You can make fitness optional — or you can make it a non negotiable. No choice is better or worse. But the choice is yours.

When life is busy or chaotic or hectic or just doesn’t seem like “a good time” you can make fitness optional or a non negotiable.

Here’s the thing — fitness is always optional. We’re all grown adults with autonomy. We can choose how we want to spend our days and times and lives. And what “fitness” in this equation looks like will look different for many of us.

But many of us DO have big or specific or general health / fitness goals that require showing up.

Or not. That choice is ours.

But when we move from making fitness optional to a non negotiable — busy weeks or days or seasons start to look less like “I fell off the wagon and didn’t workout for months because I couldn’t show up 100%” 👉🏻 to “I’m doing what I can however I can whenever I can. But I will get my workouts in, even if they’re not 100%”.

I’ll let you take a guess which one gets more long term progress. Moves that needle forward. Allows us to practice non black and white approaches to our health or training. Allows us to show up with grace. And most of all — allows us to show ourselves we keep promises to ourself.

This isn’t meant to shame if you take weeks or months off training. That is okay. And you can always come back to it. Rather, for the many that want “results” or “outcomes” moving from the fitness is optional when “life is ideal” mindset to “life is never going to be ideal but my body needs to move for my health or X goal”.

Most of the people you compare yourself or life or fitness routines to that are just normal people like you do so much boring non-sexy stuff to “make it happen”. They show up in their PJs, wake up early, train through lunch, adjust their schedules or reduce + modify to make things possible.

But they brave the storm of this messy life and view movement as a non negotiable. What that looks like in practice Varies. But they’re still there.

At the end of the day if you want to take time off — you can! And that is okay too. But we have to be okay with the outcome off that too. I’ve faced this as well.

But it’s always a choice.🤍