Pillar 03: Fitness

There are two dominant stories about fitness, and both of them miss the point.

The first is the performance narrative. Transformation photos. No days off. The gym as a shrine and the body as the project. This world is full of discipline, and I respect that. But when you strip it down, the motivation is often the same: I want to look a certain way. That can carry you for a while, but it is a fragile foundation. Aesthetic goals shift as you age. Motivation fades when life gets complicated. And if you are honest, there is a vanity thread woven through it that most people will not name out loud.

The second story is quiet resignation. "I know I should work out, but..." Fill in the blank (too busy, too tired, do not know where to start, etc.). The people in this camp are not lazy across the board. Most of them are disciplined in other areas of their life. But fitness has drifted to the bottom of the list because nothing is forcing it to be a higher priority. The consequences of skipping a workout do not show up today. They show up in five years, when your energy is gone and your body can no longer support the life you are trying to live.

Here is what both groups have in common: both have people in them that don’t connect fitness to anything bigger than themselves.

And that’s a problem. Because when your reason for working out begins and ends with you, the foundation is thinner than you think.

Your Body Is a Tool, Not a Trophy

Your body is the vehicle through which you show up for everything that matters: marriage, kids, work, community, faith. When it breaks down or gets neglected, the effects touch every other area of your life. 

A framework to help you think through this is through the lens of stewardship. Your body has been entrusted to you. Not as a trophy to polish or as an afterthought to ignore, but as an instrument to maintain and deploy for something beyond yourself.

This concept is not something our culture invented. Stewardship runs through the entire biblical narrative, from the garden of Eden to Paul's letters. Everything that has been given to you is meant to be cared for and put to use, and your physical body is no exception.

When you start to see fitness through this lens, it stops being optional, it stops being about vanity, and it becomes one of the most practical ways you can impact your life.

This Is Not Just Philosophy

The research on exercise and long-term health outcomes is not ambiguous. It is overwhelming.

A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that adults who maintained consistent physical activity throughout their lives had a 30 to 40 percent lower risk of dying from any cause compared to those who were sedentary. 

A 2024 network meta-analysis published in The BMJ, reviewing 218 randomized controlled trials and over 14,000 participants, found that exercise produced moderate to large reductions in depression across multiple types of movement: walking, jogging, yoga, and strength training all showed significant effects. The benefits were proportional to intensity, but even light activity like walking produced clinically meaningful improvements.

A 2023 overview of systematic reviews, also in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that physical activity had medium-sized effects on both depression and anxiety symptoms compared with usual care, spanning 97 reviews, over a thousand trials, and more than 128,000 participants.

And the 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee Scientific Report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, synthesized the full body of evidence and concluded that regular physical activity reduces the risk of multiple types of cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and dementia. It improves sleep, cognitive function, bone health, and quality of life.

The data is clear: people who exercise consistently get sick less often, live longer, think more clearly, sleep better, and are significantly less prone to depression and anxiety. This is not a wellness trend, it is one of the most well-documented findings in all of health science.

And when you read those findings through the lens of stewardship, the implications are hard to ignore. You are not just exercising for yourself. You are building the physical capacity to show up well for the people and purposes that depend on you.

The Honest Mirror

If you have drifted, you already know. You do not need another program or another app. You need a reason that is bigger than "I should."

Instead of asking yourself "What do I want to look like?" ask "What does my body need to be able to do in order to support the life I am trying to live?" The first question leads to cycles of motivation and guilt. The second leads to sustainable movement.

You do not need to start training for a marathon right out of the gate. A 20-minute walk is stewardship if you know why you're doing it. Start there. Start small if you need to. But start.

But here is a harder question, and one that lots of fitness content never asks: What about the person who is already consistent?

I have been working out consistently for over 25 years, going back to my time in the military. People see my discipline and assume it is easy or that I am "just wired that way." I get comments like, "You're always so in shape" or "It's easy for you because you're naturally skinny,"  but the reality is that I work out about five times a week (and have done so for the better part of the last 20 plus years). It is not extreme, but it is consistent, and consistency over time compounds.

That said, consistency does not automatically mean the motivation is right. There have been seasons where vanity crept in more than I would like to admit, and seasons where the "looking good" piece got more weight than it deserved. Seasons where working out became less about stewardship and more about self. This is the kind of subtle drift that even I didn’t examine thoughtfully because the habit itself looked healthy from the outside.

I still want a functional body that looks good. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But there is a difference between a body that is maintained for capacity and one that is maintained for the mirror. The first is grounded. The second is fragile. And the line between them is thinner than you or I think.

So the question is not just whether you are working out. It is why you are working out. 

Is it serving the life you are building, or has it become its own thing, disconnected from everything else? 

Can you honestly say that your fitness supports the other areas of your life? 

Has fitness quietly become the one pillar you over-invest in because it is the one you are good at?

Whether you have not worked out in months or you have not been consistent for years, the question is the same: What is your body being used to build?

Your body is a tool. Not a trophy, not an afterthought. A tool. And the best tools are the ones that get maintained, sharpened, and put to work for something that matters.

Fitness drift is one of the easiest patterns to recognize and one of the hardest to reverse once it compounds. But it also works the other way. Intentionality in our fitness changes our trajectory. Not just because it transforms how you or I look (although that does happen), but because it expands what you and I are able to give.