Hi there!
My cousin’s getting married today and well, unfortunately, I am not able to attend it in person. Sucky times we live in but I realise even that is a position of privilege. Good that things like live streaming are the norm today. Funnily enough, about 20 years ago, my dad’s company did that as a service - live streaming weddings to junta living overseas and who couldn’t make the wedding. This is before the YouTubes and all that. Talk about being a bit too early for your time, eh.
Personal digressions aside, I hope you are staying safe and sensible. Let’s get on with the 3 things for today.
meet the Dabbler. The Dabbler approaches each new sport, career opportunity, or relationship with enormous enthusiasm. He or she loves the rituals involved in getting started, the spiffy equipment, the lingo, the shine of newness. Over the next 3 weeks, I’ll write about the characters that George Leonard brings up in his book and why it is tremendously useful to understand the framework and also locate yourself.
3 quotes for today. Bruce Lee on education, J Krishnamurti on feelings and words.
the fitness industry in India has exploded in the recent past. It is happening all over the world as well, and India is always just a couple of years behind the global trends. We need people to promote the word and that’s why behemoth’s like Cult.fit are great for the industry.
* I seem to have chopped off the first 10 seconds of the audio :)
meet The Dabbler
George Leonard, in his wonderful book Mastery, which came out in the early 90s - no smartphones, no Netflix, no doom scrolling, no endless reels on Instagram - talks about paths outside of mastery. Because the path is long, winding, and not easy, most of us don't have the time or energy, or commitment towards something with the intent to master it.
As soon as I read these types, I recognised myself in all of them over the years. And I see most of the people I work with fall into these types as well, and the additional one that I will call as a student. Recognising it is key for me and for you - because you can decide IF you want to do something about it.
It is a choice. It is fine to be on any approach, I think. You cannot choose to master everything. Bowling or corn-hole are things that should be played only when drunk, or so I think. That's my perspective. But there are world championships and people choose to master them.
Strength training or many physical activities are ones where you can choose to be one of these types, or master them. In fact, I think even nutrition and lifestyle habits are essentially that - you are either trying to master them or you are not.
(I think) this will be 4 posts - each one going into a bit more detail about the 4 types. Let's start with them.
The Dabbler
The Obsessive
The Hacker
The Student
who is the Dabbler?
The Dabbler approaches each new sport, career opportunity, or relationship with enormous enthusiasm. He or she loves the rituals involved in getting started, the spiffy equipment, the lingo, the shine of newness.
When he makes his first spurt of progress in a new sport, for example, the Dabbler is overjoyed. He demonstrates his form to family, friends, and people he meets on the street. He can't wait for the next lesson. The falloff from his first peak comes as a shock. The plateau that follows is unacceptable if not incomprehensible. His enthusiasm quickly wanes. He starts missing lessons. His mind fills up with rationalisations. This really isn't the right sport for him. It's too competitive, noncompetitive, aggressive, non-aggressive, boring, dangerous, whatever. He tells everyone that it just doesn't fulfil his unique needs.
The honeymoon period of any new activity is just brilliant. I dabbled with running, as I've written about it before. After an extremely rough start, every week was a glorious one. I was running more miles than the previous week. I was on top of the world. But after a while, I was running at the same pace, more or less. To improve would've meant a whole lot of things, including but not limited to
working on my running style
working on my strength
hiring a running coach and following a training programme
stopping CrossFit
stopping playing Ultimate
That sounds like a lot of work. And it is made worse by the fact that I have to give up two things I enjoyed way too much - CrossFit and Ultimate. So, after my initial progress and 6-9 months of running, I switched my attention to CrossFit.
thoughts
For a lot of you, dabbling around might bring a lot of joy. Spend a few months playing tennis. Then, move on to playing badminton. And maybe take up dance after that. As long as it is checking off whatever box you want it to check off, that's great. There's no reason to overthink it.
Central to your health is that physical activity is important. How does it matter if you get bored after the honeymoon phase? If you've moved on to something else - it checks the box.
Not everyone needs to be on the path to mastery on this fitness thing. I've seen my fair share of trainees who join for a year, make great progress, and then hit their plateau and get disillusioned. When I was younger, I would take that personally - I could not help them fall in love with fitness. Today, I am a lot less egoistic about it. This might not be right for everyone. Or they got what they needed out of it and are moving on. There's no reason to take it personally. Not everyone wants to geek out on strength and conditioning.
I think the valuable exercise here is in recognising ourselves. It is not that you are a dabbler. Instead, see in what facets you are a dabbler. And if that's an area you are not seeing the results you want - well, now you know why. Because being a dabbler over there is not good enough. But if results are not a concern and you are having fun - well, that's wonderful. Being a dabbler over there is perfect.
When I started off, I needed to be a dabbler. I needed to dabble with yoga, with running, with CrossFit. Only towards the end of CrossFit did I vaguely understand what and why I needed to strength train and took my first step towards being a student of strength. If I hadn't dabbled, I would not have discovered fun things like triathlons, like long-distance running and so many other things.
Remember, this (or most things) is not about right or wrong.
3 quotes for this week
Pick up a piece of shell. Can you look at it, wonder at its delicate beauty, without saying how pretty it is, or what animal made it? Can you look without the movement of the mind? Can you live with the feeling behind the word, without the feeling that the word builds up?
– Krishnamurti
A very long time ago, a friend of mine asked me if my mind never shuts up. While I'll never know if my mind is a bit too talkative, what I've realised is that most of us have talkative minds. A year of meditation and my head hurts less when I read Krishnamurti. Maybe in a few years, there will be inward experiencing.
Education: to discover but not merely to imitate. Learning techniques without inward experiencing can only lead to superficiality.
– Bruce Lee
Context matters, not content. Wisdom, not knowledge or information accumulation. After years of reading books, I've come to the realisation I've been doing it reasonably wrong all this time. Better late than never.
It doesn't matter if you've mastered all the productivity hacks in the world; the faster you dig, the faster the world keeps flooding. [...] The more you lose focus, the more overwhelmed you feel. The more overwhelmed you feel, the more you lose focus.
– Michael Bungay Stanier
Having a morning ritual, defining what a successful day is, learning to let go - these seem to be a lot more important than all the productivity hacks that I've learned and continue to use.
on the exploding fitness industry and all that
state of health in the country
As a country, we are terribly unhealthy. Undeniable fact. There are about 135 million people in India who are affected by obesity [1]. Abdominal obesity is amongst the leading causes of cardiovascular diseases and many other lifestyle disorders. We are the diabetes capital of the world. Not a fun title to hold.
Over the last 10 years, it has been wonderful to see the fitness industry grow in India. While gyms were still around well before that, all of them were the typical ones with tons of treadmills and machines and isolated movements. Working your chest separately, and your quadriceps separately - that's a useful method when you are injured or old or want to develop those muscles alone. For regular people, we want movement. Our body is one piece and we need to re-teach it how to move.
Slowly, as we've seen the growth of CrossFit and the like in the West, we are catching on.
Every one is built to move. Everyone needs to move.
We are built for movement. We are built to lift things, to walk and run around and play and throw and use our bodies. Think about when you were a kid - that's what your body was capable of. And it is still capable of it. Except no one told you that back then. You looked around and saw old people being old people, and thought maybe that's the way.
People need to understand that fitness can be fun, that fitness can be for everyone. We need to realise that growing old does not mean limitations and creaky joints. Fitness is not something just a muscular few do but as a species, we are built for. And while doing this bottom-up is great, millions of marketing $$$ and a celebrity can get the idea in your head quicker.
That's something Cult.fit can and is doing. And that is phenomenal for the fitness industry in India. The reason I am talking about Cult is they are well-funded and have the means and the intent to be the market leader in this.
the responsibility of spreading the word
That's something a behemoth like Cult.fit can change. By spreading the word that fitness is for everyone, they will turn a lot of people into looking at their health and fitness and physical activity as an option for them. Because fitness and physical education were not part of our culture growing up, a lot of us are yet to break out of that mindset - we play when we are kids and then play-time is over.
Having celebrity faces and voices and snazzy marketing will help the younger generation build fitness as a habit from an early age, and help older people understand that they can do something about their bodies for the better.
At the scale they are aiming to operate, it is (probably) impossible for them to promote true strength and conditioning. But that's okay! The number of methods and choices in getting physical activity are numerous - yoga, sport, running, cycling, etc. Strength training is just one amongst many. While I believe (a belief founded on results, science, and lots of giants in the field whose shoulders we stand on) that strength training should be for everyone, that will never happen. Everyone will find a method that resonates with them - just coz I am crazy about lifting kettlebells does not mean everyone needs to be.
But cult.fit will open the door. For millions and millions of people to take that first step. Maybe a few of them will stay there for longer, and maybe quite a few will move on. That's okay. Well, I guess that's easy for me to say - they are the ones spending tons of money in getting them into the door. But there's a near-endless lot of people who need that first step, that first foray into fitness. And to be interesting to people at that stage, there are obviously a lot of compromises that need to be made. Well, that's the price of scale. It is much easier for an outfit like The Quad with 1000 people to be true to our system of training and near-impossible when we are talking about 100x (or more. I have no idea about scale)
CrossFit is a global phenomenon today, which is responsible for popularising strength training and barbells. Again, there are so many compromises that it made - and if CrossFit had not done that, it would not have exploded. The impact of something like CrossFit needs to be measured in the ripples it has created.
What kinda compromises? Well, a strict focus on strength and conditioning protocols will mean a lot of precise coaching. Coaching of this quality takes time, costs money, and requires individual attention. It also means the customer is patient, and it not looking for immediate results. As an entry barrier to fitness, it doesn't work for too many people. As a scalable model, it does not work - educating trainers and ensuring they can execute that high standard of coaching is difficult. Instead,
fun and lots of movement
high intensity and cardio-ish work, even with resistance training equipment
fancy-schmancy gyms that make you feel good to come in
trainers with an athletic background and a base-level of skillset to coach the reduced syllabus of movements
And cult.fit has similar potential.
a note to boutique outfits and smaller "functional" fitness places
Cult.fit will create a large number of potential customers for you. You need to understand what they are looking for when they move on from their first step and be that solution.
While you will lose clients in the short term, you will gain in the long term. They are not your competition - they can be your feeder system. For that, you need to figure out your offering, your skillset, your stance.
There's a lot of new places that crop up that regurgitate the words like functional fitness and blah blah blah. But I am not sure they understand the principles behind it. Those will die. The ones that will survive (and again, I am not talking about scale at all) are the ones that understand the first principles of their sphere of fitness, the ones that build their own method, the ones that are willing to offer the red pill to their customers.
Hang in there. Do your own thinking.
Thanks for reading/listening. If you found any of these interesting, do share with ONE friend or family member. I truly appreciate it.
