It would not work for me. The whole idea of going to some gym alone and doing training that develops skills such as strength I do not actually need to use feels very demotivating. It feels useless and sterile.
My method: I wrote about it elsewhere, but in nutshell, I needed a real sport, such as martial arts. Without a sport goal, simply being healthier and sexier is not motivating enough, and it feels silly to get stronger or more flexible without ever having anything to actually use that for. It feels silly to get strong and then go back to the computer and not use it. I also needed the motivation a martial arts trainer yelling commands is giving. On my own I would get bored after maybe 10 mins of cardio, while with a trainer I can do an 1.5 hours long martial arts training without even getting tired, and it offers me a whole package of strength, technique, flexibility, speed, courage, all kinds of trainings, while the whole session doubles as a cardio with actual bouts of HIIT (such as heavy sandbag stuff). So I get a nice overall package there (boxing, but now more drifting towards the kick-boxing class as the trainer is simply better, generally it is better to choose the best trainer you can find, not the “best” martial art).
The only issue is that it is suboptimal on the strength training, 4 x 20 push-ups during a training won’t make anyone buff, but once I signed up to an actual sport, such as trying to get a yellow kick-box belt, I feel way more motivated to also do bodyweight progressions at home. This is where being kinda fat is actually helpful. I intend to impress the guys at the martial arts training by doing one-handed push-ups (Pavel Tstatsouline: Naked Warrior book) and given that I am like 106kg (233 lbs, not as horrible as it sounds as I am fairly tall, 189cm) I will probably have scary big arms by the time I get there. Well, either that, or seriously damaged wrists. I think I need to tread careful there...
In short, my view is that I need a real sport, a structured sport training with a trainer, a real goal to use strength or other skills for, which also gives an extra motivation to do exercises outside the training times as well. It is hard for people to motivate themselves to acquire skills they don’t need to.
I am not saying I need to have competition as a goal. For example, people can choose to be hobby rock climbers, it gives them a motivation to be strong, yet light, not fat and so on as they can now actually use it.
I chose martial arts not because I am interested in them. I am not actually interested in any sports. But I simply figured fighting is a very basic part of animal life, like feeding or fu… making love, it is simply a very very basic biological experience that must be on your “bucket list”, because it is a huge part of life as an animal in general. So I figured if you have no special attraction to any sport, then just fighting makes a good general jolly joker.
My issue with your method, I mean, why I don’t think it is generalizable enough is that for example in the modern world you don’t need the ability to do a pull-up. You won’t use it for work. It just makes you sexier and healthier and this may not be a strong enough motivator, and it is also a mismatch (muscle mass may correlate to sexiness and health but the ability to do a pull-up doesn’t, as much of it is in the nerves, not muscle size). So IMHO what is needed is find a sport goal that makes it worthwhile to have the ability to do that pull-up, such as rock climbing or parkour. So you have a real reason for wanting that ability. This would be contribution to your method. (Even better: if there is such a thing as “belts”, some form of a certification of rock climbers or parkour traceours, so that you have a really clear goal to work towards, a pride based goal.)
EDIT: I missed the sentence ” I initially started exercising because I wanted more upper body strength to be better at climbing”. That is exactly my point, my only issue now is the relative importance of it. If I was you, I would have written this article as “Step 1: I decided to find an activity, sport, hobby where fitness can actually be used. In my case climbing.” IMHO this decision was the single most important in your chain of decisions and I think you are not emphasizing it enough. If you would not have a goal like climbing, but only the usual be sexier / be healthier goals, the whole thing would work differently. This is why I think a huge amount of emphasis must be put on this, recommending people to first find a hobby, a sport, where fitness can actually be used.
in the modern world you don’t need the ability to do a pull-up. You won’t use it for work..
I would argue that you would use it for work, in that some of the same fitness indicators are used to evaluate people in the workplace as in the sexual marketplace. Things like posture, BMI, self-confidence, and even the number of sick days you take factor in. Even height is a fitness indicator. It has nothing to do with actual job performance, but statistically is an advantage. It is pretty much undisputed that fitness is related to health.
However, your point is valid and something I have noticed before. People get their motivations for fitness in different ways. I suspect it may have to do with extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivators?
“Step 1: I decided to find an activity, sport, hobby where fitness can actually be used. In my case climbing.”
My intention was to give strategies that can be used to build any good habit, not necessarily physical fitness. But within the realm of fitness, you make a good point that a sport where you can see the gains provides additional motivation on top of the desire to be healthier.
I think this is about other good habits as well. I am not sure yet if I won the battle against alcohol, but if yes, it reducing my sports performance will have been a huge part of it. Simply not dying at 50 and things like that were not strong enough motivators, I needed something more immediate, and for that I needed a goal daily drinking directly interferes with.
The problem is most goods habits is just that we follow them out of a certain sense of guilt, because otherwise people will judge us, or because not doing so may kill us decades later and there is a social expectation to pretend to care about that (somehow it is not understood, that if there are people who are so depressed that they want to die right now, there must be far many more people being half-depressed who are okay with the idea of dying in a few decades, and this tends to be primary reason behind unhealthy habits, drugs, booze, cigs, overeating, but there is a strong social expectation to not be so). In this sense healthy habits are very similar today as religious piety was in the past, of course it has better reasons, but those are usually not the real reasons. Any my point is simply that for every virtuous habit, it is very important to find a short-term goal that the habit improves on, so there is some motivation beyond social expectation or a vague fear of death decades later.
Or for example high school and college. I tried not to get fail grades largely because my parents expected me to live a respectable middle-class existence and I needed a marketable degree for that. If I was completely free from such social obligations, I have no idea if I had studied or just chosen the easier, shorter life of some drug-addict homeless hobo or something like that, a no-effort and not uncomfortably long life. So it was the web of obligations and mandatory gratitude pressing me, but that vague sense of duty to my parents did not give a strong enough motivation to get better than pass grades. My point is if I had found a way to make grades more useful, in the short term, if I managed to find a personal goal good grades are useful to, I would have studied better.
So my point is largely about trying to find personal, and short-term goals that require precisely the same kind of good habits that we are socially expected to get anyway. This is sometimes very difficult (the only thing good grades would have bought me back then is a bit more scholarship money, it was not worth it, and nobody looked at my grades after graduation, nor at most of the actual knowledge) but for fitness related ones it is easier.
So that would be my general point. If people guilt-trip you due to obesity, try finding a personal goal a lighter weight is useful for, such as climbing. If people people guilt-trip you about usually not having a job and being a bit of a penniless bum, try figuring out maybe there is something you would actually want to buy, and thus worth investing time into working a regular job to earning a money for. Feel guilty about drugs or boozing, try doing things that you cannot do when high, like have a new hobby that requires driving there because the subway doesn’t go there. And so on, it would be a general method.
It would not work for me. The whole idea of going to some gym alone and doing training that develops skills such as strength I do not actually need to use feels very demotivating. It feels useless and sterile.
My method: I wrote about it elsewhere, but in nutshell, I needed a real sport, such as martial arts. Without a sport goal, simply being healthier and sexier is not motivating enough, and it feels silly to get stronger or more flexible without ever having anything to actually use that for. It feels silly to get strong and then go back to the computer and not use it. I also needed the motivation a martial arts trainer yelling commands is giving. On my own I would get bored after maybe 10 mins of cardio, while with a trainer I can do an 1.5 hours long martial arts training without even getting tired, and it offers me a whole package of strength, technique, flexibility, speed, courage, all kinds of trainings, while the whole session doubles as a cardio with actual bouts of HIIT (such as heavy sandbag stuff). So I get a nice overall package there (boxing, but now more drifting towards the kick-boxing class as the trainer is simply better, generally it is better to choose the best trainer you can find, not the “best” martial art).
The only issue is that it is suboptimal on the strength training, 4 x 20 push-ups during a training won’t make anyone buff, but once I signed up to an actual sport, such as trying to get a yellow kick-box belt, I feel way more motivated to also do bodyweight progressions at home. This is where being kinda fat is actually helpful. I intend to impress the guys at the martial arts training by doing one-handed push-ups (Pavel Tstatsouline: Naked Warrior book) and given that I am like 106kg (233 lbs, not as horrible as it sounds as I am fairly tall, 189cm) I will probably have scary big arms by the time I get there. Well, either that, or seriously damaged wrists. I think I need to tread careful there...
In short, my view is that I need a real sport, a structured sport training with a trainer, a real goal to use strength or other skills for, which also gives an extra motivation to do exercises outside the training times as well. It is hard for people to motivate themselves to acquire skills they don’t need to.
I am not saying I need to have competition as a goal. For example, people can choose to be hobby rock climbers, it gives them a motivation to be strong, yet light, not fat and so on as they can now actually use it.
I chose martial arts not because I am interested in them. I am not actually interested in any sports. But I simply figured fighting is a very basic part of animal life, like feeding or fu… making love, it is simply a very very basic biological experience that must be on your “bucket list”, because it is a huge part of life as an animal in general. So I figured if you have no special attraction to any sport, then just fighting makes a good general jolly joker.
My issue with your method, I mean, why I don’t think it is generalizable enough is that for example in the modern world you don’t need the ability to do a pull-up. You won’t use it for work. It just makes you sexier and healthier and this may not be a strong enough motivator, and it is also a mismatch (muscle mass may correlate to sexiness and health but the ability to do a pull-up doesn’t, as much of it is in the nerves, not muscle size). So IMHO what is needed is find a sport goal that makes it worthwhile to have the ability to do that pull-up, such as rock climbing or parkour. So you have a real reason for wanting that ability. This would be contribution to your method. (Even better: if there is such a thing as “belts”, some form of a certification of rock climbers or parkour traceours, so that you have a really clear goal to work towards, a pride based goal.)
EDIT: I missed the sentence ” I initially started exercising because I wanted more upper body strength to be better at climbing”. That is exactly my point, my only issue now is the relative importance of it. If I was you, I would have written this article as “Step 1: I decided to find an activity, sport, hobby where fitness can actually be used. In my case climbing.” IMHO this decision was the single most important in your chain of decisions and I think you are not emphasizing it enough. If you would not have a goal like climbing, but only the usual be sexier / be healthier goals, the whole thing would work differently. This is why I think a huge amount of emphasis must be put on this, recommending people to first find a hobby, a sport, where fitness can actually be used.
It sounds like she had this:
Sorry, missed that, I will edit my comment.
I would argue that you would use it for work, in that some of the same fitness indicators are used to evaluate people in the workplace as in the sexual marketplace. Things like posture, BMI, self-confidence, and even the number of sick days you take factor in. Even height is a fitness indicator. It has nothing to do with actual job performance, but statistically is an advantage. It is pretty much undisputed that fitness is related to health.
However, your point is valid and something I have noticed before. People get their motivations for fitness in different ways. I suspect it may have to do with extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivators?
My intention was to give strategies that can be used to build any good habit, not necessarily physical fitness. But within the realm of fitness, you make a good point that a sport where you can see the gains provides additional motivation on top of the desire to be healthier.
I think this is about other good habits as well. I am not sure yet if I won the battle against alcohol, but if yes, it reducing my sports performance will have been a huge part of it. Simply not dying at 50 and things like that were not strong enough motivators, I needed something more immediate, and for that I needed a goal daily drinking directly interferes with.
The problem is most goods habits is just that we follow them out of a certain sense of guilt, because otherwise people will judge us, or because not doing so may kill us decades later and there is a social expectation to pretend to care about that (somehow it is not understood, that if there are people who are so depressed that they want to die right now, there must be far many more people being half-depressed who are okay with the idea of dying in a few decades, and this tends to be primary reason behind unhealthy habits, drugs, booze, cigs, overeating, but there is a strong social expectation to not be so). In this sense healthy habits are very similar today as religious piety was in the past, of course it has better reasons, but those are usually not the real reasons. Any my point is simply that for every virtuous habit, it is very important to find a short-term goal that the habit improves on, so there is some motivation beyond social expectation or a vague fear of death decades later.
Or for example high school and college. I tried not to get fail grades largely because my parents expected me to live a respectable middle-class existence and I needed a marketable degree for that. If I was completely free from such social obligations, I have no idea if I had studied or just chosen the easier, shorter life of some drug-addict homeless hobo or something like that, a no-effort and not uncomfortably long life. So it was the web of obligations and mandatory gratitude pressing me, but that vague sense of duty to my parents did not give a strong enough motivation to get better than pass grades. My point is if I had found a way to make grades more useful, in the short term, if I managed to find a personal goal good grades are useful to, I would have studied better.
So my point is largely about trying to find personal, and short-term goals that require precisely the same kind of good habits that we are socially expected to get anyway. This is sometimes very difficult (the only thing good grades would have bought me back then is a bit more scholarship money, it was not worth it, and nobody looked at my grades after graduation, nor at most of the actual knowledge) but for fitness related ones it is easier.
So that would be my general point. If people guilt-trip you due to obesity, try finding a personal goal a lighter weight is useful for, such as climbing. If people people guilt-trip you about usually not having a job and being a bit of a penniless bum, try figuring out maybe there is something you would actually want to buy, and thus worth investing time into working a regular job to earning a money for. Feel guilty about drugs or boozing, try doing things that you cannot do when high, like have a new hobby that requires driving there because the subway doesn’t go there. And so on, it would be a general method.