Fitness is not a marathon nor a sprint, but a series of intervals!

I have been involved in the fitness industry for many years now and I’ve seen so many ideas come and go. I’ve seen trainers come and go and I’ve seen clients come and go. The ups and downs of the fitness industry parallels the ups and downs experienced throughout life. Sometimes we’re up and sometimes we’re down, but we’re always striving for something higher.

I remember a friend of mine once told me that “Life is like the stock market. There are ups and downs, but as long as the trend is going upward then we’re doing alright.” I’m not sure where he came up with that from, but it made so much sense that I began to apply it to my fitness…but not just my periodized programming, my overall fitness.

I used to look at fitness as a destination…as if I was going to reach a point and that would be the end. However, fitness is not a race. There is no finish line in fitness because we can always do better than yesterday. We can always do better than last week, last month or last year. Often times we have a tendency to set a destination point in fitness and many of us stop before reaching it or once we reach it we feel that we’re done. I’m here to say that you are never done. My goal has always been to be fitter at 30 than I was at 20 and now that I’m past 30 my goal is to be more fit and strong at 40 than I am today.

But there have been ups and downs over the years. There were times where I needed to take a step back and let my body heal. I needed to take time out and lower my intensities, lower my weights and work on keeping my body from falling apart. There have been other times where I needed to go “balls to the walls”, pumping out the iron, hitting the weights hardcore. I’ve gone through periods of bulking up and periods of slimming down.

I’m always challenging my body to new heights and looking for new things to stimulate both my mind and body, developing better neural connections in attempts to recruit more muscle and keep my body off-balance, developing and changing.

A marathon is a long and monotonous event, and if your training routine is monotonous and without change then it’s most likely you will become bored and give up. A sprint is quick and over within a matter of seconds. The vast majority of people are looking for a quick fix in 6 weeks, thinking that the journey stops after this. Since fitness is a lifestyle then we need to understand that there are peaks and valleys to our overall fitness and so in the end our fitness lifestyle should look more similar to interval training with periods of high intensity, lower intensity and rest and leisure periods. Don’t get caught up in the mundane or the quick fixes. Variety is the spice of life.