Fitness is...agency.

A well-known CrossFitter and affiliate owner, Blair Morrison, has published a series of articles in the CrossFit Journal over the past several months reflecting on the nature of fitness, going beyond the measured and empirical definition posited years ago by Greg Glassman and offering up some thoughts on the more subjective—though often no less striking—rubrics of fitness; things like character, potential, defense, and identity. Anyone who’s ever committed themselves to the trials of a CrossFit workout would no doubt attest that these other elements—though more averse to measurement—are all, in some manner, tangled up with intensity—the elixir of human movement.

As of yet, there are several standards unmentioned by Morrison that I believe to be noteworthy. Foremost among these is agency. Fitness is agency. Fitness is possession of the means to an end, the ability to act from a position of power, and although the various “ends” we humans now seek in the 21^st century are no different than what we’ve been seeking for millions of years—food, water, shelter, community, and purpose—our means are quite different.

“Hunt” and “gather,” for most of us, have become little more than references to our past rather than active verbs that characterize our living. Plenty of other verbs intrinsic to non-domesticated lives—jumping, throwing, sprinting, swimming, wrestling—are more and more absent from day-to-day activities, relegated instead to the realms of sport.  Even our most coveted and necessary of actions—sex—is being sidelined more often. As a population, our fitness is in need of careful attention and rehabilitation, either that or Viagra, depending who you ask.

What can in one light be construed as a health crisis might, in a different light, be considered signs of our success. Grocery stores on every corner, a continuous supply of water and electricity in every home, an elaborate network of roads and highways, access to the entire span of human knowledge at the push of buttons, motorized transit for every person. Indeed, our cleverness and ingenuity as a species has allowed us—more so than any other time in history--to hold the traumatic volatility of the natural world at arms length.

Moreover, our path toward more abundance and security with less effort has been exponential, and rather than abandon these advances and adopt stone-age existences for the sake of our health, why not simply reinvent our relationship to technology? If technology is merely a crutch, a way to circumvent our own exertion, well then there’s nothing intrinsically unhealthy in that. What’s unhealthy is living as though the crutch is your leg. What’s unhealthy is replacing fitness—your own means—with tools. Those who don’t find ways to exert themselves amidst our sea of luxurious living will surely be a weaker, frailer bunch than those that do.

Of course, this is why CrossFit is taking the industrialized world by storm. It provides a systematic, progressive, and holistic regimen of exertion than can span the course of a lifetime. From an evolutionary perspective, CrossFit is the antidote to the indulgences born of our technological success. CrossFit provides the stimuli that our sheltered living no longer does, at least not often enough (for many of us anyway), and when an individual continually subjects himself to such stimuli, he achieves an amazing thing: fitness. He achieves agency. He achieves the means to act from a position of power rather than reliance.