Training is how you put the effort back.

Nobody is going back. I am not moving my family into a forest and neither are you, and we should not have to in order to be healthy. But if your life has stopped demanding anything physical, you have to ask it of yourself on purpose. That is all training is — the effort you put back in deliberately, because it stopped arriving on its own.

We ask for it in three ways, and they are not three separate hobbies:

Endurance is a game of efficiency. That efficiency is built on the pyramid of performance. Mobility is the foundation, strength is the middle layer, and endurance is the peak.

Yoga builds the foundation: the range to get into a position and still be strong once you are there. Kettlebells build the middle: whole-body strength, the thing that holds you together when you are tired. Endurance sits on top, and it is the layer that actually takes you out of the house. Let the bottom go and the top ends up paying for it — the range you do not have gets borrowed from somewhere else, and you find out about it when you are tired.

There is one more thing, and most training never gives it to you: somewhere to go. Pick something far enough away that reaching it will change you. A distance you have never covered. An island you would like to swim to. A mountain range that would take a week. Then training stops being maintenance and becomes the thing that gets you there.

That is what the rest of this book is for.