Exercise is Two Thirds of Everything

2012.11.21   prev     next

(More than anything, this article is a message to me.)

A  lot of people, myself included at one point in my life, go back and forth between the belief that exercise is almost nothing, to the belief that it’s almost everything. You can’t be on one of those two positions for too long before you start realizing that it isn’t true. And if you’ve somehow convinced yourself at a deeper level that either one or the other of those two things must be true — or that the surest way to jump off your current untruth is to jump as far as you can to the other end of the spectrum — then you just wind up on the other one for a while until you realize that it isn’t true. And then you go, oh, I was right the first time. And you go back.

Two Thirds

Exercise is two thirds of everything. If you exercise regularly, in a very consistent pattern — really good exercise, not overexercising, but really good exercise — then that alone will take you two thirds to what you want to be, provided you want to be just a good, all-around, competent, respectable, and successful person. That’s two thirds of it right there, because you live your entire life — 24/7/365 — in this body. And if you improve that body, make it work better and look better, feel better, then that improves everything. It improves what you’re able to do, and how long you’re able to do it, and how easy it is, and whether people respect you and want to be around you, and whether other desirable people want to be around you. It affects everything. It makes everything better.

And you might say, well I don’t really want the most desirable people to surround me. Well, that’s fine. But whoever it is. It doesn’t matter who it is. Maybe you don’t want the most generally desirable, best-looking, fittest, most competent people to surround you — that’s OK. Whoever it is you do want to surround you, they’ll want to surround you more, they’ll want to associate with you more, and do things with you more, and they’ll like you more, if you are taking better care of yourself.

And that’s two-thirds of everything.

The other one third is the fact that even though you live your entire life in this body, you still do other things: You do stuff on the internet. You do work. You create things, that will be consumed by people who can’t tell whether you were fit or not, or good-looking or not, or anything like that. All they can tell is how much work went into this creation, how much care, and how much thought. You do a lot of things that don’t necessarily (at least as long as you don’t die prematurely before you can do them), depend on how fit you are. At least not directly.

But fitness is two thirds. And what this means is that if you go into a phase where you think fitness is nothing, then how well you do everything else (besides fitness) determines where you are between zero and 33% of what you want to be and how good you feel about it, and everything. But if you are doing your fitness program, then how well you do everything else determines where you fall between 67% and 100%. That means that just by doing fitness, and doing it really consistently, you’re setting the bottom of the barrel of how well you’re doing, how you feel about everything, at 67%. And then it’s just up from there, if you’re doing anything other than fitness too.

By taking care of fitness, you’re creating a situation where you can’t go below two-thirds, and that’s if you did nothing else. If you just took care of your fitness, and you just sort-of blew off everything else — did everything else to a very, very bare-minimum degree — you’d still be at 67%.

And then if you did everything else pretty well? Then you could be at, like, 90%. And if you did it really, really well, then you could be at 100%. But the point is, whether or not you do a consistent fitness routine — and remember, this isn’t an over-the-top fitness routine where fitness is what you’re doing half the day (and you certainly aren’t doing fitness activities 2/3 of the day!), you’re doing it something like 30 to 50 minutes a day, and then eating healthy the rest of the day — determines whether the top of where you can take your life is 100% or just 33%.

If you start thinking that fitness is everything, that it’s 95% or 99%, then you’re wrong, because what’ll happen is, you’ll do the fitness thing, you’ll be at about two thirds, but you’ll be sort-of neglecting everything else, because you think it doesn’t matter, and then you’ll realize after a while that you’re not really making progress at becoming who you want to be. And then you’ll think, ohh, fitness wasn’t the answer. And then you’ll jump off.

So, the recommendation here is, don’t vacillate between thinking fitness is 5% of becoming who you want to be, and thinking it’s 95%. It’s neither. It’s about 2/3. So take it seriously, because you want that 2/3. But then you also have to do other things to get the other 1/3.

And just knowing this, helps you. Because even when you go through periods where you’re following your fitness routine, so you’re getting 2/3, but you’re not really doing much else, so you’re not significantly higher than 2/3 — then you know that that’s what you’re doing. And you know exactly what to do to get more, which is to stay on the fitness program, and do this other stuff too.

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