Drawing the Line Between Fitness and Athleticism

Are Athletes Good Fitness Role Models?

When I was younger, I thought athletes where the epitome of physical health. With their incredibly lean body compositions and ability to perform superhuman tasks, I mean, how could they NOT be?

Here’s the rub: if you are looking to lose fat, build muscle, and get into great shape, you should not try to model athletes.

Wha – what? Let me make my case here.

What is the Purpose of Fitness?

It all comes back to the design of the human body. As you know, I suggest that the highest-leverage change you can make to your diet is to ditch all the food products and focus on real foods that have a proven track record of sustaining healthy human populations.

Similarly, the human body is designed for certain physical tasks, which we needed for survival before the advent of agriculture and civilization. All species have their own ways of getting food and avoiding becoming food. Fish swim, cheetahs run, and monkeys climb. So what are the movements that we are best suited to?

Fitness and the Human Body

When you compare humans to the rest of the animal kingdom on each individual physical feat, we come up pretty weak. We are not the fastest sprinters, farthest runners, highest jumpers, quickest climbers, or most agile swimmers. Although we aren’t the best at any of these things, we DO excel at performing a wide variety of these tasks moderately well.

Our cavemen forebears didn’t worry about exercising – they got all the workout they needed during their daily lives, doing whatever was necessary to get food and attract mates. We likely did lots of walking, some sprinting, and perhaps a really long run every now and then. Lifting, dragging, and pushing heavy objects, throwing things and even some climbing were also added into the mix. And even a bit of swimming for those who lived next to the ocean or a lake.

In other words – the human body is built for all-purpose use, not for specific skills. And to become fit, what we need to do is mimic the many movements our bodies were designed to do.

Being an Athlete is a Lousy Way to Become Healthy

Deviating from doing what our bodies were meant to do is never a good thing. We are used to seeing what happens when you hardly use your body at all – people who are flabby when young and frail when old. But over-specialization can be cause for concern as well. Focusing on one specific task (say, sprinting) at the loss of others is almost always a one-way ticket for injury, illness, and exhaustion.

Have you ever noticed that a lot of athletes don’t make it to old age? And when they get there they are pretty worse for the wear? Even when they are in their prime, top athletes succumb to serious illnesses and injuries all the time. We always see these athletes on magazine covers and when they are kicking some serious ass, but rarely realize that the only way they are able to keep this up is with eating a terrible diet (I’m looking at you, Michael Phelps) and constant visits to doctors and other specialists.

The LMVM Stance

I created this website in order to help young, busy men build strong, attractive, healthy bodies quickly and efficiently. But we have so many terrible ideas when it comes to health, fitness, and wellness, that I feel I need to announce when the emperor is wearing no clothes at times.

I define fitness as being in “caveman shape” – having general competency in all the basic movements and actions our bodies are well-suited for. Athleticism, on the other hand, is having a laser-like focus on one specific physical task that is exhaustively trained in a never-ending quest for perfection. This is why you won’t find any “bodybuilding-lite” methods of isolating every muscle in your body here, but instead a focus on functional compound movements.

If you are a guy who is really busy with life – school, work, family, friends, whatever – and you want to look more powerful and sexier, and you want to increase your energy levels while prolonging your lifespan, then the athlete route is not the way to go. (Yes, this includes bodybuilding, too!) You will simply get far more leverage by focusing on “fitness” than you ever will on “athleticism.”

Tagged as: athleticism, fitness