The Transformative and Restorative Process

Often I feel like the reality of why people pursue a lot of different personal training and coaching services is wrapped up in the desire to appeal to some aesthetic improvement for themselves. While I believe this is most often well intentioned and not severe enough to become referred to a psychologist for diagnosis what I try to do is guide them towards performance oriented metrics and long term physiological adaptations. The flighty subjectivity of aesthetics I have always had a hard time wrapping my head around but I do understand that it's a major reason why some people engage with training and so I by necessity need to interface with it.

What matters infinitely more to me as a trainer and coach is the long term trajectory process of improvement. Yeah, "it's cool" to have six pack abs, however, if you are so imbalanced in your body that you can't move well enough to get up a couple flights of stairs......man, I think we have the priorities upside down.

Movement really matters!

Health really matters!

Bathroom ab selfies................

When it gets right down to it strength and conditioning really matter when we are talking about exising in a body that is going to hopefully move us around qualitatively better than not for 7 to 9 decades on earth. The challenge is framing this process well to begin with. Whether you are exercising/training to be free of bodily pain, or free of the pain in your brain from what you see in the mirror it's really important to keep the long term scope in perspective here. Anyone can go on a crazy diet "find" their stupid abs and then fall off and turn into a couch potato again once they got the proof they were looking for. If all you want is short term stuff then there are a lot of ways to get to where you want to go. There are many unsustainable roads full of drugs and digital editing software that will allow you to look like whatever weirdo version of yourself you want to look like.

For the record I could not be less interested!

What I am infinitely more interested in is how do we sustain these practices for decades. How do you start small and humbly grow into a person that is so fundamentally different that old friends are shocked when they run into you again years later. I am after the full 180 for everyone that I work with. If you are limping and you need a cane to get around then we need to figure out how to turn you into a bi-pedal person again! The strength training and physical conditioning process is restorative just as much as it is transformative. If you have knee pain, shoulder pain, ankle pain, etc. then that needs to be remediated so that you can engage much more meaningfully with the greater breadth of the process. Piling more and more stress on top of an already dysfunctional system does not improve it. In these cases we must intentionally tread very wisely and conservatively in order to make progress.

What is known and what is seen with good training programs is that it improves function as well as quality of life. I have had many, many, many clients over the years tell me "I don't know what I would be doing right now if it wasn't for training the way we have over the last couple of years. My quality of life is so different! I don't hurt anymore and I'm moving/lifting so much better than I ever have." Don't get me wrong I LOVE when clients hit lifetime bests in the gym as well as achieve other objective measures but sometimes those qualitative ones are just as if not more rewarding!

When managed, programmed and executed very well training becomes a qualitative lifetime add not a subtraction! However, if we choose to use this process as a tool to flagellate ourselves then we get what we ask for there too. So the stressors matter, the progressions matter and the long term emphasis of training matters as well. The critical component to understand here is that we can overtrain, overreach just as easily as we can train within capacity and grow. When we train that has to be the head space we engage with. At some point more training stress is just more training stress that we have to add recovery strategies in to improve the process. Less stress in a lot of cases is just enough stress to move the needle and in the long term game moving the needle is THE GOAL!

If you start this process at 40, 50, 60, 70+ you need to have some goals but none of them can be more important short term ones than moving the needle for yourself long term. If we engage meaningfully over decades of time we are changed forever and in a sense you get to write new chapters in a book still full of empty pages. If we allow life to drift by and are just a passenger in the vehicle of our body then eventually we get to a destination we can't escape. Instead, if you invest in your physical body like you invest in your retirement, like you invest in your education, like you invest in real estate or any other thing what you gain back is a life that is full of physical freedom.

That at the end of the day is the gift I want to give to everyone I get the opportunity to work with. A road that is long and full of exponentially expanding physical freedoms. Now........I know that perfect lighting bathroom ab selfies are super great. However, would you rather have some pictures of yourself captured as a beautiful statuesque fragment in time or an evolutionarily developing, constantly growing and adapting wildly free biological organism? I'm not saying these things are always mutually exclusive but what I am saying is that there is so much more to explore in this long term process than just the superficial aesthetic. You are a uniquely individual person with an innately boundless capacity. You are so much more than just what you look like and you deserve to explore ALL the potential that you have yet to discover.