Vishen LakhianiFounder of Mindvalley | NYT Bestselling Author | Transforming Lives Globally

Is Fitness A Tool for Ego or Wellness?

5 Sept 2024 · 1 min

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A brief segment from a YouTube video by Vishen Lakhiani where the speaker recounts feeling proud on the day a photo was taken but then experiencing the toughest month afterward. The speaker reflects that achieving an impressive physique did not solve underlying problems, notes that their body isn’t built to be an extreme archetype ("Conan the Barbarian"), and offers a working definition: fitness as the body’s ability to handle stress and recover quickly. The passage contrasts fitness-for-wellness (functional resilience) with using fitness to serve the ego or aesthetic pursuits.

Chapters

On the day of the picture, I felt very proud. But the month after that was the toughest month I've ever had in my life. All the problems that I thought it would be solved when I reached that impressive physique, they remained untouched. My body is not designed to be Conan the Barbarian. Fitness is supposed to serve the body. Fitness is the capability of the body to go through stress and recover from it fast. It happens to many people in fitness that the body transforms to its best version. But life gets worse because this is when people use fitness to serve the ego and to serve the body.