The Duty of Functional Fitness

As a man, you never know when you might have to run. Run away or run after someone or something. I remember seeing an overweight man in Istanbul once with his child, and it occurred to me that if someone were to snatch his child, they could literally escape on foot and he wouldn't be able to catch them. At that point, I started to take running a lot more seriously. I don't have a leg day or an arm day.

I don't believe in training isolated muscle groups. I don't believe in focusing on particular types of strength training. I believe in function. Every workout should develop your mobility, flexibility, agility, your dynamic power, plyometric strength, static strength, endurance, stamina, coordination, and all of the various capabilities that a man might need in real life. You need to be able to fall and get back up.

You need to be able to roll, to tumble, and to do all assortment of compound movements. And you need to have the cardio conditioning to be able to outlast your own tiredness. This is what I call conflict fitness. These are the types of workouts that build toughness and resilience, mind and body. This is not training for body sculpting or aesthetics but for practical preparedness and capability for physical challenge including physical conflicts or emergencies.

Look, obesity has crept into our ummah, laziness, and many of us have fallen into a sedentary lifestyle. And this is unbefitting for us as Muslim men. We are responsible for the safety of our families. We're responsible for protecting them and for doing the hard physical tasks that they're just not built to do. So we need to keep ourselves in a state of fitness that they can rely upon.

We need to understand that being unhealthy, being unfit, being physically weak, being unable to absorb pain and incapable of pushing past our own exhaustion. This constitutes a kind of betrayal. Not only of our families, but of our body's own rights. Physical fitness, while lucky, is a duty.