S03E34 ENCOURAGING OTHERS ABOUT FITNESS

How do you go about encouraging others to get fit? Here are some thoughts about helping those around you.

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2023.02.22 S03E34 ENCOURAGING OTHERS ABOUT FITNESS

Sam Rhee: [00:00:00] This podcast episode is about encouraging fitness for others. Certainly as a physician, as a coach, and as just someone who's very interested in fitness in general, it's just been a challenge trying to get people around me to think about their fitness more.

I think it's important. That's why I work in the businesses I do. And I just have a couple thoughts about what it's like introducing others around you to fitness.

I definitely have made and have continued to make a lot of mistakes when I try to get others interested in fitness around me.

For example, just today I worked out with my children and let's just say it was a challenging experience to say the least. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give up.

It just means I'm going to keep trying to do better.

My first point is, is that CrossFit is not the only means to achieve fitness. I am a CrossFit Level 2 coach. I do believe that CrossFit is a great way for achieving fitness.

But I also realize it is not the only way that people can achieve fitness. Many people try CrossFit, they'll go back to power lifting or [00:01:00] running or triathlons or Pilates or Barre, or Peloton or Orange Theory or Zumba or boot camp. Anything is better than nothing.

And nothing is a straight line in life. It's a zigzag, it's a journey.

There are definitely reasons why I love CrossFit so much, but I also realize that there are so many ways that anyone can achieve fitness.

My second point is, is a gentle approach is sometimes best.

Sometimes it takes a little bit of an easy touch, encouraging fitness for others. I recently had a patient for whom I did liposuction, and that person looked amazing after their surgery and this was a person who had not really engaged in fitness.

So one of my approaches was to point out all of the amazing progress the patient had made, how happy that patient was with how their body looked after liposuction. And I encouraged the patient to continue to make more improvement in how they looked.

And so I encouraged that patient to start out with something very [00:02:00] simple with fitness. This patient had never done anything in relation to fitness. Had never gone to a gym, had never played sports, and so I encouraged this patient to start simple. I gave the patient a couple YouTube videos that had high intensity fitness training, just body weight stuff for 15, 20 minutes.

Three or four videos, and I encouraged them to just try it out at home in the privacy of their own home, on their tablet or on their phone, and just start with something really simple.

This was something I had picked up during Covid during the pandemic when I had done a lot of yoga videos at home. And there's just a ton of stuff out there on YouTube that is so easy to just pick up and do.

And pretty soon I'll be checking in on this patient and hopefully they did some of these videos. They liked it, and it's just a start in terms of their journey to fitness.

So what I really wanted to do was take that improved positive self-esteem so that this patient could just do more outside their comfort zone little by little.

An example of maybe pushing it a [00:03:00] little bit too hard, when I was on my family vacation over the winter, I had a bunch of my younger nephews in high school with me, and we all did a workout together and we all did a Tabata. If you don't know what a Tabata is, it's basically 20 seconds on 10 seconds off repeated eight times with a number of different movements as hard as you can for those 20 seconds.

And so I took them through air squats, pushups, sit-ups, burpees, and by about round four, they were dying.

Maybe it wasn't the best introduction to high intensity interval training, and maybe I needed to just take it a little bit easy there.

If I had to do that over, I think I would've taken them to a local gym, maybe started on some strength training sessions just for fun.

And I think they would've enjoyed that a lot more.

My next point is, is that sometimes timing in somebody's life can be really important, and introducing fitness at any given point in somebody's life may or may not be the right time.

If you approached me 12 years ago when I [00:04:00] was working in the middle of Manhattan and I had 14 hour days, and you told me CrossFit was the best thing that I should do and I should just start right away, I probably wouldn't have been very receptive to it.

It took a couple years of me floundering around, realizing that my health was not getting better, for me to start looking for some answers.

There are a number of people that I know at my CrossFit gym who really were almost at their wit's end before they started looking for a solution for fitness.

It just takes people some time.

My next point is leading by example, is maybe all that you need to do.

One of my athletes at the gym is a really busy person.

He is a firefighter. He just had a newborn as well as having some older children, and yet he still manages to make it into class and fitness almost every day. And I just happened to talk to his wife, and because of what he did quietly, he never told her that she needed to fitness. He never gave her any advice about what to [00:05:00] do. She decided to go ahead and start becoming more fit on her own. She decided not to do CrossFit, but she decided to do Orange Theory. And she loves it and that is great.

I think one of the most important things you can do with people around you is just show them how important fitness is in your life and in that way they can see how it might make a difference in their life.

That doesn't mean bragging or showing off. It just means living the best life that you can live and being open, nonjudgmental, and friendly.

My next takeaway is that little wins are best.

As a coach, I try to keep my athletes comfortable. I don't overwhelm them with advice, and I want to give them freedom to do what they want to do with some gentle guidance, especially with newer athletes. I have an athlete in the morning. She just started maybe two months ago.

She's a big time runner, very fit, but the athlete has some limitations because they run so much. [00:06:00] Tight hip flexors, limited mobility.

And while they are very experienced in their own sport, they don't have a whole lot of experience outside of that sport. And it's taken some time for that athlete to get comfortable with new movements, new exercise patterns.

And this is very challenging. It's really hard to learn something when you already think you know it. If you already think you know fitness, then trying to learn something different about fitness can be even harder. But over the past two months, this athlete is slowly learning how to move better, to increase their fitness, and is starting to realize that there are benefits not doing what was just done before. And I'm excited every week because I think this athlete is starting to get it.

But if I overwhelm this athlete with a ton of advice about how to correct their form on cleans, or gave them a hard time for changing the movements or didn't give them the freedom to feel comfortable within their space in class, I think they [00:07:00] would've become discouraged.

It is really a journey. It doesn't have to be done quickly, and that's why I love little wins.

And then my last takeaway point is working on positive emotions.

The older I get, the more I realize that positive emotions are the key to getting anything done. 99% of what I do in terms of procrastination is because I feel negatively about something. And it's the same with fitness.

You're much less likely to do something if you don't feel positive or good about it. And that's the same for anyone who's becoming introduced to fitness. It shouldn't be a chore. It shouldn't be something that they should do or have to do. It should be something that they want to. And whatever way you can figure out to help them want to do it in a positive way is already a half win in my book.

Sometimes I feel such an urgency to get certain people around me to begin fitnessing or to fitness a certain way or to do more, that I sometimes forget that positivity and good [00:08:00] emotion will do so much better than all the logical arguments I could have, or all the evidence-based medicine that I have. Making people feel good about their fitness, encouraging them, it's something I work on every day, and I'm continuing to learn how to do better. Thank you.