By Kris Germain

There is one thing in this article that is important above all other things.  I write it in the last paragraph, so if you don’t think you’re going to make it through the whole article, just skip down to it.  Seriously. I care more about you processing this one thing than you appreciating my metaphors. For you readers...

When we join a gym or hire a Personal Trainer or Health Coach we never ask ourselves “How long should I keep doing this?” or “What do I really want at the end of the day?”  Most of the time, we have a short term goal like “I want to lose 15lbs.”

I think the way we ought to join a gym or hire a Coach should look more like the way we decide on a school or learn a trade or master an art form.  We don’t decide on a particular university because we want to get an A in a specific class during the first semester. We sign up for four years of time, a dozen different classes, a hundred quizzes and tests designed to develop us into something else altogether.  

We expect to be changed after the totality of the university experience.

You dropped 15 pounds because you figured out your schedule and someone told you what to eat for four weeks.  Great, you got an A on the first quiz! Life is pretty good! Do you drop out of school now? Do you take the same quiz again and again?  No, you know you need to be taught more. To thrive in life outside of school, you need another quiz with different questions based on different information.  Life will throw you a curveball because life always throws you a curveball. The best teachers prepare you with that fact in mind. 

The cutting edge of Health and Fitness is all about Teaching a man to fish.  “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

The cutting edge is relationship.  It’s the long arc of patient and deliberate development.  

It looks a lot like the oldest way that things were passed on—even before Universities.

It’s hands-on.

It looks like knowing someone and being known.   

It looks like finding a master and being an apprentice until your master cannot teach you anymore and then you are a master.

Ok, you get the metaphors, now what?

This is the first article in a series where we will explore the cutting edge of how to spend your time in pursuit of a thriving lifestyle.

Thriving compared to just getting by. 

Thriving compared to running in circles, dowsing fires, and reacting to the biggest flame in front of you.

In this series, we plan to engage you with conversations and topics that yield the greatest return in the Health and Fitness frontier:

• How to eat

• How to make your body strong

• How to deal with injuries

• How to rest

• How to view and enjoy the journey

Welcome to the last paragraph (Those of you who skipped straight here, you’ve found it :).  This is the most important thing in this whole article; please leave with this in your brain:  If we want to thrive instead of just getting by day after day, it must be taught to us.  No one can look at the list above and figure them all out on their own.  Podcasts and Youtube videos, books and articles cannot teach you enough to thrive.  Thrive has to be witnessed and handed down to you. The articles that follow in the coming weeks are intended to launch the readers.  They are supposed to strike a match and combust ideas that will move you to action. By all means, email us if anything awesome happens with you, we’d love to hear about it! Or, Follow this link and Book a half-hour with us if you need some help.