When my 3-year-old received a cancer diagnosis, my wife and I sat stunned in the doctor’s office, contemplating next steps. The biopsy verdict was in. Now we faced treatment. We asked the specialist if it could in any way be related to his complex autoimmune disease. Without hesitation, she shot back, “absolutely no way; the skin is entirely separate from what’s happening underneath the surface.” My wife and I looked at each other. We looked back at her. We looked back at each other.
It was not a particularly soaring high point in my life. I’d just gone through a lot of overwhelming frustration with debilitating Lyme disease and unhelpful medical professionals. The whole household had been though a month of bronchitis leading up to the birth of our daughter (giving birth is tough - but in the midst of a severe respiratory disease is unimaginable); my business partner wanted to go in a different direction; and the stress was so high and I was so under-rested that I had a complete pectoral tear during a routine light warmup. I was so defeated that I had no rejoinder for the utter nonsense just spouted off by a leading pediatric dermatology medical doctor at one of the most revered hospitals in the world. The skin is separate from what’s going on underneath the surface? It’s a coincidence that the skin yellows during liver compromise? It’s a coincidence that skin changes precisely during hormonal fluctuations of puberty, drug use, or menopause? It’s a coincidence that my child has rampant inflammatory cascades AND a skin cancer? We scheduled his surgery, my surgery, and life soldiered forward. We take each millisecond at a time, knowing full well that the rug may be swiped out without even a warning shot. I’m good. I’m good because INSIDE I’m a put-together person, not because my external environment is peachy. Next to my son, the best man I’ve ever known passed away not all that long ago. I’m good. I’m good because I don’t rely on external affirmations or delude myself into feeling whole by virtue of who does and doesn’t agree with me, support me, and so forth. I’m good because I’m good. I’m good because I accept that I was wrong, am wrong, will be wrong, and whatever expectations I try to set up for the universe would be sheer haughtiness. I’m good. That’s what I do. That’s who I am. The doctor’s words still ring in my ear. Every day I hear her. I hear her throughout the collective “you” out there. You think you are going to force some other person to act a certain way, and that will magically change the fact that inside you are just an angry person. You think that you will change some external variable to no longer be a sad person internally. You think you will drop weight to no longer be a heavy person on the inside. You think you will support a political or philosophical position and that will change the fact that inside you are just a scared person. You cannot change the outside to fix what’s broken inside. You simply have to fix your inner broken pieces. Don’t mishear me. There are many great causes for which you should fight. Absolutely, stand up for the marginalized. Alter inequities. But don’t for one second trick your brain into thinking that will make you whole. Your inner being is broken so tragically that no amount of ire, indignation, and external forces will make it right. The inside will still be wrong when everything outside is right. This is the central message I preach in fitness. People want to lose weight, change eating, improve wellbeing, get stronger, whatever it is. That’s all great. But I know incredibly strong and visually fit people who are the most broken of all. Without a doubt, they fixed some broken components in order to showcase external outcomes. I don’t take an iota of credit away from them. Hear me though. Even in these cases, outside outcome was borne out of internal shifts. ANYONE can go to any fitness program and “succeed.” That is, work some bolt-on lifestyle steps which you will assuredly discontinue, and the scale number will descend, or you’ll get a modicum of energy, or fill-in-the-blank-here. Cool. You changed the outside. The inside is still broken. I guarantee you’ll be back at square one and worse in 6 months, 5 years, 10 years. Instead, have the vulnerability and go through the pain of acknowledging your inner broken being. That is all that matters. And, if in your egoism and self-righteousness and superiority you are incapable of facing yourself, you will be the same self except worse. Why? Because then you will have even less time to work the steps of internal revision. People sit in shock when they hear about a wealthy or famous person who committed suicide. I expect it. I predict it. It’s the rule, not the exception. People who refuse to fix the inside are the most driven to seek the outside. Then they arrive. They changed it. But surprise surprise, the whole time they left the broken inner pieces asunder. It’s time for the gut check. Do you have the same frustrations from a year ago? Do you have the same or worse impatience and temper? Do you have the same or worse tolerance for opposition as 5 or 10 years ago? If so, you’re breaking more on the inside than when you began to shape the world. This is why you are dead wrong when you say you know what to do but don’t do it. This is why you’re dead wrong when you seek first to criticize than to understand. You’re dead wrong because you want to be right. If you want to be good, try being wrong. I’m good, not great. That came from a shift where I seek TO BE WRONG. If 7 billion people believe something, I obligate myself to believe the opposite. Popular is danger. I don’t look to be right. I’m not interested in right. I like effective. I like productive. Weight loss is nice. Workouts are fun. But fixing internal brokenness is where you must start and to where you must always return. Without that, the statistics are well known. I need not bore you with them. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I like you exactly as you are. But if YOU want to change something, I would simply challenge you to do an inventory on whether you are really addressing the fundamental barrier to achieving that change. In tens of thousands of people I’ve met in the fitness industry, every single one struggling is in overt refusal of fixing the inside. They want another plan, another diet, another workout, another video series, another pill, another scheme. Those are all artifices. You have to challenge the way you think, the way you feel, your obstinance, your rejection of humility. You cannot change the outside in order to fix what’s inside.
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➡️ 14 Coaching Appts
👍🏾 fasted cardio ✅ 2 hours note prep beforehand 🤔 are there any celebrity trainers with significant experience? My calendar doesn’t even fit in frame. Pay attention to the 4am meeting (repeats daily) pictured on right. What you learn about human behavior in even one day like this, let alone the 15 years I’ve been a professional in this industry, cannot be captured in a post. But it does raise a pertinent question: why are there fitness celebrities who’ve never once logged real experience like this? Just because someone is a good “workout-ER,” why are we allowing them to delude themselves into thinking that means anything? Couldn’t a quadriplegic who can’t perform a single exercise be a better coach and more valuable voice of authority in the exercise and nutrition science worlds than some random narcissist who uploads a selfie six times a day and who never trained, coached, managed, mentored, or directly led a significant number of people? The majority of verbalized excuses are make-believe. You know this if you’ve ever intently studied communications or sales as a rigorous academic endeavor. That is, when people voice concerns while contemplating a lifestyle change, the first 3 things they say may sound good but are bogus.
A common one I’ve encountered with regard to strengthening is that people “don’t want to get too big.” There are slender female athletes around 120-150lbs of bodyweight with 12inch circumference arms who bench 200-300lbs. You cannot magically “get big.” This is a biological law. Even among the outrageously naive people who claim they “gain muscle easily,” what you discover as you continue gathering information is that this is ALWAYS based on subjective “feel.” When we do skinfold caliper measurements, circumference measurements, DEXA, etc., the veil gets lifted. NO ONE accidentally gains “too much size.” No one. Usually, what’s going on is that a person who absolutely never takes care of herself finds that once she exercises a couple times her glycogen stores in muscles will fill. This is a momentary and finite adaptation that ends almost as soon as it starts. This is merely to make you capable of doing normal activity with muscle contraction. That’s the ceiling. Done. Sure, those immediate changes in raw beginners do appear dramatic. Limb circumference may indeed go up a half inch or so. Then, THAT’S IT. The only physically possible way this can continue is if you are eating to grow, eating like a child, refusing to eat like a grown adult. And even then, the size gain is over before you complain about it. But size gain is just one of many many fake excuses. The louder the cry, the phonier the excuse. In moderating conversations about any contemplated change, the top ones are time, money, energy. But they are all built upon questionable foundations. I lay a lot of the fault at the feet of “experts.” Because experts have created certain expectations in the general populace, the time, money, energy excuses appear legitimate. For people who always compare themselves to others and aren’t confident in who they are, those false expectations are crippling. The reality, however, is that improvement against ones self takes very minor and realistic but consistent work. Yes, if you compare where you are to where some other person has arrived, you are absolutely right. You don’t have the time, money, or energy. There is no amount of time, money, or energy which can turn you into someone else. However, to improve your personal health prospects, you have a wealth of time, energy, and money. Once you realize this, you find that every single excuse you’ve ever held up, no matter how good it sounded, is just hand-waving. “Look over here,” you cry, in order to distract from the palpable truth that you have ample reserves to get better every year, every month, every week, every day, every moment. But if you build up in your mind this false picture based on some other supposed experiences, you’re dead in the water. Don’t care what “they” do or did. Just work your steps. You can stop with the hand-waving. Some players were lost. Some gained. Some queened. Positions are all different. Advantages asunder. You are still playing a game that was over a long time ago.
Yesterday I posted about how as some people continue to move forward with the timeline of the universe, most reject the changes, living in a bygone era that probably never was anyway. You know it well: family members who still somehow see you as the child you once were eons ago; friends who see you as the momentary snapshot of when you first interacted. The ironic thing is I see it in exact opposition among people I know. That is, some people who got to know me around the age of 17 will hear a very moderate thing I say as extraordinarily hawkish, right leaning, even fascistic. Some people who’ve met me in recent years hear my SAME moderate sentiment as super liberal, over progressive, left leaning, even naively pacifistic/misguided. Lol. It’s helped me to realize that the vast majority of people are wholly incapable of evaluating anything. They bring so much baggage to the table from an old chess game that they can’t even play the current one. We all do it. The remedy? Search your heart. You’ll find that in all kinds of domains you get triggered based not on the game afoot but some old chess game that no one else is or has been playing for a very long time. Where I see it regularly is in health behaviors, obviously, as I deal with thousands of coaching hours. People carry a guilt from a prior day as their lack of motivation for today. They carry a slight at work from last year as their chip on their shoulder for the present business quarter. They carry the shame of a non compliant healthy lifestyle moment from last week as the pretext for active self-sabotage this week. The game has moved on. You must as well. There is a sociological law at play when you revise who you are. Other people are not “ok” with it. Even if they are at peace with you doing something beneficial, ultimately they aren’t committed to the deep change required to view someone they know in a different way. And they are certainly not excited about the implications.
This is a problem. And it’s a big one. It is furtive. It is clandestine. It’s seldom overt. But they are out to sabotage you. Not intentionally, mind you. Merely because they have an identity in their minds which is loosely based on who you WERE, it causes them grave distress when that is shifting. It means the world is shifting. And people don’t just dislike change, they can’t stand it. Think about what’s happening here. You have decided to grow and change in a fundamental way. Others have not, clearly. They will continue to box you in to their fixed and predefined categories. They will “hear” you say something you never say anymore. They will “see” you do something you don’t do anymore. They will engage with your old self and ignore and refuse to validate the one you’re becoming. This requires a certain amount of leadership and “setting the tone” when you commit to improvement. That is, you must view that you are the absolute authority of your actions in any environment. Your work friends will continue to put out candy dishes and ridiculous treats when they know you don’t need to waste your decision making budget on opting out. Your family will expect you to shop at the same places and have the same items on hand. And on the list goes. This is why personal development and growth isn’t a bolt-on catch phrase while people work in the same way in the exact same place doing the same things in the same manner. A weekend retreat, a great inspirational book, an outstanding podcast is worthless when stacked up against obvious and severe alterations in how you operate. The long term successes find how they’ll sit comfortably within new interpersonal interactions as the crabs continue to claw them back into the bucket. People worship the scale. It’s up; and that’s “bad.” You take it to mean your burnt offering has been rejected. You cry out, “I am cursed, by you, oh great one, Scale Above All Others.” The photos above illustrate average bone density progression throughout the aging process of Americans. As body weight goes up, lean tissue goes DOWN.
The problem is that your body is readily shedding weight every day even when you see the scale go up. Aging and degeneration ARE the loss of lean tissue. Age IS the body’s decreasing capacity to make cells faster than you damage them. Thus, a weight on the scale going up for someone who “wants to lose weight” could actually be the best possible thing for them. Most people eat a nutrient poor intake. Once we remedy that, and they begin incorporating lifting, we WANT to see a few pounds up. That can merely mean you’re winning the battle against worsening. Now, to be fair, for almost everyone, that journey upward is short lived and very finite. Why? Because, as I said, your body is aching, yearning, begging to lose bone, ligament, cartilage, tendon, connective tissue and muscle every single day that you don’t put a heavy resistance on the body. This is a difficult topic for the layperson to wrangle. They don’t think about composition in the strict sense. If at 50 years old they are about the same body weight as when they were 25, they think that’s good. It isn’t good. It isn’t anything. It just is. What’s your composition and athletic capacity? In order to live well and feel good, you probably need to gain the 25lbs of lean tissue you’ve lost in the past 25 years. Perhaps you can see the compounding problem. The really high difficulty lies in the fact that people carry an extra 100lbs of body fat WHILE 50lbs less lean tissue. This reduces your function by magnitudes, not mere percentages. It’s worse in yo-yo dieters. As the years go on, their capacity to save or build lean tissue is ever-worsened. Eventually they are so weak AND overweight that the project to recover basic function is beyond the tissue-turnover horizon. That is, the start point is too weak to produce the intensity to lose the fat. Biologically, your body's weight loss efforts as we age become increasingly targeted at lean tissue, not fat mass. When the average person is down 5lbs, 100% ISN’T fat. This is why strengthening is critical. This is why there is no substitute for heavy weight training. If your starting point is totally sedentary, then yes, you benefit from being not-sedentary. Absolutely. I applaud the stages of beginning walking and hiking and just general activity. They are insufficient to do what you want though. The human body has absolutely no reason in all of biological fact to magically retain or build lean tissue as we age if you don’t pickup a very heavy weight with some regularity. No, seriously. There is no mechanism for bone matrix improvement without heavy loading. That’s not an opinion. Lookup astronaut studies, osteocalcin during resistance training, etc. Furthermore, the insulin-INDEPENDENT glucose transporters are stimulated by hard muscle contraction. Also, try to keep up: the musculoskeletal system is not simply a bunch of robotic mechanism. Muscle contraction produces myokines, making it integral in endocrine signaling. You read that right. If you don’t lift, you are endocrine-deficient. This even applies to avid endurance athletes if they never actually sprint or perform heavy resistance training. With endocrine deficiency, and with only insulin-dependent transporters, with a dearth of osteocalcin, do you really think GAIN of weight on a scale is the real problem? UP may be your body trying to save your life. Non-beneficial changes of composition are THE problem. Predominantly, the rapid wasting of non-fat mass is wearing you down. Therefore, although I am sympathetic to the scale idolatry, your false religion is ruining modern human health. After only 20 minutes of sitting, glucose transporters become more incapable. That is, you become slightly more diabetic after only a few minutes of sitting.
Damaged cells have only a few mechanisms for repair. All rely on local transportation (nearby blood flow and oxygenation). Thus, although we must rest, recover, and sleep well, me MUST move, especially when something hurts. Think back to when you were a kid. If a peer fell out of a tree, his leg or arm was cast for the whole school year practically. No more. You won’t see it even in complicated breaks for more than 6 weeks or so. Medicine has evolved a lot in even the past YEAR. Recovery recommendations are unrecognizable from 10 years ago. Yes, you read that right. There are recommendations on recovery which have changed in the past 18 months. Neuroscience has a paradigm-implicating discovery daily. That isn’t hyperbole or rhetorical device. Every. Single. Day. We have discoveries which upend decades of dogma. We are all under-active versus most of the rest of the world and human history. We do basically nothing, then tissue hurts. We take that signal of “hurt” to mean we must’ve “overdone it” and we have to rest more. But the “rest” is what led to the creaky joints, the weakness, the underfed tissue to begin with. Your tissue is starving. If you don’t move, it’s starving and drowning. Muscle contraction IS an endocrine signal. It is the mechanism of lymph movement, cell waste removal, osmotic and diffusion transport, localized IGF use, mitochondrial function, and receptor up-regulation (ie - makes you less diabetic). In a way, we have the causal relationships backwards. We wait for “energy” and “feeling good” in order to move. But it’s precisely the opposite. Yes, as you challenge the functionless body with movement, some things may hurt MORE. Follow the logic; don’t succumb to the phobia. This is a natural consequence of growth. Growth hurts. Trade the chronic death of tissue for the acute irritation of training. Yes, movement will shift structures. That can be interpreted as “pain.” Especially when we’ve become so deconditioned that the effort of EFFORT itself is unfamiliar, the only context your brain has is “pain.” You may not even be in pain to be in pain. Regardless, in order to have any hope of restoring tissue, you must get blood and oxygen in and around whatever it is you aim to improve. This is a biological fact. You cannot restore anything in the body with a dearth of building material. Quit starving your tissue. Be strong. Be mobile. Be enduring. Perhaps, be relatively lean. Don’t throw away health because of idolatry to body composition. Skinny does not mean healthy or fit. Heavy doesn't mean unhealthy or unfit. Body composition is body composition. No more. No less.
I once had a client who was in the best overall shape of her life while we were training only twice weekly. She was plugged in with me, with a yoga practice AND a variety of endurance training and activities. A busy season of work and life began to chip away at her availability, first bringing us to once weekly meetings. At that point, her strength remained. However, she stopped yoga AND any cardiorespiratory efforts. Body composition began to slightly worsen and it was evident that her endurance vanished. Over the course of three years, our frequency lessened all the more, all the while I increasingly encouraged her to find a way to become more plugged in through the week, perhaps finding a new yoga studio, signing up for a cycling club or ANYTHING. I no longer had the availability to take her more than once every two weeks or so. Otherwise I would’ve encouraged her to return to the template which worked, our original weekly split. She began reporting back “exercise” as “going for walks.” This would be a win for someone who was completely sedentary. But for someone who was athletic and actively opting out of improvement or even maintenance, this was a bad sign. Anything less than once weekly, and strength will vanish too. Unfortunately, strength is the key to all other aspects of health and fitness. Endurance, mobility and body comp can all be achieved pretty rapidly once there’s strength aplenty. Without strength, they’re a dice roll at best and an impossibility at worst. Getting lean without first obtaining and maintaining ample strength is extremely rare. Technically, it's not biologically viable. The amount of strength you have dictates how much of your food gets allocated toward NOT FAT. With high strength and intense muscle contraction, food goes to feed THAT strength and muscle contraction. Without high strength and intense muscle contraction, food goes to feed everything other than that strength and muscle contraction. It's pretty straight-forward, actually. Long story short, the client decided to become weak along with throwing away her endurance, mobility and composition. I worried for her, as she had become quite slight, and now had really big risks of bone break or trauma with even a light fall. She took a routine simple fall at work last year, resulting in traumatic brain injury. I checked in on her to find that she was attending therapy, but had become even less regular in her fitness practices than when we discontinued working together. She reported the all or nothing false religion. Since she couldn’t be immediately lean and high cardiorespiratory output, why bother even strengthening, right? I worry for her. But her false religion is ubiquitous. If people can’t lose weight readily, they quit strengthening. If people don’t have high cardiorespiratory capacity, they stop with mobility practices. They choose to get worse at everything since they can't be great at one or two things. But you can't be great at those one or two things without first getting stronger. Your choice to avoid strength is what is making you worse. It's not age. It's not time. It's not circumstances. Fitness is bigger than magazine covers. And force production is THE ONLY thing that will keep you out of the nursing home. There are plenty of flexible and thin people with endurance in the nursing home. There isn’t one person at the nursing home who can squat 200-500lbs. Don’t throw away your health just because you misunderstand fitness. When you want to accomplish anything, plan what you would do toward that end WHILE sick, injured, in pain, overwhelmed, traveling, broke, caring for a health-failing family member or friend, during monsoon or snowstorm, unmotivated, uninspired, anxious, depressed, negative, and so on.
99 out of 100 times when I hear people talk about fitness endeavors, the forthcoming week they describe is a fantasy. When reality hits, there is no more practice. The obvious remedy is to plan as if the week will be almost impossible. That way, when challenges come, no big deal. This is critical. People who are expecting or waiting to have a fantasy perfect week will never follow-through, because there is no such thing. There will always be a holiday, a weekend, a tweaked muscle, a low energy day, a life or work issue, and so forth. The people I’ve known to be most successful at anything, including fitness, don’t have ONE less stressor or barrier to success than those who are least successful. THE differentiator is what they will tolerate as a pretext to excuse themselves from their practice. Thus, excuse proof your practice. "Yay, they're dead!", shouted my six-year-old son as we entered Barnes & Noble on Memorial Day. In the era of people going out of their way to misunderstand others, I could only guess what shoppers and store clerks were thinking. Without the preceding context no one could possibly know what my son meant; and, as you can see every day on social media, people love to misconstrue and apply their own obsession with perpetual offense. However, if you had heard the prior conversation, it would make perfect sense. He was talking about how we are celebrating the veterans and appreciating their incredible sacrifice; and we are NOT celebrating the loss of them; we are NOT celebrating their deaths; we are NOT thinking "yay, they're dead!"
But this is typical. People don't have the proper context. They don't have the background information. They aren't even interested in bringing themselves up to speed. Then they launch headlong into a diatribe about their feelings. I encounter the propensity in most subjects, especially health and fitness. There was a practice among early disciples and Jesus followers which theologians later termed "disciplina arcani." Essentially, it was the idea that there are complex systems which it would be irresponsible to discuss with newbies or non-believers. Some concepts require a basic level of understanding first. In the study of education, they call this scaffolding. There have to be certain prior understandings in place before subsequent subject matter can be managed. Otherwise, people don't have the chops to engage; and everyone is left arguing with disparate axioms. Mark Twain famously quipped, "don't argue with an idiot; onlookers won't be able to tell the difference," which has often been misattributed as, "don't argue with ignorant people; they'll drag you down to their level and beat you on experience." We can see this with debates over economics, climate change, vaccines, and historical sciences. People want to refuse learning the most essential pieces of a subject, and then they proceed to have fiery soliloquies about the advanced topics. The outcome is obvious to us all: extremes on both sides. Without a basic understanding, it's unclear where to even begin a debate. Thus it is in nutrition and fitness. I find it remarkable how many people "know it all" when they haven't worked a single full-time week as a health and fitness professional. I've even run into "trainers" who think they've somehow arrived or reached an advanced level of development when they've never worked a single day of full-time coaching. You may be good or even great at one modality. But before you've put in 10 years of 40+ hours per week in a given pursuit, you just haven't reached mastery. I haven't reached mastery at 14+ years of 60-100 hours per week. It takes patience. And there's always more growth possible. Now don't get me wrong. You are entitled to speech and opinions. And regardless of how little experience you have, feel free to put together arguments based on facts. Fitness as a subject, however, is simply too multifactorial to let just anyone wade into the discussion. Let me clarify. Anyone who is an ideologue or has an agenda shouldn't be welcome. I'm a pragmatist. I've done veganism. I've done paleo. I've done low fat. I've done high fat. I've done long distance endurance training. I've done sprints. I've done no cardio. They've all worked. And I'm not just referencing my own program. I'm talking about thousands of clients. I've seen two people with nearly identical variables follow the exact same guidelines while one of them loses bodyfat and the other gains. You see, being right doesn't matter. Worldview doesn't matter. Personal testimonial doesn't matter. Effectiveness is all that matters. And different programs have same or greater effectiveness in even the same person at different points in their lives. Leave alone different people with different variables for now. For every example you give of a success story due to X, I can give you at least ten stories of people failing due to the exact same X or succeeding due to the exact opposite of X. Biology isn't like chemistry or physics. Even within physics there is uncertainty. We calculate some things. We can estimate some laws. But within biology we can't even predict how a strain of flu will evolve in the near term. How then can people act so assured of themselves about human physiology over the long term? It's preposterous. Then we add in the humanity component. Human physiology is even less predictable than with other animals, because of our minds, our emotions, our technology. A wild dog can crave food and possibly do absolutely nothing about it. A penniless human can borrow a family member's credit card and buy food. We humans are totally unrestricted in a sense. We have to start with the axiom that we don't know everything. We have to begin with an understanding of humility. If you aren't precisely where you want to be, it's time to reevaluate just how "right" you are. You have to be ready to be wrong. Coaches, you need this more than anyone. If you aren't prepared to be in the wrong and re-evaluate your approach, just please stop calling yourself a coach. You're so ready to blame the clients, because "I know that it works if people just listen to me." That statement misses the mark altogether. Coaching IS figuring out how to get resistant people to act in their own best interest. I understand the problem. Some of you don't have that many hours of experience coaching. Fitness is your side gig, after you work in an unrelated field, or after you were a competitive athlete or bodybuilder. You work almost exclusively with people like you or wired like you. And so you have a sampling bias which prevents you from building important skills which ARE coaching. Instead of figuring out how to communicate with people who have different wiring than yours, you shame them, deride them, and complain about their unwillingness to follow your orders. YOU ARE NOT A COACH. Your clients are the clients who would've been successful without you. The kicker is that they would most likely be even better without you. Your approach has pushed away the difficult people who could help make you great, if you were willing to learn, to be wrong, to reassess yourself. The layperson is the real client: the people who fear the gym, resist the lifestyle, aren't sure of the way forward. Most of those people won't even look at some of these self-styled gurus, let alone shake their hands, let alone start being coached by them, let alone stay with them. I'm not saying that body composition goals aren't nice. But don't conflate them with health or fitness. There are extremely healthy and fit people with excess body fat. There are extremely unhealthy and unfit people with low body fat. Humans need strength, activity and sensible eating regardless. Don't let a superficial and visual idea of "perfection" become the enemy of good or great health and fitness. The highest good in health and fitness is a sustainable lifestyle. Just being active, and building strength and endurance, benefits you mentally, emotionally and physically. Yet, somehow, people will quit doing healthy behaviors just because they aren't achieving body composition goals. A big part of the discouragement comes from trainers. I've heard trainers say, "you must not be trying," when someone isn't hitting body comp changes. And I just shake my head. I think that's an easy belief to have if you've never personally experienced overwhelming odds (or maybe forgot what it was like when you were up against them) or you've built no emotional IQ. But for those of us who've struggled with incredible barriers or for those of us who have some humility and empathy, we KNOW that effort doesn't ALWAYS yield an expected return. If you don't have a lot of experience, or if you're unwilling to be influenced by data, you don't know this. I've seen people who are high compliance, hitting macros, nailing the program, and the skinfold pinches won't budge. They don't lose an ounce of stored fat. I've seen people who are non-compliant, skipping workouts, lackadaisical in program, and they just keep getting leaner and more muscular. There are many factors at play; but usually it comes back to stress management. People who manage stress well have a greater underlying health foundation. People who don't manage stress well are operating under compromised health. Which person's body is going to be willing to change? This is no small matter. Positive people with low-perceived life stress and good sleep are in a better position for health and fitness. This alone dictates a lot of outcomes. I have ample examples of people with incredibly low stress lives and rockstar sleep patterns who aren’t really trying that hard but still get in great shape. Conversely, I’ve seen people SLAVE for improvements during high stress periods in life with little sleep and get NOWHERE. There is a lot of context to keep in mind. There is more complexity than can fit in a sound byte. Most people know too much and yet not enough about health and fitness. |
Elev8 Wellness
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