Bigger Than Preference

When you go to buy a car, you have options. From the color to the drive train, you can make a selection largely based on preference. The same is true for a quick trip to your favorite smoothie shack. If you prefer the rich cacao, peanut buttery one, you can have it. If you’re more of the blueberry and banana-type, you can opt for that preference. In fact, these opportunities are everywhere we look in our lives.

Health and fitness doesn’t work that way. Fitness is different because the act of doing fitness often comes with an intended result. It’s rarely just a pastime. For example, if you found yourself buying a car again, only this time you were buying a car to haul the kids around successfully, your preferences about the GT coupe won’t serve you. Back at the smoothie shop, you might prefer the rich cacao, peanut buttery concoction, but if you’re ordering it to achieve your fighting weight for a local competition your preference become irrelevant, again.

If you’re choosing a fitness practice for entertainment value or as an autotelic hobby, then your preference is a wonderful guide. You’ll find yourself always doing only the training that you enjoy. The trouble is this isn’t why most people do fitness. People do fitness because they want something else.

As long as you’re exercising to look, feel, or perform better, your preferences are almost never going to be the best determining factor as to what you should be doing. If you’re training for a reason beyond entertainment, your training must be bigger than your preferences.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach