Enough fitness
In a culture consumed by appearance and aesthetics, you can see the effects of training more than necessary everywhere. Just spend a couple of minutes on Instagram. There is an entire world of "fitness" and training-related information, most of which is vanity at best and, at worst, actually harmful.
When we talk about training more than necessary, we're not talking about over-training (training so much that your body can't recover). We're talking about necessity.
What do you actually need from your training?
What does your life require?
What do you want from your lifestyle?
Necessary and Sufficient
Here's what we've seen...
For people that want to:
Look good
Feel good
Have energy
Not be sore all the time
Be able to do all the things life requires of them.
Don't WANT to spend multiple hours a day in the gym
2-3 days a week is all that's all that is needed. That's it. With a well-designed program, you can have a high level of fitness with only 3 hours a week in the gym.
But...
That also JUST includes formalized, high(ish) intensity training. For a person to live a lifestyle like that above, they also have to do a few other things.
1. Eat well. Stick to meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and a little fruit, and avoid sugar.
2. Use their fitness. Get outside and play at least 3 days a week.
Play a city league sport
Go to the lake and play in and out of the water
Go mountain biking
Go play in the pool
Set up a slack line in your backyard and play
Meet some friends for Volleyball or Racquetball
Train hard 2-3 days a week, and then go use your fitness on a regular basis.
The benefit of sport
Part of our definition of world-class fitness includes "regularly learning and playing new sports." This is because the benefits of playing sports are vital to high levels of fitness. Sports like basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey, lacrosse, etc., require a lot from the body that is almost impossible to train in the gym.
Take agility, for example. Agility is your ability to react and change direction in response to another object. This could be a ball, a person, or a nerf dart. Basically, anything that causes your brain to ask your body to change direction quickly. This spontaneous and improvisational brain-body connection is hard to train in the gym. It requires getting outside and reacting to the randomness of sport.
What if you want to train more?
Cool.
Some people love to work out all the time. Those people train more because it's fun, not because they NEED to. In fact, they may be spending more time in the gym to the detriment of their overall fitness. But they enjoy it, and that's cool.
If your goal is to be really strong, you want to be good at working out, and you enjoy it, that's cool with us. We're here to help you with that. Just be aware that if all your "training" is in the gym that there is a large area of fitness that you're missing and maybe some sunshine too.
Regardless of what all the “Instagram fitness experts” might say, you don't need to spend every day in the gym to be fit. However, you do need to consistently eat healthy, workout a few days a week, and live an active life.
