How Wise People Stay Fit in a Foolish World

Beyond the two shitty options

Ancient Greek wrestlers have at it.

Socrates didn’t think much of Athenian fitness.

Average citizens who labored, farmed, or rowed triremes were fit without fitness training, of course, and it was mostly the middle and upper classes he worried about.

At one extreme, swollen meat heads preened their disproportioned and overspecialized bodies in the gymnasiums. At the other, a flabby, degenerate leisure class was preternaturally aged and incapable of serving their fellow man in war or peace.

Socrates’s students Xenophon and Plato and the later Stoics agreed, and thought there was a better way. They believed orienting your life and identity around body maintenance is as foolish as letting yourself rot.

Today, we’re worse off than the Athenians, and rarely see healthy moderation represented, least of all in this madhouse we call the internet.

At one extreme is…well…almost everyone. The obesity epidemic and diet are a topic for another day, but The Centers for Disease Control says only 28% of Americans hit its underwhelming target of 2.5 hours of moderate physical activity and two days of muscle-strengthening activity each week.

Body-obsessive influencers hold down the other extreme. They grind away at the gym for hours, uploading posing videos to Instagram and taking dangerous growth hormones that mortgage their future health for bigger biceps. Worse is what they neglect to live this life.

Can we do any better?

Fitness Sanity in a Foolish World

Our world grew foolish as it prospered and many are caught in a sedentary trap called “suburban sprawl.”

Our city designs preclude passive exercise like biking to work, school, and friends or hauling groceries home on our backs. Exercise was once inextricably tied to utility, but now it’s a thing we allocate precious time for.

Cars take us everywhere, forcing hours of sitting beyond what we’re obliged to do while hunched over keyboards.

And when the determined few force themselves to exercise, they endure a further sedentary tax — a quarter hour crawling through traffic to the gym, and again on the way home.

It’s no wonder so many neglect fitness, but the cost of doing so is high. Putting longevity and disease risk aside, Socrates was ahead of his time in noting that “…even in the process of thinking and not using our body, it is a matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health. And because the body is in a bad condition loss of memory, depression and discontent often attack the mind so violently as to drive out whatever knowledge it contains.”

In other words, we’re going to be dumb, depressed, and mistake-prone unless we move. So move we must.

Virtuous Movement:

Virtue was the litmus test Socrates and the Stoics brought to all things. So what does wise, just, courageous, and moderate fitness look like in your circumstances?

How do we do enough without obsession? Can we be fit without sacrificing other critical things?

The Stoic philosopher Seneca praised walking and “short and simple exercises which tire the body rapidly, and so save our time…these exercises are running, brandishing weights, and jumping…But whatever you do, come back quickly from body to mind.”

There is no single virtuous exercise program; Xenophon tells us Socrates instructed students to “study their own constitutions throughout life to see what food or drink or what kind of exercise was good for them individually, and by what use of these they could live the healthiest lives. He said that anyone who observed himself in this way would find it hard to discover a doctor who could recognize what was good for his health better than he could himself.”

So my suggestions here are just that — one man’s attempt to live virtuously in regards to his body.

Get Strong In Little Time:

Anyone can be strong, muscular, and more aesthetic utilizing little more than their body weight for 15-40 minutes of strength training 4-7 days a week. No need for a gym commute or membership fees. No need to build your life around fitness. The only piece of equipment you’ll need is a cheap pull-up bar installed in a doorway.

I suggest increasingly challenging progressions of three exercises —  pushups, pullups, and squats/lunges, which strengthen all major movement pathways.

Make Them Easier: If you’re out of shape and unable to do these, each can be made easier until you’re strong enough. For pull-ups, tie an elastic exercise band to a pullup bar at one end and loop it at the other for your foot or knees. This takes some of your load as you pull. Pushups can be made easier by doing them on your knees. Gradually bring your knees further back as you get stronger until you can do them in a plank.

Make Them Harder: Staying at the baseline version of these exercises will make you stronger than 70% of the population. But there’s no reason to stop at this low bar.

• One-legged squats — called pistols — are quite effective for your legs.

• Weighted pull-ups are as easy as putting something heavy in a backpack.

• Weighted pushups, diamond pushups, raising your feet to increase mechanical disadvantage, or putting your hands on blocks to increase range of motion are all good options for making pushups harder.

Sets/Reps: Three sets of each exercise done within a rep or two of failure works great.

Blocks vs Broken Up: I find the least obtrusive way to do strength training is inserting a set whenever I rise from my computer, which happens at least once an hour. This has the added benefit of refreshing my mind. If you don’t work in a conducive environment for that, you can use them to break up your morning/evening routines.

Alternatively, you can do all these exercises in a solid block, taking 2-6 minutes of rest between sets. The later means more time spent exercising since you don’t need rest intervals if you’re inserting sets throughout your day.

Cardio:

Few of us move enough. Find a way to do it. I used to be obese and hated cardio, but now enjoy it and don’t feel right without it.

I do a lot of walking, hiking, rucking, and biking. Some of this is for utility, but I’m luckily enough to live within biking and walking distance of a library, parks, a grocery store, and multiple coffee shops and friends’ houses.

But even utility doesn’t yield enough exercise, so I simply decide to move. I meditate, work on a problem in my head, look at the trees, talk to a friend, listen to a podcast, or call my girlfriend or mom. God a kid? Throw them on your back or put them in carrier slings and get stronger as you move.

Thirty minutes to an hour of movement each day is certainly not unreasonable, but do the best you can.

There’s no reason exercise can’t be pleasant. Socrates was fond of dance. When his friend discovered Socrates dancing at home by himself early in the morning, he laughed.

“You are laughing at me, are you?” Socrates asked. “Is it because I want to exercise to better my health? Or because I want to take more pleasure in my food and my sleep? Or is it because I am eager for such exercises as these, not like the long-distance runners, who develop their legs at the expense of their shoulders, nor like the prize-fighters, who develop their shoulders but become thin-legged, but rather with a view to giving my body a symmetrical development by exercising it in every part? Or are you laughing because I shall not need to hunt up a partner to exercise with, or to strip, old as I am, in a crowd, but shall find a moderate-sized room large enough for me (just as but now this room was large enough for the lad here to get up a sweat in), and because in winter I shall exercise under cover, and when it is very hot, in the shade?”

Good questions. There’s something admirable about finding the exercise that suits your personality and stage of life.

Whatever you do, find a way to move without building your identity around it. If you can enjoy it, all the better.

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