Offense vs. Defense: Fitness Edition

We’ve talked about being on offense or defense before with regards to your time. A small percentage of us are on offense when it comes to our time, meaning we are actively choosing how to spend our time, and may even use scheduling to avoid a reactionary approach to life. Most of us, however, are playing defense with our time, reacting to every thing life sends our way. We are just one email or text away from being controlled, for example.

This understanding of offense and defense has strong carry over to what we see in fitness, as well. Most people, I’d say, are playing defense in their workout habits. Fitness for these folks is a reaction to what happens in their life. Working out when you’re on defense moves the role of fitness to the position of “judge and jury” of your lifestyle. In this instance, training extra hard is a way to bring justice to a scenario where you’ve indulged towards lush drinking and sugar celebrations. The more extreme the unhealthy deviation, the harder the fitness punishment must result.

I see this play out a hundred different ways in hundreds of different people on a daily basis. It’s extremely ineffective and psychologically unhealthy. Simply put, this ends up being a toiling effort to break even. Mentally it is crushing and physically it excludes all the potential beautiful progress made available by training.

The alternative would be to take an offensive approach to fitness, which looks at training as its own mutually exclusive journey. Being on offense says training is worth pursuing for its own sake. Fitness can be autotelic. Believe it or not, it doesn’t have to be a conscious cleanse or a rebuttal to poor decisions. Fitness can be a lifelong journey like learning to love a friend or finding your soulmate. What if you could had a relationship with fitness like a photographer has with photography?

Now, that is you being on offense!

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach