6 Fitness truths that became even bigger truths during lock-down (if you get what I mean!)

When I did the leaving cert, a book we covered (Animal Farm I think) had a saying which translated to English was:

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

As we get into the easing of restrictions of the lockdown and anticipate the return to everything from outdoor workouts to barbers, I was thinking about fitness and how things will change. Which got us to thinking about how certain truths became “truer” during lockdown. Like:

1. THE MOST VALUABLE THING YOU HAVE GOT: We will never get sick of saying this; your health and fitness is the most important thing you’ve got. Yeah businesses and jobs are important and obviously family is even more important but you experience and interact with everything through your body and mind. This extract from “The Body” by Bill Bryson is just one example of how impressive our bodies are:

“Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in 30 seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in 30 years. A morsel of cortex 1 cubic millimetre in size (think grain of sand) could hold 2,000 terabytes of info, enough to store all the movies ever made…

Altogether the human brain is estimated to hold something in the order of 200 exabytes of info, roughly equal to the entire digital content of today’s world.”

2. YOU DON’T NEED A LOAD OF FANCY EQUIPMENT: It’s great to have things like kettlebells, dumbells and Assault Bikes, but you can still make a hell of a lot of progress with a well-structured body weight program, done correctly. The lockdown has made us appreciate body - weight trainings that we have done with the likes of Body Development, Animal Flow, Training for Warriors and GMB even more!

3. OVER LOAD IS NECESSARY: If you want your body to adapt you need to increase the demands on it over time. Even when body weight training is your only tool you can make this happen in so many ways, eg. increased reps, more time under tension in your reps, increased sets, exercises using different angles. Point being there is a way to make it happen.

4. RECOVERY IS ALWAYS NECESSARY: Constantly putting your body under stress without the right recovery systems in place will just cause you to break down. Even on lockdown when people may have had the chance to lie in a bit longer, it was still common for people to under sleep and ask too much from themselves at times. You need to look at health and fitness as including everything from exercise to nutrition to recovery (sleep/hobbies to help switch off etc).

5. THE RIGHT PEOPLE/ENVIRONMENTS ARE VITAL: Again we have said this for years but having a training partner/community (some might call it a society!) is going to help you stick to your training regime and work harder at it. Also a not insignificant factor is the enjoyment/emotional support you’ll get from having the right people on your side when it comes to health and fitness. For us, the satisfaction of seeing people working so hard at their health and fitness during was matched by the craic in the Zoom chats and games nights over the last 3 months.

6. IT’S UPTO YOU: Fitness communities are a huge help, having the right programs are a massive benefit and accountability is brilliant. However you have to want to do the work and you have to take the initiative to get yourself going. How many programs and free workouts were out there and how many people didn’t do any exercise, despite their best intentions over the last while?

7. MISTAKES WILL BE MADE: Yeah I said 6 truths at the start of this article and this is number 7. We kept it like this because even the best Trainers occasionally make mistakes with their counting and this will continue to happen! And people will continue to make mistakes on their fitness journeys, but it’s those who play the long game and are consistent over the coming weeks/months/years that will absorb their mistakes and continue improving their health and fitness levels…

So this is our fitness version of “the more things change”. We doubt that “the more true things are, the truer they become” will ever make an English book.

But I do know if you take the lessons on board they will help you look after the most valuable thing you’ve got…