Life, Health and Fitness

Recently I was training a young chap and I asked him why he wanted to get fit and he answered “I want to look good for the chicks”. He was expressing an existential motivation. Existentialism deals with the meaning of life. Woody Allen once quipped “I took a test in existentialism. I left all the answers blank and still got 100%”. I have to admit that existentialism is a bit like that. So how does an obtuse form of philosophy have anything to do with health and fitness?

Existentialism is all about the individual and the choices the individual makes in trying to construct a life. An existential philosopher would use terms like “confusion”, “searching” or “life definition”. So we humans are all confused until we define our own life. Existentialism cannot apply to a creature like a fish; a fish swims around the ocean eating, until it is ultimately eaten by a bigger fish, it does not consider its role in life it is simply programmed to react. Now existentialism might be a bit fancy when trying to explain health and fitness. But not to worry, the point being that when we are talking about health and fitness we need to consider our whole life. What choices or non-choices have we made in regard to our health and how do these choices affect our life?

We define many aspects of our lives. You might define yourself as someone who can cook, for instance. Once you define an aspect of our lives you put considerable effort into building and protecting that aspect. So in the example of cooking, you might purchase cook books, try different recipes and actually build your cooking ability. The reverse is also true, if you define a negative aspect of your live you will protect that definition of yourself, it is almost like you don’t want to let go of an excuse. So the classic example is someone who defines themselves as not being fit. So these people will join a gym, take on a personal trainer and their fitness level will increase, no surprise there, what happens next is surprising. Once people who have clear definition of themselves as being unfit start to get fit they will sabotage their health and fitness routines. They will go to great lengths, subconsciously, to protect their definition of themselves. How we define ourselves is very powerful.
By taking the time to think about our life and what we want out of life we can be much more determined and deliberate in the choices we make; we can be more motivated. The young lad at the start of this story had very strong motivations to get fit. However this benefit is in the distance. Like so many aspects of being fit and healthy the benefits are in the future and therefore cannot be fully appreciated by the unfit. So you might have been told that you will feel so much better when you are fit, which is true and for some people this might be motivating. However for some people the exertion and pain of training might be too much and they never get to appreciate the feelings of being fit, hence motivation is lost. The aim of existential is to define motivation in terms of larger life goals.

Now this is not to say there are not limits on what we can achieve, someone with degenerative knee issues should not be trying to run marathons. So how to stay motivated? There are two basic strategies. We need to understand how we define ourselves and how these definitions affect our behaviour. The existential theory of behaviour will be explored in the next few blogs.