The Absurd Logic of the Solstice
This weekend coming is the winter solstice here in Australia, at 6:24pm Sunday the 21st June the sun will hit the furthest point north for us and then start heading south again making the days longer.
I generally use this as my absurd reasoning that summer is on its way. I really feel this is my toxic positivity trait haha. To me it is just that little thing to think that while it may be winter and cold, at least the days are not going to be any shorter.
And when I was in my 20’s, I always said that with that being the longest night of the year there was more time to party! (More of that absurd reasoning!) Because the solstice usually coincides with my birthday, I wanted to enjoy that night each year as much as I could.
Things change in time though, I am not the party person I was at uni in my 20’s, and that is AOK. I would hate to think how unwell I would be if I had continued to do to myself what I did back then. I didn’t exercise, I ate pretty average all round, drank too much, sleep was for the dead! Haha, and my mental health was really suffering a lot.
Chasing the Look
I am far from perfect when compared to any metric, my thing is though that I just keep trying to be better, better than I was yesterday.
What that means isn’t that I necessarily break world records or anything down the track ( I may, because we never know what the future holds) but that I am just trying to do and be better in all aspects of my life.
With my movement, with my eating, my sleep, and my headspace as my four pillars of being overall as healthy as I can be at 50. It hasn’t always been this way though.
I once chased the look. You all know what I am talking about. And I am not saying there is anything wrong with a goal of wanting to look better, all of us want to put our best appearances out into the world. It is a goal that can become an obsession, or one that you just pack in and quit on because it is so superficial.
This year around the solstice I am thinking back over my last 20 odd years of life, and how much has changed, yet some things stay the same.
23 years ago I was just starting to do a bit of exercise. My nutrition was pretty crap. I was a night owl, and would struggle out of bed, I really disliked what I saw in the mirror, my libido was pretty damn shit, I found it difficult to see any brightness in stuff around me, I saw drinking as relaxation and downtime, and was working a job I was quickly coming to despise even though I once loved it.
I am not telling you this for sympathy or anything, just a background to change is all.
My initial drive was to look like a cover model, I even have a book I bought called the covermodel workout. I wanted my then fiance to not lose interest in me, and I thought because in my opinion I looked like shit, that she shared that and so did the thinking for her, hence my plummet in libido. So I got to trying to look like a cover model!
And at one point, I sorta ended up on the cover of a magazine, true story. Australian Ironman, an old body building mag. I had a two page spread featuring me in not much except fake tan, haha. I won some books, some protein powder and a 12 month subscription.
I had had the biggest transformation in a 12 week period for that edition and won. I looked ripped, shredded one might say. My physique was pretty damn good. But I was not healthy.
I had spent the previous 12 weeks on a savagely restrictive diet, I was at the gym twice a day for between an hour and an hour and a half each session. I was almost obsessed with my appearance and the scales. Yep, this happens to males as well.
Doing challenge after challenge had made me look pretty damn good. But I was far from good.
I am actually stronger now than I was then. I was 32 when I won, and at 50 this week I am stronger than then.
Building the Four Pillars
My workouts are an hour at a time, five days a week, just five hours of my week.
And my eating isn’t restricted.
All those challenges, they had made me look great on the outside, but I was a polished turd.
An outward appearance of a fit and toned physique, but inside, filled with depression, anxiety around foods and missing the gym, a libido that was very hit and miss still. The thing I wanted fixed, still wasn’t. AND I still was not happy with what I saw in the mirror. I was still picking up even the slightest flaw in my physique. The sport of bodybuilding does this in competition, if something is a bit off, then the contestant is told, and they can improve in future. I was using sports competition standards as my own yardstick for myself. Yeah, nah, that isn’t where it is at.
I needed to find what worked. Not just for me, but for most people.
It is pretty regularly I see people in the industry at the point I just was. Never happy, always chasing ‘success’ in a ‘challenge’, and so they go again and again OR worse still, just pack it all in and return to what they did before, nothing.
So I had to find it, what was going to make me be better? The truth is, it was me. I had to find the answer in me. I needed to make peace with myself that I was good enough and stop placing my worth in what others and society thought of me.
Over the last 15 or so years I have sought to change things, for the better, sure sometimes I fuck up, we all do, but I simply go back to, well, how can I improve on that?
I found that it wasn’t about doing a challenge where it was me against everyone else in it for the prize purse, for the accolades, for the before and afters. It was about finding a bunch of people that wanted to be part of it all with me, to all be striving together for a goal where we all succeed, we all win.
Moving From “Me” to “We”
It isn’t about going it alone. Sure there are outliers that can do that forever, but humans are social animals. We crave a group, a community, we want to belong to something bigger than just ourselves.
So I got more and more into the mindset of achieving good things in the gym, on performance, not outcomes. And especially not aesthetic outcomes. This might seem like it comes with age and giving less of a fuck what others think about you, but the truth is I still want to look alright, it is just that I know that trying to train as much as I was and eating as little as I was is not sustainable long term.
And here I am now, looking after people to stick with it long term, to help them be fitter, stronger better than they were before. Seeing so many people over the years get chewed up and spat out by these short, sharp, super intensive programs and competitions I knew I had to make the changes I did.
I am no longer going it alone. I have such an amazing bunch of people that keep me honest about my training and on track, some I have been training and/or training with for a decade or more now and all the different times in between.
Because my adaptation over time to get better became about more than just me. It was so I was a better parent, better friend, lover, coach, and well, all round better human. When I saw that there were goals of being better in those areas I realised that being ripped was a pretty crazy idea as a number one priority.
I do think that maybe I have matured, and then I think nah, I can still do some pretty dumb shit.
Overall though once I changed the goal, and went for longevity over appearance my health as a whole improved. I became better in the gym, I found that I was enjoying life more, no more guilt around foods and having an occasional beer, I can relax now, that libido returned, I am clearer in my thoughts, I don’t have the episodes of depression anywhere near like I did when I was diagnosed in 2009, and I am not anxious about the future.
I put all of this down to taking a long term view of my training, and how I can keep training like I am for another 50 years into the future. And I want that for you too.