There’s a message anyone who is trying to improve their health should know: Working out is not enough to generate the deep capacity you need to become fitter. It is a starting point, not an end point.
This goes just as well for running, dieting, and a good deal of 12-week training programs.
This is a hard message for someone who wants a short-cut.
They want the “six pack for summer”, the “high level cardio”, the “big lifts” in a short time; without doing the work of changing their habits and lifestyles.
They think that working out 5-6 days a week is enough to combat the poor physical and mental choices they tolerate every other hour of each day. They think that joining a gym will instantly make them move better and faster. They think that signing up for a diet challenge will instantly make them more committed to their own well-being.
Most coaches and gyms, of course, encourage this kind of superficiality. Because it makes you feel like “fitness” is easy. Because it keeps you in a never-ending cycle of what is next and new.
Here’s the problem: Fitness is more complex than that. It doesn’t actually work that way. The “key takeaway” behind every diet program and fitness regiment gives you the context needed to use it in real life. But it is not the end point.
Let me give you an example.
A key take-away from reading CrossFit’s Level I training guide is that everyone is subject to a “health spectrum” ranging from illness to wellness to fitness. A very useful idea.
However, due to individualized differences – epigenetics, biopsychosocial influences, medical history, training age – we all have varying and constantly progressing or regressing definitions of illness, wellness, and fitness. There are so many follow up questions.
Where do we individually draw the lines of illness, wellness, fitness? Where is this generally useful? Where does this model fail us? And so on. Just knowing about this model of health doesn’t help us.
But if one takes the time to invest in the nuanced details of fitness and to define the model for themselves, it is possible to make the model useful.
Why do all this? Because without specific definitions and relevant, detailed goals, your efforts are built on sand.
What a 12-week program, a diet challenge, or a gym membership may give you is is a map from your current state of fitness to another state of fitness. But if you have not done the work to expand your knowledge and navigate the territory, you will only ever look at maps. You will never see the land.
This is the great difficulty, of course. We lack time, and opportunity costs are real.
That’s why a great coach will do two things:
- Help you develop an excellent filter – Based on your goals, what is worth learning deeply? What is the simplest expression of the first-principle of that method? What is your first step off of the starting line?
- Increase your autonomy – One day you will go from reading the map, to surveying the land for yourself.
Join a gym. Buy a 12-week program. Invest in that nutrition plan.
But do not stop there.
As James Clear writes in his book Atomic Habits “It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.”
In other words, there is no end point.
