This little paragraph from the Exercise is Medicine group on LinkedIn is a very powerful paragraph, full of wisdom. It is on point about where fitness in our culture is not a state of being, but an activity.
In general, most believe that you have to spend hours in the gym, working your upper body, lower body, core, and cardiovascular system separately. This may be the type of training appropriate for body builders and power lifters, but if you are just pursuing fitness, it’s probably not the best. Fitness can be defined as having the physical capability to deal with life and maintain health. In dealing with daily life, you are NEVER going to use your muscles isolated from each other. In every imaginable task, the body works as one entity. How harmoniously various body parts are able to work together determines whether the movements are free and easy or painful and hard. With this in mind, maybe it’s time to stop isolating the muscles and train the way we live, as an organized system of interdependent units. Stop training in a gym, doing movements you’ll never use outside of the gym and go live. I mean really live! Go rock climbing, skiing, or scuba diving. Jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Climb trees with your kids or joint them in a game of “the floor is made of lava.” These are the types of activities that will keep you fit to handle daily life.
