Fitness is important.  It is not a luxury.

It is not just a way to get your sexy abs noticed.  It is the bedrock of our moods and our health.  With a good mood and good health we can move mountains together.  We want our kids to inherit a world that has the seeds of vitality woven right into the habits of day-to-day life.

Last night we were up many hours of the night with our youngest son Caius.  He has got a nasty cold and when he gets one like this his airways start to close off so Amber gave him a dose of an inhaled medicine.  It was storming all night so it took us a while to get back to sleep. It was not easy getting up this morning.  Despite this I was eager to get to my office, to turn on the computer, to write this message, and to keep going.

We are not exactly bubbly this morning.  But that doesn’t matter.  We know that every hour we spend in this office, someone else is going to suffer less, maybe a lot less.

Let’s paint a more vivid picture of what our work as Happy Human might accomplish:

• Someone’s mother is not going to get diabetes
• Someone’s grandfather is not going to fall and break a hip
• Someone, maybe you reading this, are going to live an extra 10 years (think of what you might be able to do in that time…)
• A Minnesotan will be fit enough at age 82 to take her grandson on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Bali.
• A husband is going to feel more confident, get a promotion at work, and be nicer to his family.
• An insomniac is going to feel the sweet refreshment of a full night’s sleep for the first time in years.
• A loving mother is not going to be hoodwinked by a bestselling book about how eating every other day is the way to sustained weight loss.  She won’t spend money on it.  She won’t be grumpy all the time and lose her ability to be a good mother, she won’t get the elation of quick weight loss, but she also won’t feel the crushing disappointment of it all falling to pieces in 2 years.
• Someone’s sister will be released from a depression through running and personal training.  She will go on to write a book about her passion which happens to be ending homelessness.  This book will start a movement.  And the movement will mean that someone’s best friend from high school has a home, is able to kick his drug habit, and feel hopeful about the future for the first time in his adult life.
• A teenager is going to be inspired by their mother who is now seeing a personal trainer regularly.  She is diligent about her fitness habits and the results are tangible.  The teenager gets a real lesson in how hard work pays off.

These are important things.

This is why I’m working through the occasional sleepy day.  Why I will make the decision to keep working to help people through hardship.

This is the personal “why” for our work with Happy Human.

Here is that “why” in mission statement form…

The Happy Human Mission

Help Real People
Break the Cycle of Fitness Failure
to Create Lifelong Vitality

Help Real People

The 99% of people who aren’t elite level athletes, models, or movie stars.  All the mothers, brothers, uncles, and grandmothers out there who would experience a big improvement in the quality of their lives if they got regular and well-thought-out exercise.

Break the Cycle of Fitness Fitness Failure

What is this cycle?  See if this sound familiar –

1.  Get excited about the latest fitness marketing scheme.
2.  Go gung-ho on it for a few weeks, months or, rarely, years.
3.  Experience the rebound (deconditioning, feelings of failure, self-hatred, and hopelessness)
4.  Soothe the pain of failure with another desperate ride on the fitness fad merry-go-round

We are building an approach that builds fitness right into the bedrock of daily habits of people, households and communities.  Habits that, once established, last a lifetime.  The beautiful thing about habits is that they don’t require thought, willpower, planning, or motivation.  They just happen.  Your trainer just shows up at your house, you automatically go for your walk, you put the ice cream into a smaller bowl because that’s what you’ve done the last 100 times and that is what you will do the next 100 times.  They don’t require willpower and they don’t require the boom and bust cycle that the fitness industry profits from.

To Create Lifelong Vitality

Here is the heart of the matter: feeling as excited as a kid to get up, to move, to explore and to learn even into the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.  We want to inspire a generation of the youngest octogenarians who have ever lived.  And doesn’t that sound like fun?  To be up and moving and enjoying life instead of that slow fade away in front of the television set?

Let’s do this together.

Help us to create this world.  We are starting with personal training, but who knows what’s next.  Help us create a world in which people have the energy to take on the tough problems, to create, to be a good example for their kids, to flit around the house like a 7-year-old (when that is appropriate), and to be supremely, maturely, focused and engaged (when that is appropriate).

We mean it.  Fitness is important.  Our bodies are important.

Let’s create a world of Happy Humans.

Let’s do it together.