Active Living

If you want a different body, then you have to make the time to build it. Sometimes I think I get my messaging wrong when I try (mostly in vain) to get people off the sidelines and into the fitness game.

I spend a lot of time pushing back against the idea that fitness is complicated. There’s a lot of noise out there about what works and what doesn’t, but there’s a remarkable consensus from people who know what they’re doing around what needs to be done to make a body stronger, leaner, and more mobile. Especially in the very beginning, you need to learn basic movement patterns like the squat, hinge, push, and pull; and you need to do these movements with progressively heavier weights while also eating vegetables at every meal, protein at every meal, and starchy carbs in moderation. That combined with walking a few days a week usually yields results with which people are incredibly happy.

I find it remarkable then when people come to me and voice objections right away when I tell them what the pathway to their goals looks like.

“Oh, I can’t give up my shows.”

“I like wine too much.”

“I don’t want to join a gym.”

“I have 8-pound dumbbells. Is that enough?”

“I only have 20 minutes a day to work out.”

“Working out is boring.”

“I’m too busy.”

Do any of these sound familiar? Ever used any of these excuses yourself? Chances are if you’ve said or asked any of these things then you’re not actually committed to the process of change. You have the body you have now because your lifestyle looks a certain way. Now you’re telling me that you don’t want to change anything about your lifestyle but you want a different body? Nope. Nope. All the nopes.

You have to make the time. You have to make the effort.

Fitness isn’t so much about discipline as it is organization, but you do have to make the effort. One of the things our gym offers free with personal training is lifestyle coaching, and we walk people through a habit-based curriculum focused on nutrition and body composition. A common theme from the feedback we get is that setting the 20 minutes a day aside to think through the “lessons” feels overwhelming. The pace is slow, so the first few assignments are things like “eat slowly” or “make time for yourself today.” We’re not talking advanced calculus. But just the process of taking the time to read a little and learn about habits feels like too much because of the 20-minute time investment.

If you can’t take 20 minutes a day for yourself, and remember, we’re not even talking about changing behavior, cooking, working out, or sleeping more, then you don’t have much hope for changing your body. The very first step in body transformation is giving yourself the permission to take time for yourself. This is not vanity or narcissism or selfishness. This is the foundation for success.

Over the next week, I’m challenging you to take 20 minutes for yourself, whatever that means for you. It could be taking a walk, reading, sitting in a dark room without speaking, meditation, or organizing the next day. The point is to take 20 minutes devoted to enhancing your quality of life. No one else can do this for you. Before thinking about taking big steps (like going to the gym or eating more vegetables), see if you can take this small step: make time, take time for yourself.

“Why do you work so hard when you don’t have to?”

A child asked me that question recently, curious about why my own strength training sessions are relatively intense compared to the general population.

“I like the feeling of being strong,” I said.

“But you’re already strong,” she said.

“And how did I get this way?” At this point I thought I had her. Surely the logic of a 40-year-old man would trump that of an 11-year old’s.

“But you keep doing more and more. You don’t need to do that, do you?” It was a fair point. She’s right. I have certain numbers in my head that I’m trying to hit, for no other reason than pride and maybe more than a little ego. This was a classic case of an adult being forced to boil something down to its essence because of the logic of a child–granted, a really smart child, but a child nonetheless.

So why do I keep pushing? I don’t need a 500-pound deadlift in order to age well, and my young interlocutor understood this intuitively. The truth is that I’m addicted to being strong, and I’m trying to get as strong as I possibly can while I’m still able because there will be a day when getting stronger isn’t possible. I’ll have to rely on my “muscle reserves,” so to speak, to thrive in my octogenarian years.

But it’s more than that. While there is a part of me who is trying to bank as much muscle as possible for when I get (even) older, if you strapped me to a lie detector test I’d tell you that I’m doing this for the right now. I’m doing this because:

I enjoy the way a strong body works.

I enjoy the way a strong body feels.

I enjoy the way other people respond to a strong body.

I enjoy the self-sufficiency that comes with a strong body.

The difference between you and me if you’re not working out isn’t just physical. You’d enjoy all of the things I listed too. It’s that I’ve always worked out, and thus I don’t have the same insecurities you do.

I leave my cards at the coffee shop I frequent. I hear from people all the time who tell me that they picked up my card there “six months ago” or “several weeks ago.” What took them so long to finally get in touch?

Fear. Insecurity. Previous bad experiences in fitness (usually involving judgment). They spend half a year building up the courage to seek out the help they need to get strong, to feel the way I do.

I’ve not solved this problem. I don’t know how to prove to people that I won’t judge them, make them feel less than, or belittle their skills in the gym. People who study human behavior and change might say that there’s nothing I can say because people have to be ready to change. I understand this intellectually, but I want to solve the puzzle. I want people to know that the gym can be a safe, empowering place.

I want everyone to know this. I want this understanding, this belief in the power of strength, to reside deep in everyone’s soul, from the 22-year-old with body image issues and a questionable relationship with food to the 60-year-old grandmother who’s never touched a dumbbell in her life.

My industry has tried to solve this problem by lying to people, selling them supplements they don’t need, and telling them that the answer to their fears is a singular piece of equipment or THIS exercise modality (and definitely not THAT one).

So when you add extant fear and insecurity, mix in a layer of smokescreen-induced distrust, then you get the recipe for you not walking into that local gym or yoga studio.

But remember this:

I enjoy the way a strong body works.

I enjoy the way a strong body feels.

I enjoy the way other people respond to a strong body.

I enjoy the self-sufficiency that comes with a strong body.

And you will too.

I promise you.

When I trained in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. there was a notable absence of family obligations for many of my clients. These coastal cities tend to be more transient* than a place like Dayton, Ohio, so to the extent that people had social obligations, they were more likely to involve friends and coworkers than family.

Here in Dayton many of us are surrounded by sometimes several rings of extended family, so it’s not uncommon for a weekend to be consumed by a cousin’s wedding or a childhood neighbor’s graduation party.

I’ve noticed in recent weeks my own struggle to balance the routines that I’ve implemented to make my life work for me against things like Sunday family dinners, invitations to social outings, and holiday gatherings one might otherwise ignore if not for family tradition.

It’s a lot easier to say no to happy hour with work “friends” than it is to the aunt who practically raised you and has invited you over for brunch. So what can you do to stay organized when a family obligation happens to fall right in the middle of your usual grocery shopping, food prep, or workout time?

The standard answer of course is you have to plan around these things. You have to know your calendar well in order account for a family command performance.

But that feels like glib advice to me. Sometimes bad timing is just bad timing, and no amount of calendar preparation and planning ahead can make up for the fact that Sundays are your grocery shopping days and going to the cookout will get in the way of that.

This is one of those areas in which my best advice is to give yourself permission to do the best you can most of the time and good enough the rest of the time. What I mean by that is if you have a well-established grocery, cooking, and workout routine and you get invited to a family gathering, then you ought to go. (I’m assuming here for the sake of discussion that you have a healthy, non-abusive relationship with your family. If you don’t, then this advice doesn’t really apply. Don’t put yourself into situations that are bad for you–family or no family).

Uncle Joe might not serve the healthiest food. And the spread at Sunday dinner might not have the best composition of macronutrients. But you’ll be glad that you spent that time with family, and you’re more likely to remember those Sunday dinners than you would the extra rowing workout you squeezed in. The people you love aren’t going to be around forever, and it’s best that you keep that in mind.

Here’s another thing to consider. The more authentically and openly you live your life, the more likely the people around you will be to consider your healthy choices when they decide to invite you over. Don’t proselytize–nobody likes that fitness guy–but be you. People will notice that you tend to always add vegetables to your plate, even at breakfast. And when they invite you over for Sunday dinner they might ask you what kind of vegetables you’d like, or even what you’d recommend. It’s then that your lifestyle choices begin to rub off on the people who matter most to you.

The other thing living authentically will do for you is allow you to say no sometimes. Don’t be insecure about the fact that you love to work out, love to eat well during your work week, and love the yoga class you’ve been attending. Set the precedent right now that these things are important to you so that you can say no to some things and not hurt anyone’s feelings. If they love you and care about your health, they’ll understand when you don’t come to everything.

*When I say these cities are transient, I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t longtime residents for whom generations of families have called, say, the District of Columbia home. These cities are transient insofar as there are a number of residents moving in and out–but that’s not true of everyone living there. We tend to ignore the longtime residents who form the backbone of places. I don’t mean to do that in this case. For more on transience in American life, check out this helpful report from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Your friend has never been particularly fit nor particularly interested in nutrition. Maybe she was your old college roommate, and you have distinct memories of late nights, bad decisions, and otherworldly alcohol consumption. But something has gotten into her lately. Maybe she started going to that new yoga studio down the street. Or she hired a personal trainer. Or she started running and has fallen in love with piling up miles.

She’s not obnoxious about her healthy pursuits. She still talks about literature and movies and books and the occasional reality TV show. It’s just, now when you suggest drinks or happy hour she tells you that she’s scheduled for a class or a lift or a run.

You have a choice to make here. You can be supportive of her new healthy lifestyle, perhaps ask her questions about her yoga studio, personal trainer, or running coach.

Or you can do what a lot of people choose to do and be an asshole.

Unsupportive friends do whatever they can to derail a newly fit person’s journey. “Come on, just skip the workout,” these people will say.

“Oh look at you! Now you decide to run. Whatever happened to the girl I knew in college?”

Some version of this happens in work settings all the time. Someone decides to stop treating their body like a dump truck at lunch and instead of going out for bar food he brings lunch from home. But instead of asking how this person is going about overhauling their lifestyle, people pressure him to eat garbage alongside them.

We rightly have pushed back culturally against body shaming and unrealistic expectations of women in particular to “be thin.” But it’s okay somehow for us to make fun of the friend who favors organic food, perhaps even more expensive but high-quality food, and home-cooked food over fast food, microwaved food, and processed food.

Why do we make fun of fit people? The simple answer is that our ridicule reveals some insecurity about ourselves. It sounds like trite analysis, but I think there’s something to this.

Have you ever met someone who’s incredibly accomplished, good-looking, and nice? And your initial reaction rather than appreciating the opportunity to meet this person was to search for something wrong with them? I sure have. If I find myself comparing my accomplishments to someone else’s and see that I don’t quite measure up, sometimes I’ll start deducting points from their side of the ledger to make myself feel better. I’m not proud of these moments, but I know myself well enough to be able to admit to them. Getting older has done wonders for helping me realize that talent, merit, accomplishment, and admirable traits aren’t a zero-sum game: there’s enough out there for all of us. Still, I can be petty just like anyone else and it ain’t pretty.

If you find that a friend or family member is making an effort to live a sustainably healthy lifestyle, be supportive. Ask questions. JOIN THEM. Your ridicule and shaming of their choices could quite possibly undermine their efforts–leaving both you and them less healthy.

Besides, ridiculing someone else for doing something positive for their wellness just isn’t a good look. Don’t do it. Ever.