Everything I Know about Life, I Learned from Fitness
or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Grind
It’s easy to make the argument that fitness can lead to a better life: Better overall health, increased strength and vitality, improved physique — these benefits of getting fit are obvious, and foremost on people’s minds when they decide to set foot on the path of fitness.
However, as I enter the fourth year of my personal fitness journey and ongoing self-transformation, I can’t help but notice how much fitness has affected life outside of the gym as well. The analogies between fitness maxims and everyday life have become just as apparent as the improved health markers, if not more so.
Turns out, there’s an underlying philosophy to exercise, weightlifting, or bodybuilding — one that can not only help you become a healthier person but a better one as well. To put it another way: Success in the gym can lead to success in the rest of your life.
Consistency is Key
Failure to plan is planning for failure. In fitness, having a routine can make all the difference. Plenty of us have had the experience of signing up for a gym membership, showing up a few times to meander our way through what we called a workout, then eventually slipping back into our old, sedentary ways.
All too often, the best of intentions fail to keep that momentum going and, eventually, our aimlessness gets the better of us. How many of us have lived through this year after year as our New Year’s fitness resolutions falter? The truth is, there’s just something to be said for having a solid plan before you walk through those gym doors.
Consistency is essential to the overall effort to improve your health. It took decades of an unhealthy lifestyle to put me in the state I was in at the beginning of my fitness journey. Dabbling with infrequent healthy meals and exercise routines just wasn’t cutting it.
After a few months of this with little visible progress, I decided to get serious about my goals. Rather than taking stabs at pursuing better health, I began a gradual but determined effort to revamp my entire lifestyle. What that amounted to was a whole lot of planning.
I had already gotten the hang of eating more healthily in general, but my diet was still relatively haphazard. I did some research and stumbled across the concept of “macros”, or macronutrients — protein, fat, and carbohydrates — and how the composition of your diet plays a part how successful it can be.
I also began planning my workouts more. I knew enough about weightlifting to piece together a string of exercises using the basic lifts — bench presses, shoulder presses, curls, etc. — but I had absolutely no clue what I was doing when it came to things like exercise choice or order and, as it turns out, that stuff is kind of important.
Enter Dr. Jim Stoppani, one of the world’s leading experts on fitness, nutrition, supplementation, and training program design.
My first real program was Super Shredded 8, one of the many Featured Workouts on JimStoppani.com. The program incorporated a number of elements I’d never heard of, like periodization, pre-exhaust, and supersets. The program’s overview laid out in detail how to use these methods, why they worked, and how they combined to make for a singularly-effective overall program.
While I had done well enough to piece together my workouts, knowing exactly which order to do each exercise — and why they were so ordered — made a huge difference in the results that I got. Dr. Stoppani’s Dieting 101 plan, designed to enable you to tailor a sustainable diet specific to your needs, added another element of consistency.
Both of these — the program and the diet plan — had a tremendous impact on the way I approached life in general.
You see, many of us treat life the way we used to treat the gym: We kind of meander about aimlessly, trying a little of this or that, but with only a vague sense of what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. That can do a lot to diminish one’s sense of purpose and, in the long run, meandering is all you really accomplish.
Having a plan, on the other hand — knowing which steps to take, and when — makes the path ahead so much clearer. I soon found myself applying these principles to everything.
My days had been filled with busy-ness, and yet nothing seemed to get accomplished. But if I could manage to plan out my day’s meal prep and eating schedule, supplementation, and workouts, why not the other aspects of my life? I realized I’d never really done much to organize my life, and that meandering was leading me nowhere.
Suddenly, not only was I twice as productive, but I somehow managed to get it all done in less time. Goals that I had set for myself outside of the gym were being achieved just like my fat loss goals. Establishing routines and following through with plans the same way I did with workouts made my life that much fuller, and it’s a lesson I’ve carried with me ever since.
Balancing Consistency with Change
As beneficial as routines are, staying in the same rut for too long will work against you. Just like ensuring that you work every major muscle group rather than favoring some and neglecting others, balance is key. As Dr. Stoppani often remarks, the best program is the one you’re not doing. Change is necessary for continued progress. This is why his programs so often feature periodization — the systematic changing of volume and intensity, intended to prevent stagnation.
Featured Workouts like the aforementioned Super Shredded 8, Shortcut to Size, and 3 Prong Strong all include purposeful adjustments designed to keep you moving toward your goal. Some programs, like his Variable Training Method, are entirely designed around changes to acute training variables like rep speed, exercise order, and manipulation of rest periods between sets, all with the same purpose in mind: Keeping your muscles guessing, preventing your body from adapting and becoming too comfortable, which leads to stalled progress.
Yet how often are our own lives un-periodized? Let’s face it — everybody wants to feel comfortable. The sad truth is, though, that comfort is a dead end. Stay too comfortable with where you’re at, and nothing will ever change for the better unless it happens to you by chance. Taking control of your health — and your life in general — requires action, not reaction. Taking action means making changes.
Our comfort zones are wastelands where nothing grows, and that’s a hard lesson to learn when comfort is just so…well, comfortable. But it takes a challenge to spur growth, and the tougher the challenge the more potential there is for results. Just as with weightlifting, things that test our strength also strengthen us.
Taking this principle to heart, I’ve found myself ill-at-ease with comfort. I actually want to challenge myself, leave my comfort zone, try new things, and see just how much I can endure. If I can survive one experience, what about the next? And so I’ve become more adventurous when it comes to my life, just as I continually try new programs, and test my limits to see how far I can go.
Pushing Past Failure
Discomfort isn’t an unfamiliar concept to most fitness enthusiasts. “No pain, no gain”, right? But eventually, we reach that point where we just can’t perform another rep. That’s important in weightlifting, especially hypertrophy training. Some training techniques, like rest-pause, drop sets, and forced reps, are designed to take us even further than that. The point being: Success lies on the other side of failure.
It isn’t a hard parallel to draw with life. How many times have we come up against obstacles that seem insurmountable, or found our inner strength drained before a task was complete? Sometimes it’s a matter of knowing when to quit, but far more often it’s an opportunity to keep pressing forward and persevere.
Learning to pause for a few moments before eking out another round of reps taught me to treat my failures in life the same way. And as it turns out, many of the obstacles I had thought to be immovable were in fact only one more push away from toppling entirely. By learning to persevere in my workouts, I learned to persevere in life.
Patience and Perspective
One of the most discouraging factors of fitness life can be the fact that it takes time for progress to become apparent. For those of us who started out mired in an unhealthy lifestyle, it’s easy to neglect that it took years of living that way to get to where we were. A few days of clean eating and a workout or two aren’t going to be huge strides toward our goals. Long story short, it takes time to get where we want to be.
I made this mistake a few times in the early stumblings along the path of fitness. I set huge goals that took months to achieve — and was frustrated by the end of week one. In hindsight, seeing how things played out, I’ve learned two valuable lessons here: Not only does it take patience, but it helps to keep things in perspective.
There’s nothing wrong with an overall goal that amounts to a night-and-day difference from your current position, but it helps to appreciate how that path will unfold. While that end goal is worthwhile, setting up smaller goals that are easy to reach is important, too.
Rather than aiming for 50 pounds and tackling the whole of it, establish a few nearer goals like getting through all your workouts for the week, or losing 5–10 pounds first. The sense of accomplishment you’ll experience will go a long way toward keeping you motivated, perpetuating your momentum, and helping you ultimately hit the big goal you’ve been pursuing all along.
Because of this, I’ve come to appreciate the little victories as much as larger triumphs. By celebrating these miniature milestones, I not only get that sense of accomplishment but also get to experience a small dose of joy. By being patient with myself and keeping things in perspective, the pursuit of my goals has become that much more fulfilling and, in the end, it really has become about the journey rather than the destination.
Expect More from Myself — Limits Are Not Laws
What I’ve learned most of all from the fitness lifestyle is that I am, and always have been, capable of so much more than I thought. I had done so much to limit myself, but as I’ve pushed through workouts, endured these programs, accomplished my goals, and transformed myself for the better physically, I’ve seen that I’m made of much sterner stuff than I ever imagined.
I’m still learning that, in fact; still coming up against and exceeding what I thought my limits to be — and it’s just as true outside the gym as it is during my sessions.
I’ve learned to expect more from myself in all areas of life, and trust that I can meet that demand. By continuing to apply lessons like setting up smaller goals within reach, pushing past my discomfort and failures, maintaining my routines, and continually exposing myself to changes that challenge me, I’ve become a better person for it. It’s helped me to better navigate the world and life in it, and overall my successes in fitness have translated to a healthier, more successful life.
Depending on where your personal journey has taken you, the connection between an unhealthy physical lifestyle and your overall approach to life may be far closer than you had thought. The good news is that this connection is just as strong when you decide to take control of your life and give yourself the gift of better health.
Fitness doesn’t just give you stronger muscles, a leaner physique, or a healthier heart, it can reshape your entire world if you let it. All of life is a grind, and with the right approach you, too, can learn to love it.
Don’t sleepwalk through life without a plan, don’t let comfort lull you into immobility, don’t let adversity or perceived limitations hold you back. Make a plan, take action, and you’ll soon see that whether it’s one more rep in the gym or one more step in life, your goals are waiting to be achieved.
How has fitness changed your life outside the gym for the better? Leave a comment with the lessons you’ve learned in the response section below!
If you’re ready to make a change for the healthier or looking to improve your existing fitness journey, JimStoppani.com features hundreds of articles and videos from Dr. Jim Stoppani himself, on everything from nutrition to supplementation and training.
