Ask Yourself These Questions Before Setting Fitness Goals
Patrick Mahomes' trainer says fitness is so much more than physical strength
“What’s the point of getting shredded at CrossFit if you have two shoulder replacements, a back injury that puts you on the shelf for four-and-a-half months, and you get divorced?” - Bobby Stroupe
Photo credit: Heather Smith (above),
The only BS in Bobby Stroupe are his initials.
Anyone who has ever spoken with Bobby is struck by two things: this man knows his stuff and he is not afraid to say exactly what needs to be said.
Bobby is the owner and found of ATHLETE Performance Enhancement Center (APEC) which he started in Tyler, TX in 2005 and subsequently opened a location in Fort Worth. He and his family are currently moving to Kansas City. That might seem like an odd choice until you learn that his most famous client is an athlete he’s been training since he was a kid: Patrick Mahomes.
So Bobby had to be the first Trial & Expert that I spoke with because so much of what I’ll be trying for Trial & Error has to do with fitness and health. I needed to get my mind right before I started trying to tackle any challenges. Yet somehow my conversation with Bobby shattered my worldview and left me picking up the pieces and putting them back together again in a much more positive way than I ever expected.
Bobby’s second most famous athlete: Me.
Trevor Story, Quinn Ewers (pictured above), Jalen Hurts, Sam Ehlinger, and more than 20,000 other athletes that APEC has trained may beg to differ. They’re entitled to their wrong opinion.
My baseball coach took me to see Bobby when I was a sophomore in high school and said, essentially, “This is the slowest kid I’ve ever seen. I know you’re not a miracle worker but you’re the best chance I’ve got. Can you at least make him a below average athlete?”
And Bobby gave it his best shot. I got a little faster, in a little better shape, and felt stronger. But more than that I learned for the first time in my life how to actually warm up, how to actually work out, how to push myself, and how I would never, ever be a good athlete no matter how hard I tried. But the best part about Bobby is that he didn’t care one ounce if I would ever be a professional athlete. He just wanted me to be the best version of myself.
So, 15 years later I called Bobby and explained my fitness goals and I asked him what I should do. Essentially I said I wanted to lose about 15 pounds of fat and put on about 10 pounds of muscle. I was hoping he’d say something like “squats” or “work out five minutes per week.” Instead, he started in a totally different place.
“Why do you want that? What’s going to change in your life?”
I started fumbling over my words. I thought I was going to get some tips on workouts, not re-evaluate my life. I said I wanted to be stronger so I could do daily activities easier, be in less pain, and have more energy.
“You start there. Now you need to build a program where someone feels and is strong. You need to prove objective measures. You need to round out that process.”
Essentially, like Simon Sinek says for leaders, start with the “Why.” Don’t start with the physical goals and do whatever you can to get there. Start with what your overall goals are, start with what you want out of your life, and think through what you’re willing to do to get to these goals. Fitness, according to Bobby, is not just increasing your deadlift numbers. Fitness is all-encompassing: mental, physical, and aesthetic health, and, most importantly, vitality. Vitality is a word he focuses on a ton. Can you live the life you want or did you push yourself so hard to achieve a fitness goal that you ruined your joints, lost all your free time, and harmed your personal relationships?
Or, in Bobby’s no-BS words, “I could get you to put on 10 pounds of muscle and take off about 18 pounds of fat and get stronger. But what if it’s at the expense of personal time, or social awkwardness when you go out to eat, or some type of divide between you and whoever you have a relationship with because all of the sudden you can’t eat sweets on Saturday? These things matter and they are not being identified as markers of fitness.”
Bobby mentioned personal relationships a lot in our conversation. He’s been around fitness and gym culture his entire life, he knows how important community and friendships are to getting people in the gym. He fosters a tight community at his APEC locations, but he also knows the pitfalls that a lot of gym-goers fall into. In fact, as you saw in the quote at the top, he thinks the biggest mistake many make is valuing the communal aspect over actually doing things that work. Sometimes that communal aspect pushes you to do workouts that push the boundaries of safety and sometimes that community pushes your personal boundaries well beyond anything you ever intended.
I personally know four different people who’ve had affairs with people they grew close with at the gym. That quote at the top isn’t just a shot at CrossFit, which is often a target of Bobby’s because of the methods that are taught in many CF workouts. I am not getting into that here. What I am getting into is this: No one who started throwing themselves headlong into CF, or any other intense workout that sucked up hours of each day, thought “I’m going to start spending hours of my day in a place with other fit people not wearing many clothes, develop close personal bonds with them, and cheat on my wife/husband.”
Nope, every person jumped into it with a desire to get stronger, get in shape, build muscles, increase mobility, etc. But they didn’t think through the consequences of each decision. How often do we find ourselves in these kinds of situations in life? That job that sounded so promising took up so much of your time that you didn’t see your kids grow up. That fun hobby became such an obsession that you spent thousands of dollars feeding it with no reward on the other end. Had you foreseen these issues at the beginning you would have never started.
That’s what Bobby is stressing, think through it all before you embark on any kind of fitness journey. Write down all your goals, write down your reasons for those goals, then find the right people and place to help you achieve them.
Bobby sums it up with this question, which is the crux of this entire post:
What do you want with your life? And then back that into your exercise.
For me, I don’t want to spend countless hours in a gym, I don’t have a desire to be on a magazine cover, or even to run a 5K. I want to hike with my wife and not get super tired, I want to not be the most out-of-shape person on my indoor soccer team, and I want to feel healthy. There are ways to accomplish all these goals at my local family-oriented rec center, I don’t need to find an intense gym or CrossFit place for this.
“If you want to get divorced then identify a gym where people don’t wear many clothes and go there. If you want to stay married and you want to be able to hike, then find a place where families can work out and people can help you with your vitality goals.”
Physical health is only part of the equation. If you don’t have everything else squared away your squat personal records mean nothing. To achieve any goal in life requires sacrifice, just make sure that what you’re sacrificing is worth the achievement.
Listen, I really want to lose 10 pounds and I’ve made some sacrifices to get there. I’ve been considering some other sacrifices too, but after speaking with Bobby I have re-evaluated why I want to lose the weight. Will that make me a better husband or a better dad or a better writer? Probably not.
So if I never lose those pounds but my relationship with my wife and son grows strong and I am an overall healthy person, that’s great. I wasn’t trying to be on the cover of Men’s Health anyway (unless they’re considering me, in which case I need to do some crunches). Instead of looking for extreme measures to achieve an arbitrary physical fitness goal, now I’m trying to focus on being the best person I can be. Bobby will be the first to tell you that physical fitness plays a part in that, but that’s far from the most important thing.
How many professional trainers will actually tell you that? Like I said, Bobby isn’t here for the BS.
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