The Guide to Lifelong Fitness Design

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Just like eating healthy, the path to getting and staying fit has become harder to come by in our overworked & overly sedentary society.  Compound our propensity of inactivity with a market saturated with bunk fitness solutions, and advertising & media outlets that push an unrealistic body image, and there are no doubts about why a more meaningful type of fitness is hard to achieve.

But what does it mean to be truly fit?

Being fit means being able to move well from now until well into your later years.

It’s a type of fitness that helps you achieve your performance aspirations, at work and at play.

It’s a type of fitness that comes from a place of vitality rather than vanity, a feeling rather than a look.

And it’s a type of fitness that lets your body do all the things you want it do so you can savor the moment when you summit Mt. Everest, or when you keep up with your friends in a game of pick up basketball.

Notice that we are not focusing on sexy six pack abs or “toned” arms.  Although we understand that may be important to some of you, we believe that many of you want more, a deeper, more enduring, more resilient, more meaningful type of fitness, where form follows function — or rather, looking good as a byproduct of training your body to move well.

Much like eating healthy, there is no one way to get to where you want to go.  One size fits all programs like CrossFit, P90X and even magazine fitness tips are not the solution to facilitating lifelong fitness.  In fact, it’s these forces as well as other ones that are keeping you from achieving a deeper more meaningful type of fitness.

So where do you start?

Well you got to figure out what stands in your way, we have way too many how-to’s these days, so a better type of fitness really starts with figuring out the obstacles, and becoming privy to the game being played around you, so you can navigate the fitness landscape on your own terms.

Like in the food environment, there are other factors that impact your fitness decisions everyday.  By better understanding these, you can make more informed decisions about what you may choose to spend your time and attention.  In order to help you do that we’re putting together a new fitness series.  Here’s a quick roadmap of what it will look like.

• Why The Fitness Industry is Failing You – This is about the larger fitness environment.  The fitness industry’s goals are misaligned with your own, that’s a fact.  At the core is the industry’s drive for profit and for the most part they can care less whether you actually get fit or not, but whether their wallets get fat or not. It’s this misalignment that is at the center of much of the fitness industry gimmicks and fitness confusion.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still: Our World and Inactivity – This is your more immediate environment like your home and office. Did you know that more than 60% of the US workforce are knowledge workers who rely on thinking rather than physical labor for their job?  Physical activity has been engineered out of our lives.  Know how and why this happens so you can re-engineer it back into your life.
• How To Move Well – What does it mean to just move better and move well?  Does this mean being able to run a marathon or lift 200 lbs above your head?  This part of the series will more clearly define what it means to move well so that you can be fit while maintaining a high quality of life until ripe old age.
• There is No One Size Fits All, Just Your Size – Everyone has different health and fitness goals so why should our fitness paths be the same?  If your goal is just to walk and run more so you can play with your kids, then maybe intense Crossfit gyms and P90X workouts are not the solution.  If you better understand your fitness goals, then you can better design an active lifestyle that fits just for you.
• A Guide To Designing Your Own Fitness Path – After knowing about the world that affects your fitness decisions everyday and knowing how you want to move, now is the time to design your own pathway.  This installment of the series will help you sift through all the different workout systems out there so that you can better define, create and implement your own.
• How to Deal with Big Life Transitions on Your Path to Fitness – So you’ve figured out how to design your own fitness pathway, but what do you do when you have big life transitions like marriage, children and changing jobs?  This last past of the series will provide insight on how to approach big transitions so that you can continue to achieve true fitness.

Just like the eating healthy series, this series is not the end all be all solution.  Rather, see it as a call to action to think more deeply about the game being played around you while also becoming fit in a much truer sense.  We hope this series inspires and empowers you to take charge of designing your own patterns of fitness. So get ready for our next post: You and the Fitness Industry.

Photo via Saad Faruque