Unless you happen to be blessed with the luckiest of genes, exercise is definitely the easiest route to owning a great body. Of course, working out may not be exactly budget friendly for everyone, and most people would argue that it is a little hard. Still, it beats every other option out there. Perhaps we have not always been certain about it, but at this time in human history, the available evidence on the benefits exercise has for our overall health and physical appearance is more than adequate. So, the chances for people who hope to look better - own those toned limbs, a firm midsection and even bigger glutes - are pretty high.
But it involves work. Fitness is a matter of being motivated and staying motivated. These days, it is also looking as if that vital morale is quite easy to come by (it is not). I mean, is it not curious that so many people, many of whom you may have never met in real life are actually interested in your health and appearance, invested in making you look good? Just about everyone on the internet is either a wellness advocate or a fitness influencer. Imagine that! Everywhere you turn, someone is sharing tips on how you could cut down on carbs and drink more water, consume less soda; strategies on how you should train your lower body and what supplements to take in order to optimize muscle growth. Fitness culture is a thing. Style and fashion these days has even undergone a little evolution to accommodate it. The word is athleisure. If you really think about it, fitness has become an integral part of modern culture. Why is a business promoting their brand of luxury furniture showing you videos of people working out, or one of some shirtless man with impressive musculature testing a bed by gracefully diving onto it? Media projects and advertisement campaigns that should have nothing to do with fitness would find a way to infuse this 'culture' into their work. That goes to show how much space fitness is taking in our world. Now, all this is good. Fitness culture is exactly what we need. People who exercise have improved chances of living longer, aging slower, having fewer health problems, being stronger and more attractive.
If you are reading this, I hope working out is part of your lifestyle or that you at least have real plans to make it so. I do not intend to bore with why you should exercise or talk about routines and the kind of diet you should follow for better results. I want to talk about why we do all this. Because it is possible that you may not be sure anymore. It is possible that you have forgotten that you did not start working out with the goal of having that Dwayne Johnson body. It is possible that what you wanted at the beginning was not those massive thighs and bottom. I might as well go straight into it: the primary fitness goal, I mean why we have to hit the gym is so we can be stronger and healthier. You should be working out not because you want to lose weight and look gorgeous right now. It should be because you want to be strong enough to do interesting things such as hiking or running in the future with people you are older than with at least fifteen years. Except if you are a professional athlete or an aspiring one or someone employed in the entertainment industry, your goal should always be to feel healthy, and to be happy about how your body responds to you. It is okay to want to have a beautiful form, but I am telling you that you are better off aspiring for more (or should we say, less) than that. Fitness is a personal journey. It should hence be personalized, customized to suit the unique needs of your body. That way, you may find out whether or not you need to do fifty deadlifts a day and whether you need to work on your core and your biceps that much. It should really be a journey where what matters is not how fast you bulk up or how many reps you can do but how consistent you are at showing up for yourself. You see, even if you can do no more than twenty minutes of workout out of three days in a week and you are consistent at it, your body will reward you with some result. It is important we conceptualize our own fitness goals so we can stay realistic and enjoy the journey. For many of us, it is simply impractical to spend more than eighty minutes a day in the gym. We cannot pump our bodies with many nutritional supplements and basically live our lives as if we exist for an optimized body, when we're sure that we are not body builders. Really, exercise is about staying healthy, it is about longevity and good posture and good eating habits and being happy with yourself and oh yes, a healthy sex life. It should not be about impressive bodies.
Having that gorgeous body is a wonderful reward but experts think it really should be secondary. Besides, I do not see how you are improving your chances of living longer than you are naturally predisposed to, and being healthy in your 80s when you are doing this whole fitness thing like some competition. When I say own your fitness journey, I mean listening to your body, being gentle with it and loving it regardless of your current weight. You have to love that body from the beginning. That way, you know to take your time. You don't feel the pressure to make use of stimulants or become obsessed with counting the calories that go into your body. You may follow an influencer's or even a peer's workout routine/diet and that is okay. But you also understand that you may not have the same result as the individual you copied. When you own your journey, you know it is okay to be passionate about fitness, that need to get motivated in order to keep doing the work especially on the days you do not feel like it. Still, you understand that having to miss workout sessions is not a crime to your body. You know it is important to have rest days and that words such as "no days off" and "no excuses" in the fitness space may be toxic. When we own our fitness journey then it may be easier to ignore all these impractical bodies on social media and the people in the gym with perfect physiques who make us feel like we must be doing something wrong. It becomes easier to remember that those people have their own life and unique goals, and we have ours.
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