About the poll I added

I added a poll to my blog yesterday. It's set to last for about 2 months--yeah, so this is a low-traffic blog and I need to add extra time in hopes of attracting more participants. So, what's the poll about?

Well, it relates to a fitness blog I check on with some regularity, located here. This guy does an insane amount of fitness activity. Reading about his regime and thinking about my own comparatively modest endeavors I get to thinking . . . how long will this guy last?

I don't ask that with any malice. He seems nice enough and writes engagingly. But in my view he's going way, way beyond what is necessary for his health.

Will it hurt him to do so much more than the minimum necessary for maintaining good health? Who knows? He might end up with some sort of stress injury, which could have a greater or lesser impact on his health. Or he may not. But the real question at stake here is whether you can exercise too much. And I don't profess to have an answer to that question--certainly not with respect to the physical component of fitness.

I can, though, attest to the psychological aspect of overdoing fitness. I know from my own experience that it is possible to burn yourself out by doing too much: I learned some lessons about that back in my bike racing days. When that happens, it becomes drudgery, something you have to force yourself to do. Which is one step along the way to ceasing to do it altogether.

There are ways to deal with that, one of which is to introduce variety. That's what I'm doing in my own routine and it seems to be something fitbomb (the guy has never revealed to me his personal identity, so I'll just refer to him by the name of his blog) may be doing as well--though I'm not sure he's adopted it as a strategy: he may just be trying out all the latest fitness fads.

Which brings me to another possible motivation for him: perhaps he's doing what he does, in part, because it's popular? He's got a ready-made community of fellow exercisers that buy and perform the same sets of commercialized fitness regimes he does. Because of the promotion the creators of the routines engage in, the products are popular and glamorous. I don't discount this as a possible motivating factor for him.

But there's a flip side to the popularity aspect: what happens when, as happens with all fads, fitness wanes in popularity? Would he be doing what he does if most people held that fitness pursuits were a waste of time? Would he be able to sustain what he now does with the rise of this sort of attitude?

Aside: you might detect from these remarks that I am not a believer in progress. I do not hold that humanity has evolved to a point where the importance of fitness has permanently impressed itself on the collective consciousness and will remain with our kind in perpetuity. No, being a keen student of history I see those kinds of assumptions as naive and ill-advised. The time will come again in our history--provided our race survives long enough--when fitness will seem like a waste of time, mark my words.

Enough philosophizing . . .

All this being said, I do suspect fitbomb may be doing what he does for reasons that differ from the reasons I'm doing fitness. He seems fairly young--maybe early thirties? So he's doubtless still got a pretty good energy level. He seems not to have been in really bad shape before he started his current exercise craze, though he does admit to not being terribly athletic earlier in his life.

Me, on the other hand, I've turned to fitness to try and address some serious health issues. Not that I've been terribly unfit at any point in my life either. But I'm probably quite a bit older than this guy and my body--as is typical of bodies starting at around my age--is starting to deteriorate. Thus, I see fitness as mandatory for me if I expect to lead a decent life in the years ahead. In short, I should be maintaining at least my current level of fitness for the rest of my life.

I'm not sure these sorts of thoughts have entered fitbomb's mind because he may not yet have faced his mortality in such an urgent way as I have. Perhaps for him fitness will end up being some sort of fad, a phase he goes through during a certain brief portion of his life? Hard to tell.

But what I do sense is that he's overdoing things a bit, which can lead to burn-out. Now, granted, I do not know this guy. He might be a sort of manic personality, someone who was a hyperactive kid, and so may be capable of maintaining such an intense level of fitness for a very long time.

Whatever the case, the poll is designed to address some of these questions. How long do you think he'll be able to keep this up? My own feeling is that it won't last too much longer--maybe another year. I'm really guessing here and, if I knew this guy personally, I might have an entirely different opinion, knowing his personality. But not having that sort of information, I would have to guess that it won't last very much longer.

Find the poll at the top of the right hand column of this page and weigh in with your vote (I've included a screenshot of the poll in this entry: find the real, interactive poll at the top of the right column of this blog).