What does "being fit" mean to you? In school, we learned that fitness was being able to have a certain aerobic capacity, or having "x" amount of body fat, or that we could lift a certain percentage of body weight. I think this way of thinking about fitness is great if you have a certain goal or are a competitive lifter, but for the average person, I'd argue that being fit could mean something very different.
I recently had a client of mine tell me that she chose to work with me to take back control of her own health. She was tired of depending on others to "fix her." She wanted to understand her body better. I loved this! What if being fit isn't necessarily about what the "numbers" say, but about the relationship you've created with your own body?
We are constantly moving our bodies all day long, and most of us tend to (unknowingly) move ourselves in the same patterns day after day. We feed our dogs, do the dishes, carry the laundry the same way we've done it a million times...that is until it hurts. At that point, many of us start looking to "experts" to tell us why we're hurting and "fix us up."
BUT...what if rather than needing to be "fixed," we instead started to grow an awareness of how we are choosing to move throughout our day and had OPTIONS for moving differently?
What if we understood how the way we're loading the dishwasher might be hurting us, and could choose to move differently? Would we feel more empowered? More comfortable in our own bodies? Would we feel safer exploring new activities? What if being strong isn't about always having the most muscle (nothing against muscles here, muscles are good,) but instead about having the most options???
In my experience, the older we get, the fewer options we seem to have when it comes to movement because we become very set in our routines. That doesn't have to be the case though. Learning new movement options at any age, and especially into our senior years, gives us back the ability to take control of our own bodies.
Learning new movements allows us to do things differently when things hurt, as opposed to just not doing them at all, and to regain or keep our independence, and continue to do the things we love at any age. To me at least, that's what the true definition of being fit means.