Does Athleticism Have a Role in Modern Professional Life?
You really have a lot of other stuff on your plate
Some time around 23, you start to realise that the footballers and boxers you watch on screen every Saturday are, in fact, younger than you. Your dreams of growing up to be a professional athlete, which fitted somewhere between becoming a recording artist and having a career in acting, are probably not to continue.
This is the real tipping point in your personal health. What’s in it for you now?
As a child, you exercised because it was fun. You exercised because you played football every weekend and wanted to be the best. You did it because it might impress the girls (or guys).
What role does exercise now play in your life?
Perhaps, you say, it is a drain on your time and resources. Suppose you have many commitments: you work a full-time job; you have family to look after; you have a hobby. How would you justify taking valuable time to spend alone in a gym? It would inevitably tire you for the rest of your day, and be one more thing that stands between you and relaxation.
Under this framing, it appears surprising that anyone under the stresses of adult life engages in physical training.
Why do people exercise at all?
There are a few factors to consider. The most immediate is that we are constantly told to. The World Health Organisation advises adults to undertake at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity every week. This is motivated by a wealth of research indicating the enormous health benefits achieved even just reaching this threshold. And so one of the underlying motivations to exercise is for general health and longevity.
And yet this would not make sense to explain exercise’s preponderance. This ‘physical activity’ can include walking to and from work, and so this threshold is surprisingly attainable. A fifteen minute walk each way to work five days a week would get you pretty much there.
Many people far exceed these standards. Perhaps, then, the next explanation you come to is vanity. People exercise in order to look good. It is undeniable that this plays a huge role; consider the economic power of the vast array of clothing brands marketing themselves as sports wear. They are largely capitalising on people’s desire to look better. The workouts pushed by these organisations inevitably focus on ‘toning’ or accentuating your figure. They also are very much more style than substance, as any athletics coach will attest to.
You can get away with a lack of rigour if your audience is less interested in getting fit, but in looking fit. Wearing the clothing gets you halfway there.
So these two considerations perhaps cover the widest net of people engaging in exercise. Another motivation is competition. Many people exercise as a means to an end; it allows them to improve in their chosen sport or pursuit, and this provides meaning and pleasure. Many people start out exercising to ‘get in shape’ and continue because they start to enjoy the element of competition. Every year, thousands sign up for the London Marathon, at least to some degree for the expected sense of achievement.
But again, this still does not feel like a complete answer.
Why ought I exercise?
Here is my first proposal. As an adult you can aspire to some loftier goals with your physical training. It does indeed improve your health, longevity, and can make you look more attractive. It might let you show off when you’re next playing catch on a beach. But these motivations are transient and the rewards often far-off, which make them obsolete for underpinning a lifelong devotion to physical training.
There are much more fundamental reasons why you should train, that provide the power to add great depth to your experience.
Exercise is a microcosm of real life. That is, much of the elements that characterise life are found in exercise. If you have ever pushed yourself hard exercising, you will know the power of training to confront your limits, to expose you to failure and to learn to persevere despite it. In a compressed manner, exercise can condition you to practice these skills in a way that can only bleed into the rest of your life.
Socrates allegedly placed athletics alongside scholarship as the two pillars to meaningful life, to be “the man of thought and the man of action”. Why was this so? It is easy to believe, in this modern age, that exercise is unimportant. No longer bound by physical labour, the age of the machine has freed us to reside solely in the realm of ideas.
In fact, in the highest echelons of society, this has always been the case; the mind allows humanity to wield much more power than ever could be achieved through brute force. Even among gorillas, it is not the strongest and most aggressive member of the pack that rules but the one that is both strong and also an effective communicator, able to forge alliances with those around him.
And so we prioritise teaching our children Pythagorean theorems and grammar over physical training, because we acknowledge that these will provide them much more opportunity over their lifetime than athletic ability alone could.
Some variation of this argument indeed appears to underpin much of the modern malaise over exercising. In the UK around 40% of people are sedentary — that is, they do less than 2 and a half hours of exercise per week. People are voting with their feet, and they do not believe physical exercise to be a useful investment of their time.
“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (ca 410 BCE)
So why did Socrates place such emphasis on athleticism? It is really the same reason that the military insists upon persistent physical training. A significant proportion of those enlisted will work in roles that do not require the same fitness standards that they are exposed to in training. Only a subset of soldiers are close-combat troops. And yet the military, who have plenty to lose from wasting training time on unnecessary activity, continue to allocate a high proportion of soldiers’ time to physical training.
Many people will observe, too, that the sleep deprivation, persistent intensity and lack of rest mean military fitness can be quite an inefficient (and gruelling) way to get athletes in shape. The reason it is used though is simple; as much as this training conditions the body, it also conditions the mind. The science behind this is actually unimportant in this discussion, but can be discussed in the future.
You are a military commander and you wish to breed resilience and mental strength in your soldiers, attributes that are crucial to their work and livelihoods. There are a few options available to you, all of which fundamentally are means of short-term discomfort for the soldiers that will train them to withstand such pressure. And none of these methods is better, long-term, than vigorous exercise.
Of course colour-sergeants across the globe use other means plenty; they expose them to the cold, deprive them of sleep or food, or use psychological methods.
However, exercise has a number of benefits. It is progressive, it can be applied in measure, and can simultaneously have a beneficial impact on their health. Disregarding fitness capabilities, soldiers who perform well in their physical training are demonstrating a number of attributes.
They demonstrate an ability to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term goals. They demonstrate a resilience to pressure. They demonstrate their commitment to their role, and an ability to maintain this commitment over weeks and months.
Equally, there are lessons tied up in physical training that cannot be taught in a classroom. Lessons around how to persevere when things are tough, or how to break tasks down into smaller chunks in order to overcome them. Much of this comes wrapped up in improving the camaraderie of the soldiers with their peers.
Now ask yourself: which of these attributes does not play a role in your own life?
Exercise is a means to transform yourself, and it will permeate everything that you do. The discipline you show in training is a habit that you practice, and will permeate the way you approach every aspect of your life. Exercise is a means of personal growth.
