And if life were like that, so predictable, where you just know the emergency that will occur will fit perfectly into the one thing you’ve trained for ... well, you’re good to go. Go rescue that puppy trapped under that Buick, or deliver the insulin to the stranded grandma in the hills 20 miles away after a gigantic electromagnetic pulse has taken out the world’s mechanical transportation devices, including, uh, all the bikes too. You’ll be a hero.
But that’s not how life is. It doesn’t ask one thing of you. It asks almost everything, in potential. Nature rewards the specialist by letting it live in undesirable places. Polar bears and alpine goats and cave bats and subterranean salamanders and camels in the wasteland caravansary. We, however, should be good at everything, capable of meeting what life throws at us. Competent over a broad spectrum. Suited to just about any task. Fit in the way that the fittest survive.
So being the strongest guy in the room is good. Being the strongest man in the world is a bit more than seems reasonable. Being able to help a buddy move his refrigerator down the stairs, and all those boxes of disco records he bought at a yardsale and never managed to sell on eBay -- without waking up the next morning feeling like you’ve been trampled by elephants -- this is a good thing, and a sign of robust fitness.
There are lots of good definitions of fitness. They all require being good at more than one thing. Generally, the idea centers around doing a lot of work in a little time. That’s the definition, the formula, for power. Power. P = f x d / t. Force times distance (that is, “work”) divided by time. Force here is the same as weight. So big power is doing a lot of work quickly, small power is doing perhaps that same work, slowly. The point?
The fitter you are, the more power you have -- you can do more, faster. We can and do rely on our natural vitality, and may fake our way through a task. This cannot last. A competent workout will prove it to the un- or improperly-trained, on day one. If you haven’t trained for actual fitness, you will hit the wall, harder than you thought you could. Happens all the time. High school and college athletes come thinking they’re elite. Perhaps they are, in their sport. It doesn’t transfer. They want to quit -- sit down, start crying, vomit, and quit.
It’s not that we demand more than is reasonable. It’s that what most folks think is good enough, is good enough only by a surprisingly low standard. The pork rind and soda pop standard that makes reality TV the gold standard of contemporary entertainment. So it's an eye-opener.
Real fitness is amazing. And by any reasonable standard, it’s not hard to get. Just work differently. A lot of gym time is likely to be a lot of wasted time. See? Intensity is about time, and intensity is required. It’s the faster part of “more, faster”. It's the power part of work.
Ah well. Wouldn’t it be nice to be powerful. If only there were some way such a fantastic dream could come true. And all the benefits that come with such untold power -- the beauty, the health,the vast fortune, the desire engendered in the inward parts of the groovy chicks or happenin’ dudes.
We say it regularly: health is earned. You must, must, must do the work. There may be magic, but there’s no magic to getting fit. Exercise won’t whiten your teeth, but it will make you look and feel better. The exercise benefit comes from intelligent intensity. This is why FitWorks measures the workload and power that workouts generate. Because power and intensity are so closely related. You'll hear a lot about that, intensity.
No, we do not strive for goals at any cost. “Trample the weak -- hurdle the dead! Grr.” Funny, as a slogan on a teeshirt, but in the real world, foolish and unethical. Goals, at a reasonable cost, in effort, and at a sufficient cost. It's not about hope, buying or selling -- not about enthusiasm, or anything relating to fantasy. It's about results. Emotions, then, are tools that we use to get to goals. At the end of the day, it's about rationality. Like math.
Be excellent.
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