Be strong, healthy, happy and free

A really thoughtful article written by my friend Khai who is into running free.

Khai believes” Our true nature is to be strong, healthy, happy and free. “. He’ll try to bring out the inner Tarzan in you.

Awesome!

At least, that’s the idea that came into my head when an introduction piece was written in such a way for me. Thanks! From low profile me. However, I’ve always believed in sharing with others on what I believed was good and beneficial to becoming stronger, faster and fitter. Thus, when asked to write a simple article on my views on being healthy, I decided to write my views in this first entry/article to the SGTitans.

Honestly, before I begin, let me give you a word of warning. I’m not a fitness expert, I don’t have certification after certification from the fitness industry, I’m not a knowledgeable person in the field of health and heck, I’m not even sure what most of the names of the muscles in my body are.

I’m what you call an average person. I am the layman who is trying out stuff that might help him in his quest to become (as what the SGTitans believe) stronger, faster and fitter. What I do believe is that as long as I practice at being strong and healthy in a natural manner while staying happy and free, I’ll achieve being a better person. My point here is that the views that I am to write below are all my own two cents worth of experience on what works for me which may or may not work for you.

What I can offer though is that I can only thank you for taking the time to read this and provide your own thoughts on what I believe to be “strong, healthy, happy and free.”

The thing about fitness nowadays is that most people are training for aesthetics. They want to look like the fitness models on magazine covers or have that chiseled and buffed look of that certain movie star. Honestly, I rarely hear people come up to me and say “Hey, I want to be able to run faster, climb better or lift easier” when it comes to their goals in “working out”. Even the phrase “Working out” turns me off. To me, the idea of staying healthy should never be something that you “work” for. It should be something fun, it should be something natural and applicable to your daily lives. (Just because something is fun, doesn’t mean it’s easy, mind you.)

 

Being healthy is not “work”, it should be a way of life.

Barefoot running
Barefoot running

Here’s an idea of what I mean. You commonly hear a person claiming that they’re working out to burn calories, to get back in shape or increase their chest or bicep size. (The size of your bicep should not factor in being healthy and strong, in my humble layman opinion.)

For me, I want to practice skills that will help me become strong, healthy, happy and free. Now the typical person will say, “I want to practice or do exercises that will increase my strength or stamina so I’ll do a training program that will enhance these aspects of me.” They’d want to increase their flexibility, their strength, increase the number of plates on their bench press or something along that line. (On a side note, I am completely amused of the number of people who I know can bench a lot but are not able to do a simple pull up)

But if you were to follow along the line of practicing SKILLS, now instead of having a training program, it’ll be a session where you practice swimming. Why swimming? For example, a person may have a very high strength and stamina. However, try giving the same person a swimming pool with clear waters and no currents. Now without practicing a certain skill set, such as swimming, that same person may waste his strength and stamina due to his inability to perform the proper strokes and breathing techniques.

Which is why to me, practicing a set of skills is more important than practicing exercises which do not have a direct practical and functional application to real life situations. I believe that, while training for strength, endurance, flexibility and others are fine, we also need to train our use of skills. These are skills such as running, jumping, swimming, climbing and even fighting. And do take note, when you do practice these skills, it’s not to just train your body to become healthier, no. This kind of “skill practice” is to train your body to interact with its surroundings in challenging situations.

Moving along this train of thought, it’s when you let your body run along uneven surfaces and temperatures instead of the normal treadmill, all while doing it barefooted. To climb uneven and random branches which will really develop your upper body strength the way it should be trained – Naturally.

 

The point I’m trying to make is this – it is ok to train for aspects of fitness such as strength, agility stamina or others that I may not know off. However, to truly discover your potential, it’s how you use these aspects of fitness and apply them in random situations in the environment through your usage of skills. To sum it up, keeping yourself strong, healthy, happy and free should be a form of lifestyle.

In my honest-humble-layman opinion, you are not training yourself; you are educating yourself.

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