Jumped through hoops for the last 13 months, but NOW we are official!
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musings
By Neil Anderson
Exercising has one distinct purpose. It's purpose is to serve you. It is to help you live a richer, more capable life. A life not limited by self-induced capacity and/or disease. It is to help you enjoy life's benefits and reap its rewards. It is to help you avoid the pitfalls of ill-health. Exercise is meant to enhance your life in ways that promote a healthier lifestyle for you and those around you. It is the conduit to creating health on every level. It is noble to exercise.
At GPP we workout so that we can attain better health. Better health helps us to be better parents, better spouses and better children. Better health helps us to be more active in our communities, our jobs and in our worship. We exercise so that we may serve others. We exercise so that we will have more capacity and energy to engage in rich and meaningful hobbies and crafts that interest us.
Unfortunately, as exercise rightfully becomes more and more important among the masses, its purpose is becoming more and more bastardized. Its effects are now being used by increasingly selfish people to become more and more UNHEALTHY. People are now using it for looks only. They are using it as sport. They are using it as a way to feel superior. People are turning to exercise as a way to build so-called "incredible" bodies and perform feats of strength and endurance that serve NO other purpose than to glorify themselves. This is the epitome of ill-health.
Folks have lost track of the knowledge that health through fitness occurs along a continuum. On the far left side of this continuum there is no participation in fitness. We all know the effects of ill-health that can occur from participating in a life devoid of proper exercise (obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, poor energy, and etc.). On the far right side of the continuum is "hyperfitness." The pursuit and attainment of which is no less unhealthy than no fitness at all. Health occurs somewhere in the middle.
As the world continues to use exercise for increasingly unhealthy pursuits, I think it behooves us to give exercise a mighty and humiliating demotion. It is time to put exercise back into its place.
Exercise is the servant. For healthy people it always will be. Its entire purpose is to strengthen the healthy capacities of those who participate in it. These "healthy capacities" include service to our well-being, our employers, our employees, our families, our relationships, our community, our country, our society and our God. Otherwise it has NO important purpose.
by Neil Anderson
I think the above (title) needed to be said at some point. In fact, as you get better and better at the workouts, as you become more and more fit and healthy, you will find that these workouts just get harder and harder.
You'd think the opposite would be true. After all, that is how THEY sell exercise to us. THEY tell us the more you do, the easier it gets, right?
It is hogwash!
EFFECTIVE, life changing exercise that lasts forever and looks good ON will not get easier as you go. You may recover faster. You may not get as sore. Maybe you'll even begin to enjoy it more, but in our experience, exercise only gets HARDER the better you get at it.
This is as it should be.
You should know, as you get better at these workouts you will start to experience a VERY strange phenomenon. You are likely to become sure that the workouts are getting harder and harder when, in fact, they are NOT. You may also begin to become convinced that we are conspiring against you personally when programming workouts for you to perform. Again, we are NOT.
The truth is these workouts are only getting harder because YOU have become stronger. You have gained more stamina, endurance, power, speed, agility, flexibility, coordination, balance and accuracy. As you have become much healthier and more fit, your ability to crank reps has increased. This demands enormous levels of energy. You have now progressed to the point where your ability to produce work has outstripped your ability to immediately recover from it.
To get to this point you have done and learned much to assemble the basics of success. You have learned self-reliance and accountability. You have learned to muster the guts and the will to move forward through that which is painful, embarrassing, intimidating, unsightly and uncomfortable. You have learned to pay much closer attention to the auxiliary necessities of nutrition, hydration, sleep, stress level moderation, recovery, physical limitations and injury management.
These are not aspects of health which are considered by most. Neither are they well publicized. Why would anyone publicize this? Why would I? Hell, I can't think of a faster way to scare folks off. Nonetheless it is REALITY. And those who have walked through the fire that is "improved fitness and health" know all too well the realities of self-improvement.
If you are at this point, where you are convinced that these workouts are getting harder - I congratulate you. You are uncommon. And you are to be congratulated.
You have conquered this part of the journey. You have done the relatively "common," uncommonly well. While there are many more levels yet to conquer, your experience thus far predicts success in the upcoming challenges you have yet to face. It is our hope you will look forward to these challenges with an eye to ever increasing health.
Here is to you, and what you have accomplished. May you never look back.