The problem of too much fitness.
How much fitness is enough? The answer isn’t always”more.”
There is a Golden Mean of fitness – a point beyond which each additional gain becomes harder and more expensive to achieve, while contributing less and less to the life you’re actually trying to live.
I learned this in a fairly brutal way at the Western Canada CrossFit Regionals in Richmond, BC. The second workout of Day 1 was a triplet: a 2,000-metre row, 50 pistol squats, and 30 hang cleans with a 135 lb barbell.
My superpowers are the ability to suffer and bodyweight strength, so I came off the row and through the pistols in a strong position. Then I got to the barbell. I weighed about 115 lb. The bar was 135, a weight I had only managed once before, and I needed to do 30 of them.
While I failed attempt after attempt, competitors who outweighed me by 25, 30, even 50 pounds began catching me. They could string together sets of hang cleans while I fought to manage a single rep.
The buzzer sounded. After all those attempts, I had exactly zero reps. “Did Not Finish” was written beside my name. Day one of a multi-day competition, and I was already going home.
I had trained incredibly hard just to qualify for an event at that level. Other people had sacrificed to help me get there. In that moment, it felt as though I had let all of us down.
My competitive instinct was predictable: Get better. Get stronger. Try again. But once the disappointment faded, I started thinking seriously about what “better” would require.
At my size, if I wanted to keep progressing in competitive CrossFit, I probably needed to build considerably more muscle. Maybe 20 pounds or more. Those pounds wouldn’t come easily… if they came at all. It would require a ton of calories, more time in the gym, and probably a new wardrobe. Reluctantly, I arrived at the conclusion: Not worth it.
I didn’t need another 20 pounds of muscle to be healthy, and I didn’t need it to feel or look my best. I only needed it to become better at competitive CrossFit.
Fitness is a curve.
On the far left is too little. When we are weak, sedentary, or poorly conditioned, the consequences bleed into every part of our lives.
Moving rightward from there has an enormous return, but the curve doesn’t continue upward forever. Eventually, you become fit enough that another increment of fitness costs disproportionately more to achieve.
At some point, fitness stops supporting everything else you do and everything else you do begins supporting your fitness. That’s the other side of the curve. Other interests get squeezed out. Family, friends, and career all compete with the demands of becoming incrementally fitter.
Somewhere in the middle is the Golden Mean: enough fitness to extract most of what fitness can give you without requiring your life to revolve around it.
Some people on the left side of the curve are wary of fitness because they associate it with the vanity, obsession or self-absorption sometimes found on the far right of the curve. They have people to serve and better things to do than spend hours in the gym.
But neglecting your fitness isn’t selfless either. Sacrifice your health for everyone else long enough, and eventually the people you wanted to care for may have to care for you.
The Mandates are aimed squarely at the Golden Mean. They are a health and fitness guide for people who have goals and responsibilities outside health and fitness, designed to capture the benefits of fitness without requiring your life to revolve around pursuing it.
That doesn’t mean the Mandates won’t produce high levels of fitness. Done consistently, they do, and you’ll be remarkably capable across a wide range of physical challenges. On that foundation, you can pursue more specialized fitness if a particular challenge or season makes the extra investment worthwhile.
I like how C.S. Lewis put it:
“Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air.”
For most of us, our fullest and best life will be found not on the left, and not on the right, but in the Golden Mean of fitness.
Homework
Find yourself on the curve. Are you under-fit, somewhere around the Golden Mean, or has fitness itself become the pursuit? What is one thing you could change to move closer to the middle? Write it down.
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