Recently, I celebrated my birthday. My birthday made me ponder on the following question : “What is the one fitness lesson, I wish I had learned earlier”. In this article we will talk about an invaluable fitness lesson that I learnt after being lost in the wild. I guarantee that if you follow this fitness advice, you shall always be grateful to your former self.
Few years back, I was big on heavy lifting. I wanted to look big and so trained exclusively towards that goal, whilst neglecting other aspects of my fitness training, such as flexibility, endurance and balance. As a result, I became big and strong on my lifts. I was really proud of the gains that I had made. However, one day I found myself being lost deep in the wild. During that eventful day, the huge drawbacks of unidimensional training methods came glaring down on me.
The invaluable fitness lesson that I learnt in the wild
I was on a trek to the summit of Nag Tibba, with my friend Deep. After a pleasant walk of 8kms along the Himalayas, we decided to camp down, in a beautiful valley. Once we set up our camp, we lit the campfire after much toil. After having a few drinks and gazing at the clear star studded sky for an hour or so, we decided to call it a day. Knowing that the tougher part of the climb was still ahead of us, we went to sleep early.
The next day we rose up as the first rays of the sun, beamed down on the Himalayas. Soon, we started our ascent. As ill prepared as we were, while passing through a thick forest, we found ourselves lost. We soon found ourselves in the middle of nowhere, in the thick Himalayan Forests. With no sign of civilization around, I had my heart in my mouth. We could only hear sounds of wild animals, making weird noises. I thought to myself,” May be they are inviting the whole jungle for feasting on the two of us.” It took some time for us to realize the deep mess we were in. Now, the only way to reach home was to somehow make a path for ourselves through the dense jungle. If we wished to reach home alive, we had to trust each other and our fitness levels !
It’s funny how at the hour of crisis, the mind manages to gather information from the deep recesses of the memory. We started recollecting information that the British Adventurer, Bear Grylls gave on television, like how to find water in the jungle and most importantly how to find your way when stranded in the wild. Thus, firstly we decided to get an idea of the terrain by climbing on the hill top so that we could gain a high vantage point.
Soon, we reached the top. When looking around, all we could see were thick forests, with no signs of humans. However our silver lining, was a temple dome that was peeping at us from the dense jungle. Thus, we set our sights on the temple. But there was a catch to it. We couldn’t lose sight of the temple, as that was our only north star. Therefore we had to climb along the mountains, across the steep slope.
Few minutes in, I started running out of breath and my heart began pounding. As we moved on, the muscles on my legs started burning. On top of that, my lower back was hurting. I told myself, you can lift over 350kgs in the gym, but when it comes to saving your life, your fitness has deserted you. I realized that I was big and muscular but not fit. I was strong but I lacked endurance and flexibility. I found that, when it comes to facing unforeseen circumstances in life, it’s better to be average at different aspects of fitness, rather that being really good at doing just one thing at the cost of ignoring other areas.
After a few agonizing hours of struggle. we finally managed to reach the temple. Seeing humans, had never felt so pleasing !
[In the picture : Me, just after reaching the Nag TIbba Summit, more relieved than happy ! ]
A common mistake that I see many people make is the same that I made. We get so fixated on one aspect of fitness that we ignore the other areas of fitness. The people who love lifting ignore the endurance runs, dreading the loss of gains that it would result in. People who love running/cycling totally ignore strength training, as, ” they don’t want to get big.”
If you are a professional bodybuilder, then it probably makes sense to skip stretching sessions, endurance runs in order to max out your gains. However for rest of us, its most beneficial if we include different aspects of fitness in our physical training. In fact, scientific research has also proven cross training to be highly beneficial for improving athletic performance. Thus, if you want to get big, you still should go for long runs and do yoga. If your preferred fitness activity is running, you should still work on improving your overall physical strength.
To sum it up, if there’s one fitness advice that you should listen to, it’s this: Work on getting better at all aspects of fitness, ignore none of them. After all, when it comes to fitness, it pays to be a jack of all trades, than being a master of one.
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