If it's Thursday, there is probably a list involved...

Fitness has some surprising allies.  Here are some things that we might not consider as assets, but that turn out to be useful:

• Laziness.  Not the first thing that springs to mind as a fitness skill, right?  However, those of us who are lazy are willing to figure out the most efficient way to get the exercise we need.

• Intellect.  We all know the stereotype of the dumb jock.  While exercise does not require any particular smarts, those of us who think and read can learn and apply best practices to what we do.

• Busy Schedules.  When we are busy, we are forced to plan our fitness if it is going to happen at all.  Knowing that we have a particular window of time can make us show up for class or for that date with the treadmill.  Once we get fitness into our routine, we’re golden because what is on the calendar actually happens.

By Accident

Recently, a couple of people asked me why I chose Pilates.  I told the truth:  by accident.  I was already a personal trainer and one of my colleagues asked if I wanted to do the training with her and some of our other coworkers.  I went for it.  I’m not sorry.

I may get a visit from the Pilates police for saying this (it’s okay; they don’t really exist or I’d have been hauled off long before now…), but I think of Pilates as a great part of fitness, not as a means to fitness all by itself.  Pilates, as a practice, creates abilities to do other things.

Some of us, for example, struggle with flexibility and mobility.  Pilates, by moving the body through its range of motion, helps with both.  Others need to build coordination to improve performance in sports or activities (or daily life!).  Coordination depends on proprioception, the sense of where our bodies are in space.  The mindful movements of Pilates help us hone that sense.  That same mindful movement can help us retrain our motor pathways after injury.  These things can be ends in themselves, but they also enable us to run, jump, and play with more abandon.

By nature, I tend toward the holistic—I love mixing things up and seeing what happens.  Pilates, as a practice, infiltrates my approach to weight training and both are enriched as a result.

You are absolved

I make people feel guilty.  I don’t want to or intend to.  It’s just my existence that does it.  People find out what I do and suddenly feel convicted of not exercising enough or eating the wrong food.  However, I am not here for that.  I am not anyone’s judge.  I have enough of my own issues, thanks.  I do not need to be evaluating everyone else’s.

All of us, me included, come to fitness with our own set of expectations for ourselves and many of them are—how to put this gently—totally unrealistic.  Yes, there may be people out there who exercise for hours every day and eat a perfectly calibrated number of calories that exactly fill their nutritional needs, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never met any of them.  I’m also pretty sure that their lives have to be built around doing that, and most of us have other priorities, as we should.

I am not saying that we should not aspire to do better than we do now.  We’ll feel better if we do our cardio most days.  We’ll be able to play longer if we lift weights pretty regularly.  Our bodies will appreciate the broccoli and the water we feed them.

We have lives, with families and jobs and cars and dogs and parties and errands and all the other beautiful, complicated stuff we need to show up for.  We need to show up for our bodies, too, but it is a part of life, not all of it.

Guilt is not the best reason to work out.  Love is.  Do the work of fitness because it enables all the other good stuff.

And if that’s not enough:  I forgive you for the cake last week and that missed workout on Wednesday.  Go play.