My father called me yesterday asking me which operating system would be the best to go with for video and sound editing. And instead of answering him directly, I asked him what it was for and why he wanted to edit film and sound to begin with?

The long short of it was that he wanted to get passionate about making videos and music come alive for other people. He said he wanted to go into the mania of the process. And he wanted that process to start with purchasing a computer with a good operating system.

My advice to my father on which operating system was really to first check his personal operating system, his personal creative process. So I asked him if he would create content every single day and upload it to a platform of his choice for thirty days? He said no way, and gave me a slew of reasons why he couldn’t. So the question I asked him was simply if you can’t create content every day, what good is any of those tools you want to buy?

In not wanting to be a hypocrite, I told him I would start a channel and add content to it every single day for thirty days. I told him it would be a secret channel that I wasn’t actively trying to get the word out about. And if in that thirty days, I could keep up the habit and there was a need to upgrade the tools that habit is using, I would do it.

The point I was trying to make to my dad was that we often we want to fill the void where our passion goes with the best that materialism has to offer. These kinds of actions are easy to make, but yield little in the way of results. And why is that? I call it The Fat Man’s Fitness Dilemma.

The fat man knows that he wants to make a change in his life, he knows that he has seen others do it and there is nothing holding him back from making the change. So he goes and buys nice running shoes, a nice work out outfit, a ton of work out equipment and 10 weeks of personal training and diet coaching. He goes on his first run and he loves it, he goes to his first coaching session and he loves it, and he stands on his brand new scale, sees he lost a pound and he loves it. Things are looking bright for him, right?

But then the next day he is sore, tired, and not in the mood to eat what he has in the fridge. You can probably guess what happens next. He goes out to eat, feels bad about it. He misses his run, feels bad about it. Stops going to training, feels bad about it. Never touches his gym clothes again, and feels bad about it.

In the end we are left asking what did all of his purchase do?

They made him feel good, and that’s it.

The key is to take small, consistent actions towards a larger goal until you need to reassess and make a new goal. And if along the way to achieving that goal you need to make a purchase to take the next step, do it. Just don’t make purchasing the latest and greatest to mark the start of your journey, otherwise you may find your self right back where you started and now with less money.

It seemed kind of strange to think that this feature has been around for years and I have never used it, that is the email to post feature…

For this entry into my blog I want to share a recent book I read, which is what I do around here, and I want to share a story of how I came across this author.

First off, anyone who has read my blog for a while knows that I do take fitness seriously, and that I am currently going down a road to personal fitness that is more akin to development over the long term and not just for hypertrophy.

With that, a friend of mine and I had just gone to lunch and we were talking about how life was before covid and how we used to be more involved with the gym. He remembered that I had let those days go of going to the gym and he wondered what I had been up to. I told him about Convict Conditioning and how it had truly changed my perspective on what physical fitness should look like.

He kind of laughed at me and told me that stuff was lame, and not a broad or deep enough perspective into the art of callisthenitcs. “Have you heard of Steven Low and his book Overcoming Gravity?”

Well, obviously I hadn’t because he began telling me about what the book was about. Even mid conversation I pulled up library genesis and started looking for the text. Sure enough, it was there and over the next 48 hours I began reading the massive tome on gymnastic conditioning until I had fully engulfed the text and understood the basics.

The Basics to Bodyweight Conditioning

In all reality, I am not an expert. I am guy who started off in middle school swimming after school and taking that sport to its logical conclusion in high school: swimming in high school. Granted swimming did become a kind of gateway to another watersport that I think is highly under-rated and under-appreciated: water polo. But I digress.

You see, physical fitness had been about participating in a sport and performing at a very high level all growing up. Then in my twenties, fueled by unrealistic expectations of who I was supposed to be and manipulated into thinking I was more important than I really am, my rageful pursuit of hypertrophy was what dominated my world view.

It was when I started cutting back from the gym, due to covid regulations, that I started to discover a new world of difficulty that I had never understood. I mean, I could lift twice my weight off the floor. I could press my weight over head. And I could press one and a half times my weight off my chest… But a pistol squat? Get our of town. That’s when I started my journey into the beginnings of body weight fitness.

Now, I didn’t go into bodyweight conditioning for long for my first go at it. I got bored of doing the same stuff over and over again (ironic, weight lifting is really no different). But as the pandemic’s lockdowns and restrictions waged on, I knew that I needed to continue learning about bodyweight exercises or get weights. You guessed it, I bought weights like a good little consumer trying to find the shortcut to a toned physique and mass of muscles.

When I started experiencing pains in my joints, I discovered that I needed to reasses my fitness from the ground up. And that is exactly what I did when I learned about Convict Conditioning, I had to real learn to rebuild my strength from the joints outwards.

Enter the Expert to Body Weight Conditioning

Truthfully, I don’t really know much about Steven Low or what he is all about. But sometimes you don’t have to know much about an expert to know that the information that they are sharing is expertise.

As I discovered how gymnists train and the terminology that they use to develop tremendous strength in their sport, I found my self desiring for my self the kind of strentgh and mobility that comes with training the body against the weight of the body. And I found myself wanting that for the whole of my life and not just for a few years of looking shredded and feeling body bound.

See the big things that attracted be to Overcoming Gravity were the progressions into deeper levels of strength while attaining more profound mobility in my limbs. This is ultimately what I desire for my fitness. And it took stripping away all the ego, the misconceptions about the body and the slot machine of social media the surrounded my worldview to see that I want is to have the power and flexibility of learning how to use my body.

Steven Low does a great job teaching that the real difficulty in becoming truly bodyweight powerful is learning how to develop routines that progressively build overtime. And that skill of building routines is, from my perspective, what will set someone up on their journey to an understanding of physical fitness that can’t be attained through just lifting weight, running another mile, or taking another more exotic supplement.

The root of fitness means to be fit, and there is no better way to determine if we are fit than to take our body and leverage it against the world and see if we can overcome gravity.

Your Fitness Journey

Tell me about your fitness journey. Are my thoughts out of whack or do they make sense? Do you believe that weightlifting is superior to bodyweight training? Or are you aware of a methodology of personal fitness that isn’t readily known? Comment below.