Fitness is Not Just Physical
Aug 19, 2023
You are an athlete.
The sport you are playing is called life.
You play different positions (spouse, parent, employee, etc.), and each position has different requirements.
But how do you stack wins?
And how do you show up to play hard at each event?
In this article I am going to teach you the 4 types of fitness you need to win at the game of life.
Of course, you can neglect these 4 fitness types, but you risk losing out on experiences.
When you develop fitness in these 4 areas, you are primed for performance and are more likely to stack wins.
Life is a Sport
How do you win at life?
Winning may be subjective, so this is hard to answer. However, we do know what losing looks like.
Losing is when you show up on your death bed:
- Never taking that risk
- Without realizing your potential
- Ignoring nurturing friendships and relationships
- After working non-stop at the expense of time with loved ones
Losing is reaching the end of the line FULL of regrets.
We will all likely reach the end with some regrets. But the volume of regrets that we hold indicate our success in this game.
At only 39 years old, I am not speaking from experience. However, Bronnie Ware writes about her experience as a nurse in The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying.
Ware worked in palliative care and documented the insights she gathered from conversations in the final weeks of her patients’ lives. She found that the top 5 regrets included lacking courage, disconnecting with friends, working too much, avoiding conversations about feelings, and allowing self-happiness.
Yikes… these hit hard.
I say that the scoreboard in life is much about the regrets we hold. Zero regrets = a perfect score. How can we get as close to this as possible? Did you notice the above regrets are all action based? When comes to taking action, we can train for that.
To win at sports, we must train. The same applies for life. In life, however, we need more than physical fitness.
There are 4 arenas of fitness for life-performance.
- Mental
- Physical
- Emotional
- Spiritual
Each one empowers us to take action in a different way, thus avoiding regrets down the line.
Let’s start with mental fitness, as your mind is the most important resource you have.
Mental Fitness
“I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
This is a regret that starts in the mind.
Your mind dictates everything you do.
Your body will set limits for what you can do (which we will talk about in a moment).
But your mind is the root of it all: how you feel, what you think, whether you take action, how you approach difficult situations.
Mental fitness is the ability to control your thinking. When you control your thinking, you control your actions.
Take this daily routine of the average person in America:
- Wake up after hitting the snooze button a few times.
- Immediately open social media and start consuming.
- Eat a sugary breakfast and get ready for work.
- Go to work at a job they don’t care about.
- Scroll some more social media.
- Eat lunch with more sugar.
- Finish work with lackluster energy.
- Go home to the family.
- Fulfill family duties as needed.
- Eat an unhealthy dinner and put on a show to watch.
- Watch TV until bedtime, usually while scrolling social media.
- Go to bed feeling like nothing was accomplished today and not looking forward to tomorrow.
How awesome does this sound? Sounds pretty lame to me.
It all starts with the mind. Are you drifting or are you focused? Are you intentional or are you passively?
Mental fitness starts with understanding what you want.
What are your goals and aspirations? Who are you becoming? Who are you taking with you? Why?
When you are clear on what you want, you can plan the actions to get you there.
You identify what you need to learn. You acknowledge what must be done. So how do we become mentally fit? We train it.
Here is a 3-step training regimen to level up your mental fitness:
- Identify your goals
Ask yourself what you want and why you want it. Also, create clarity on where you are at now. The Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”
Create clarity.
- Write down your goals and remind yourself of them daily.
When you lose sight of your goals you are more likely to drift. Write your goals on a notecard and read them in the morning and night.
- Swap social media for learning.
Social media weakens your mind by giving you reward without effort. Swap the scrolling for educational content. Read. Listen to audiobooks. Take an online course. Find a topic you want to learn and start consuming knowledge, not content.
When you are mentally fit you can think clearly and accurately. This is a requisite for taking effective action.
When it comes to taking action, the level of action you can take is dependent on your physical fitness. So now we need to talk about physical training.
Physical Fitness
“I wish I hadn't worked so hard.”
Work, work, work. There is more to life than work. There is…. well…. Life.
When we prioritize our work over other areas of life, our physical health is usually the first thing to go.
Unfortunately, a loss in your physical fitness prevents you from bringing energy to your day.
Being out of shape prevents you from certain experiences.
Alexander the Great believed your body should be the servant of your spirit and not the master of it (likely a teaching from Aristotle). This means that whatever you want to do, your body should enable you to do it, and not limit you from doing it.
Assess your current physical condition. Does it empower you to do the things you want to do? Or does is stop you? Is your body a ticking timebomb for a stroke or heart attack? Or is it like a Ferrari just waiting to hit the road?
Strength is empowering.
Endurance is enabling.
Your fitness matters.
While you can find tons of workouts online, here is a brief overview on how to build your physical prowess.
- Clean up your diet.
Excess sugar may taste great, but it is killing you. Swap it for protein.
For breakfast, you only have two options: skip it, or make it high protein. Strive to eat 1g for every pound of your body weight.
- Lift weights.
Strength training builds muscles. With muscles comes strength and increased quality of life. If you want to try a new physical skill like rock climbing or water sports, your strength will limit or empower you.
- Run.
To have well-rounded fitness you need to have some endurance. Running is the simplest way to build endurance. Just grab some shoes and go outside to run.
Running is also good for your aerobic fitness (your heart). Your strength and aerobic fitness influence how long you will live and your quality of life. It can help prevent cardiovascular disease and decrease your risk of heart attacks.
Get fit. Your life depends on it.
Emotional Fitness
“I wish I had the courage to express my feelings.”
The sport of life is played with others.
We connect with others because of how we feel and how we communicate those feelings.
We are feeling animals who think, not thinking animals who feel. Emotions are core to our experience.
As such, our ability to connect and thrive in life is impacted by our emotional state.
What’s more, our ability to express our emotions improves our communication and overall wellbeing.
How do you feel inside when you bottle up your feelings?
How does it feel to speak with someone who will not tell you how they really feel?
It’s terrible.
There are two aspects of emotional fitness which influence our experience in life:
- Emotional control
- Emotion communication
If you have no emotional control, or become overly emotional in every situation, it clouds your ability to think and act rationally.
While having emotional reactions is normal and expected, your feelings and your actions are two separate things. You do not have to let your feelings dictate your actions.
Emotional mastery is whole other topic, but there is one reliable way to take better control over your emotions: take time.
Give yourself time between feeling an emotion and choosing a reaction. This allows you to feel what you feel and choose an appropriate action (instead of reacting).
You can feel all the feels, but if you cannot effectively communicate how you feel then connecting with others becomes limited.
This does not mean you have to gush, overshare, or be 100% transparent with your feelings. It does mean that you should be able to state how something makes you feel.
If you care about someone, let them know.
If you are fearful, speak up.
If you have a problem and are frustrated with someone else’s behavior, tell them.
Bottled up emotions don’t do anyone any good.
This also means you must be able to listen to the feelings of others.
We are emotional animals.
Build the courage to express your feelings.
Spiritual Fitness
“I wish I would have stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier.”
Marcus Aurelius said, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
We are all mortal. You know what they say about life… there’s no getting out alive.
Spiritual fitness is your readiness to meet your maker, should that time be upon you.
Have you done what you wanted to do? Have you said the things you needed to say? Have you been present for the important moments?
If not, start doing so.
Be present. We waste our current moments be reliving the past or worrying about the future.
Yes, we can learn from the past. And yes, we should look to the future.
But we should not live there.
The next time you are with a loved one, be present. Be nowhere else.
The next time you are having a conversation, be nowhere else.
The present moment is what matters.
Wherever you are, be there and be intentional.
The Wrap Up
Life is a sport. There are wins and losses, but at the end of the game, we should strive for the feeling, “Man I am glad I played.”
To avoid regrets and play the game as well as possible, work on the 4 areas of fitness:
Mental fitness gives you clarity of purpose.
Physical fitness unlocks your ability to act.
Emotional fitness enables you to connect.
Spiritual fitness reminds you this game eventually ends.
Get fit, my people!
And crush it!
Clark