I won't title this, but give it a read

Fitness, at its core, is an intensely personal and individualized path to walk down. Most people start some kind of "fitness journey" (I loathe that overused phrase but cannot think of a better one at the moment, just for the record.) for reasons that are understood only to themselves, and maybe they don't even truly know the real reason until they're a long way in. Sure we all say we want to "get healthy" or "feel better," and to some extent that's true. But it's not the entire truth. Nobody wakes up one day moderately overweight or with borderline hypertension and then embarks on a multi year quest for glory. People need a real driving force to elicit true change, not some vanilla feel-good internet meme version of motivation backed by a ray of sun hitting a 5 lb dumbbell. Losing 6 lbs of vanity weight just to make your doctor shut up isn't truly life altering change, it's putting in work for a few weeks followed by complacency once Dr. BMI is pacified. Why? Because it wasn't the persons true goal. It was an external force, not a personal motivation for true change. The result is no less noble (6 lbs is a lot of work!) but it's not long term change. What I'm talking about is the kind of life altering a-ha moment that takes you from a couch potato that doesn't quite know what is missing from your life, to a certified badass in whatever way one might need to qualify as such. Maybe that means dropping a significant amount of bodyfat and gaining some muscle to start loving your body instead of hating it. Maybe it's getting freakishly strong because your mental state needs the confidence to know your body can carry the burdens of life both mentally and physically. Maybe it's running a marathon because your high school track coach said you would never make it. Whatever the REAL reason, it's YOUR reason. You don't need to share it, since most people won't truly understand it anyway. But try to find it for yourself, and once you're on your way there, don't look back. And if you need help along the way, ask someone you can trust. They're few and far between, but they're there. It may be your spouse or significant other (but don't bank on it...that's a whole different blog), it may be your best friend, it may be one of the ChrisFit coaches (we hope so, and are proud to be able to do so), or it may be someone you only just met at the gym. But the point is, even though it's YOUR path and nobody else's, that doesn't mean you have to walk it alone.

Steve Decker