Mid Life Fitness

Are you making free choices or are you just reacting? Is your fitness and health plan really on track or are you stuck in a rut heading off into the sidelines?

Your Are Unique
This is your one chance at life, your one chance to express who you really are. Never before has the world seen anyone just like you and never again will it again see someone who has the exact blend of skills, talents, strengths and even weaknesses that you possess. How long are you going to hide in the flock and pretend to be just like all the other sheep? How long will you continue to believe that a one size fits all approach is really going to meet your needs?

Labels
Do you identify with certain peer groups? Are you a hardgainer? Are you suffering a mid life crisis? There are many labels we can use to describe ourselves, how we act, how we react, how we think, what we like and what we do. They can be very useful in understanding ourselves so that we can realise the things which trigger us into patterns of behaviour. They give us a solid foundation from which we can move forward.

But labels carry an inherent conflict. For all that they are useful tags which tell us things we need to know, we take those labels further and actually make them a part of our identity. When we do that, those labels can become mental prisons. “I can eat what I like because I’m a hardgainer”. “I can’t get as muscled as those guys because I’m a hardgainer”.

Mental Prisons
Often these prisons are imposed upon us. Society, fitness and health gurus, our friends and our peers impose upon us their expections, their hopes and their opinions. Some are imposed by law, some by the moral codes of our religious beliefs but perhaps the ones which we absorb the most deeply and question the least are those created by the media and our immediate circles of friends and peers. They all dictate what we should do, what we ought to do, what is acceptable,in other words what is normal. And of course we all want to be normal, to fit in, to be seen as part of the ‘in crowd’, to have the fast track on the latest trend or information.

But we can’t blame everything on others, indeed in truth we can’t blame anything on others. Routines of various sorts; habits, obsessions and addictions, all form when we repeat actions. When we repeat an action or a thought we create a path of lower resistance in our minds and bodies. There are too many things happening around us for us to be able to pay attention to all of them, so we filter and only pay attention to those we deem the most important at that time. Anything which isn’t the focus of our attention is performed on automatic, at least as far as our concious mind is concerned, so the choice will always be the path that was followed before. Any path which is followed repeatedly becomes a rut. But as it becomes easier to follow the rut, it also becomes harder to climb out of it.

Escaping Your Cell
We allow the prison walls to be built because we value our safety. Sometimes we build the walls ourselves deliberately in order to set a new pattern or to break out of an old one. But we don’t just choose paths because they are those of the least resistance, we also choose the safest path. Familiarity with the ground makes it appear safer, but the safety is often only perceived, it isn’t real, for there may be better paths. In this regard perhaps one of the biggest dangers is that these choices are rarely done consciously. As we walk a familiar path, our attention is elsewhere, and our sense of balance is kept by our unconscious mind. Only when we reach an obstacle do we consciously use our sense of balance, and yet if we focused and trained that sense of balance we might be walking tightropes instead of still being the rat treading the endless maze.

Does money equal freedom?
A visit to a commercial gym easily demonstrates just how much of a mismatch there can be between effective exercise and what the market provides. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not possible to consider every decision you make, but there are some which are core to your life and others which are not, and I’d like to think that getting your body into a state which will set you up for the rest of your life is one of the decisions you can’t avoid.

Similar to the gym industry, many households have dubious fitness products stuck gathering dust in storage, and even personal trainers jump on bandwagons, trying to appear cutting edge, but often instead simply end up making their clients reliant upon them instead of giving them robust and reliable routines.

Are you making real choices when it comes to where you spend your money on fitness or are you just choosing between alternatives given to you by others who have very different agendas?

Freedom
Freedom means being able to see the real choices which are available in that situation. Freedom means being able to investigate those choices, reviewing them and discussing them. It means at the end then being able to choose a new path which is suited to the unique person that is you.

Ask yourself: Am I really free to choose the best routes for me or am I just following the flock? Are my mental ruts keeping me from seeing the wider view?