Hi listeners and welcome back to another episode of Get Fit Guy. If you're joining us for the first time, then welcome. Regular listeners will know that I'm more concerned with health and wellness than I am with aesthetics and high performance, being that fitness is defined as the absence of disease in an organism.

But fitness isn't just limited to your physiology, because as organisms, we're a system.

We can't ignore that our minds are an integral part of the concept of fitness also.

Now, I like to think about this as a play on words around the famous Japanese

manga, Ghost in the Shell. Now, across the last 20 plus years of coaching and the thousands of people

I've helped and come to know, I see a familiar pattern. People start to train or go to the gym as a

coping strategy for some form of life trauma and stress.

As time rolls forwards, the dose response required for the training to have the same effect as a distraction or coping mechanism increases.

And then it either reaches a point where you just can't recover from it or devote enough time to it.

Now at this point, I often see people abandon their physical fitness entirely and deep dive into more

alternative or spiritual strategies. Breathwork, cold water therapy, sound bathing, manifestation, energy healing,

and so on. Now, in the first example, they're working solely on the shell and distracting

themselves entirely from the ghost. And in the latter situation, they've abandoned the shell completely to work only on the

ghost. But the reality is that your spirit cannot travel far in a broken vessel, and your vessel

itself will not get far with a broken operating system. So we need to work on the ghost and the shell. So with that in mind, and with a

Japanese theme already set in motion, I thought this week I'd talk about some life lessons from

martial arts. Anyone who has done martial arts themselves or perhaps sends their children to

martial arts will be familiar with the claim of most of the clubs

to instill moral values in a code of ethics.

But is this true?

Are martial arts more optimal for the development of the spiritual and physical self

than other sports or training methodologies?

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