To make the most of our full time on Earth, it’s helpful to free ourselves of our culture’s highly limiting youth-centric notions of strength, fitness, and athleticism. When we keep our concepts of strength and fitness and our training objectives rigid or stuck in the past, it robs us of much of the joy and potential of the majority of our years on Earth. This holds us back from evolving as people and as a society.
We struggle when we resist reality and try in vain to artificially control it. This shows up a lot in our strength and fitness culture, and it’s particularly unfortunate because this tends to be one the few areas in life where we actually work on developing ourselves. Stuckness in that realm contributes to greater stuckness in life.
We can open up the concepts of “strength” and “fitness” so that we can better align our lives with the flow of nature and our continuing journey through the experience of life. When we think of fitness and strength training perhaps the image that comes to mind is people in weight rooms lifting heavy metal objects. I’m actually a major proponent of resistance training for muscle strength; I’ve been doing it for 28 years. Lifting heavy things supports our ability to function powerfully in nature and supports our durability for life. Furthermore, the discipline we gain and the more general lessons that we learn about training ourselves as we build this ability helps with the development of other abilities. However, muscle resistance training is just one tiny chapter in a true book of strength.
Human strength changes and evolves over the course of our lives. The changing nature of strength is one of nature’s many rhythms that we can tune into and work with. Speed and muscle power and explosiveness peaks in our twenties and endurance related physical capabilities tend to peak in our thirties. With proper attention to our mindset, various forms of mental strength can continue to grow forever. This is one of the reasons many great endurance athletes are in their forties and fifties; the limiters are no longer based on maximum power output but tend to become mental. If we dedicate ourselves to learning, the strength of wisdom also seems to advance forever. Accepting strength as an evolving concept and recognizing this as an opportunity empowers us and helps prepare us for a healthier and more rewarding life. The different strengths we work on developing in our later years help us open interesting new chapters to our athletic explorations as well as in our broader lives.
Static and limiting ways to think about strength and fitness tend to make us miserable. If our ideal of strength and fitness is based on capacities that peak in our twenties like big powerful muscles, then it will be difficult to stay happy if we’re trying to hold on in vain as nature flows away, if we do not appreciate the strength that we can maintain, or we fail to find joy in our opportunities for new strengths. If we choose to believe that challenging and intense athletic activity is just for young people because professional athletes often retire in their twenties and thirties, then we’ll just miss out on all the fantastic athletic opportunities that continue to exist throughout our lives. Concepts of fitness that are grounded in a linear view of life may no longer serve us if life asks us to evolve. Some people might be happy with a very linear life, but others may find that life’s greatest rewards come from opening new chapters which will requires us to continually update our training and learning objectives.
Here are some ways that we can more effectively approach strength and fitness over the long run:
We can put some attention into allowing our concepts of strength and fitness to be more fluid. When we are at peace with the reality of aging and the reality that certain strengths will naturally drop off as other strength capacities grow we can more effectively channel our energy into optimizing present reality and we will lose less physical and mental energy from trying to resist reality.
We can periodically adapt our strength and fitness concepts to follow shifting athletic inspirations. When we open ourselves to more expansive outlooks on athleticism, our athletic lives may open up and new opportunities may present themselves. As we learn the lessons that certain challenges can teach us, these inspirations may naturally change and evolve over time as we explore more aspects of what our life experience has to offer. By keeping our strength and fitness concepts up to date we can adapt our training objectives and practices accordingly. We can ask ourselves what strengths we physically need and mentally need in order to pursue our current athletic inspirations and use these answers to help inform shifts in our training.
If we find ourselves in a trap of chasing the same strength for many years and never feeling strong enough or never feeling satisfied despite impressive accomplishments and powerful experiences, this may be a sign that we have not yet learned the lessons of our experiences. It may be helpful to step back and give this some attention so that we can move on to a stimulating new chapter.
I should point out that I’m just advocating shifting our perspective and not in any way advising people to give up on physical strengths as they age. This is about optimization, not mindless or resistant maximization. Although certain physical capacities may peak when we are young we don’t lose them. If we train well we can maintain good muscle strength, decent power, and great physical endurance capacities well into our old age (and relatively untrained people can actually even make substantial physical progress in their sixties and beyond). The underlying reality that we are working with is that our bodies were designed to be active survivors, not gluttonous TV watchers. When we examine archaeological records and studies of modern hunter gatherer tribes, it looks like our ancestors could generally live a long healthy active life so long as they could survive infancy and childhood. We’ll just need to take better care of ourselves as our bodies start taking longer to recover and we’ll need accept that we cannot stay competitive with younger bodies in certain ways. But that’s OK. Last time I checked, focusing on competition might lead to inequality, war, and perhaps even apocalyptic doom.
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