Fun Fitness

Originally Created: 6-11-22

Fitness should be fun.

For many of us the topic of fitness rings up visions of fad-diets, lose 100 lbs in 3 weeks ads, the "special" fat burner core exercise or cardio machine, millions of failed New Year New Me attempts, along with many more. To clarify, there's nothing inherently wrong with diets or exercise machines but let's examine an overlooked yet important aspect of fitness. Fun.

Fitness usually wouldn't be described as fun per-say but fun is a necessary element of a healthy and ultimately fulfilling life. Recently, I've been re-analyzing how I train and most importantly the reason I train. The reason roll my ass out of bed, get my ass off the couch, to turn the phone off for a few and hit the weights then stretch (or start a playlist or audio-book instead of digesting mental junk food), all of the effort but for what reason?

My intrinsic motivation grew dull with the missing element of fun. The satisfaction levels of working out for (or with) fun has made discipline in this arena easier because I'm able to get in-touch with the childlike energy within me through focused activity on my personal growth overtime. When I've worked out in the past I always had make sure I rushed through everything whether it be moving as fast as I can or doing as much volume as possible in order to reach results in a short amount of time, then compound those results over and over.

This mentality of rush, rush, RUSH! isn't healthy for the human body, but despite this basic fact I still kept pushing with it until I learned the hard way why not to push yourself 24/7 max speed, strength, and volume. Exercise in this way becomes more of a burden that eventually feels so heavy and pointless because it's like you're doing all this work for nothing. Then slowly over time you'll exercise less and less or stop completely because of an injury from exercising in this fashion.

When we add an element of fun to the equation then what seems like chores transforms into easy tasks (a bit of an exaggeration, maybe not so "easy" per say but more like less difficult instead of extremely difficult). For example, I practicing on the heavy bag and speed bag are fun for me so I'll do boxing circuits or practice my technique. This union of inner-drive, hard work, and fun make for a challenging and exciting workout.

Now, I don't say this to excuse being lazy because we should be going hard with workouts but we should also make sure we don't fry our Central Nervous System's every day. It's important to challenge yourself, grow, and evolve yourself but it's also important to take time to smell the roses and have some fun while you're at it :)

PS: I may be disorganized in my thoughts but it has been on my mind for quite a bit and it is how it is. Wish everyone the best on your respective path!

Introduction into my next fitness article-

I believe that if we want to get the best out of our health and fitness, exercises should be diverse IF our goal is overall fitness for longevity. Every part of the body including the neck, rear delts, ankles, feet, hands, wrists, forearms, calves, along with the other trained muscle groups. Even with main muscle groups such as the legs or back we tend forget about the little screws and bolts that help run the back or legs. For example, for a chest workout we may mainly work the pectoralis major through bench presses and push ups but forget about the pectoralis minor, the inner, and the outer chest, hitting it from all angles within and without. Growth is about going within and without in order to bring a muscle to "full display" or to a "maximum" (*maximum meaning the full amount of muscular growth intrinsically and extrinsically).

From my personal training experience after trial and error, it's soooo important to consider hitting a full muscles. Here's a classic example, you decided to do a shoulder workout at the gym. Your usual schedule might fall into a sequence of barbell shoulder press, dumbbell lateral raises, arnold press, and maybe some back fly's. Though not a bad list and some work is better than none, improvement can be made. Most of the exercises focus a lot of the stress onto the lateral and anterior deltoids which isn't bad IF it's balanced out with extra attention on the posterior delts and the trapezius because if it's not properly balanced out it can lead to muscle imbalances, strains and pains, and future pains such as a possible muscle tear or the dreaded rotator cuff tear (depending on which exercise you were doing).