Fitness Isn't A Hobby For Me Anymore
Takeaway Points:
As a beginner, fitness was a hobby for me - as an expert with 17 years of experience, it’s something I’ve actively lost interest in thinking too much about.
To a certain extent, the same thing has happened to my career in fitness, now reaching 11 years of experience.
With enough experience, any hobby or career just becomes an automatic practice, and it becomes more and more natural to follow through.
When I started out lifting, I would definitely have called it a hobby. After years of hanging out in the gym and slowly getting more experienced and knowledgeable, I got more enthusiastic, and would have probably called it my primary hobby for a very long period of time. Then, there was a long period where it was both my primary hobby, and my career.
Now, I wouldn’t even really call it a hobby at all.
So what changed?
The dividends paid off
A while back, I wrote about how fitness becomes more natural over time. This is because it’s a skill like any other - it’s difficult at first, but as you get more experience, it slowly gets to a point where it becomes easier and easier.
In that post, I compared it to investing - early on, you invest a lot of money over time with little to no return, but in the long run this careful investing and long term thinking starts to pay off. Things get easier and easier to maintain, there’s a larger margin for error, and you find it easier and easier to maintain a habit.
So what happened in my case?
Well, those long term investments paid off. I’ve been lifting now since around 2006, which at the time of writing (2023) has put me up to about 17 years straight of lifting. During that time, I’ve never taken more than a month at a time off of training, and even in those cases only because of serious illness or injury. Aside from three specific instances where I had to take about a month off, and the occasional week off from holidays/travel/etc. here and there, I’ve been training nonstop for 17 years, which at the time of writing is also more than half of my life.
During that time, lifting has become so natural to me that it’s like second nature. I’ve trial-and-errored my way into an ideal training program and diet structure, and I don’t ever really need to think about it much at all. I don’t worry about things, I don’t spend a lot of time managing my own training or diet - I just show up at the gym, spend about 5hrs/week training, track my macros, and continue to smash my goals month after month and year after year. If I didn’t go to the gym, I don’t know what I’d do, because that activity is just a fundamental part of my normal routine and identity.
There were certainly times that it was A Serious Hobby. There were times where I would spend endless hours in the gym and many more hours managing my training: studying everything related to diet and exercise science that I could get my hands on, trying out new styles of training, thinking about training when I wasn’t training, trying every little trick I could to get a little bit better.
More recently, I was forced to reassess my training and pull back significantly on my training volume. In 2020-early 2022, I definitely fell into the trap of over-exercising, letting it take over my life, in part because I was adjusting to a new training style (mostly bodyweight, at-home training). Correcting for that in early 2022, I pulled back significantly on my training volume (going from about 25+hrs/week of training to about 5hrs/week), and since then have reached a nice little equilibrium. I train 3x/week, I see amazing results, and I move on with focusing on other things in my life.
Mentally, this uncoupling from a maximalist approach and embracing a minimalist approach has had an unexpected side effect - I don’t even really think of lifting as a hobby anymore. It’s just a part of my routine, a thing I do - it’s a natural part of me, but not something that I focus my time or energy on, because I don’t need to do that to keep achieving my fitness-related goals. I don’t think about it because there’s very little to think about - I just train, I get the results I want, and I go.
Fitness as a career
The same thing applies, to a certain extent, to my career as a personal trainer and coach as well, starting in 2012.
Similarly, when I was a newer coach, I was constantly worried that I wasn’t very good. I spent a lot of time trying to learn new methods of training and new fixes for potential problems clients might encounter. It felt like a terrible blow whenever a client had a problem that I didn’t know how to fix, especially if it resulted in the loss of a client. Every mistake I made, I learned from and spent endless time improving and perfecting my processes.
But at some point, the scales started to tip as well, probably much more recently than my training. It became natural to work with clients, and I started having easy answers to pretty much all their questions. When I didn’t know the answers off the top of my head, I knew exactly where to find them so I could get back to the client quickly. As a result, I don’t really make mistakes anymore, and most of my clients stick with me for a long period of time, usually only canceling due to financial issues, hitting their goals and graduating out of the need for coaching, or ultimately discovering that online coaching isn’t a good fit for their needs.
Most of this shift happened sometime around 2020, when I put a huge focus on streamlining, improving, and automating my work processes, and this also had the huge benefit of significantly reducing the amount of time I need to spend working each week.
And of course, there’s also the fact that for a while, I put my coaching business on the backburner while I started a whole new career working in video games, and since 2018 I’ve been doing it part time.
But the end result? It doesn’t really feel much like I’m “doing fitness” as a career anymore. It feels like a job where I have to write, edit, run a blog, craft social posts, make YouTube videos, edit them, have calls with clients, write programs and send emails - but it’s not really “fitness as a job”, it’s just all those other things.
I won at fitness
To a certain extent, this is all pretty good stuff. This is a sign that I “won” in a sense - I’ve achieved a perfect balance. I’m able to see consistent progress and achieve my goals without thinking much about it, and without spending much time in the gym. I’m able to minimize the amount of mental headspace that fitness takes up outside of the gym, so that I can focus on work and the other things that matter to me.
But at the same time, it does feel like I’ve lost a bit of the passion. I don’t have the excitability or energy for training that I might have once had. I look back on training programs I used to follow, and I can’t imagine a world where I have the energy or enthusiasm to try something like that again (even if it would be a useful program, which in many cases, it wouldn’t - a lot of my past programs were way too hard on purpose, because I just didn’t know what I was doing or how to get results). I find it a bit hard at times to think about fitness all day, on purpose, to come up with topic content.
Still - I love this job, I love fitness, I love what I do, I wouldn’t really trade it for anything.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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