Keep it Simple

Keep it Simple 

By: Ian Cutting

It seems that more and more so, we are approaching the whole realm of health and fitness backwards. We have spent so much time and money making them complicated, and into more of a perception than a reality. They have become topics muddied by secrets and gurus, detoxes and details, filters and photoshop, marketing, and social media. Keep it simple, and here is how.

I’m going to break a few things down into real, actionable, and simple pieces.  They may seem too simple, perhaps even frustratingly so.

Do you want to have a stronger more functional upper body?

Do a lot of push-ups. (Need some guidance? check out this handy video.)

Do you want to have stronger and more functional lower body?

Do a lot of squats. (Also need some help here? Here is another helpful video.)

Do you want to be a healthier, more durable, capable, longer-lasting, functioning, aesthetic… human being?
Do a lot of both.

Do you want to breathe better?
Walk more.  Take the stairs.  Park further away.  Go for easy and relaxing walks (with your head up, not buried in your phone).

Do you want to move better?
Move more.  Stand up and stretch.  Watch less TV, change seats or exercise during the commercials, or watch from the floor.

Do you want to feel better?
Slouch less.  Sit or stand up straighter.  Go outside.  Read a book.  Turn off whatever screen you’re looking at, and go to bed.

Do you want to look (better)?
Drink more water, and have an apple.  Put down or don’t buy the XL chips and cookie boxes, children’s cereals, processed snacks decorated by cartoon characters, and sugar-liquids of questionable contents and origin.  Say no a little more often, confidently, and a little less guiltily.  Say yes appropriately, not overwhelmingly.

Do you want to make a change, fix a problem, heal a hurt, or get better from an injury?
Take action.  Complaining is ineffective.  Telling yourself you’re broken or settling for sympathy doesn’t help you grow (and usually makes it worse).  Doing nothing rarely helps solve anything.

Do you want to make more progress?
Stop seeking or relying on the validation of others.  Fitness exists without hashtags.  Sweat and struggle a little more, stare and scroll a little less.  Double-taps are fine, but they don’t affect the work you have to do. (I’ve found a small committed fitness group can help with this.)

Do you want to be healthier?
Stop thinking that it only counts if the world sees you trying to be healthier.  Some of the healthiest people in the world don’t have online platforms.  Likes don’t really matter.  Effort all adds up.  Just live.

Keep your exercise simple, and do it more often.  Equipment is unnecessary.  It doesn’t take a perfect plan, schedule, or secret exercises.   There is no perfect plan or schedule, and the best exercises are the simplest ones done consistently.

Keep your food simple.  Counting calories, tracking macros, and different diets are fine, if you can stick to them.  However they often create more stress than is worth the changes they might cause, and raise more questions than they answer.  They can confuse the incredibly simple facts of food.  Eat more of the things you already know you should be eating, eat less of the things you already know you shouldn’t be eating as much of.  Look in the mirror regularly, check the scale occasionally, and adjust the quality and quantity of your intake accordingly over time.

Keep it simple, and repeat all of these for the long-term.  Adjust as needed, and have more patience.  The biggest problems are that you wanted all of these changes to have occurred yesterday, are disproportionately motivated by the world seeing them, and are overly concerned with the reactions of others.

How you treat your body you affects how you’ll feel today, how you’ll look in 6 months, and who you’ll be in 10 years.  It doesn’t matter where others have started or what others are doing.  Start wherever you are; that’s the only place you can, the only place that matters.  Get to it.  Keep getting to it.

We know what we have to do to be healthier.  We know, and yet insist on making it more complicated than it needs to be.  Move more, eat better, work harder, repeat.

Filter the noise.  Dilute the details.  Take action.  Be patient.

Keep it simple.

Client Profile – John Cutting: "Finding time for a fitness adventure"

(aka 2 years of Contemporary Athlete)

Before CA – Way back when

Raising kids, daily lap swimming and watching sports can take up a lot of one’s day and even make one believes finding time for anything else seem unlikely.  However, in the grand scheme of things, staying healthy should be high up on your list of daily priorities.  As a parent this became painfully evident while watching my son rehab his way through a sports-related back injury.  The upside to his journey into and out of competitive soccer was his decision to be a health and wellness major in college.

CA 101 – The early months

Based on my son’s incessant pleading and logical arguments to do something else other than swim laps, I drank his youthful Kool-Aid and entered the world of CA.  Overcoming the fear to walk into CA was step one and step two was participating in my first CA session.  Crawling, stretching, box pushing, running, twisting, jumping, squatting, inch worming, rowing, and burpees are not life threatening but they sure do make you question the logic behind completing steps one and two.  If sore muscles and creaking joints are a sign of doing good work then I must have a perfect record.  CA humbles you but it doesn’t knock you down.  Everyone shares the same fun!

John Cutting: Finding time for my real life adventure into fitness"

CA – The middle months

Some might say that drinking the Kool-Aid is easy and buying into the whole exercise regime isn’t rocket science and they might be correct.  However, most of the fitness advertising touting a perfectly sculpted body through the use of this device or doing that exercise routine fails to mention that without a personal commitment you likely won’t achieve anything beyond a growing sense of frustration.  Perceptible change isn’t achieved overnight but with continued work and CA helping me I can attest that it does happen.

 

John Cutting: Finding time for my real life adventure into fitness"

CA Today – Believe

Although a medical issue created a three month gap in my routine, not returning to CA did not enter my mind.  One problem with an exercise routine is not really knowing how long it will take before you start feeling fitter and looking better.  Hearing those encouraging words during sets of burpees or kilometers of rowing made me a believer in the CA experience.

John Cutting: Finding time for my real life adventure into fitness"

CA Tomorrow – keep doing it

If life is just another terminal disease, you can either let it slowly kill you or you can get out of your chair and do something positive for yourself.  I am about to turn 62 and my CA adventure is certainly not over.  I survived the early months, the middle months, today and I will be there tomorrow!

Patience is the answer

Training is a lot like life.  In both, the roads towards progress and success are full of obstacles. Most of the time patience is the answer.

In life this could mean a surprise company move, being laid off, even the death of a pet or a loved one.

In training, there are often weeks filled with injuries and accidents that prevent you from optimal training.  There are often months spent at a plateau, perhaps even in conjunction with those life events that all conspire keep you away from the gym for longer than you’d like.

One thing that will keep you going is understanding and practicing patience.

The dictionary definition of patience is “The capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.”

It is important to understand that health is a lifetime commitment and fitness is a lifelong work in progress.

In between mastering new movements or hitting new PRs there will be times when you get discouraged by a perceived lack of progress.  You will get knocked down and scraped up.  You will get caught at or called in to work, but the only way to guarantee you’ll stop making progress is if you stop working.

As long as you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you will be further along than if you quit and stop moving altogether.  Sometimes you get slowed down, or get thrown off track, or hit bad weather, but you keep going.  The only way to make sure you keep on the right track is to keep going.

Practicing patience means recognizing that you won’t be able to walk in to the gym each day and absolutely crush everything you do.

Practicing patience means accepting that sometimes things will come up, and when they do, you do the best you can until you can resume working the way the way you’d like to.

Practicing patience means seeing the bigger picture.  You will experience ups and downs, you just have to keep going.

Work hard, roll with the speed bumps, treat obstacles as opportunities, and learn from every experience

Patience has power, and learning to use it will help you keep moving forward.

The Holi-daze of Fitness: It is too good to be true

Beware of easy.

I wish there was some magic pill.  I wish there was some miracle product.

I wish there was some neat little package you could receive in the mail that would be the answer to all of your health and fitness “problems”.

I wish there was, because I’d be first in line to buy it, or first in line to sell it.

But there’s not.

This time of year you will be bombarded with all kinds of information for health products.  There will be all kinds of things you suddenly need, or never knew you needed.

There will be all kinds of advertisements for weight loss pills; there will be infomercials with groundbreaking fitness products; there will be a magazine covers with seductively sweet secrets; there will be gurus with their patented solutions, there will be panels of experts discussing the latest supplement; there will be a celebrity with their current endorsement; there will be companies saying that they have finally found “it”.

Everyone is trying to sell you something.  There is nothing wrong with that.  Everyone is trying to make some money, or make a living.  It is possible, and likely, that some of them genuinely care.

The problem is that many of them don’t.  For the most part, they are more interested in their bottom line, not your health and fitness.

 

As Jon Goodman recently stated, is that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”  Something to keep in mind whenever you encounter any information source that sells fitness equipment, supplements, or preaches one specific dietary or training approach.”  Of course their way is the right way; it’s their only way.

 

They bank on your desperation.  They count on you having tried other fixes.  Their strategy is playing up and playing on your “failures”.  Their punchlines are the false promises and failed results of other similar products.  They push you into picking up your phone or entering your credit card information one more time.

The substance of their advertisements stem from past promises, not miraculous breakthroughs.  Their science is sketchy, their methods unsubstantiated.  Their positions are nebulous, their premise negative.

“Are you sick and tired of… are you fed up… are you done with… are you ready for… have you heard about… then you have to…”

You’ve tried this, you’ve tried that, and they haven’t worked, now here’s mine.

It’s a cycle founded and fueled by failure and misinformation.  It keeps you coming back for more.

How can that fail?

Ultimately, there is a simple solution.  The magic pill does exist.

However the real solution is not a sexy one to market, and the pill is not an easy one to swallow.

 

  • You’re going to have to work.
  • You’re going to have to make some changes.
  • You’re going to have to be uncomfortable.
  • You’re going to have to set some real, timely, actionable, and appropriate goals.
  • You’re going to have to follow a program that aligns itself with that goal(s).
  • You’re going to have to exercise consistently.
  • You’re going to have to improve the quality of what you put in your body.
  • You’re going to have to focus on the quality of your sleep.
  • You’re going to have to ask yourself and answer some tough questions.
  • You’re going to have to take a good look at your lifestyle.
  • You’re going to have to commit to long-term improvement.
  • You’re going to have to be patient.
  • You’re going to have to work harder.

None of those statements are sexy.  None of those are particularly marketable.  None of those look good in a television commercial.

You can’t buy them packaged in a pretty little box.  I wish you could.  I would buy it in bulk, and mark it up heavily.

But, all of those statements are effective, tried and true.  They may not be what you want to hear, but they are what you need to do.

Yes, you can do it.

Yes, it is worth it.

Commit to making small changes that will add up over time.  For example, commit to exercising consistently before worrying about what the best workout plan is.  Put down or don’t buy the bag of snacks before worrying about what your daily optimal protein or fat or carbohydrate intake should be.

Health and fitness is not a final destination.  There are no shortcuts.  There is no short-term, easy path to achieving what you want to achieve or looking how you want to look.

 

If you need help, find a trainer or coach who knows a thing or two and will help hold you accountable.  Reach out to those who’ve been there or are going through it now.

Especially this time of year, beware of the easy way out.  If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.