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Dai Manuel’s Whole Life Fitness Manifesto

With this book, I hope to both educate and inspire you to develop a better understanding of fitness, one that’s based on how your body functions and feels—today, tomorrow and for the rest of your life.

FUN-ctional Fitness

Let’s stop the insanity of a vanity-based approach to fitness, and start prioritizing a function-based understanding of fitness. This, as I like to call it, is FUN-ctional fitness, with a big emphasis on the fun. This means taking an enjoyable, exciting and uplift-ing approach to health and well-being, one that’s grounded in real life, not the numbers on a scale, or the size of your pants. Foremost, it’s a lifestyle. It’s about tying our goals to a lifetime quest to be the best that we can be.

To have a sense of direction on that quest, we need to ask ourselves: How do I want to feel in 10, 20 or 40 years’ time? What quality of life do I want to have now, and when I’m older?

Be honest with yourself, and you’ll start to visualize a new path. You’ll start to see how fitness is the very thing that allows you to perform everyday functions, from sit-ting and getting up, carrying groceries from your car, lifting your child, playing with your grandchild, or putting together a piece of ikea furniture (don’t laugh, that’s actually one tough workout!). In these everyday scenarios, we’re recruiting the same muscle groups that are used in the conditioning movements I explain in Chapters 7 and 8.

So using that chair (or sitting on the toilet, for that matter) mimics a squat. Lifting your groceries from the floor to the counter, then from the counter to the cupboard, combines a deadlift, bicep curl and shoulder press all in one fluid movement. And simply getting up from a prone position is the basis of a burpee. (What’s that? Never heard of a burpee? Turn to page 92 if you can’t contain your curiosity!)

We may take these daily actions for granted, but if we don’t look after ourselves, or consider our fitness on a daily basis, our muscles and bones will deteriorate with age, and our mobility will be restricted, compromising even the simplest of movements. After all, there’s truth to the old adage: Use it or lose it. That is, losing the ability to move your body unassisted results in a serious downturn in your quality of life. Think about it: We all know the importance of investing and saving for our future financial security, but what daily investments do we make in our health?

A man’s health can be judged by which he takes two at a time—pills or stairs.”

—Joan Welsh

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