Progress

Even if your progress is slow…

Even if it seems like you should be improving at a greater scale, quicker, faster, more obvious and especially if you are looking for the antidote of the frustration born of instant gratification, please relax.

Everyone’s response to physical fitness, training and bio-mechanical growth is different. We are not robots manufactured on a third-world assembly line with cookie-cutter precision. We are not Orc-like rising from the primordial mud hard-wired for a single task. We are not all the same, as much as white supremacists wish it were otherwise.The myth of the master race has been exposed as propaganda so you will have to work just as hard for your gains as the next guy. Nothing is given by birth that cannot be taken away by a motivated individual with an agenda. 

Should you be interested in gradual increments of progress, the reality of resistance training, you must be ready to check your ego at the gym door and commit to a process. If this isn’t your cup of tea, the alternatives are both expensive and illegal. Not to mention quite unhealthy, bordering on dangerous. You can have bigger beach muscles by Friday if you trade your adrenal glands for them. You can be 100 pounds lighter by Thanksgiving if you are in possession of a disposable fifty large. (I will refrain from the cheap shot of suggesting that liposuction sucks). 

The only way to improve your quality of life, assuming that you connect the dots of training, exercise, diet and stress management, is to create a scenario of a consistent rotation of work, rest, fueling and hydration along with some type of non-toxic management of mental and emotional tension, aka stress. The three areas of main concern are the most obvious. We each have a mind that needs constant stimulation to function optimally. The central governor of this miraculous organism has complete (most of the time) control over all the other parts, managing in real time, heart beats, lung volume, muscle tension and release, detoxification, waste management, thermo dynamics, balance, and an incredible network of electrical activity known as the autonomous nervous system. Making this miracle even more dynamic is the part that those collective parts (the union of associated body parts local 443) plays in keeping them all running smoothly in a precise and relentless dance of effort and rest. Last but far from least is the part that our spirit plays. Without the wise, mature and totally blissed out Zen master of the soul, this bag of carbon and water would collapse under the weight of its own apathy. 

There must be meaning. We must be continually prodded, pushed or pulled in the direction that most pleases first the soul and then the body. We leave the judgmental mind to assess our progress and design tweaks and course corrections as necessary to accomplish the primary directive of the spirit. 

You want to improve your speed, get faster and win some races? Get stronger to better accomplish the goals that your spirit has labeled as passion? Or are you most interested in finding that plateau we call optimal health and fitness? 

Should you decide to heed the calling and devote your time and energy towards the intellectual, please remember that you will need a healthy body to transport you to the library, research center or to the top of the mountain for an archaeological dig. Perhaps the logic behind yoga being a prerequisite for transcendental meditation is to allow for longer periods of sitting, is suddenly crystal clear. 

It starts with the song of the soul. What excites the electrons currently whirling around your brain? What is your meaning? What (do you suspect) is your calling? Why are you here? 

In the case of many of us, that is a difficult question. I get up, go to work, pay the mortgage, love my wife and break my back to put the kids through school. If I have any time or energy after all that I might play a round of golf. And we go to church once a month. And certainly one could do a lot worse that a pitcher of nightly martinis? Right? 

OK. 

If that is acceptable and you have three-part harmony with your mind, body and spirit, congratulations! Should this be a compromise you have made, a plea-bargain with the judiciary of your soul, then you might be wise to look a touch deeper and get an updated and current status report. 

Get started today with one, or more, of the elements that augment your level of happiness and quality of life. As you do so please commit to the reality that no matter the speed, whatever your rate of improvement or however slow your critiqued progress, even progress at a pace slower than a banana slug…

Is still progress.