Episode 8: Life is hard either way

We explore why life is hard either way and how to choose the hard that leads to strength, energy, and fewer regrets. A recent marathon becomes a lens for practical choices in training, nutrition, and presence with family.

• the core idea of choosing your hard across life domains
• lessons from marathon training on discomfort and perspective
• strength training benefits versus the cost of being sedentary
• deliberate eating habits versus default choices and low energy
• self-discipline, regret avoidance, and protecting meaningful time
• how to start small, stack wins, and reassess progress
• simple, repeatable actions for strength, nutrition, and mindset

If you're new on the fitness journey and looking for guidance or help, Sperling Fitness is here for you, for the people that need help on the fitness journey, that need the coaching, that want a welcoming and strong supportive community to get you on the path to a healthier life

Transcript

Welcome Back & Marathon Recap

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the 1% better podcast with your host Josh Williams. It has been a couple weeks since I last hosted one of these episodes, and uh looking forward to getting back into their your earbuds. So today's topic is going to be life is hard either way. And this kind of comes about a couple different ways. When I was reading a really nice email I received from one of the physical therapists that I follow, I kind of just jogged some ideas. And also it kind of came on the same week that I was uh completing my marathon. That bring my first marathon, if you don't know, uh some of you all know been talking about it because, well, I've got nothing else to talk about in my life. But, you know, I started training for it hard back in April. You know, I was dabbling over the winter and uh completed it uh this last weekend, and it was it was hard. You know, the funny thing, and maybe this is another episode on it, is going through it, I was like, I would never do this again. And now three days removed, I'm like, uh, maybe it wasn't that bad. And so your perspective changes as the soreness goes away. Again, I don't, I don't know. The the verdict's out if I'll do one again. But it was there's a lot of lessons learned uh through the training, through going through the process, through completing it. And uh yeah, so but one of the big things is is choosing hard. Life is hard either way, and not trying to avoid it. And I kind of looked at it in kind of three big buckets for us, and kind of in the category of of strength, you know, nutrition, and then mindset. And one of the books I read early on in my life of reading, maybe it wasn't that early on, was The Art of Not Giving a Bleep. And I don't remember a whole lot about the book. I just remember I think the I think the pinnacle point of the book was you know, you know, choosing what is hard. Regardless of life, there's gonna be choices, and you're essentially choosing what what challenges you want. Regardless, we're never gonna avoid challenges, challenges are always gonna be there. And hopefully in life, we just have more and more opportunities to pick the challenges that we want to interact with. And ideally, those challenges are getting us to the point, the place that we want to go, or you know, getting us to becoming the person that we want to become. And none of it comes without without challenges. And so, first up, you know, talking about strength, we're big on getting people strong. The benefits of strength, I just love that more and more research comes out every day, it seems, or maybe more people that with authority are talking about it, but just the endless amount of benefits from just strength training, getting stronger and healthier. But the reality is training is hard. Strength training is uncomfortable. It is lifting something heavy, something that is challenging. Of course, doing it safely, but in itself, the body is like, this is harder than me doing nothing. It starts recruiting more muscles. You have to use your heart, have to use lung capacity, have to use energy. You might get sweaty. And so strength training takes time, it takes effort, it takes determination. You get sweaty, you can get sore from it. You might even question like why am I doing this today? I can be doing literally anything else that's not as hard as this. But the benefits of strength training are you're stronger, you're more capable, you have more energy, more freedom. They can even have the benefits of the mental side, of being proud of yourself, being part of a community that you might not have in other areas. And so there's there's lots of benefits, but to get those, there are challenges and it's hard. Versus the flip side, and again, I'm going polar opposites here. I know there's a spectrum, but what's paint a picture is being sedentary. Being sedentary is hard as well. So if we are sedentary for a long period of time, we might have lower energy. You know, daily tasks become harder because we're not used to doing hard things. So again, our our body and our mind typically prefer to do easier tasks that are going to give us some level of satisfaction, even how how high or how low it is. We're wanting to choose easy. So daily tasks become tougher, whether that's getting upstairs, um, doing chores, playing with uh grandkids, you know, being part of a beer league for baseball, whatever, they become harder, maybe more aches and pains because we're no longer using muscle, but we're using more bone-on-bone structures, which kind of feed into potentially wearing down of the joints and arthritis. And so again, also hard, hard to be low in energy, hard to be dealing with traversing stairs constantly and making those decisions of do I want to do this or not, based on do I feel physically able to. So both are hard. It's choosing which one we want to be in. On another spectrum, we have you know, healthy eating versus, I'm just gonna put it as like ignoring nutrition. I don't want to say non-healthy eating. Maybe you can say like deliberate eating versus non-deliberate, bunch of different things. But but the reality is is to eating a well-rounded diet. And what does that some depth context here? Typically high in protein, you know, moderate in carbohydrates and fats. Again, carbs want to be complex carbs versus versus simple like sugars. But for the most part, if we're cooking our own meals, you know, has lots of color, not a lot of like butters and fats, or we're doing pretty good. But it's hard. It requires planning. It's thinking ahead during the week. What am I eating at each meal? Or what do I have on hand? So it's grocery shopping. It's, you know, it's it's ignoring short-term cravings, knowing that it could be boredom or it could be a bunch of different things. It could be stress, it could be this or that. It's not actually that I'm hungry. And then making consistent choices regardless of the environment that you're in. So I might be out to dinner and all my friends are having dessert. I don't really want dessert, but then like, oh, everyone else is having dessert. So do I choose to do that this or no? It's hard. It's a hard decision whether you do decide to have it or not. And so eating a well-balanced meal consistently and healthy is hard. But of course, the trade-offs are ideally more energy, more health, more longevity, feeling better. On the other side, you know, not paying attention is also hard. Again, kind of falling back into some more lethargy, potentially poor quality sleep, unwanted weight gain, increased risk of disease, and then you know, frustration, uh, potentially with the situation that we are in. And again, I am painting extremes. There is a plethora of places in in between. But either way, uh nutrition can be hard, and it is hard. And it's choosing which one do you want to do. And then, you know, uh the other ones is gonna be this idea of you know self-discipline versus you know, things I wish I I did. And at the end of the day, growth is hard, it's challenging, it requires um consistency, patience, and getting a little bit uncomfortable, learning new skills, trying new things. But staying the same is also hard. You know, a lot of times if we stay the same, keep doing the same things, we look back and I don't like the R word, regret. It's a hard word to look back and say, I really regret that I missed out on that opportunity because I didn't do X, Y, Z. I didn't prioritize this, this, and this. And, you know, wishing it started sooner or feeling stuck, this all takes an emotional toll. It's also very hard. And so this is what I, you know, I say is it's choosing your heart. Both are hard. And how to decide which which one is looking ahead in life. Where do I want to be? Where do I see myself? You know, looking back on my life. If I'm, you know, on my deathbed, what are the things that I regret? You know, commonly people will say, you know, spending more quality time with friends and family or spending more time with your kids. Am I working on doing that? It's hard. Like for me, I love the job that I do, and it can be awe-consuming sometimes. But I also know that there's a strong chance I will regret those small moments of being with my children. And so in that moment, though it's easy for me right now to continue to do work when I'm spending time with them or at the bus stop with my daughter this morning. What's hard for me is, you know, putting away work and just being in that moment and enjoying it and knowing that I'm not gonna have that and continuing to choose that so that when I'm older, I'll know that I had those moments. Not easy, but hard. That's one of my hards that I have to go into because the easy thing I know is not gonna lead me to where I want to go. And so it's knowing where you want to go. So that's the first thing. You know, it's not always easy, but it is kind of looking back, like what are the things I regret? It doesn't matter how old you are or where you're at, there's always things that we can be doing to improving ourselves and getting closer to doing the things that we want to do. It's never too late. You know, the big thing is to start small. So in any hard thing, so when I was training for my marathon, I didn't just start out long distances. I started out with, you know, like a three-mile run. So little compared to 26 miles. Three mile run, slowly build up to five, then eights, then tens, then twelves and thirteens, and so on, and stack that over months and months and making hard changes or just making a change, which is hard, all starts with small, consistent changes. And so, you know, going back to maybe one of my things of work that might be okay, I'm gonna put my cell phone in a drawer in the bedroom or somewhere away for these hours in the day. That's gonna be hard. But consistently picking something small that I can hit, you know, 90% of the time. So pick something small, not something huge, like I'm never gonna do this again. That's usually gonna lead to failure. Pick something small, build on that stack, and then each couple of weeks reassess if it's getting easier because now that hard your body's used to it, so it's not as hard. And then we can slowly, you know, increase incrementally. And so again, don't double it, meaning, okay, there's gonna be an hour when I'm with my kids, I'll have none of that, then double it to two hours. No, maybe it's like I'm gonna bump that window 15 minutes or something like that. So choose your hard breakdown, know where you want to get to. And then once you decide what maybe hard decisions you want to start choosing to work on, make them chunk size, make them small so that you can succeed and stack those wins. Again, thank you so much for tuning in today. Because a great rest of your week. And if you're new on the fitness journey and looking for guidance or help, Sperling Fitness is here for you, for the people that need help on the fitness journey, that need the coaching, that want a welcoming and strong supportive community to get you on the path to a healthier life. That is what we are all about. And I hope to see you all in person or be in your earbuds very soon.