On April 10, 1899, then New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech before a group of men in Chicago entitled "The Strenuous Life." In this address he argued for the necessity of strenuous living and the benefits to both individuals and the nation as a whole. In part borne out of his childhood battle with severe asthma, this speech reflected TR's personal ethos of Vigor di Vita. From an early age, Roosevelt pursued life with an extreme intensity and engaged regularly in vigorous physical activity.
Physical fitness was an important part of living well for Roosevelt. He enjoyed engaging in many activities that required physical exertion both in the gym and outdoors. Even as President, Roosevelt routinely buffeted his body in the service of strenuous living.
As we consider what it means to pursue of life of excellence, there is much to learn from Roosevelt's example of strenuous living. Physical activity and physical fitness should be an important component in our development of the Arete Ethos. The benefits of regular, physical exercise are numerous. But here are three reasons that fitness should be a central part of pursuing a life of excellence.
It prepares us to do hard things
Fitness and exercise will train you to expand your physical limits. As a general principle, through exercise, you can train to lift heavier, run longer and endure greater physical challenges. Thus when you increase your physical capabilities you decrease your physical limitations.
How many times have you seen a patient who cannot walk to the exam room without getting winded; seen someone who pulled a muscle in their back trying to move a couch; or the patient who has become so deconditioned that they can do little more than lay in bed or sit on the couch? These are all the natural consequences of a lack of attention to strength and stamina.
Unfortunately, even though the physician job is devoted to promoting health, we often suffer along with our patients from a lack of attention to our own physical health. Specifically in the post-industrial age as jobs have become less physically taxing, strength and physical endurance have becomes less immediately necessary. We have engineered the physicality out of work and life in favor our developing our cognitive and creative faculties at work and comfort at home. However, the change from strength based work to thought based work has not removed the necessity of strength and exercise for the human body. We weren't designed to sit at a desk, peering through an LED illuminated window into the virtual world of viewing, processing and manipulating data.
Despite this shift in what is required, physical strength and endurance still holds an important part in our daily lives. Have you ever had do lift a patient off the floor; or been asked by your friend help with their move? Are you capable of performing these activities? If you think back over your last week and month, you can probably imagine even more scenarios that would have been improved with physical conditioning. And then there are the extreme scenarios? What if, suddenly, you needed to run from someone or something chasing you? What if you needed to carry someone to safety? Would you be able to do that?
Mark Rippetoe, author of Starting Strength writes that even though strength and endurance isn't mandatory for our subsistence, "Our strength, more than any other thing we possess, still determines the quality and quantity of our time here in these bodies." Enter the need for regular physical exercise. Exercise prepares us to meet and overcome the physical challenges that we face in life.
It develops endurance during hard times.
Our natural desire is to avoid pain and to seek comfort. Call is a self-preservation instinct if you like, when something becomes uncomfortable we tend to stop doing that thing. Like water running down hill or electricity taking the path of least resistance, we often pursue the easiest solution that maximizes pleasure and minimizes discomfort.
And not only do we avoid hard things, when we experience challenging situations, our perception of a challenge often grows to insurmountable proportions while in the midst of it. What before or after is perceived as a manageable feat, grows to an overwhelming and all consuming trial while in the midst of it. Only time and changing circumstances provides perspective.
When I am running, I am painfully aware of the amount of exertion that it takes to keep going. With every stride, my mind tells me that I could stop and the discomfort will go away. And to make matters worse, during exercise, time itself seems to slow down to an exaggerated degree compounding the perceived misery. The challenge is to develop the skillset of maintaining perspective during the challenge.
The idea and quality of perseverance is borne out of adversity. The apostle James writes about this concept (though applied to father rather than exercise), but the principle still applies.
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. James 1:2-4
Just as it requires breaking down a muscle to build it up, so also we need to challenge our minds through adversity in order to practice perseverance. We may not experience difficult situations in our every day lives. But through fitness and exercise, we can put ourselves into situations where we face pain and difficulty. We can use the gym to develop a mindset of persevering.
It develops a mindset of doing hard things.
Every time you work out you are making a choice - to do something easy or do something hard. As we discussed above, what is easy is certainly more desirable - in the moment. Whether at home, work or anywhere else, life is filled with choices between easy and hard.
When the alarm goes off in the morning, it is easier to hit snooze rather than swinging your legs out of bed. It is easier to sit in front of the TV and consume curated content designed to generate discontent than to do the hard work of reading doing house chores. It is easier to stay on the couch rather than hitting the gym.
In his book, Fortitude, Dan Crenshaw writes about the idea of embracing suffering. He argues that suffering is an inevitable, necessary and even desirable part of life. In fact, he argues, repeated doses of self-imposed suffering should be a habitual ritual in our daily lives. "Voluntary hardship builds resiliency and meaning so that when the involuntary suffering comes you are better prepared."
The simple reality is that life is filled with hard things. The question to ask yourself is what type of person do you want to be when you face suffering? Do you want to be able to rise to the occasion, overcome adversity and grow. Or do you want to be someone who is incapable of handling the difficulties of life perpetually reliant on others for mere survival. Success in life is often more about the choices we make than the circumstances in which we are placed.
Engaging and achieving success in the little "hard decisions" will be a huge catalyst for later, bigger, "hard decisions." Fitness is a form of embracing the little "hard decisions." In exercise, we push our body and our mind beyond what is comfortable and into the realm of suffering. It is in this suffering that we experience growth.
Fitness, therefore, is an excellent training ground. It is a great opportunity to mold, shape and develop our minds, bodies and the Arete ethos. In his speech, Roosevelt comments,
We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.
Fitness, as a necessary pillar of living the strenuous life, is an excellent preparation for life. Get after it!
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