 months of training.
But this is something we already know.
A pointer to both our problem and the solution.
Sorrows are our best educator. A man can see further through a tear than a telescope. Bruce Lee
Were that always the case we’d be elite fitness specimens but here too fitness is curiously unique because our misery comes courtesy of one myopic move after the next. Nevertheless, as Bruce alludes to, self-awareness is the key.
When stuck—instead of outsourcing again— you first turn the spotlight on yourself. As in every other domain, you’ll always find one or more of:
I have a skill deficit
I was focused on the wrong thing
What I’m doing is not taking me in the direction I thought it would
I’m not doing what I need to do to move in the direction I want to go
You can then take RESPONSIBILITY and decide: I have a skill deficit:
I need to figure out how to do something different. I need to figure out how to do what I’m doing better or I need to figure out how to do what I’m doing more. Then you will make progress. Only then can you change where and who you are.
And change is the point of the exercise. As you change, you reach milestones in each of the relevant departments that prove progress and your preparedness for more. But it’s yet another skill that means you can do this not for 6 weeks or 6 months or even 6 years. But indefinitely.
In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
James Clear
The peer-to-peer coaching in the new Leftfield Training course is this problem-solving at the systems level. And we needn’t contrive these case studies because we know something is going to go wrong. And with many people, many things. So we’ll apply a Leftfield framework to a whole range of real-world scenarios.
And a whole series of good things happen:
You’ll never be under the illusion that things have to be ‘right’ for you to get and stay fit, because you see that things are never ‘right’ for anyone.
You get to look at other people’s challenges without being emotionally invested and see how, in most instances, the solution is obvious.
You see how quickly people make progress when they are willing to take and implement feedback.
You then need only a pinch of that self-awareness for it to become equally obvious that our progress would be just as easy were we able to treat ourselves in the same objective manner. So you turn a now-trained and more objective eye on yourself.
Certainly, we can and will never detach as effectively when looking at ourselves, but it’s also true this too is a skill and we get better at it.
To cut the most unenlightened criticism off at the knees, this doesn’t mean we turn into unfeeling automatons. No. It’s a skill that, like any tool, makes our job easier. A skill that, by contrast to any alternative treats both ourselves and any intended goals with due respect.
That's experiential behaviour change. Not reading about it or even employing strategies and tactics to help make behaviour stick—but to make you well practiced at figuring it out by yourself.
And our lack of self-awareness in this regard is for lack of this problem-solving ability. When we don't believe we can fix problems often we’ll never see them because it's too painful, so we rationalise or even defend them instead.
But when you know you know. And self-awareness coupled with the skill to address problems is no longer a source of helplessness or anxiety but growth: just the next rung of the ladder. The more you learn the more you realise how much you don’t know but you’ve further realised that knowing isn’t necessary because you are ever more familiar with testing the ‘right’ course of action.
And this builds agency, confidence, independence and autonomy so you’re not looking outside to the next product, service or any other white knight to ride to the rescue. YOU change you.
You’ve got the skills. But all skills are not created equal and you’re now better at:
Learning: learning how to learn
Teaching: the best way to learn anything
Discomfort: a precursor to growth.
All higher-order skills, called meta-skills: a kernel of pragmatic knowledge that applies to a wide variety of circumstances including ones you have never directly experienced before.
Fitness—in optimising all other learning and your engagement with life— is the master meta-skill and the fitness practice isn’t about achieving a temporary goal but establishing a permanent, adaptable routine that integrates seamlessly into your life.
Scalable in the present and over time and via which, even entropy is reversed.
Ennui becomes interest, helplessness becomes empowerment, and a full stop becomes ever-evolving. An acknowledgement of disorder not merely so we’re not derailed by it, but so that we and our practice are better for it.
Bringing order to chaos. And the more chaos the better.
Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI