I take my workouts seriously, I always have and I always will. But I don’t label myself as a ‘workout guy’ or a ‘fitness guy’. I’m not ‘into fitness’ and I don’t really care what is going on in the ‘fitness industry’ because for the most part I think it’s all a load of crap.
Your workout shouldn’t be your only identity.
As far as I’m concerned there shouldn’t even be a ‘fitness industry’.
All there should be is you, and your workout that gets you to your personal goals. Unless you’re a pro athlete it’s likely that you’re personal goal is to maximize the look and shape of your body…and along with that comes a what most people would call ‘health’ and vigour and renewed energy and all of that stuff.
But lets be honest, we all want to have a kick ass body. Nobody would workout if it somehow made them healthier but also fatter and weaker. We just wouldn’t do it…we all really like the fact that working out builds a damn good looking body. And for good reason, a good looking body, is a healthy body, it attracts people, it exudes confidence and you can draw confidence from it.
There is simply nothing bad that comes from having a well built body.
The problem arises when you allow your workouts and thinking about your workouts to take over your life and become a bigger part of your identity than it should be.
There should be much more to what makes up your life than just your workouts and how you eat. Identifying yourself with your diet is an entirely separate issue that I find even more ridiculous than identifying yourself with your workout. But I digress.
For today we’ll only discuss the workout side of the equation.
Let’s say you workout constantly 6 times per week. And you put a solid 1.5 hours into each workout. For most people this is already more than they are currently doing and in fact, most people won’t even get to this level. But lets just say this is what you’re doing.
That averages out to less than an hour and a half per day for the entire week (and we would consider this very dedicated). Yet many people will wear this workout as their identity to carry with them throughout the rest of their day and week. It becomes who they think they are.
From the standpoint of hours per day this is likely one of the things you spend the least amount of time doing. Heck I know people who spend twice as much time as that per day commuting back and forth to work. But they don’t consider themselves a ‘commuter person’ and don’t wear it as an identity.
Most people will watch more than 1.5 hours of TV in a day, but they don’t wear that as their identity either.
There are many other things in your life that you spend far more time doing that you will choose not to associate with your identity, but they are in fact a bigger factor to what makes up who you are than your workout does.
The point is to realize that your workout is meant to be taken seriously but not as your identity.
Get to the gym, get the workout done, put your best effort in. Then once you leave the gym, leave all ideas of working out behind. Don’t read about working out, don’t discuss it with anyone, just go and live your life and do whatever else it is you like to do.
Working out is simply a tool to be used to get your body to a look and shape you like, it’s not a life to live in and of itself.
Once you get this sorted out you’ll be able to give your workout the maximum effort and intensity it deserves without it seeping into the rest of your life and controlling more of your thoughts than it should.
Your workouts are important, there’s no doubt about that, but they’re not your identity.
John
About Allen Elliott