Finding Balance

Often life gives focus to the elite. The professional athlete, the successful business person, the high level academic all equally and in their own ways draw our attention. We strive for what they have, seeing them stand at their own pillars of excellence after years of striving for some end. The vast majority of us, myself included, will never know this level of specialization. This is because most of us do not actually want this level of “success” because, whether we like to admit it or not, this objective requires much in the way of sacrifice. Sacrifice of family, relationships, time, and even self in order to excel. The thing that we should all strive for is not excellence, but rather balance.

The issue with balance is it isn’t sexy. Balance doesn’t sell. I can remember over hearing some folks at a gym critique a known outdoor clothing brand’s recent marketing campaign showcasing a workclass climber hanging off the side of an inaccessible cliff wearing their newest jacket. These folks said, “I’d rather see Joe from down the street wearing it while he walks his dog, that is much more relatable.” Marketing, like ourselves, is trying to sell us not what we can obtain, but what we wish to obtain. Doing and wishing are a ven diagram with a varying overlap pending our own ability to understand our current reality. These folks would rather see this marketing piece display a real person, a balanced person. They want to see Joe, climbing at his local crag on a Saturday morning before taking the kids to soccer practice after working a 40 hour work week. That is balance. That is relatable. That does not sell dreams. That is selling reality. We could all use a bit more reality, especially in our marketing and especially in our social media.

Aside from being sold a dream of hanging off a cliff if we buy a jacket, we are also convinced that in order to do anything, from weight loss, to lifting, to just starting a training regime, that we must be “all in”. If we want to see change, we need to fully commit to this change. While there is some efficacy to this approach, it would serve us all much better if we first decided to find balance in our lives. Balance between eating cookies, and hitting our protein goal. Balance between getting in our training sessions, and sitting on the coach watching bad TV. No one is all in all the time, and if they are telling you that, they are lying or trying to sell something, or both. Long term success at anything requires sustainable practice. Sure, we can starve ourselves for 8, 12, or even 16 weeks in order to hit a target weight, or do the same to manage a training load that allows us to perform for an event. These practices are not inherently sustainable because they are not balanced. They require that we sacrifice time with our families or time with ourselves in order to make the ends meet. 

This is not an excuse to cut your workouts short and eat ice cream for breakfast everyday instead of working towards some goal. Finding balance starting with an honest assessment of where you are right now. I would argue that the elite athlete is just as unbalanced as the sedentary office worker. Both are sacrificing their bodies and health, in very different ways, in the name of some intangible goal. First, look at what you are doing. How do you spend your time? How do you indulge? Where do you see room to move the dial in the other direction? Maybe you need to schedule in 30 minutes at the beginning of your day to move with purpose to offset that office job. Maybe you need to leave Sunday unscheduled for training and meal prep so that you can spend time with your loved ones. Both are examples of balancing one’s fitness, health, and life.

This process, like many we have discussed here, starts first with an honest self assessment. We all have things we know we do too much of and those that we maybe should do a bit more of. Balance will look different for all of us and different within our on lives as the seasons change and the years pass. This requires frequent self evaluation in order to keep the scales as level as we can tolerate, but once we find them, a deeper level of life satisfaction is more readily accessible. We will create sustainable training habits, nutrition goals, healthy relationships, and a greater respect for ourselves and our world. So please, if you feel unbalanced, or even if you never considered to look, bring out the scales, and start to level them