Hi! I’m Josh and I’ve been moving and coaching people toward positive change for 25+ years in athletics, martial arts, and my own fitness studios before joining the RMF team. I’ve created our new program: Forrest Fitness. Nice to meet you!

“Fitness” is a funny thing. It means something different to everyone, and different things at different stages of life. Fitness has been long tied to so many competing marketing messages--some healthy, some less so--that it’s hard to know what it means to be fit at all.

The many definitions of fitness fall into three buckets: appearance (look), injury abatement or protection (feel), and physical and mental ability (perform). Like any good marketing approach, one element is pulled out and aimed at a targeted audience. A great way to sell things, but doing so ignores the reality that in actual (physical) life--everything is connected. Each of these buckets spills into, and helps fill, the others.

I’ve personally morphed my definition between these fitness buckets a number of times over my decades. As a skinny and bullied kid, fitness meant to change my appearance with more muscle. Later, after I grew into a competitive runner and collegiate rower, fitness meant data-driven performance: how fast I could run or row and how much weight I could lift. By my early twenties, fitness meant escaping intractable back pain.

While three buckets of fitness don’t change, we and everything around us sure does. We face more responsibilities, less time, changing metabolisms, more chair and screen time, and an ever increasing list of stiffness, weakness, pain points, and body mileage. I find myself shifting my own practice to meet all these demands, on a day to day basis. So how do we move forward on any one part of fitness, let alone all three, while facing all of the obstacles of life?

The first step toward healthy fitness is to turn inward: a mindset of exercise as something we do with ourselves, not to ourselves. We have to actually work on positivity within. Consuming endless marketing messages and images extolling it, isn’t the same thing :) Though it’s bad marketing to not call on your feelings of inadequacy and missing out, hold the truth that you are improving on something that is already good. You’ve got you where you are today, and if you are like anyone else: that’s included facing some pretty tough stuff. Exercise is a treat, not a punishment.

Recognize too that you’ve been bombarded with language of violent transformation through decades of fitness culture. It has hurt us greatly. How can we expect to build anything of value through punishing ourselves with ripping, shredding, toning, blasting, melting, smashing, and grinding? An endless war isn’t a path through the long road of life.

Next, move in ways that align with the functional design of the body. Because human nature includes being readily adaptable to nearly anything--for better or worse--every form of exercise does something. As long as we’re sore and sweaty, right?! Well, sure but...you can overdose on anything. Kale is my go to metaphor here: even though it’s a mighty powerful food, you wouldn’t fill your entire shopping cart with it.

What’s more, not every form of exercise contortion provides equal value. We’ve invented a million different workouts for one body. Here’s a secret: not all of it aligns with the physical design of the body or is equally useful in moving your fitness needles forward!

An easy way to look at what goes into a healthy and integrated fitness path is to look at what I call Modern Body Syndrome. MBS means:

We get weaker with age (clinical term is “sarcopenia”). Most of what people complain about when they talk about getting older is a symptom that they are getting weaker in some aspect of strength.
Our bodymind ossifies with age. Without active work to broaden our horizons, we get stiffer, less flexible, less adventurous: both physically and mentally.
We spend most of our lifetime hunching over a screen. We have breakfast with a tiny screen, we drive or commute with a screen, then we work in front of a screen, we relax in front of a big screen. Increasingly, we exercise while sitting down--spinning our wheels--in front of a screen!

And that’s just the physical side. While staring at screens, our minds consume endless streams of content of images and videos and words, both positive and negative, but all exhausting and programming our mind. We’ve completely internalized constant stimulation and the stress that flows from it. Even the word for all the shareable media produced --“content”-- is an on-the-nose nod to how vacuous and empty much of it is.

Bah! How do we escape this modern fate! A complete movement diet is a most powerful antidote and addresses all of it, in one pill?

To reverse weakness and sarcopenia, build all the 5 Strengths

Stability
Strength
Power
Stamina
Range of Strength (functional flexibility)

To keep your bodymind’s horizon open, broad and receptive:

Keep your body primed with short daily practices, not just big workouts. I call these Daily Doses.
Include movement attributes like fluidity, balance, control and reaction with skills like locomotion, throwing & catching, kicking, crawling, climbing and rolling. Include not just rigid exercises, but variation and exploration as well.
Learn new skills: take up a new sport, dance, or martial arts!

To combat the bodymind baggage of hunched screen time

Make a time and place for you. A 5:00 Daily Dose is my perfect space.
Get outside and maybe even skip the nature selfie from time to time. My girls remind me “no pictures, papa” all the time!
Recharge away from the screen. Screens are important tools as we communicate, learn and collaborate-- all critical things for us social creatures. But if the on-screen world becomes more important and inescapable, then we are being wielded by our tools rather than vice versa.

Finally, complete fitness also needs a balanced mix of intensities, what I call the “Walk, Run & Sprint” principle. These pertain to all exercises (not just the versions on your feet):

“Walk (or jog)”. When you are injured or moving through some mileage, keep it slow and gentle. Even if you are feeling great, start gentle and ramp up, or mix gentle between intensity.
“Run”. Your practice should be challenging. It should bring heat and sweat. You should be able to see the edges of your ability horizon.
“Sprint” Bring your Strength Face out to play. Not every rep of every workout, and don’t try to shove yourself until you fall off the ledge! But knowing how to access all that you can do is critical for ability at every age and stage of life.

Fitness may be funny, but it’s not a mystery. There are many ways forward. If you feel like Modern Body Syndrome is getting the best of you and are looking for a path that helps you Look, Feel and Perform better --I’d love to coach you. All of these principles are baked right into RevFit. Come see for yourself.

With Strength & Smiles,

Josh