We tend to talk about fitness as though the workout itself is the accomplishment.

How much weight did you lift?

How many reps did you do?

How long did you hold the plank?

How many steps did you get?

Did you work out three times this week?

Those things can be useful ways to measure what you’re doing. But they’re measurements of training.

And training is supposed to prepare you for something.

So maybe there’s a better question to ask:

What are you actually training for?

Your answer doesn’t have to be a marathon, a competition, or some impressive physical feat.

You might simply be training for Tuesday.

Fitness Has to Work Outside the Workout

Think about what your body actually does during an ordinary week.

You wrestle a full trash bin to the curb.

You step over the dog who’s somehow positioned herself directly in the doorway.

You crouch down to find the thing that rolled under the couch—and discover you now have to get back up.

You haul a bag of potting soil across the yard. Reach into the back seat of the car. Push open a ridiculously heavy door while carrying your coffee. Stand on one leg long enough to pull on a sock. Spend an afternoon painting a room with your arms overhead.

Maybe you walk through a huge airport trying to make a connection. Paddle a kayak. Shovel snow. Dance at a wedding. Help someone carry a table. Wander around a new city all afternoon. Or spend a Saturday tackling the project you’ve been saying you’ll get to for six months.

That’s where your fitness actually gets used.

That’s where your fitness actually gets used.

The squat you did last Tuesday morning isn’t terribly important because you performed a squat.

What matters is what your body developed by doing it.

Strength.

Coordination.

The ability to produce and manage force.

The ability to lower and raise your center of mass.

The ability to tolerate load.

Those capacities leave the workout with you.

And that’s the point.

Exercise Is the Stimulus. Adaptation Is the Response.

Your body doesn’t know that something is called a workout.

It understands demand.

When you repeatedly place an appropriate demand on your body, your body attempts to adapt to that demand.

That’s why we train.

Pick up something heavy enough and your muscles have to produce more force.

Challenge your balance and your nervous system has to figure out how to organize your body differently.

Move through different ranges of motion and you’re asking your body to maintain access to those ranges.

Challenge your cardiovascular system and it adapts to become better prepared to meet that demand again.

The exercise is simply the stimulus.

The adaptation is what we’re after.

And eventually you put the dumbbell down, step off the yoga mat, or finish your walk.

But you get to take the capacity you built with you.

What Does Your Life Ask Your Body to Do?

This is one reason I’m not particularly fond of questions like:

“What’s the best exercise for _____?”

Best for whom?

Best for what?

These questions lack detail and insight because….there isn’t a universally perfect collection of exercises because…there isn’t one universally identical human life.

Your body has to be prepared for your life.

If you love gardening, your physical demands might include getting down toward the ground, changing positions, carrying awkward objects, pulling, pushing, reaching, rotating, and staying there long enough to finish what you’re doing.

If you love traveling, you may need to walk significant distances, manage stairs, carry luggage, reach overhead, get in and out of different seats, and tolerate long periods of sitting.

If you want to play on the floor with your grandchildren, getting down there is only half the equation.

Eventually you’ve got to get back up. 😂

That’s why the question isn’t simply:

“Am I exercising enough?”

A much more interesting question is:

“Am I building and maintaining the capacities my life requires?”

Functional Fitness Doesn’t Mean Recreating Your Life in the Gym

There’s another side to this conversation that I think is important.

Once we start talking about training for everyday life, it’s very easy to make everything “functional.”

But you don’t need to recreate every activity you perform outside the gym during your workout.

You don’t need to carry grocery bags around the gym to prepare yourself for carrying groceries.

A dumbbell works just fine. 😂

The goal isn’t necessarily to practice an exact replica of every task.

The goal is to identify and develop the capacities those tasks require.

Strength.

Mobility.

Balance.

Coordination.

Power.

Endurance.

Your body then uses those capacities in different combinations depending upon what you’re asking it to do.

We’re not simply training tasks.

We’re building capacity.

And that’s a distinction worth understanding.

Fitness Isn’t a Look

Once we start defining fitness in terms of capacity, something else happens.

Fitness stops being something we can determine by looking at someone.

A person can have the appearance our culture associates with being “fit” while lacking the physical capacities required by their particular life.

Someone else may look nothing like the stereotypical fitness model and be extraordinarily capable.

Because fitness isn’t an aesthetic.

I’d argue that it’s much more useful to think about fitness as the relationship between what your body can currently do and what your life asks it to do.

And that relationship isn’t fixed.

Your body adapts.

That’s incredibly good news.

But adaptation works in both directions.

When we consistently ask our bodies to do something, they have reason to maintain or develop that capacity.

When we stop asking, our bodies have less reason to maintain it.

That’s why I’m such a proponent of maintaining capacity before you have to reclaim it.

Try This Instead of Another Fitness Test

This week, I don’t want you to perform some arbitrary test to determine whether you’re “fit.”

I want you to pay attention to your actual life.

Notice when you:

• get out of the car
• carry something awkward
• reach overhead
• climb stairs
• walk across uneven ground
• get down onto the floor
• stand back up
• push, pull, lift, rotate, balance or carry

And when something feels harder than you’d like it to, resist the temptation to immediately judge yourself.

Get curious instead.

What did that task ask my body to do?

Did it require strength?

Mobility?

Balance?

Coordination?

Endurance?

Probably some combination of them.

Now you have information.

And information gives you something useful to work with.

Welcome to The EveryDay Athlete

This is the thinking behind The EveryDay Athlete—my approach to functional fitness, body literacy, strength, mobility and healthy aging.

You don’t have to run races.

You don’t have to compete.

You don’t have to belong to a gym.

You don’t even have to consider yourself particularly athletic.

You have a human body that is continually adapting to the demands you place on it.

And you have a life that asks things of that body every single day.

That’s your sport.

Your training should help you keep doing it.

Because ultimately, I don’t care whether you can say you exercised three times this week.

I care about what those workouts are buying you.

More capacity.

More choices.

More confidence in what your body can handle.

And more years spent doing the things that make your life your life.

Your workout isn’t the goal.

Your life is.

---

Watch: What Are You Actually Training For?

What Are You Actually Training For? | Fitness for Real Life After 50

If you’d rather watch—or want to see some of these ideas in action—I’ve explored this same question in today’s video.

Ready to Understand Your Body Differently?

The EveryDay Athlete Field Guide helps you begin looking at fitness through the lens of capacity, adaptability and your real life.

FIELD GUIDE LINK

And if you’d like to go deeper, The EveryDay Athlete Mini-Course teaches you how to build body literacy so you can make more informed decisions about movement, exercise and the body you’re living in.

MINI-COURSE LINK