Smart Steps to Better Health & Fitness

A review of Steve Pavlina's Personal Development for Smart People

[This is the first post in a series that will unfold as I work through Steve Pavlina's new book.]

With the opening lines of the Introduction, I decided this book had potential.  It starts with a quotation from Buckminster Fuller.  Why is this significant?  Fuller is the “father of tensegrity.”  And tensegrity is a major paradigm shift that changed the way we think about structures from the largest dome right down to the single celled organism.  And its progeny, biotensegrity, is helping bust the myths of current conventional thoughts on health and fitness.  Perhaps Personal Development for Smart People will hold more paradigm shifting potential than all the shelves of self-help drivel we have all grown tired of.

So far, this book seems to put significant emphasis on separating the wheat from the chaff.  In our world of ubiquitous access to information, this is becoming ever more relevant.  The world of health and fitness is overrun by experts with conflicting opinions, each of them with something to sell (disclaimer - I don’t exclude myself from this assertion).  So where do we look for help, Pavlina seems to suggest in his introduction that the Truth lies in the common threads.

I capitalize Truth because I am of the opinion that it is the source of all “right decisions.”  There may be many truths, each of them in their own context, but Truth is universal and unbending.  I have a friend who is fond of stating, “it’s just physics.”  He applies it to more than just matters of physics, and instead uses it to signify that something is just a simple matter of universal laws, of simple cause and effect according to those laws.  I have always liked his assertions, because I instinctively feel that the idea of universality goes way beyond science and directly binds the consequences of human actions and decisions.  Pavlina adopts the power of universally applicable laws, what he calls Core Principles, as the nucleus of his approach to human growth.

He has distilled the laws of human cause and effect down to a set of primary and secondary principles.  And indeed Truth takes the number one spot on his list, joining love and power as Core Principles.  His Secondary Principles include oneness, authority, courage and intelligence.  As I go through the book, it will be interesting to see how these principles are applied and what they may mean on our journey to better our health and fitness while shedding the misconceptions of conventional thoughts in the industry.

As I think on the message gleaned from the Introduction, I’m struck by the depth of implication for health and wellness.  Consider a simple statement like, “you need a strong core.”  On the surface, this would seem like a universally true statement with respect to good health and functional fitness.  But on deeper inspection, it is contextual.  What about a wheelchair athlete who is paralyzed from the thoracic region down?  Yes, this is an extreme example, but it does give the lie to the universality of the statement.  However, we can dig down and find Truth in health and fitness.  One of the best examples of a blanket Truth regarding wellness comes from my coach, Scott Sonnon.  It is from him that I learned that “We are always training.”  Everything we do repeatedly will cause adaptation, whether we like that adaptation or not.  This runs the gamut from lifting weights, all the way to how we sit at our desk for hours each day.  This is true for everyone, in every time, everywhere, which is one of Pavlina’s requirements in defining universality.

Chapter One goes on to cover Truth, the books first Core Principle, in-depth.  While reading it, I was struck with the applicability to what I do with my clients, and what I hear from them, on a daily basis.  I’ll explore that chapter in a future post and, in the meantime, I remain intrigued by what lessons remain waiting in the pages to come.  I hope that the momentum continues to build.