What is Holistic Fitness, Health & Wellness — & Why is it so Important?
Welcome, welcome, welcome to my FIRST blog post! I’ve always been a story teller (I even already have a podcast with this topic as the first episode for those who prefer listening to reading!) so you’ll find my writing & podcasting — while educational — also tends to be more casual. I’m just trying to talk to you like we’re already friends, you know? Because I hope we will be someday!
BUT… Onto today’s topic: Holistic fitness health & wellness. You may be thinking to yourself, “Ryan… Why do you have to say all three words? Can’t you just say wellness & let that cover everything? & ‘Holistic’ sounds woo-woo as helllll, I mean I’m not... so... sure about that.” Well, the answer is YES. Using all three words is important, & ‘holistic’ is absolutely not woo-woo by any means. Let me break them down one by one for you:
1 — Fitness
Fitness is an organism’s ability to survive in a certain environment. Now, if you read closely, that definition didn’t mention anything about whether or not an organism is healthy. It just describes an ability to survive in general.
2 — Health
So, if you tack health onto that, it can take you down a couple of different avenues. You can view it as free from injury or illness or you can view it more generally as the overall condition of someone’s mentality & physicality.
So now, we have someone with a healthy mental &/or physical fitness level. But how did they get there? They kept up with their…
3 — Wellness
Wellness is the act of practicing healthy habits on a daily basis to attain better mental & physical fitness so that instead of just surviving… You’re thriving! But one can’t thrive on mental health alone, or physical health alone. That’s where adding the word holistic comes into play. Holistic describes the belief that all parts of the whole are interconnected.
So when you hear me say ‘holistic fitness, health & wellness,’ I’m referring to incorporating not just weightlifting or just therapy or just good nutritional habits into your daily or weekly routines, but all of them together & more to be able to survive AND thrive in the most complete way possible. & All of these things have connections to each other in some way as well.
A good example of how your mental & physical health are connected, for example, is actually my own story, but I’m sure a lot of you out there have gone through something similar. If you live with depression or have ever gone through a tough period in life like I have, then you know it can effect your nutritional habits in a pretty big way. You might eat way more & eat foods that aren’t the best for you, or you may not eat nearly as much, if at all. Both of those things can have an effect on your sleep cycle, which can, in turn, have an effect your physical health. Eating habits & sleep trouble both can have an effect on your physical health, lowering your immune system, bringing on nausea, headaches, being too weak or tired to work out… The list goes on, & that’s just one example of holistic fitness, health & wellness.
Let’s try another!
This time just focused on your physical body.
I tell my clients all the time: Even though working out is, obviously, healthier for you than not working out at all, focusing too much on a certain style of workouts can actually negatively effect how good of shape you’re in. Let’s say you looove weightlifting, but you don’t really do much cardio or stretching & then a friend asks you to help them move. Sure, you can carry their heavy boxes all day, but because you’re not taking the time to work your heart & lungs out by doing cardio exercises, you get insanely winded going up & down the three flights of stairs they didn’t tell you about ahead of time & end up slowing everyone down in the end.
Or maybe your cardio health is fine! But because you aren’t making time to stretch after your workouts or at least do some light weekly yoga, your muscles have contracted & shortened so much that they can’t lengthen how you need them to in order to squat down & lift a heavy box. So you pull a hamstring, hip or low back muscle & then you can’t even do the lifting that you love so much for a little while, right?
These are just a couple of small examples of why going about your fitness, health & wellness goals holistically is a better idea than just focusing on one or two things you may like or for some reason find more important than the others. & Starting to implement a holistic approach now can give you a better chance of avoiding illnesses & especially injuries as you get older. If you think about it, if you want to try to be as independent as you can into your 70’s & 80’s for as long as you can, you’re going to need that balance. You can’t just be mobile enough to get down the stairs, you need to be strong enough & have a healthy enough heart to get you back up the stairs, you know?
Now we’re at a point where you may be asking yourself, “Okay, but now it feels like I have sooooo much to do. It-it’s overwhelming! How am I supposed to be able to do all of this??”
The answer is so simple:
You don’t have to! Not all at once, anyway. I mean, some of you out there might be the type of person who can tackle everything all at once & be totally fine, & if that’s you then go forth & be a rockstar! That’s freakin’ amazing because I think it’s safe to say that the majority of people try to throw a ton on their plate all at one time, we end up getting sick, hurting ourselves or burning out pretty quickly.
If the latter sounds more like you, then all you have to do is what’s called habit stacking. It’s where you implement new habits a little at a time. In fact, just start with one at a time! Choose something, whether it’s focusing on a more healthy water intake or adding some kind of journaling or other introspective mental health tool to your routine, build that habit first, see if you can stick with it for a month & if you can then start another new habit! Or maybe it’ll take longer than a month… it did for me.
I started buy focusing on introspection. I just focused on myself for a couple of years & figure out who I am outside of anyone else’s influence. Then I added a yoga practice, which involves a lot of mental work but also brings in physical movement. Then, I started therapy. Then supplement knowledge due to poor nutritional habits. Then weight-based workouts & then finally started working on the one I knew would be the hardest for me: my nutrition. All in all, I’ve been on my journey for about seven years now. So… yeah. If you think it might be hard work & might take a while for you to be more holistically healthy, it absolutely is & it absolutely will.
But any diet or workout that says it’s easy or you’ll see major results in a short timeframe (& by short I mean a year or less) is probably not something you’re going to be able to maintain for a long time because it’s probably drastic or not very healthy in reality. Taking things one step at a time is what will help you build truly healthy habits in a sustainable way so that it becomes — not easy, but easier to carry them with you as you go into your future :)