American Fitness Professionals & Associates

By Gary Allan Ratson, MD
Adapted from the “The Meaning of Health - the experience of a lifetime”By integrating what we already know, we’ll clear up the reasons for fitness failure, cut through the glut of diet/exercise fads, and pave the way toward a lifetime of cross-training that conditions the body, mind, and soul.

The spirit of fitness is literally about the spirits we’re in while physically active. It is the depth of our awareness that determines our level of commitment, the endurance of our success, and the ultimate value of any training program. When we exercise in the spirit intended, as a lifelong process of wholesome conditioning, we begin to experience the love of the game.

The spirit of fitness begs for a greater meaning of fitness. Because the medical meaning of fitness is limited to the muscle, the purpose of exercise gets reduced to the body. While strength, flexibility, endurance, and lean muscle mass do indeed slow and reverse the biomarkers of aging, these effects are short-lived. These inspiring metabolic effects that influence all body tissue wear off within weeks. Therefore, exercise often becomes a treadmill of never-ending frustration.

Dr. Kenneth Cooper, the grandfather of fitness who coined the term aerobics, is at a loss to explain why the fitness boom has virtually busted. He still thinks we should continue to “bomb people with information”, while admitting that “obesity is not a problem of the intellect”. When motivated by frightening facts and fattening figures, all that we and our muscles remember is the fear.

 The fitness boom broke down about the time we thought we could fake it. The air-brushed beauty and forced physiques that adorn our culture are the necessary exaggerations for exercise that is sold in a bottle, slides under the bed, and works in our sleep.
The mass of low-fat, low-cal, and low-carb fair work to lighten the taste, lower the quality, and reduce the meaning of food and further weaken our resolve. Only the fitness industry gains strength, pretending that it cares that the fit get fitter and the fat get further behind.

When weight-loss is the only motive for eating and exercise sooner or later the fat bounces back. Remember that your childhood likes and dislikes changed spontaneously with the genuine growth in your understanding, interests, and values. Changing adult eating and exercise patterns similarly requires a continued evolution of awareness, concern, and wisdom.

The current medical advice for preventative health has been consistently trimmed down to a modest amount of brisk walking. Anything more strenuous it seems is mis-guided overkill at best and a muscle-head obsession at worst. But since soulful fitness relieves emotional angst and spiritual hunger-and there is no end to that-recreation indeed has no finish line.

The difficulty in maintaining and enjoying exercise comes from a limited purpose of the body. But elite athletes are hardly the picture of emotional health. Professional athletes compete for shortest life spans, while the ‘healthiest’ eaters are the most aggravating dinner guests. Food-obsessed waifs and food-hating heavyweights have similar relationship issues with their meals. Expectations of strain, pain, and boredom are the self-fulfilling assumptions that nurture our poor technique, common injuries, and long-term failure. As hard as it seems to keep in physical shape, it’s that much more difficult to face your emotional flab and spiritual laziness-much more detrimental for longevity and well being.

When our plans are purely physical, the frustration leads us to reckless routines that we can’t wait to finish. We impatiently force our way through a boring regimes for minimal pleasure and temporary results. In such mindless occupations, we need to otherwise occupy ourselves with outside interests like talking, reading, television, and music to blast our way through.

We know how ineffective we are when we have something else on our minds. Our muscles are similarly conflicted by all the mixed messages, unable to perform under that kind of pressure. Add the overwhelming cultural and peer pressure and it’s no wonder we’re cheating, rushing, ignoring early warning signs, and risking injuries like crazy. Ironically, it all adds up to troubling experience that we’d rather not repeat.

Pushed by constantly changing and conflicting outside advice, the mind is constantly distracted by external monitors, charts, and digital readouts. But just as the best athletic shoes are ones that fit best, our ideal body weight, target heart rate, intensity, duration, and frequency of exercise are best known by respecting the comforting messages of our own breath, muscles, and joints.

The thick and thin of healthy size and shape is going to be more than the raw facts and figures. How and why we got that way is way more important than the specific measures-and it’s that same spirit that sustains us. The diversity of what a healthy body looks like is matched only the variety of physical activity. The harmony of our personal relationships and career satisfaction more profoundly reveals our over all fitness.

Understanding the true meaning of moving our body allows us to enjoy the moment, progress naturally at a comfortable pace, and turn a chore into a ritualized way of life. Now, mindful exercise offers a spontaneous, uplifting pleasure that endures with emotional and spiritual stability. Any impatience and pain are overcome by steadfastly attending to the matter at hand. Feeling and sensing the muscle through an entire range of motion gives us something to do while introducing us to the muscles we never knew we had.

It’s this undivided attention that controls our level of tension and comfort. It offers the time for proper technique, sensitively responding to body comfort, and lessening the chances of injury. We’ll actually save time and energy with faster results.
But this kind of conditioning has more lasting value and with it, the greater respect for body’s natural ability.

When we exercise to stimulate our senses, calm our cravings, and stabilize our emotions, then we wisely create a burning desire that is no force of will. The clarity of thought, creativity, and imaginations help us let go of our body fat and cholesterol count.
The love and care of social recreation boosts our over-all healing with an endurance that is more than merely physical fitness.

No matter where we are starting or how far we have come, the same spirited intent allows us not to just do it, but to actually mean it. Like riding a bike, our muscles never forget. The body lives to mirror our beliefs which often conflict with our dreams.

We can walk through anything. But mindful activity is entirely different animal, on the inside. The quality of attention and intensity of intentions are the long and short of exercise that pace our emotional and spiritual development. Buns of steel and washboard abs are now merely welcome side-effects.

Tapping into something true about ourselves, we achieve a comfort beyond the joy of pure physicality. Ahead of the changing science and expert advice, we’re secure in the knowledge of what always works. Ultimately, our strength of character is more interesting than any outer show of force. The trust in our biological perfection unmasks the need for cosmetic appeals.

Exercise stresses the body to ease the physical and emotional stress in daily exertion. Meditation uses the mind to calmly condition the body in workaday confusion. Using the body to calm the mind and using the mind to cool the body both temper those critical aging parameters.  What could be better than that?

Yoga is the ultimate life-specific exercise because it trains the mind to stay focused in the midst of activity. When we allow our mind into all our activity then everything becomes yoga. The lasting pleasure and enduring power of whatever we do results when we are motivated by an endless purpose and an undying love.

Persevering in the controlled tension of physical exertion teaches the patience and courage for confronting unscheduled stress. Maximizing the function of parts that still work lessens the drag of chronic injuries. All of life appears more beautiful when we experience the beauty of our own physicality. Exploiting our abilities transforms any resistant bulges and unsightly disabilities into rather amusing trade marks. These life-lessens give a little more substance to mere winning and losing.

When a pitcher takes aim at the catcher’s mitt, he trusts in the body’s spontaneous precision will remember the hours of arduous practice. By forgetting the fundamentals, our magical inspiration is free to construct the slow motion poetry in the not-so-mythical athlete’s zone.

As we give our body free reign, the odds of achieving the runner’s high or the climber’s peak experience are peaked by simply walking briskly around the park. Lapsing into this moving meditation we’ll know what they mean by being-the-ball and being-at-one with the mountain.

The World Health Organization calls the growing obesity of America’s youth “a global health crisis,” but is at a loss to explain it or fix it. But see, the extreme sports adventurers symbolize the spiritual peaks we’re all afraid to climb. At the other extreme, the swelling sedentary masses are a symptom of compensatory consumption, the immediate fulfillment with food rather than meaning.

It’ll take a certain emotional dexterity and spiritual fitness to finesse our way out of this one. The battle of the bulge correctly implies that we’ve made an enemy of own food and our body. It’s redundant to continue fighting a war that is already being waged that nobody can win. This conflict is only resolved by the spiritual warrior with love and understanding, rather than by discipline, denial, and further disintegration.

The spirit of fitness is not apart from the art of living or the meaning of health. What could be more spiritual than our undivided attention and highest intentions? With the right incentive, we just may cajole that corpulent creation into some soulful re-creation.

At a time when the most prestigious medical journals admit to the biases, omissions, conflicts, exaggerations, statistical deception, and critical censoring inherent in the competitive business of drug research and development, we need to take the responsibility of integrating the bits and pieces of scientific truth into our own experiential truth. That’s the spirit.

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