UFFDA! Ep 21
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[00:00:00]
Introduction and Welcome
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Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the UFFDA! Podcast. I'm Jordan Rudolph.
And I'm Emily Morris.
We are happy to be back with you on season 4, episode 21.
Understanding Proactive Fitness
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Today, we're talking all things proactive fitness, [00:01:00] proactive, I guess we can say slash, like, health and wellness, but it's more so proactive fitness.
We've done proactive nutrition before. But now we're specifically going into a little bit of a deeper dive of proactive fitness.
Yeah, I think it can be an area where if, I mean we use this all the time here at the gym, where if we're not proactive, chances are we're being reactive to something. Right, if we are not getting out ahead of it.
We often then find ourselves stuck in a situation where we are forced to, willingly or not, be a little bit more reactive, perhaps not then making the decision that we would otherwise make, or getting stuck in a situation where we're unprepared for a situation that comes our way.
I think the biggest thing there is you just saying it right at the end is just the preparation, right?
Reactive vs Proactive Approaches
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We, it's, Like, what is the difference between reactive and proactive? They're [00:02:00] depending on who you talk to, you're going to find a list for each one. I feel like proactive is predicting, you know, like take, take, try to have a plan for the predictable and then have a followup and an adaptability to that.
But it's, it's, it's preparation. It's, it's, you know, I don't want to say like expect the worst. Assume the best. You know, I don't want to go down those routes, but oftentimes what, what, what we see and jump in here and help our listeners understand if, if this is different or if there's some other point to this, but oftentimes what we see when stuff hits the fan on our clients lives.
And when I say this, I'm not saying that you have to drop everything you do to make sure you get your workout in. I'm not saying every time you go on a trip, you have to make sure you get four workouts scheduled when you're on vacation a week. We're not those people. We, I, I was at one point like encouraging people to do it just because I believe in the power of fitness and the freedom of health.
Those things are very, very high on my [00:03:00] list. I, I obviously value those very highly. Um, and I'm fully aware of that, fully aware of my bias towards it.
Balancing Fitness with Life
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But we often see like everything's completely dropped off. Like there's no, There's no middle ground. People are very black and white, and I feel like when people get very black and white, it's a very anxious, emotional response and reactivity to something, and they had no plan in place, so it's just easier to say, Cut this cold turkey, cut everything out.
And for sometimes, that's the exact thing that somebody should do. Um, but if we miss a workout, can you still get your 10, 000 steps in today? If you missed a 5am workout, what's your evening look like? If you missed your evening workout And you, and maybe you didn't know you were going to miss it, or maybe you were, could you come in the morning?
Could you make that a day that you focused on your 10, 000 steps like we said before? It's, it's just kind of pairing all the things together. What we don't want to feel is like you lost. And that's an all or none mindset, which you all know if you've been listening to this show from day one, [00:04:00] first episode.
I think we talked about it in the first episode. Literally we did.
Yeah.
Right? That is not the mindset that will lead to success long term. In any category specifically in the category of your health and fitness health and wellness It's going to be crash and burn
right? Well, that's where my mind was going as well when you were talking there About the all or nothing mindset, right?
Like that's where my mind immediately went and I think sometimes we can react emotionally to that because we are so tied to our health and fitness goal. If we have that little bit of emotional stake in it, it can be a little bit of like, Oh God, like frustration and annoyance, perhaps that something threw us off track, right?
And then we weren't able to execute the plan that perhaps we worked with a coach to lay out and we know that works and reaches us towards our goal. It's easy to get emotional and have an emotional response to that.
Consistency and Flexibility in Fitness
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At the same time, we've always talked about, again, maybe from episode, maybe we [00:05:00] call this episode two, I don't know, I know we've talked about it in the podcast before, about how the best plan is the one that you can stay most consistent in.
So if your best plan then requires a slight deviation from what is perfect, or what would be that all, the deviation does not have to be none of it or all of it. The deviation can be, hey, I'm going to focus on my 10, 000 steps or I'm going to get in a quick 15 to 20 minute hotel workout circuit because that's what I have the space and the equipment and the room and the capacity to accommodate and Then when I get back into the gym, I'm not gonna immediately just make up for and react to the things not going perfectly I'm just gonna get back right to what I was doing before similar to what we do with nutrition where we're We're not going to completely restrict because we had one crazy weekend.
We're going to get right back to what we were doing before. And fitness can be that same way, especially as we think more proactively about it, where the question doesn't become, Oh no, what can I do in this [00:06:00] moment? It's what can I do Looking ahead at what I have available to me. It's a okay. What does the hotel gym look like?
What does my space look like? What does my day look like to fit in a later p. m. Workout or an earlier a. m. Workout if I know the p. m Might get crazy. Okay, great. Do I have to bite the bullet and get up it for a 5 or 6 a. m. Workout? One day of the week? Maybe we can make that happen. Maybe we can't. And that's where we've kind of employ some of those other strategies along the way as well.
For sure. And, and one of the things we said before, like I used to be more on the, if someone has gone for a week, okay, which days are you training? And they kind of like, uh, you know, give me the stare. Well, we should be thinking about which days you should train. Yes. Maybe some of those worked out, but I'm more on this mindset more and more and more.
And this other, like I'm sliding my spectrum over a little bit, my, my meter, if you [00:07:00] will, where we don't, we're not about building your entire life around your fitness. But again, coming at it from two people that have been doing this for 10 plus years each, we know how powerful fitness can be for other areas of your life.
So it's more so taking a quote from our, one of our members that, I don't know when Karen said this. to 2020, 2021, but it's the gym shouldn't be your life. The gym should help improve your life. So it's, it's more so about building the gym or your fitness around your life, not your life around fitness. And, uh, more so now we're just focused on being active, using tools through your vacation.
that you've learned from the fitness side of things for the steps or from daily movement. Um, you know, something along those lines, like it should be something more of a routine mystic habitual thing. Almost like if you don't do it, maybe you feel like you're off your routine a little bit, but it's not the thing where [00:08:00] you're shaming yourself if you don't get it in.
Or if you feel like, Oh, well I didn't train on vacation, so I'm a failure. And now I'm back or I didn't train because I got sick and now I'm back. I'm going to try to make it all up in one set. Like that's, That's a poor, again, that's that all or none thing, and it's, it's a poor outcome on either of those scenarios where everything is kind of laid out and it's, and it's, again, it's, it's not just 50 shades of gray, it's thousands and, and finding your ground of where you're at and, and, and just understand like you're a human first, like understand the human element of it and then understand that this is part of the lifestyle that you can build into it.
Um, but thinking, thinking more globally, like you're saying and preparing and futuristic and adaptability and having everything set up for success. Uh, those are the things of proactivity, like, and, and, and you're setting yourself up for predictable stuff. It's, it's, you know, obviously there's things that are gonna be unpredictable that come into play.
And you're gonna have to shuffle your schedule around and [00:09:00] shuffle your training, your week around, but it's not just your training, like your entire week can get shuffled. And. Uh, if anything, I guess from this proactive fitness episode that we're covering right now, it's potentially just a call back to the all or none.
piece of it.
Yeah.
Right?
Well, and I like what you said there about, it's not just your fitness that gets shuffled around. Like, your whole life can be shuffled. And sometimes we do have weeks where the life gets shuffled. And that's where the fitness is an element of your life. It's not the entire thing, but it's an element of.
So it doesn't always Also have to be the thing that's dropped. Maybe that's the anchor point that we keep in and other things can shuffle around it as well Provided that that's the best outcome for your life. So it looking at again that whole thing as a picture of What do you want to do, to call back a few other episodes, who do you want to be, and what role does fitness play in that?
Maybe it's something else that needs to be shuffled around. Maybe you do a grocery delivery or [00:10:00] a grocery pickup to save yourself an hour and you use that hour to go to the gym. Maybe it's prioritizing an extra hour of sleep and going to bed a little bit early and you save that last episode of the Netflix show that you absolutely must watch immediately.
But we'll be there tomorrow after you've slept and trained and taken care of yourself, right? It's not just also fitness that needs to be dropped immediately. Oftentimes, it's not. can be just the easiest, especially if you're new into a fitness journey and that's where it can almost feed into that all or nothing mindset of either I'm doing fitness or I'm not doing fitness versus, hey, this is how fitness fits in with all of the other things that I have going on, which is what's going to make that mindset shift.
In my opinion, will make the greatest impact long term, because you will be the most consistent with it. You will create that kind of sustainability throughout all of those things.
Metabolic and Lifestyle Flexibility
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We, we talk about, at times, I [00:11:00] don't know if we've discussed it on this episode or not, I can't remember, but we've talked about before, like, metabolic flexibility.
Like having your, having your metabolism be flexible enough to respond to you when you need it to, in terms of So, muscle. Like your metabolism can only do one really good thing at once in terms of burning fat or building muscle. But when we build muscle, we're oftentimes storing a little bit of fat. When we're burning fat, we're oftentimes potentially losing muscle, so we have to learn to create a flexible metabolism to do that.
What I'm getting at through all of this then is this metabolic flexibility. Like it's kind of lifestyle flexibility. Like having that flexibility, um, that some is always better than none. Right? And knowing that you can reshuffle things around and know that life's going to happen. and you're not any worse on yourself.
Um, and then, then it's looking at the consistency of it. Like we can talk about the adaptability piece, but if you're missing, we can say like a training session or missing, like if your consistency is something that's maybe detrimental to your goals and it's [00:12:00] becoming a routine, a pattern, a habit, it's not so much of like a proactive thing anymore.
Proactive Fitness and Health
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It's, it can be, if we look ahead and see, like do an audit of your schedule, we'll do an audit of you. and seeing where those things are. Uh, the proactive fitness side of things, the proactive health side of things is, is looking ahead. Like it's, it's not just about burning through the reps, burning through the extra sets and doing more weight.
It's looking at it from a standpoint of helping you out from a, from a goal that's beyond a gym setting. And understanding the power of that. And again, the, the freedom of health, like when you have freedom of health, Your freedom of your, your, your purpose, like everything else gets like better from that.
And, and I, I truly do feel like that's one of the very few things in our life that when we focus on that, everything else will come along with it. It has to come along for the ride. Like we can't get healthier and feel worse about [00:13:00] ourselves type of thing.
I would agree. I would agree with that. I don't
know if I've seen it yet.
Right.
Long-Term Fitness Perspective
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And it, like you were saying, it has just those far reaching abilities where we use fitness for that and recognize that fitness has that power, but oftentimes it can be so easy to be myopic and look at only the short term effects of fitness. And I think that's often what happens when we're in that reactive state of like, Oh my gosh, I missed one workout.
I must make it up. Instead of, Oh, I just missed one workout over the course of 30 years, 40 years, 50 years of workouts, right? We can kind of then take a different approach of like, okay, that one workout. Yes, it's not great in the scheme of things, but instead of that workout, I was able to get a little bit extra sleep, prioritize a little bit of recovery, get 10, 000 stabs, whatever the situation might be, wherever we kind of flexible and compromise and kind of find the balance there.[00:14:00]
But in the grand scheme of things that one workout is not going to make or break the difference of 50 years unless we make it become a habit or we Compensate the other way, and this is a little off topic But also on topic, start doing too much too soon and then get injured and then that starts to have negative effects the opposite way So we can avoid all of that with a little bit of pro proactivity in In planning some of these fitness and what that looks like
Knowing what you're training for, what your fitness is about, um, planning ahead, like you said, where can you buy back time, right?
Can you delegate anything? Can you hire anything out? Can you, can you use all the different services that are out there now?
Balancing Fitness and Life
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It's again, it's oftentimes when stuff comes up, fitness usually is like the first thing that people check off their list and, and we understand why for the most part, but we're, we're, we're ultimately looking at.
And usually when that [00:15:00] happens, it's something bigger than just the hour of fitness that's taking away from your life. Like there's usually other stuff going on. And what we're, what we're ultimately getting at here is maybe a little bit of a slight jab of how can you manage your, your schedule better?
How can you learn how to say no to some things? Maybe when it feels like it's impossible to say no to. Because when you say yes to something else you're saying no to something anyway, so where's where's the cutoff there? Looking to be more proactive on your scheduling and understanding that piece checking out and auditing your routines They're like there's several people that I know that we've worked on it where they've been staying up later and later because it's the only Time that they've kind of had to themselves So what's the thing you do?
You're stressed. You had a long day. You're you're a high achiever you Kids go to sleep. Everyone's asleep and you get nine o'clock you and your spouse or just you You You get to watch sports until midnight. You get to watch multiple shows, multiple movies, and then what are you doing when that's happening?
There's usually some sort of drink involved, beverage, [00:16:00] usually with alcohol or likely with alcohol from a lot of people, and it's typically not healthy food. Like, we're not sitting there munching on vegetables and hummus at 10 o'clock at night. It's very rarely that.
Adjusting Routines for Better Health
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So, one of the big things that usually happens is that this person sleeps in then the next day until the last possible minute.
And then they're scrambling just to get ahead of their schedule to be at work by 8, 9 o'clock. Well, what if you did go to bed earlier and you got up earlier? What if you just got up earlier, before the world's awake, and you have that moment? And, and go through all of that. Like, what if you started your day off like that?
Rather than ended your day. Very rarely are people pounding booze, alcohol at 6am. Are they going for the bag of chips? Are they going for whatever is there? They're typically in a much different mood. And just habitually and culturally, it just, those things don't happen at 6am, 5am. So it could be looking into just flipping a routine that maybe feels distant right now, but it might be [00:17:00] finding that routine could work for you in the future too.
It's, it's, it's just being open. I think being open to all of it and, and obviously the proactive in its nature is looking ahead.
Well, and I like what you said about being open and it's all like, Worst case scenario, you can change back, right? If it doesn't work, you can always adjust. We've now learned, and then we can either go back to what we were doing, if that was working better, or if there's then another way, maybe it's two iterations down the road, but we just can't see it very in this moment.
But if something has to change, To not super simplify this, but like, if something has to change, something has to change. So we have to be willing to adjust. If you don't want to do the same thing that we've always done, in terms of your proactivity around fitness, then we also have to be willing to try something different too.
We can't just wish and hope that it will be different, and then, It won't be different on wishes and hopes [00:18:00] alone. We have to also be willing to take the action to get proactive, to change, to adjust, whatever the situation requires that to be.
The Importance of Control
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And if we think about again, the definition of proactive in a nutshell, what, what are usually people scrambling to get when something comes up and they're reacting to it, what are they trying to regain or trying to get a hold of?
Usually it's whatever they lost, but that's very vague. So I don't know if that's the answer that you're looking for.
What if there is like an overarching lost? What if there's something that kind of goes and encompasses everything else, like an umbrella? Could it be a little bit of actual, actually a word that starts with a C?
I
don't think the podcast listeners know your history of words that start with C.
I tend to have a, I have a tendency, I've been very good in this lately to, Hey, there's a word I'm thinking of. I can't remember what it is right here. I think it starts with a C and it's not. [00:19:00] And just yesterday there was a word that I was saying that
did start with a C and
it started with a C cerebral was the word, but this word that I'm referring to is control.
The, the ultimate thing that people like an immediate panic alarm that goes off when, when this is happening is the. Is the loss of control. So they're doing whatever they can as fast as they can to regain it, which creates a reactive state. And again, it's not feeling comfortable. It's feeling uncomfortable.
It's feeling anxious. Proactivity is all about helping you maintain that. That's, that's what we're ultimately getting at here, like in a nutshell. And uh, it's not to say that you don't need to be a total dictator over it, but you should have. a good idea or understanding of how to control your day to day life.
If it's feel like it's burning out of control, that's also where we can step in and help with a little bit of [00:20:00] behavioral change and development through that.
Behavioral Change and Consistency
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I know we're just quote unquote personal trainers, but we've been around this long enough. We've don't been to this long enough to get people their best results.
Not only do we talk about the secret sauce of consistency, which we just talked about last week, episode 20. Last week. It's also working on behavioral change. In a lot of people who are high level, this comes naturally to them. Like, fitness was the missing piece, and everything else just becomes exponentially better because of that.
But, if we look at this from the very beginning, when, often times when people feel like they're ready for the gym, there's this little piece in front. That we can tackle. And this behavioral change piece is critically important to that, to giving you the control and staying with it for people.
For sure.
For sure. Well, and then we start to, part of that is what we touched on with that Bidu have. We start to just become the person that, that is part of your life. Bingo. Right? So it starts to then become this [00:21:00] repeating cycle of We got a smoothie
going on.
Hopefully, they won't be able to hear it. But, then this becomes that repeating cycle of, you don't have to think about it, you don't have to react to it, you're just then the person that thinks proactively about your nutrition because you're the person that thinks proactively about everything else in your life as well.
reinstilling that control and all of those things trickle along with it.
You couldn't have said it better, Em. A proactive fitness is just more so proactive life. A proactive lifestyle. It's not saying that that will all happen and it's a direct correlation, but it's ultimately just looking at helping you be more proactive about your overall day to day schedule.
Absolutely. If fitness is not there, In that sense, we probably know there's other areas too, again, because by nature, fitness is usually towards the bottom of the totem pole for most people.
This just happens to be a health and fitness podcast.
Yes. And that.
Conclusion and Podcast Wrap-Up
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As always, thank you guys so much for tuning into this week's episode of the OOFDA [00:22:00] podcast.
Share this with someone who you think will find it valuable. Leave us a rating, a review, subscribe, download all the things that help us to grow organically and we'll catch you in the next episode. Bye everybody.
Thanks everyone.
