Believe it or not, there are days when I would rather stare unblinkingly at a featureless wall than write one of these emails.
Today is one of those days.
And yet, here I am penning my usual missive to you.
Why?
The short answer is because the discipline I’ve cultivated through training transcends the mundane acts of lifting weights, running, and whatnot.
The longer and more interesting answer lies in Aristotelian ethics, specifically in the concept of “eudaimonia” which roughly translates to living a “flourishing life”.
I shall explain:
Aristotle believed that everything possesses a unique function distinguishing it from all other things. Hence, virtue can be measured by how well the object or being in question fulfills its special purpose.
Man’s unique function is his ability to reason. So his key to the flourishing life is to develop and use this faculty through the pursuit of rationally beneficial (i.e. self-evidently virtuous) actions.
More:
Physical fitness – which Aristotle wrote at length on – is the foundation stone upon which human eudaimonia stands.
Why?
At the most basic level, getting strong and in shape requires two things:
1) Good habits, and,
2) Patience.
Both involve exercising the will (reason).
The former in getting up early, going to bed on time, eating more of what you know you should and less of what you know you shouldn’t, finding a solid exercise programme to follow then executing with intent. The latter in understanding results come slowly when not spurred by steroids and other harmful substances and not quitting when things don’t go your way.
Do this for long enough and it’s basically impossible for it not to have a knock-on effect on other aspects of your life. Work, relationships, personal projects, and so on, all begin to “flourish” as a byproduct of the virtue you’ve won through hard graft in the gym and on the pavement.
Why is this?
Simply, every effective training regime, even those as minimalistic as I tend to prescribe, forces you to make adjustments in all aspects of your life.
For example, it’s axiomatic that ever improving performance in the weightroom will catalyse a desire to eat better and sort your sleep out, if only to make the sacrifice of dragging yourself to the gym when you really don’t want to worthwhile.
Then when you see the results from that, you start thinking about the kind of results you can get by doing beneficial things you don’t particularly want to do.
And that is why I am sitting at my desk rather under the weather writing this email to perhaps inspire someone to become a client by subscribing to my old-fashioned real paper newsletter called “The Phil Tyreman Letter”.
More on that here:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/information/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman