How to Establish a Healthy Family Fitness Habit: 8 Principles to Ready You for the Outdoors and Life

(Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post contains affiliate links, which means that if you make a purchase through one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the channel and website and allows me to continue to make content like this. Thanks for your support!!)

I studied Aristotle in college - well, among other things. Within my Political Science major, I focused on political philosophy. Hence, Aristotle.

He was big on habits. In his Nicomachean Ethics, he wrote, “these virtues are formed in man by his doing the right actions.” Aristotle gave birth to a philosophical school of thought known as “virtue ethics.” And there is a bunch of great books and thinking that come from that perspective. The grossly simplified summary of the school of thought is that the foundational view of ethics should not come from outcomes or intents, but from virtues. An outcome based view would say, “do that which will produce the best outcome.” The intent-based view would suggest that a good outcome born from poor intention isn’t ethical, at all, so intentions matter. Virtue ethicists would say that we need to develop character that is good, so, we first define what are good characteristics (such as being charitable) and then do those things that align with virtue.

Without getting really any deeper into this, I will say that the one thing I took away from all of my philosophical studies was that every philosophy makes some pretty good points and none of them are complete enough to stand alone and be accepted as the “better way.”

But one of the “good points” Aristotle and virtue ethicists makes - in my mind - is that virtues are developed only when made from a combination of intent and action: that you cannot be charitable by only having charitable thoughts, you must act on those thoughts. This is where Aristotle’s quote comes into play. You need to know what you want to be (virtue) so that you can know what you want to do (thought) so that you can perform those actions that align.

What is most interesting to me about this quote - and admittedly, I taking away a lesson that was never intended, is how much it aligns with modern phycological discoveries about the power of habits and their superiority in shaping character when compared to will. This is why diets don’t work. This is why Noom is a thing. You could argue that the entire field of cognitive behavioral therapy is based on this, too.

So, in this sense, I believe the path to fitness leads from the point of just doing some fitness activities, every day. I’m not talking about super, high-quality workouts that push your body to its limits and forces it to adapt. Yes, that is the physiological reality that we have to confront, eventually. But, if you start your workouts with things that push you that hard, you are asking your will to engage and keep you sticking to it, because your body - and the chemicals in your mind - won’t want to. On the other hand, if you begin by just picking out a time of day, and doing something every day at that time, even if not particularly intense, it will become habit. Now, all of those neural chemicals are working in your favor; so, you can start turning up the juice on your workouts, pushing your body.

Now, I think there are other things you can do to help stack the deck in your favor, and that’s the point of the video. But, at its core and like Aristotle suggested, the habit comes first, then the virtue follows.