Strength Within: Reclaiming Our Right to Physical Health

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” — Socrates

There’s something powerful about this quote from Socrates. Physical health is taken for granted and most people don’t fully experience what it means to live in a body that’s capable, strong, and resilient. If that was true two thousand years ago, it’s even more true today.

We often lose sight of that.

There’s a moment in Brandon Sanderson’s Yumi and the Nightmare Painter where a character reflects on this odd contradiction. Isn’t it strange, he says, how we’ll go to great lengths to fine-tune an engine, but we won’t fine-tune ourselves?

Mic drop.

We’ll focus on our calendars, our careers, and our inboxes. We upgrade our phones, tweak our software, fine-tune our cars.

But when it comes to our own bodies, we tend to ignore them until it’s too late.

We’ve built a world full of innovation, convenience, and constant motion, yet in the process, we’ve lost connection with the one thing we live in every day: our own bodies. We fine-tune our tools but neglect the machine that makes everything else possible. It’s not about vanity or chasing elite athleticism. It’s about reclaiming the strength, clarity, and resilience that come from treating physical health as a priority, not an afterthought. If you’ve ever felt like something was missing or like you weren’t quite operating at your full potential, you’re not alone and this article might help you figure out why.

Physical Health Became Optional

A hundred years ago, physical activity was baked into daily life, but our modern culture has slowly shifted that. People drifted to the city, and living just got easier. It wasn’t as hard to survive.

And in most ways, that tremendous news.

So much more is now possible all because people can spend the time discovering, exploring and creating. But it also has created the culture of instant gratification, with all the tradeoffs that come with it.

Being productive is praised. Being busy is a badge of honor. We celebrate mental hustle and intellectual achievement, and the physical prowess of a select few Olympians and sports athletes, but rarely take pride in what OUR OWN bodies can do.

Somewhere along the way in modern progress, physical health got labeled as optional.

We treat it like a “nice to have” instead of the foundation it really is.

The truth is physical capacity shapes how we show up in EVERY area of life. It affects our energy, our focus, our confidence, and our ability to recover when things go sideways.

And yet we fall into common traps. (Myself included!)

We tell ourselves that skipping lunch or burning the midnight oil is a sign of commitment. We wear stress like armor and call it discipline. But these habits don’t lead to success. They lead to burnout, inconsistency, and eventually breakdowns that force us to stop.

What Physical Health Actually Gives You

Socrates made the case for physical strength as a fundamental part of being a fully capable human.

Being in shape is the point!

When we train our bodies to be strong, flexible, and resilient, we increase our capacity across every other area of life. When your body can lift more at the gym and run farther outside, you carry stress better at work and your patience runs longer in parenting.

You’ll have more energy to handle life’s challenges, who doesn’t want that?

When our bodies are tired or out of shape, there’s a reason it feels harder to make good decisions, stay calm, or show up fully. Physical strength builds you from the inside out.

The willpower it takes to train regularly, eat well, and recover properly doesn’t stay isolated to the gym.

It fuels mental and emotional strength. You’ll start showing up everywhere better: discipline at work, confidence in relationships, even your ability to follow through on the commitments you make to yourself.

Most people feel this instinctively, and the data backs it up.

The CDC shows that over 70% of adults in the United States are either overweight or obese. That’s not a surface-level issue, it’s a fundamental performance, vitality, and freedom issue. 70% of us can’t live at our full potential. We’ve truly stopped treating physical capability as essential.

Socrates thought we didn’t have the right to treat our bodies like that. He thought it was a shame. He thought we had a right to physical health.

He understood that our bodies are the starting point for everything else we want to accomplish. It’s the tool, the vehicle, and the test of strength in every form. The more you develop it, the more you realize you were built to do hard things.

You earn this strength over time. Through early alarms, uncomfortable reps, and the discipline to keep showing up. But what you gain in return touches every part of your life.

Physical health is a lifestyle choice and one worth striving for.

Why Do We Avoid It?

So now for the hard truth. If physical health really is this important, why do so many of us skip over it?

I think the main reason is that the consequences of ignoring it are slow. Your car dash lights will scream at you when it needs maintenance and your phone will crash when it runs out of storage.

But your body? It stays quiet, right up until it doesn’t.

There are warning signs, tension headaches, fatigue, rising blood pressure, but most people, and even doctors, don’t do anything.

My friend was told, “just take a pill” as if that was the fix. Never mind that he worked out once that whole year! If you ignore the warning signs you are losing valuable time.

That’s what makes the Sanderson quote hit even harder. We might spend hours researching the perfect setup for a home office, or finding the perfect show on Netflix, but we won’t spend twenty minutes jogging outside to help our heart.

Rethinking Productivity

I’ve recently started to challenge the idea that physical training is separate from productivity. Some of the most successful professionals follow habits that include movement, recovery, and training.

I remember reading a WSJ article called, “Yachts and Watches? The Real CEO Flex Is Washboard Abs.” How is it that the busiest and wealthiest people on earth also follow Socrates’s advice?

This is not a coincidence!

The people in that article don’t find time to exercise, they make it. They aren’t “amateur[s] in the matter of physical training” and fully understand that a healthy body gives them more capacity to do their best work.

It only makes them better.

And the crazy thing is that you don’t need to train for a marathon or look like The Rock, to see immediate benefits. You just need to start and then regularly check that exercise box.

Seeing what your body is capable of can be a deeply emotional and even spiritual experience. It gives you access to a sense of pride that can’t be bought. You earn it.

And the best part? That strength to do this is already inside you. It’s just waiting to be used.

Reclaim Your Health with a 90-Day Fitness Reset

One of the most effective tools I’ve seen for reclaiming your health and turning plan into action is our 90-Day Plan. It’s a free download that is a simple but powerful framework that helps you turn a vague intention like “I want to try what Socrates was saying” into something you can actually track and achieve.

Here’s your 3 bullet point preview of how it works:

• Start with a vision: Where do you want to end up? Maybe that is run a marathon or to look like The Rock.

• Set a three-year milestone: This could be running a 20K or hitting a target weight.

• Then zoom in to the next 90 days: What can you commit to now that builds toward that goal?

Let’s say you want to run that marathon eventually. Your 90-day goal might be to complete a 5K. You’d break that down into monthly and weekly milestones, and finally, into daily habits like walking or jogging 30 minutes a day.

Reclaim your Health and grab the free 90 Day Plan template here.

And remember, you don’t need a perfect plan, just the decision to stop waiting and start becoming who you were built to be.

Our Right to Physical Health

Socrates’s words are a challenge. Don’t go through life without discovering what your body is truly capable of. You can do hard things. Don’t let modern life convince you that your body is a background character. You live in it every second of every day. It deserves more than just survival. It deserves strength, energy, and priority.

You don’t have to wait for a wake-up call like I did. You can start today. Move. Train. Take that first step. You might be surprised how quickly your body, and your life, begin to change.

You were never meant to just get through life, your body was designed to help you live it.