Welcome to Currents from Black Creek Coaching. This is a podcast for people who want to stay capable for the life they actually want to live. I'm Hugh, and this week's topic is deciding what fitness actually means for your life. So years ago I came across this quote from Fred Hatfield, who is a like world-class power lifter and coach. He was known as Dr. Squat, and this is what he said about fitness. Fitness is the ability to meet the exigencies of everyday life with ease. And I think this is a great way to think about it. I think exigencies means like obstacles and bullshit in your way, uh, if uh you don't like $5 words. Um so you can ask different people and get different and valid answers about what it means to be fit. Um if you're familiar with kind of my outlook on things, you might expect me to say something along the lines of it not having anything to do with the shape of your body, like being in shape has nothing to do with the shape of your body. But I don't think that's really true. I do think there is a lot more to being in shape than what you look like. Like I mean, like way, way, way more than that. But it's also true that most people do care about how they look to a greater or lesser extent because we're social animals. Like we, you know, live in a society with other people, and the way that we look, you know, gives impressions to other people about us. So to my like my perspective on fitness is that it is primarily and mostly about functionality, but there's also room to care about appearance. Like I wish that we live in a society where people weren't shamed about their appearance. I don't want anyone to have to be, you know, go through being shamed for their appearance. But at the same time, judging somebody because they do care about their own appearance is like also shaming them, which I don't see as being really any better. So let's talk about that, about how you look. And the problem with using aesthetics to define like fitness or if you're in shape or not is not that it's like a shallow or a vain or superficial metric. The problem is that aesthetics don't work as an operable decision-making framework. Like most of the potential customers of the fitness industry want to lose weight, which typically translates into losing fat because most folks know that it's not the muscle, bone, and organs that's bad for your health or your appearance. It's the fat overabundance of fat tissue, right? So people will will want to lose weight generally, either because they think it's gonna improve their health or because they think it'll improve their appearance. And most people think some combination of both. So let's take a hypothetical person who sets a goal of losing 40 pounds because they want to look and feel better. The 40-pound number is kind of a guess. Uh, it's something that we pick based on either like epidemiological data, which is like where BMI charts come from. Uh, or, you know, so if somebody's like BMI is at a certain level that they feel like is too high and they want to bring it down, they can figure out how much weight would you have to lose to you know lower your BMI by five points or ten points. Or you can be picking that 40-pound number based on your own memory of your past self, like how much did you weigh when you were in high school or college or before you had kids, or you know, from some other arbitrary source. So my point being that when you say, I want to lose X number of pounds, X is a guess, an estimate of how much you think you need to lose. And what happens when you actually lose that 40 pounds if you lose it? So maybe you lose 40 pounds and then you think that you still need to lose more weight, like 40 pounds wasn't enough. Or maybe they lose the 40 pounds and think they look kind of frail and gaunt and hollowed out. Or maybe they only lose a fraction of the 40 pounds and feel like they failed, even though they've improved their long-term health prospects and their friends and neighbors are saying, Hey, you looking great. So when we think about changes to our bodies in terms of pounds and inches, um, it doesn't really tell you when you've arrived because it can be a moving goalpost, or sometimes just one that's altogether unreachable, which is really beneficial for a fitness industry that preys on people's insecurities and harmful for pretty much everybody else. So I think that describes why appearance is a little bit of a pitfall when it comes to defining your fitness. So the other parameter of this is your functionality. And lately, I say lately, it hasn't actually been that lately, but like within the last like 10 to 15 years, there's been a more of a shift in, you know, in sort of the social space and media to encourage people to prioritize what their body can do over how they look. And we can talk about some kind of unglamorous but very practical examples of this type of thing. So being able to get off the floor without using your hands, or being able to carry all the groceries in one trip up the stairs into the house. These are the kind of things that get cited a lot as sort of functional fitness defining um criteria. And it's cool because you can pick the list. Like, what are the things that are important to you? So you might be okay with the whole like carrying groceries up the stairs thing, and that might be enough for you. Or you might be somebody who has a goal of like being, I want to be able to do 15 pull-ups or want to do a thousand mile through hike on some kind of crazy trail that most people have never heard of. None of those things are wrong. You get to choose the functions that you want to be able to perform, and then you can train for them. This is great because a list of functional things you want to be able to do is testable, and you'll know when you've really achieved it. And when you get to that point, you can say, Hey, you know, I did good work and I'm done now. Or you can be adding more things to the list, like what's the next mountain you want to climb. Also, I think that the sort of like functionality checklist can give you better clarity on what you need to do in order to achieve the things on your list. When we chase aesthetic changes, it's easy to get bogged down and like pulled in a lot of different directions because there are so many different ways that you could approach changing the shape of your body. So that ambiguity over how to proceed with that kind of goal means that you're going to be spinning your wheels longer, or you're more likely to be, I should say. So we've talked about appearance, we've talked about functionality, and I want to put both of those two things together because as I mentioned earlier, there's been this trend among really, I think, mostly well-intentioned people to encourage people to focus on what you can do and not on what shape your body is. And that sounds great on the surface, but that rhetoric can really downplay and invalidate and even shame the understandable and natural desire that people have to look their best. So now people are feeling bad about how they look, and they feel bad about feeling bad about how they look because they're not supposed to care. So the distinction I want to make here is that it's okay, it's totally fine to care about all of it, to care about your appearance and to care about your, you know, your kick your capacity, your functionality. But it's better to steer your decisions based on your functional goals. Training to improve your capability is almost always going to also change how you look in a way that you'll probably like. So if you let appearance concerns drive your exercise and nutrition decisions, hey, I've got really exciting news for you. You have just entered the sport of bodybuilding. And the reason that most people don't look like bodybuilders is the same reason that most people aren't other kinds of professional athletes, which is that only a tiny fraction of the population has enough talent and enjoy the hard grueling work enough to put that work in and excel at that sport. So I just want to make that clear is like bodybuilding is a sport, and a lot of people participate in it recreationally, but it is the sport of changing the shape of your body. So if the participation in that sport doesn't sound really exciting, then that's where those functional goals are gonna, you know, beat out the appearance goals most of the time. And I think another thing that gets overlooked by the fitness industry or fitness influencers in a lot of cases, is you can change your appearance in a lot of ways without actually like changing your body. So your clothes, your uh kind of the attitude you you the way you carry yourself around, your hair, cosmetics. There's a lot of things that reflect who you are, other than like the dimensions of your body. And I know with a very high level of confidence that I am not the guy that you want to be getting your fashion and beauty advice from. So I'm not claiming to be an expert there. I'm not even claiming to be conversant in that, in that field. I'm just saying that those are are those things are possible and they're accessible. So it's okay to work on improving your self-image from the outside in as well as from the inside out. And that's going to start wrapping things up. Your action step this week is I want you to write down five things that you'd like to be capable of doing that are specific enough for you to test them. And then think about whatever level of exercise or training you're currently doing is moving you closer to being able to do any of those five things. Then, this is a double action week. After you've done that, I want you to write down five things that you can do that have nothing to do with diet or exercise that will improve your own opinion of your appearance. And again, this can be clothes, hair, cosmetics, getting a new tattoo on your forehead, you know, like whatever you want. I'm not giving you specific advice. Don't do the tattoo on your forehead thing. You would honestly be better off asking my dog for advice on that because he already thinks you look great. So that's this week's episode. Um, if you're struggling with how to make your list of capabilities a reality, uh reach out to me, Hugh at BlackCreekcoaching.com. I'd love to have a chat about that. And um next week's episode is going to be talking about training for the game or the sport that you actually play. So if you're so inclined, it'd be great if you would share this episode with a friend, a family member. And until next time, be well.