Aristotle, Glassman, and the Definition of Fitness
Last week I spoke at the Cincinnati Classical Academy on the role of the body in education. Many thanks to Headmaster Rose and his PE faculty for the invitation and hospitality.
I have written here in “Adam’s Curse” previously about our culture’s attitude toward the body. I mentioned Cyborg Theory and the cascade of pathogenic abstractions from academia in a previous article; and my essay, In the Gymnasium of Life, addresses the marginalization of the body both in and out of school. Additionally, my work at Iliad Athletics takes physical fitness as a chief area of educational focus.
But since this was a talk for a classical school, and since Aristotle is more at home in classical schools than in others, I thought it appropriate to call on The Philosopher to help make the case for true fitness
Aristotle’s definition of a virtue as the mean or balance between two vices is well known. Less well known, or at least less discussed among the sedentary corps of Aristotle enthusiasts in academia, is his application of the same principle to physical fitness. In the Ethics he describes the pentathlete as the most beautiful of the athletes because he suffers from none of the defects of specialization. Just as fortitude is a virtue that strikes a balance between cowardice and rashness, the pentathlete is the most beautiful and fit because he strikes a balance between strength and endurance.
“Beauty varies with each age. In a young man, it consists in possessing a body capable of enduring all efforts, either of the racecourse or of bodily strength, while he himself is pleasant to look upon and a sheer delight. This is why the athletes in the pentathlon are most beautiful, because they are naturally adapted for bodily exertion and for swiftness of foot.”
-Aristotle
A pentathlon, by the way, consisted of the long jump, javelin, discus, a 200m sprint called a stadion, and wrestling. As you can see, Aristotle’s ideal athlete is neither the body builder in an air-conditioned gym who lacks full range of motion and basic endurance, but nor is he the 90lb weakling who can run all day but not fight bad guys when he arrives to wherever he’s been running. Aristotle’s ideal of fitness is the same as his ideal of character: it’s the well rounded, the functional, the balanced between opposed extremes that is ideal and therefore most beautiful.
This collision of the good and the beautiful is captured in the Greek work kalokagathia. A combination of the words kalos, meaning “beautiful,” and agathos, meaning “good,” kalokagathia conveys an ideal of harmony between interior and exterior.
So how should we train? Believe it or not, Aristotle’s definition of ideal fitness is pointing in the right direction.
If you are familiar with the work of Greg Glassman you’re likely to know that he founded the wildly popular and successful Crossfit. What is his approach?
Glassman proceeds from a water-tight definition of fitness to a method of training that produces fitness. His essay defining fitness in the early 2000s is decisive and a must read for anyone who exercises…and if you have a body, you should consider exercising. Here are a few key excerpts from his essay that should remind you of Aristotle’s line of reasoning.
“The general public both in opinion and in media holds endurance athletes as exemplars of fitness. We do not….The essence of [our] model is the view that fitness is about performing well at any and every task imaginable…..Our fitness, being “CrossFit,” comes through molding men and women that are equal parts gymnast, Olympic weightlifter and multi-modal sprinter or “sprintathlete”….
The implication here is that fitness requires an ability to perform well at all tasks, even unfamiliar tasks and tasks combined in infinitely varying combinations. In practice this encourages the athlete to disinvest in any set notions of sets, rest periods, reps, exercises, order of exercises, routines, periodization, etc. Nature frequently provides largely unforeseeable challenges; train for that by striving to keep the training stimulus broad and constantly varied.
-Greg Glassman
Glassman started with a definition of fitness and built a training program that pursued it. Sounds logical right? Yes, it is. And for the Aristotle fans, the Glassman approach shares Aristotle’s emphasis on the multi-functional, the kalokagathon, if you will.
Despite his common sense approach (figure out what something actually is then figure out how to achieve it) sadly, the opposite approach is more common. Given how sedentary contemporary life can be, I’m reluctant to find fault with the various good-faith approaches to fitness that motivate folks to live in and care for their bodies. But on the other hand, the tendency of the health and fitness industry to proliferate dubious fads seems unhelpful at best and more likely disingenuous.
An example I’m particularly familiar with from my time in the military is the penchant for junior (or senior) officers who like to run (usually because they are good at it but occasionally because they cannot think of anything else to do) to define “being fit” as the ability to run. Quick tip for anyone in that position—all the troops who are obeying you, but can kick your ass in a fight or carry an M2 while you carry an M4, don’t buy your implicit definition of fitness anyway. They are merely tolerating you because of the UCMJ. In my experience, the best parts of the military deploy Glassman’s principles in their training.
Another point: Aristotle is one of the great philosophers of nature, and his definition of ideal fitness is drawn from his understanding of human beings as possessed of a nature with certain capacities, limitations, and natural objects. Health, for example, is one of the natural objects of exercise. Because we all have bodies and are good Aristotelians, we know that health is a good pursued for its own sake. Here is Glassman on fitness and its relation to health:
“Done right, fitness provides a great margin of protection against the ravages of time and disease. Where you find otherwise, examine the fitness protocol, especially diet. Fitness is and should be “super-wellness.” Sickness, wellness and fitness are measures of the same entity.”
In our age of endemic illness why should we willingly abandon the natural balance our bodies are designed to achieve? Just as the virtuous character chooses fortitude as the balance between cowardice and rashness, so we should pursue fitness as the balance between general physical ineffectiveness and excessive physical specialization. I’ll close with another quote from the Ethics but not before suggesting that Glassman is our best contemporary guide to pursuing true fitness.
“For both excessive and insufficient exercise destroy one's strength, and both eating and drinking too much or too little destroy health, whereas the right quantity produces, increases and preserves it. So it is the same with temperance, courage and the other virtues. This much then, is clear: in all our conduct it is the mean that is to be commended.”
-Aristotle