Exercise vs. Training
Movement matters, and so does your intent.
Modern times seem to have set the bar for fitness pretty low. Unfortunately, this seems to also spill over into athleticism. In fact, anything above being an average couch potato seems to be touted by armchair experts – with endless PubMed citations and influencer reposts – as “optimal.”
To make matters worse, on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have “news” headlines like:
The bipolar-ism creates a tragic vacuum where people like Bryan Johnson and Brian Johnson (aka Liver King) are idolized on a pedestal. That’s a tangent for another day, but sets the stage for the modern fitness scene.
Movement is Not Inherently Exercise:
Movement is simply locomotion. In technical energetic terms this is what we call “non-exercise activity thermogenesis” or NEAT. Movement is literally anything besides sitting on your butt; house cleaning, walking to the refrigerator, daily steps, etc.
Exercise, on the other hand, requires exertion. For a generally sedentary person working a desk job it may in fact take some focus and effort to get 10,000 steps per day. Whether or not that arbitrary benchmark is relevant or helpful is another side-issue.
The literature on movement is fascinating. While there are various endorphins released through different mechanisms (e.g. lifting heavy weight or long endurance running) the more recent literature suggests that movement isn’t so much an anti-depressant or anti-anxiety boost as it is a human’s natural state.
As such, it seems to be much more the case that being sedentary is a depressant and induces anxiety. Life, however isn’t stagnant, so you likely have to exert some effort (i.e. exercise) to maintain physical and mental status – we may even call this “fitness.” This is highlighted by both ends of the spectrum of life; developing children and elderly persons.
Not All Exercise is Training:
This is going to break some hearts, and I won’t apologize for it. Training requires focus, an objective, a plan to reach that objective, execution of said plan, and attention and analysis of the results of the executed actions.
What we often see polluting social media, and quite intentional preying from magazines, is the peak of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Knowing, or thinking you know, enough to be dangerous – mostly to yourself – is the definition of the “bro-culture” stereotype.
The insidious nature of this type of thinking is that people develop very little ability to see beyond themselves or what’s currently working for them. This phenomenon is so prolific that it pervades (especially?) once well-meaning critical-thinking communities (“carnivores”, CrossFit, etc.).
What this ultimately stems from is insecurity and a lack of confidence, which is of course built from experience, pressure testing, and prolonged exposure to the truth.
Skill is an Energy System:
Sport and skill development are their own energy system. I see a lot of jacked dudes in gyms that put up otherworldly lifting numbers – they’ve probably never run a mile in their life. This brings us to the spectrum that various sports lie on between skill and physicality.
The word “fitness” is also ambiguous because what we’re really asking is how “fit” is someone for a given task, Assuming all sports require some kind of locomotion (a physical expression), they also require different levels of skill expressions.
Bowling and golf are highly skill-dominant. Obviously you have to pick up the ball and swing the club with some degree of exertion (exercise). What you would often encounter here is a physical limitation of skill expression – one lacks the mobility to swing the club or roll the ball efficiently.
Just as obviously, you can “grip and rip” a barbell and maybe even put up decent numbers with your deadlift looking like a dog taking a dump. Eventually, you’ll encounter the opposite problem to the golfer, a technical limitation of physical expression.
Actually doing and being good at the things you want to be good at requires skill. Those skills must be developed. They require time, energy, effort, and recovery. Those are all limited resources that skill development will have to compete with physical development for.
In my own training, I used to lump grappling into the “anaerobic capacity” energy system because that’s the most accurate in terms of physicality. However, it’s not valid when trying to compare how much time or energy I spend on fitness versus skill development.
This distinction is warranted because there’s a point of diminishing returns in that no matter how astonishing my physical feats might be in the weight room, the obvious question remains, “is my grappling getting better because of it?” Phrased differently, I must constantly ask and re-evaluate the components underneath that question:
Am I physically fit for my sport?
Am I technically fit for my sport?
Thus, I started documenting “sport” sessions as their own “energy system.” Similar to physical fitness systems, sport / skill sessions can be further classified by difficulty ratings: rebound, cultivation, development, and test.
Summary:
Unfortunately, a lot of people are blown away by a 6-pack and a spray tan. The decaying physical health of the Western World, particularly America, is tragic. Never before has the bar, the standard, the expectation, the “normal” been set so low.
We’re constantly bombarded by how “toxic” masculinity is. Ironically, “toxicity” has never been about being “masculine.” It turns out that being an asshole is the toxic part, regardless of one’s gender identity.
Furthermore, real effort is constantly cheapened by people looking for shortcuts. We need to move to be healthy. If what you can fit in with 4 kids, 2 dogs, and a spouse is chasing them all around the yard – so be it.
To call something exercise, you need to exert yourself. To call exercise training, there needs to be direction, strategy, and measurable outcomes – in a sense, judgment.
To be clear, this isn’t a jab at families, or some sort of ableist nonsense. It’s a confrontation and a call-to-action to dare to want more for yourself. Do you want to rest your entire identity on past achievements, or do you want something more for yourself? If you’ve really put in the work, why stop at the foundation?
Why not channel the physical attributes you’ve built into a skill? Those skills will require time, training, effort, failure, and recovery; just like physical attributes. Perhaps your fitness and “enlightenment” have only served to make you more insecure and afraid to once again be a novice. Being bad at something is a prerequisite for being good at it.
Entitlement isn’t empowerment. Stop believing you’re an exception, that you’ve arrived. In a world where “decrepit” is increasingly “accepted”, “sufficient” is mistaken for “excellent.”
PS: I was going to include a segment on doping and cheaters – I’ve talked about both of these before. However, it would have made this summary even more tangential, so that topic will have to wait for another day.