Body for Life, 30 Years On

SP:

I don’t try to get people to [follow] a list and a diet and a workout. I want people to get to a place of beingness where they are actually [living] in a healthy, vital way through freedom of choice, not through discipline. Discipline is great to get you started, but ultimately, beingness transcends motivation and discipline. If you’re aware of how your body’s feeling in the moment, if you’re aware of the foods you eat that don’t serve you, you don’t have to be on a diet because the diet is self-directive.

SP:

Ultimately, we’ve got to be accountable to our own strength, our own vitality. To me, strength is an integration of body, mind and spirit. It’s an abundance above and beyond [physicality]. I always say strength is the ability to give and contribute to others, not just survive yourself. 

A lot of people talk about health in a way that is an interesting dichotomy, because “health”—for most people, I believe—means the absence of illness, not the presence of anything. So you’re walking along with diabetes, 40 pounds overweight, and think, I don’t have cancer, so I’m healthy. It’s not health.

SP:

For me, there’s something really valuable in the old-school strength training. … It’s really a practice about me versus something [else]. When you get to the domain of expertise, you’ll always find that the [experts] like doing the work. … There’s always something inside there that you weren’t looking for that you find. I like to say creativity isn’t thinking, it’s being out of the thinking mind and allowing [the unknown] to arise in the world. 

SP:

Nourishment’s a word I use a lot. I think nutrition’s a very tactical thing. It’s more of a numbers game we can measure in calories. But nourishment to me is wholesome goodness. How am I feeding my body, mind and soul? How am I serving myself with this? Ultimately, [this approach] gets people to what I call nutritional freedom, which is really the ability to eat the foods that are best for you because they’re the foods you want the most. 

An athlete’s going to take in the fuel on the bike or during the run and is very intentional [about it]. What I eat is going to be applied to the next hour or two of my life. Well, how is that any different from how an executive or a mother or father shows up in their day? How I eat is going to affect how and if I show up in the rest of my day. 

SP:

A lot of people say, “I want to get better” at something or in something. [The better measurement is] how am I resourced? That goes back to strength. Strength is about having an abundance and not always being just on the edge of bankruptcy, physical, energetic bankruptcy. 

SP:

One of the questions I get is, “I’ve gotten off track. How do I get back on?” You just do. You don’t beat yourself up. You don’t dramatize it. You just choose to get back on. 

Phil Mickelson is the most famous golfer in the world for coming in second. [At the 2013] British Open, he was into the final day with a 5-stroke lead, and at the 12th hole, he just duffed his second shot out into nowhere. He looked at his caddie and he smiled and said, “That was the best shot I had in me.” Then he hit the second shot in, parred the hole and won the Open. 

That’s it: The moment where you just say I’m going to let it go, play it where it lies and move on. When people build a history of fitness, they have a movie running in their head that says, “I failed this many times” or “I struggle at this” or “I’m no longer any good at it.” The reality is you can just let the tape go at any moment, start anew and do your best.

SP:

The workout you will do is the best workout you should do. Pick the workout. Don’t spend a bunch of time debating it. Don’t compare it to your friend’s workout. Just do the workout. It’s not three sets of this, five sets of that. We overthink it. The reality is quantum change comes from simple things repeated every damn day, right?

SP:

Sometimes I just start them on a bench press because there’s something amazing about the act of pushing and pressing—it’s a real metaphor for pushing into the world. Because so often the world’s coming over us … but when we push into the world, there’s a certain power and release in that, and we can start to feel our strength. Find an exercise that’s not going to overwhelm you [and repeat it] until your body starts to feel it, and focus on it, really be aware of what you’re doing with your body. That’s when the mind and body start to connect to one another. And that’s not going to happen in a day.

SP:

What I’ve found is cycling has brought that same level of intensity and challenge [as strength training]. Cycling brings in what I learned from strength training, which is how to push the edge, how to find and dance with the red line, meaning I climb to a point where I don’t know if I can go any farther and then everything just focuses in. It may be one more pedal stroke, one more rep, one more, one more. No more, no less.

I began cycling in the first place because my buddy was going to ride the Triple Bypass for his 40th birthday. It’s 13,000 vertical feet over three peaks in Colorado. Well, you can’t fake that. I had to find my way into that different version of a spandex pant and become a cyclist. What works for me is community. I find people I can hang with because I wouldn’t go out if they weren’t expecting me to be there. 

The guys that taught me how to ride took me out, taught me what cadence was and how to move my bike. Three years later, I was taking new people out to [the same] rides. Ultimately, that’s the difference between someone who gets in shape and someone who gets transformed: People who stay fit after a transformation, who really are transformed, always give it away. They’re always giving it away, they’re always teaching. 

SP:

A friend of mine who’s a doctor found that people are already exhausted, they’re stressed out, fatigued, and then they add this stress called diet and exercise. The body doesn’t go, “Oh, that’s a positive stress.” It just goes, “More stress.” And so it starts to shut down. 

It’s not that your willpower failed you. We don’t climb Mount Everest, we go to base camp and acclimate. So Strength for Life has a 12-day reboot, which is a way to help the body acclimate so it can be ready to perform. Heal it first with six simple practices. It’s removing things and setting a little framework that helps people come back to [start] the fitness transformation program from a position of strength.

SP:

I wrote about this in “Strength for Life.” You can get away with murder in your 20s if you don’t get caught physically. In your 30s, most people fake the last half decade. They have some momentum. In the last half decade, they try to pretend like they’re not crashing. But how you live from 40 to 50 is going to dictate how and if you live the rest of your life, and now it starts to become serious. It’s real. It’s not just vanity.