The fitness industry is silly as fuck.
Actually, let me rephrase that.
The fitness industry, as a whole, is silly as fuck.
I realize how douchey/pretentious/degenerative this sounds, but STAY WITH ME – I promise I’ll loop this back to something awesome, something you can seamlessly apply today. In the meantime, listen to this song for some good vibes and take a deep breath with me, way into your belly. Feels dope right? Let’s do one more.
You legit can’t read past this line until you take a deep breath.
Nice dude what’s up! I’m Alex, and welcome to my blog. This is NOT a personal blog, where I write poems and post pictures of my vacations and dogs and shit. Nay, this is an asylum custom built n’ fortified for our health, consciousness, and freedom.
So I digress or whatever :D
I love the field of fitness and I love the mission that I’m on: to become a world-class fitness coach. But in my deepest intuition, this industry – in many ways but not all – often does more harm than good. To be fair though, let’s give a little preface: the intent is always pure. The INTENT behind most fitness endeavors is usually the same.
“Take care of myself and my health. Become more confident. Challenge myself. Grow.”
As a coach, it’s about the same: Help people take care of their health. Give them confidence. Guide their challenge. Watchthem grow. Freak out about how awesome they’re doing :).
But intent often differs from execution, and the path to the promised-land gets fruitless and… weird.
Why?
Well, it’s simply the other edge of the sword. Unfortunately, the sword is sharp as fuck. This is why we’re silly:
We pitch a Utopia of hotness
As an industry, we sell and we promise a place where everyone has a six pack and a nice ass and tight bodies and golden skin, where nothing hurts, where we’re all ruthlessly happy and everything’s made out of music. We worship the ephemeral moment of a stage, and we punish each other for our own human inevitabilities. We vilify imperfection. Even worse, we don’t acknowledge it. We tell the world that they’re not enough, until they are where we are – in magazine hotland.
I want to reiterate here that again, this isn’t everyone. There are some badass coaches out there and some badass people. But let’s have a little storytime sesh real quick.
Long long ago, last week, I saw a transformation story on the internet. It was this post of a girl who got into shape, made this incredible, amazing, inspiring transformation from where she was one year ago. She made MASSIVE amounts of progress and in her “after” pic she looked beautiful. The post was all about how far she’s come and how much she loves losing weight, and then she ends the post with “#ThoseGrannyArmsTho”.
I read that and my heart made a little sad face and I kid you not I realized right then and there one of my biggest missions in life: to heal the intermittent self-loathing that comes with getting in better shape.
Because in many ways, we do this way too often.
We approach growth and life and doing good things for ourselves from a place of inadequacy, insecurity, hurt.
We approach it from a place in our heads that compares us with the past and the future, and with every person we know.
We approach it with reckless admonition for the present: with a voice that tells us we need this to be happy, and until we get that or we are that, we can’t be happy. We don’t deserve to be.
And that is silly as fuck.
Because life isn’t easy but it’s not meant to be shitty. So much of the time we get caught in the web of our goals and our body – the aesthetic, the result. We thrive on the two days of seven that we do everything, exactly right. But on the other days, often, we turn into our worst enemy.
When we fall short of a goal or eat a bad meal or whatever, we revert to comparison. We revert to a skewed and flawed paradigm that advertising teaches us to look through. Instead of recognizing a mistake and moving on, we berate, and we start being mean – to ourselves.
Do you talk to your mother the same way you talk to yourself sometimes? What would you think if you heard a person talking to someone the same way we talk to ourselves when we’re down?
The path to growth is paved with mistakes, obviously. But you can’t psyche yourself out for taking risks so you can grow. So talk yourself up and show yourself some love. Be kind to yourself. When you make mistakes, forgive yourself. Hahaha. Like, it’s OKAY. It’s okay to fail, it’s cool, you’re fine. Laugh about it and learn, and then in the immortal words of Taylor Swift:
What I’m about to say next is something I never thought I’d be saying, let alone in a friggin’ blog.
It’s also one of the first things I spend a lot of time instilling in my clients subconsciously, through different lessons and habits and really special moments in the coaching process. I’m about to give it all to you upfront. You wanna know the Fruity Truth?
I dunno...
For me personally, it changed the game. It changed the way I approach every challenge, and made things actually fun. It’s top secret af.
But I’ll let you in on it since you’re here ;)
The Fruity Truth is that fitness, at the core of it all, isn’t even about fitness. It’s not about a six pack or a PR or a goal weight or fucking how many dumbbells you can hold.
Focusing only on that is the Rat’s Race of better health.
The Fruity Truth is that fitness is about learning to love the shit out of who we are and where we’re at on our quest to be dope(r).
A badass physique is just a gem in your journey – a direction.
Learning to balance your raw ambition with humility and self-love – those are the true champions of good health.
So that’s it, blog time is OVER I’m goin to class then training my client Jake, he is deep in week five and killin ittttt. Just remember!
It’s not JUST about the six pack.
It’s about actually having fun no matter how close or far you are from your goals.
It’s about learning to enjoy the process of growing and changing.
It’s about not talking down to yourself; finally giving yourself permission to be cool with you, no matter the shit or the shweg that you’re in.
After all, isn’t the point of all this to enjoy your life a little more?
