What Are You in This For?

• Are you hitting the gym twice a day, 6 times a week?
• Are meal preparation and eating consuming most of your waking hours?
• Are you spending your monthly earnings on worthless supplements?
• Are you desperately trying to keep up with your favorite Instagram fitness icons?

If your days revolve around the gym and your macro-friendly meals, you might want to reconsider your approach to fitness.

Fitness should enrich your life, not turn yourself into a neurotic, self-obsessed gym junkie. Getting strong, getting lean and getting healthy must never come at the expense of living a rich and fulfilling life.

Fitness is but a tool

I use fitness for my purposes, I don’t let it run my life.

That wasn’t always the case, however. In my early years starting out, I’d spent most of my time training, eating or thinking about training and eating. I guess, at that point in my life, I was looking for a way to add meaning and purpose to my existence (completely overshooting the target in the process).

Don’t get me wrong. This is still who I am and what I do. For as long as I can remember, I had an obsession with muscle, strength and human performance. Always looking for new ways to train and diet and never becoming complacent with my routine.

Nothing has changed in that respect. Today however, I understand that there is such a thing as balance, and being “hardcore” is nothing but an attempt to justify a one-dimensional approach to living.

The more time you spend on fitness, the less you get in return.

It’s a simple equation really. Don’t make fitness the center of your universe.

Fitness in itself can never be the good life.

It is merely a tool to help you attain higher goals in life. You’re clearly missing the boat investing all your time and energy in fitness.

Unless you want to be the “gym guy” (or girl). But seriously, who wants to be reduced to that?

This is coming from someone who’s making a living in fitness. You’ll never see me spend hours in the gym, obsess over meal timing or call-off dinner dates because I’m on a diet. I make this lifestyle work for me. I’m not a slave to it.

Lose the blinders and start looking at the big picture

Think back for a moment.

Why did you embark on this journey in the first place?

That’s right. You wanted to look great and maybe pursue some specific performance goal. You wanted to be strong, fit and lean, you didn’t want to spend your entire day obsessing over your meals or abs, right?

So what happened along the way? How did you get sidetracked?

You got so invested in this new lifestyle that you lost sight of your goals. You lost sight of what’s really important. You’ve let fitness consume you. You’ve allowed fitness to define who you are, and you’ve accepted this as the new norm, the new you.

Life is good, life is short

What are you in this for? Are you consistently moving closer to your goals? Do you even have clear-cut goals?

Demand more from yourself. Demand more from life, and start using a minimalist approach to building your body. Put in less work and get more out of it.

Make fitness your bitch.

Train 2-4x per week (check out The Ultimate Training Routine), eat the foods you enjoy (in the right amounts) and spend less time obsessing over what supplement to buy and what equipment or program to use to get thicker upper pecs or a slimmer waistline.

This is not an invitation to slack off. I’m not telling you to get lazy. I’m telling you to be smarter in your approach. Set precise goals and use fitness to crush those goals. Make it work for you, without becoming a slave to the grind.

And don’t pride yourself on the fact that you’re living in the gym, eating clean and doing everything by the book. Who are you trying to fool here? Is this really what you want in life?

If fitness is your life, if you make money as a model or bodybuilder, please ignore my ramblings and move on. This is for the average gym goer that, somewhere along the way, got sucked into this lifestyle and lost track of what really matters.

 

Thank you for reading

Victor