Slow Fitness

There’s really no advantage to being slow in fitness, is there?

[This particular email is stolen from an article I wrote for Medium.com.)

If you’re looking to lose fat, the faster the better, right? I mean, aside from the almost certainty of a weight loss drug, isn’t speed half the benefit of the ‘zempy? 

It doesn’t help with strength or muscle gain either. If you want to show off on Instagram or fill our your t-shirts, you want those things today.

Not tomorrow and not a year from now.

Heck, athletes know what it means to be slow. Slow means not getting to the ball before the other guy. Slow athletes have trouble retaining their starting varsity spot.

Slow athletes don’t make the plays that need to be made.

---

I strolled through Barnes & Noble, the store illuminated by the embers of a reclaimed passion for reading (and probably some industrial LED lights). 

As I walk in, I can sense the Starbucks cafe to the right and the registers to the left. I know the kid section is somewhere to my 10 o’clock and I think there are board games straight ahead.

I’ll walk past every small table because they’re mostly filled with topical biographies and Sarah J. Maas novels — those are for my wife, Kara — and probably other contemporary titles that B&N bought too many of (like a pallet of 15-bottle cases of Korbel sparkling wine on January 2nd). 

My arena is toward the right, mostly non-fiction self-help books that promise to make you happier in thirty seconds (or maybe thirty days, I can’t remember). 

This particular time I walked straight back to the section that said medicine, feeling drawn to something especially dense with the names of small, insignificant bodily tissues that have really no bearing on the outcome of a training session.

I persevered through the psychology section and into the business shelves, stumbling upon the usual Rich Dad, Poor Dad alternatives where the author promises to make you rich in 200 pages.

(I always found it ironic that my purchase of their book was likely making them as affluent as I could probably ever hope to be, but I’m no book industry expert either.)

The only book I noticed that caught my attention was Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. But then, admittedly, I put it down and said to myself, “Not another Cal Newport book, Josh.”

As I picked my head up to see if Kara was anywhere within earshot, I noticed a section of books titled “Local” and meandered toward it. I figured it would be mostly tales of lobster fishermen in Gloucester or the Salem Witch Trials, but to my surprise, I did come upon a short book about the history of Rockland, Massachusetts. 

And as a devoted walker, I thought it might be interesting to see which buildings are still standing.

Not satisfied to walk out with a picture book (picture books are for children), I took one final lap and reluctantly grabbed the Cal Newport text.

---

The idea of Slow Productivity is basically this: without a physical product to generate, modern-day knowledge workers are forced to use some combination of pointless meetings, trivial emails, and all-day instant message conversations to prove their productivity.

The problem is this: these constant, tedious tasks become a hindrance in the pursuit of deep, thoughtful work.

Perhaps the best ideas we’ve ever had are sitting in the back of our brain, rotting, like me in business classes during Summer I at Northeastern circa 2011.

The way out is to be thoughtful and deliberate with our alternatives. If we are to avoid the pitfalls of “efficiency,” we need to learn the art of slowing down.

And there have popped up all manner of alternative: slow food in exchange for fast, slow medicine, slow cities.

But what about slow fitness?

---

A quick Google search reveals plenty of results for “slow fitness.” But they mostly have to do with pilates, Tai Chi, yoga, and slowing your eccentric movements down more to really feel the muscle working.

You’ll get countless YouTube videos of yoga-pant-clad beach bodies demonstrating exercises real slow, with really light weights. 

A quick scroll reveals discussions and forums, folks asking why their progress has been so slow and others responding with why slow progress is better.

It even compares “slow” with “low effort.” Eh, not my favorite.

---

Slow fitness doesn’t mean no fitness. And it certainly doesn’t mean “low effort.”

Weight loss is an important component of fitness for many a gym-goer, but one of the bigger problems emerging from the current wave of obesity medications is the amount of muscle mass that this quicker-paced weight loss seems to take with it.

This isn’t new. Losing more than a few pounds of fat in any given week (especially for weeks or months at a time) has been well-documented in it’s tendency to take lean mass, as well.

And building muscle mass (whether for the first time or after an aggressive diet phase) doesn’t come fast either.

Those that deem the process “too slow” are bound to be either injured or scouring the internet for “how to buy performance-enhancing drugs.” 

It takes time and patience to change our bodies, but we aren’t at the helm. The many biological processes required to lose fat, build muscle, increase our flexibility, and improve our endurance are all out of our hands. And we can’t rush the process.

Fast fitness is crash diets and juice cleanses and that weird thing where you just drink water with cayenne pepper and lemon all day.

Fast fitness is going to random fitness classes seven days a week, trying to Rx every workout to earn more Plop Points than your friends (or whatever they’re called).

Fast fitness is fat burners and late-night infomercials selling you home gym equipment that you’ll never use while the manufacturer lines it’s pockets at $2000 a pop. 

Fast fitness is predatory practices by both fitness influencers and the supplement companies supporting them. 

Fast fitness is somebody’s son taking anabolic androgenic steroids just to make starting tackle on their high school football team.

---

Slow fitness is just the opposite. 

Slow fitness is consistency, patience, and forgiveness.

It’s gratitude.

It’s both holistic and focused. It strikes when the iron is hot. It’s calm and composed.

Slow fitness is community, not the type that thrives on guilt, shame, or exclusion, but the type that grows and shifts with each added member.

A collective that is stronger because of each member and where each member is made stronger by being a part of it. 

It’s connectedness, support, and compassion.

Surely, it’s the only way I know of that actually works.

And “works” meaning forever, not just for some six-week challenge.

---

I love looking at pictures of old Rockland. 

When I sought out to redo our kitchen, I hardly imagined that buried in the wall behind our dishwasher would be a copy of The Rockland Standard from December 8th, 1955, five years before my father was born.

I’ve browsed the issue a few times now, noting the addresses of the old Pontiac, Ford, and Chevrolet dealerships around town.

Today, most of them are gone. Some are houses. Union Street, one of the main thoroughfares in the town, stands in stark contrast to a busy retail center in a manufacturing town from 100 years ago.

Some of the buildings are still there, but many were lost to fires (as were so many other buildings in the 19th and early 20th centuries).

There are a few reasons for this, including proximity of buildings to one another and the common use of fuels for things like cooking, heating, and lighting, to name a couple. 

But many of these buildings were also built out of wood. It was cheaper to come by than brick or stone.

It was also faster to build with.

---

After we walked around Barnes & Noble a bit more (and unsuccessfully looked for a replica of the Monster Book of Monsters from Harry Potter), we got in line to check-out and I sort of confirmed with myself, “Ok, Slow Productivity is for learning and this book about Rockland is just for fun.”

The universe is hilarious.