Zen fit­ness

I was talk­ing to two sin­gle friends at work who were com­par­ing notes with each other on their P90X fit­ness plan. They were going on and on about how much of their time it takes up, how much gro­cery shop­ping they need to do to pre­pare the pre­scribed menus, and how com­pli­cated the work­outs are with pushups (many vari­a­tions), pullups (many more vari­a­tions), kenpo x, yoga x, ply­o­met­rics, x stretch.….

Fit­ness doesn’t have to be that complicated!

I have a fam­ily. We barely have time to eat din­ner together some days. I don’t have time for P90X or what­ever else the lat­est fit­ness craze is. I also don’t have time to bal­ance tempo runs, speed inter­vals, hill inter­vals, and com­pli­cated run­ning pro­grams which require me to mea­sure VO2Max, Max Heartrate, Tar­get Heartrate, Lac­tate Thresh­old, and who knows what else so that I can reach my new PR. I haven’t had a PR since 1997.

Calo­ries in <= Calo­ries out

The for­mula for fit­ness is easy. Make sure you burn as many or more calo­ries than you con­sume. Keep the calo­ries you con­sume as health­ful as pos­si­ble. Make the calo­ries you burn as enjoy­able as pos­si­ble. That’s the long term solu­tion to health and fit­ness — and it’s a life­long com­mit­ment, not the lat­est exer­cise or diet fad promis­ing to get you lean and trim (or buff, or strong, or fast…) in 90 days.

Now if you’re an élite ath­lete, it’s dif­fer­ent. Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe we all want to be élite. Maybe if we train like the élite ath­letes do, maybe if we fol­low the com­pli­cated and rigid train­ing pro­grams, maybe if we make our work­outs more sci­en­tific, then maybe we too can be élite some­day or at least be able able to move for­ward a few feet in the pack at the start­ing line because now we’re in a dif­fer­ent pace group.

Or maybe we’ll just cre­ate more stress for our­selves, not enjoy run­ning as much, and not enjoy as much time with our fam­i­lies as we oth­er­wise could.

Keep run­ning sim­ple and enjoyable

I’m a big fan of Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits. He knows how to keep things sim­ple. Some­times de-​​cluttering and sim­pli­fy­ing helps us to redis­cover the joy and won­der in activ­i­ties that at best we have started to take for granted, and at worst have become a chore and a bur­den. Leo has a great post on sim­ple fit­ness on his site. Check it out, and leave a com­ment below to share your thoughts.

And then for your next work­out for­get about all the com­pli­cated stuff. Lace up your shoes, leave your watch and heart rate mon­i­tor at home, and just run for the fun of it. You’ll be glad you did.

4 Comments

• 
  Natalie December 22, 2009 at 11:24 am

  I agree with all the com­ments. I need both struc­ture & less com­plex­ity based on my moti­va­tion. Occas­sion­ally I stress about work­ing out, which is when I need to leave all my mon­i­tors home; then there are times where I need to have every­thing struc­tured to make sure I do not push it to the side for other com­mitt­ments (specif­i­cally work).

  Every­one should use what­ever meth­ods work for them, but it is nice to remem­ber that we shouldn’t always stress about it. Work­ing out is sup­posed to be fun too.
• 
  Karen Lundquist December 21, 2009 at 4:10 pm

  And one other comment…the work­outs in the P90X pro­gram are no longer than 1 hour. Sure, the pro­gram has you work­ing out 6 days a week, but stay­ing fit requires a commitment.
• 
  Karen Lundquist December 21, 2009 at 4:10 pm

  I don’t agree. Keep­ing it “sim­ple” leads to doing the same things again and again, which leads to no results after a while. The key to fit­ness is vari­ety, which is why the P90X is a good pro­gram. The exer­cises are not com­pli­cated (how com­pli­acted is it to do a push-​​up with your arms wide, rather than the tra­di­tional style, or to do pull ups with dif­fer­ent grips?) and to say oth­er­wise shows a lack of knowl­edge of what it requires to be and stay fit. As far as run­ning goes, tempo runs, inter­vals of hill inter­vals also lead to gains in speed and endurance. I don’t think this advice is worth following.
  • 
    Evhen December 21, 2009 at 7:09 pm

    By no means did I mean to say that P90X sucks or that it isn’t a good pro­gram. If I chose to spend less time with my fam­ily, then I’m sure I could get great results from P90X! My point is that I can choose to stay fit by enjoy­ing run­ning and sim­ple work­outs sev­eral times a week, and also enjoy spend­ing time with my fam­ily. Sim­ple is not nec­es­sar­ily worthless.