The Illusory Nature of Fitness

If you are reading this column in the SOMA Get Fit blog, it is almost certainly because you are working with Scott and our team in an attempt to get more fit–a noble and important goal, without a doubt. It is, however, a dangerous one in that it can, and often does, consume huge swaths of time and energy. The goal of fitness is not by itself the culprit. Rather, it is that our modern culture and lifestyles imbue us with a mindset that problems can be tackled by setting “goals.” These goals are rarely prioritized, often scheduled into a day that is already full, and, in the end, often not fully realized. For every New Year’s resolution that has gone unmet, there are dozens more “goals” that have met their demise on the pyre of our modern, over-worked, over-scheduled lives. At SOMA, we want to let you in on a little secret: this kind of goal setting is useless and demoralizing. It will serve no useful purpose in your life, but instead will only magnify the deficiencies that you already feel and have brought you to us in the first place.

Fitness as a goal is no goal at all–it is an illusion, no different than setting up a goal of “world peace,” or a “safer city,” or a “greener planet.” What does any of this mean? How do we get these things? In the same way that a politician can offer up working solutions for maintaining the peace, making your city safer, or sustaining a greener planet, SOMA offers you a viable way to get more fit. All of this, however, spares you from having to make the hard choices of what such things mean to you. As a physician and a neuro-scientist, I can state with near certainty that every individual’s definition of fitness and one’s actual abilities to reach their fitness ideal will change as they age. Not only aging in the chronological sense but in an emotional sense too. For instance, there is certainly no major physiological limitation that says a 50-year-old could not keep muscle mass like that of a 20-year-old. A more relevant question, however, is this: would a 50-year-old want that? This is the moving target of fitness–it means different things to different people at different times of their lives.

The challenge in getting fit, and staying fit, critically depends on your ability to flesh out what it is you want from your training and what it is you do not want. If your definition of fitness is having those sculpted hips and legs of a 20-year-old figure skater, and you just hit your 40th birthday, I think I can advise you that you are in for some disappointment. Can you “get there”? Sure you can, but not without making major sacrifices in the rest of your life. Family, friends, work, sleep–something will have to give. At 20, these things may have been less important to you, so you would not have had to make the hard choices. At 40, your priorities are likely to have changed, and these things are probably highly important to you. Goal-setting involves prioritizing. The most crucial part of fitness lies in determining how you will accommodate your training into your life without ruining one or the other, or both.

SOMA is more than a mechanism to realize physical improvement. We pride ourselves on recognizing the shifting nature of fitness and our bodies, and on our ability to help you define clearly and precisely what fitness means to you. Nearly anyone today can provide you a place to sweat and run through some exercises. Months later, and perhaps with a lighter wallet, you might wake up and realize that you maybe look thinner, or perhaps can run a bit further, or even both; but you also realize that you are unfulfilled and do not feel any better, any younger, any faster, or any stronger. And therein lie the paradox and the challenge: working out brings your weaknesses front and center, weaknesses that were not there when you started your fitness program. Part of getting fit is recognizing that overcoming those weaknesses makes us stronger, makes us healthier.

In the end, that is what fitness truly is: challenging ourselves, our bodies, and our minds to do better, to do more, to do something more effectively. These challenges and journeys to improve ourselves should bring us joy. And we ought to recognize that at any age it is always a worthy goal to learn about ourselves and our limitations and to challenge them. Perhaps this is the secret to fitness, and it is certainly something that we at SOMA hope to help you to experience.

By Jason Campagna, M.D., PH.D.

Medical Director

This entry was written by scrawford, posted on October 11, 2009 at 10:42 pm, filed under Fitness, Life is Fitness, Santa Barbara and tagged Blog, Fitness, jason campagna, Medical Director, Santa Barbara, SOMA GET FIT. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.