Functional life screen

Your hobby is my work. 

In physical training and therapy we've seen offered a functional movement screen. This is a series of movements which the person performs, and you look at whether they can perform them well, have to shift around a lot to do it, or if the movement causes them pain. There are many ways to look at movement and assess it, the point is to have some systematic way of looking at the body's movement so you can improve it.

You can think about your life in the same way. Every person's life has several things in it which give them meaning and purpose, from which they draw strength and fulfilment. There are lots of ways to break them down, “work, rest, play, pray” is one, I offer another. The exact way you break it down isn't important, what's important is that like your physical training, if you think systematically about it then it helps you focus on your strengths and weaknesses and lets you know what you need to work on.

This will be relevant to health, fitness and personal training, I promise.

Friends & family - some may separate the two, but in some cultures it's all family, in some blood relatives are less important and friends are more so. The point is that you should have some people in your life who you socialise with, who you can rely on to help you when needed and tell you hard truths, and who can rely on you to do the same.

Intimate – among your family and friends there will be one person you are particularly intimate with, who you can trust absolutely and have shared a lot of significant experiences with. Commonly this relationship will be sexual, but it need not be.

Work – Work is an activity which fulfills you, makes you feel productive and creative, and towards which you feel some sense of duty. This is distinct from a job, which is just what earns you money. You may have a crappy job (street sweeper, accountant) to provide money for your real work (being a father, helping adult literacy, etc). Obviously it's most convenient if your job is also your work.

Hobby – like work, a hobby fulfills you and makes you feel productive and creative, but you feel no sense of duty towards it, you can pick it up or put it down at any time. Note that a diversion or leisure activity is not a hobby. Watching the football, doing bicep curls, spending hours on the elliptical or masturbating to porn may be relaxing and fun, but they don't fulfill you, still less make you feel productive and creative.

These four elements of life complement one another. A person who has all four going well will be happy, no two ways about it; if anything goes wrong with one of them, the other three will support it. For example, I lost interest in my old career, but with help from my intimate (wife) and advice from my friends, I turned my hobby (fitness) into my work (I went and got qualified). Thus the three functional areas of my life supported the dysfunctional area. Three legs of the four-legged table were steady and made up for the fourth being shaky.

With just two, any difficulties in one may hurt the other. For example, I know a couple who moved to China for the man's job in engineering. His wife got a job teaching English, which she loved – it was her work. But she was away from her family, and there was no way for her to keep up her netball hobby. She had work and an intimate, but family & friends and hobby were absent. When she had stresses at work, this led her to put a lot of weight on her marriage, and there was a lot of tension and arguments. She then spent more time at work avoiding this and eventually left China and went back home, the marriage broke down. Had she had her family & friends around (or new ones), or her hobby to enjoy, things might have been different. A table with two legs will not be standing long, it's just too unstable.

When just one of the elements is present and doing well, it's very unlikely to last. One part of a person's life simply can't handle the weight of their whole life. A person with none of them is on a bare-arsed gravel slide to depression.

More numbers-oriented people may choose to rate each area of their life as per the functional movement screen.If you do choose to give a rating to these areas, you should burn the paper immediately afterwards, since simply seeing a rating of themselves is not likely to impress the people involved in it.

• 3 if the element is going very well with nothing left to desire. It functions and functions well.
• 2 if the element is present, but could improve in one or two ways (eg job and work becoming one, more time with intimate, etc). It functions but not as well as it could.
• 1 if the element is present but not working well or is “okay, I guess.” It's not really functional.
• 0 if the element is entirely absent, or actually makes the person unhappy (eg no friends & family, or hobby of volleyball made less fun by team politics, etc). It's dysfunctional.

Nobody is going to have a score of 12/12. I would say that 9 is pretty damn good, providing that there are no elements with a score of 0.

I'm not the type to score things this way, I just offer it as a suggestion. But it can be useful to consider each area of your life in turn and ask yourself if it could be improved in some way. This may require compromises, more time and effort here means less there. Maybe you love your work but 12 hours a day there leaves no time to see your friends and family, or maybe you gave up your hobby for time with your intimate but would now like to return to it. It's all about balancing the different aspects, and remembering that you can't give 110% to any one area without it seriously harming one or more of the other areas. 

Relevance to fitness & personal training

Others talk of your life in terms of traffic lights, eg if you are moving house this weekend your life is in a “red light” situation, and you can't really start an ambitious new physical training programme today; but if you are healthy, happy and with no big changes coming up, you can. The four elements of the functional life screen offer a more systematic assessment.

In my experience, people who would score poorly on the FLS simply will not stick to a fitness routine. If they have no intimate or endless difficulties with them, if they argue with their few family & friends, if they have a job but no work, they will be too miserable and irresolute to get anything useful done. The exception is the hobby area, since physical training may become their hobby, it may fulfill them and make them feel productive and useful. One client said to me, “Some people like movies, some like shopping, I like deadlifts.”

The purpose of PT is to make physical training more productive and fun for the client. We make it more likely that health & fitness will become their hobby. Despite what PT school told us, we're unlikely to train people for whom fitness is work – fitness models and athletes. At best it's the client's hobby. Remember that the thing about a hobby is that the person has no sense of duty towards it. They can stop at any time, or do it somewhere else with someone else.

A while back Alwyn Cosgrove commented that most people have only three places they go – to their job, home and one other place for their hobby. They have to have a job to survive, they also need a roof over their head – their hobby is optional. If a person comes and spends time with a personal trainer, they are choosing to spend a good part of their lives the PT. We have to be the best part of the client's day.

Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. This month I have had two clients quit. The first asked for a certain style of training, got it and didn't enjoy it – I was definitely not the best part of her day! The second is stopping after 22 months and over 150 sessions because she has taken on a huge mortgage, the day she told me I thought she was going to cry. About a year ago she said, “the days I work out with you are simply better.”

Dan John said at the end of Intervention,

“You can add and subtract all you want to this. But the thing is this. If you ask the right questions, if you narrow and you throw out all the stuff you read on the internet and all the stuff you see in magazines, if you get down to what is crucial and important... you can change lives with weights.”

He's absolutely right. He's talking about what correct movement and strength do for bodies, but it's true for our souls as well. Having a fulfilling hobby, spending part of your day on something which makes you feel productive and useful but for which there is no pressure of duty, this can complete your life. This hobby doesn't have to be training up your health and fitness, but if it is I might be working with you. Your hobby is my work.