If you read about the typical lifestyle, we are not surprised you want to change; its likely fitness is first on your mind.The fitness lifestyle is a lifestyle that is organized around maintaining fitness, muscular development, and usually an ideal body weight.
According to Wikipedia:
Physical fitness is a state of health and wellbeing and, more specifically, the ability to perform aspects of sports, occupations, and daily activities. Physical fitness is generally achieved through proper nutrition,[1] moderate-vigorous physical exercise,[2] and sufficient rest.[3]
Before the industrial revolution, fitness was defined as the capacity to carry out the day’s activities without undue fatigue. However, with automation and changes in lifestyles, physical fitness is now considered a measure of the body’s ability to function efficiently and effectively in work and leisure activities, be healthy, resist diseases of affluence, and meet emergency situations.[4]
Great, but the above definition is much broader than most people in a fitness-oriented lifestyle actually practice. Though a fitness lifestyle can take you in the direction of and is an essential component of health and wellbeing, it is not what creates health and wellbeing.
We need to develop other aspects of our lifestyle and areas of life for “wellbeing.” For starters, and in today’s climate, many fitness lifestyles practice unhealthy dietary patterns and don’t promote recovery, therefore compromising health.
Think of bodybuilding and CrossFit as the two best examples. They are both so good in so many ways. They influence people to get on the path towards a Performance Lifestyle. Still, muscular development and fitness to the extreme and arguably unhealthy dietary practices prevent these lifestyles from lasting long. In CrossFit, typically, not enough recovery are drawbacks to this way of life. Not to mention that both can consume a disproportionate amount of one’s lifetime, throwing off life balance.
In today’s fitness lifestyle, it’s extremely easy to overtrain, engage in macronutrient restriction to promote weight loss and consume too much protein. For example, for muscular gain, among many other practices are borderline and blatantly pseudoscience.
Breaking free of the constraints and limitations of the fitness lifestyle was one of the original motivations of our founder John Allen Mollenhauer “JAM,” who was a competitive bodybuilder and gym chain owner.
After experiencing the injury and symptoms of both Bodybuilding and CrossFit, JAM started living a healthy lifestyle; and ultimately developed the Performance Lifestyle.®
A healthy performance lifestyle enables you to maintain energy, health/fitness, and performance to achieve your family, business, and career goals, possibly sports or creative arts goals.
Generally speaking, a fitness-centric lifestyle is more appealing to younger people, even though fitness remains essential and is vital to those living more balanced lifestyles.
Without fitness, you don’t know how energetic or healthy you are, which affects your life performance.
Sleep is usually not generally high on the list in a fitness lifestyle, and fatigue can mount as excessive fitness activity builds on top of life stress. Still, the impact of these shortcomings is not fully felt at younger ages. However, this is changing as our fast-paced performance culture is taking its toll on younger generations.
Ask many men and women in their 40’s and 50’s today, and most would say they would have “worked out less, or smarter and recovered more.”
The fitness lifestyle is incredible because it focuses people on the community around physical activities, fitness challenges, even competition as modeled again by the CrossFit Community.
And athletic experiences like that are a major influencing factor in what inspires people to live better. You feel better when you are fit, in a community, and you are more capable.
If getting fit excites you, or you want to feel and look healthy, start developing your performance lifestyle with one idea in mind; you own nothing except your own body.
So, what should be the behavior towards your only property? The answer is obvious, take care of it, pamper it, prepare it, and keep it fit and healthy.
Fitness consciousness is where most people start, considering that unlike the typical lifestyle statistics, the average percentage of the U.S. population participating in sports, exercise, and recreational activities per day by gender from 2010 to 2019, according to the source, is 20.7 percent.
Awesome. Developing fitness is an excellent step in the right direction.
Health consciousness among people in general, including fitness-oriented people because most will do anything to get fit even if it compromises their health, is exceptionally low.
So now you want to build health in your lifestyle.
What we want to do here is to get you on the path to living, at minimum. A healthy lifestyle includes fitness, on your way to ultimately living a balanced performance lifestyle, where you are also proactive about managing your energy.
Healthy, performance lifestyles are about way more than fitness and inspire an increasing, and eventually, an all-in commitment that becomes the by-product of your desire and pertinacity to want to live better.
Pro Tips
Fitness is a great place to start developing a healthy performance. All you need is a little determination to begin stressing the body’s cardiovascular system, muscular system and keeping the body flexible and aligned.
- Develop fitness and flexibility via yoga, where you are also strengthening and coordinating the body.
- Work on the cardiovascular and muscular system via many strategies available today, from weight training, endurance activities, and more.
- As you do, you’ll face the need for improved nutrition and recovery needs and the need to change, improve, and optimize other aspects of your lifestyle.
- That is the reason why we suggest you dive into your fitness training, with at least an understanding of the 12 Fundamentals of a balanced and healthy, performance lifestyle in mind.
- Working out is a great place to start because it puts your body into a “performance situation,” where your body’s stress demands will reveal your body’s actual condition.
Few things motivate a person to change more than pain, even more so than positive outcomes. The guru on the pain and pleasure principle is none other than Tony Robbins, and he says the brain will do more to avoid pain than it will to gain pleasure.
Now learn about a healthy lifestyle.
