Exercise might improve your sedentary lifestyle but it will never fix it.
Ok lets be honest. It's pretty weird to hear a gym and online training business owner say that "exercise won't fix your sedentary lifestyle". Heck the whole gym industry is built around selling us exercise as a fix for everything about our bodies, it sure as heck better at least make up for all that time we spend sitting.
But alas, no it does not.
See, our bodies evolved to MOVE A LOT and WITH GREAT VARIETY. Our sedentary lifestyle doesn't deliver this, and our exercise only partly makes up for it. One hour of exercise a day doesn't deliver the quantity or variety of movement that our bodies expect.
Think of it like a garden. Imagine you want to grow a beautiful garden so you spend an hour every day watering plants and removing weeds. That's a really good approach right?
Now imagine you do all of that, but the other 15 hours that you're awake each day you ever so carefully scatter weed seeds around the garden. Clearly that's not helping matters. You know it. We know it
But its exactly what a sedentary lifestyle does to all that good effort you put in exercising. It undermines it.
The real solution to a sedentary lifestyle doesn't lie in exercise, it lies in building more movement into your life. And not just more movement, but more variety of movement.
And this brings us to how we (as gym owners and online training providers) can say honestly that exercise might improve your sedentary lifestyle but not fix it. We don't primarily sell exercise. At least that’s not how we see it.
See, we do teach some exercises (they have their place) but we mostly teach you movement skills and techniques that not only help get you fit in the gym but which you can also apply in your daily life, making it just a bit more active.
To borrow a metaphor from the business author Jim Collins, our approach to health and fitness (and this is true for anyone teaching real life skills in fitness) is a bit like a big flywheel (a heavy wheel that’s hard to start spinning but once its going is also hard to stop). You come to class and do a session and that gives your flywheel a push. But you learn something to and then go and apply it in your daily life giving that flywheel a second push. Then you apply it the next day and get another push. Soon your flywheel starts to get some momentum of its our and it build from there.
An exercise program without skill development is more like pushing a rock in the mud. Yes it moves when you push it, but it never build up momentum, and you just keep pushing forever.
So here's the deal. Whether you train with us or someone else it doesn't matter. Just make sure whoever it is is helping you to find ways to make your daily life more active as well as giving you a good workout, because your body wants both, and a good gym or online training program should give you both
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