Here's something I don't see discussed a lot, and it relates to the idea of balance in your life. The goal of a fitness program, at least from my perspective, is to improve your quality of life. Q of L from my personal perspective includes not spending a lot of your life suffering from crippling soreness [italics mine].

Now, you might point a finger at me and call me an obscene hypocrite. How dare I, where's my hardcore spirit, you can't make omelets without breaking things, and so on.

Maybe I'm getting older, but there is a point when five days of intense soreness--soreness the impinges movement, that slows you down significantly, that makes even the most rudimentary athletic movement a painful, cringing, hobbling mockery of life--starts to make your ilfe worse rather than better.

I have a feeling that body-parts splits, at least among the cognoscenti, are becoming extinct, but for those who still favor using them, this is one reason why you might consider another model.

I was talking to my good close personal friend Alwyn Cosgrove (who, in truth, might barely be able to pick me out of a police lineup as long as the other suspects were Oprah, Vernon Troyer, and Toonces, the Driving Cat), who said he woke up to this fact when a youthful relative asked him to kick a soccer ball with him, and he couldn't do it. He said he was worse off than an incapacitated great-grandfather.

Not me...

...not me, either...

...definitely not me.

Is that any kind of life?

I agree with every other fitness schmo on the planet that goal-setting is important. You've got to look ahead, look to the future, see clearly where you want to be so that you can make that dream a reality. But I don't hear a lot of people suggesting that you actually enjoy wherever it is you're at right now. Your fitness regimen shouldn't be so glaringly in the foreground of your life that everything else fades away. Can't go out to eat because of my diet. Can't attend that event because of my spinning class. I mean, come on, like, seriously, aren't we working out and eating right so that we're around longer and thus able to enjoy things like social events and eating out?

Working out to the point of debilitating soreness all the time (and I do stress "all the time" here--sometimes a killer workout is just what the fitness-freak ordered) is another manifestation of that. Not only will your gains stall very quickly, but you just won't be able to enjoy your life much if all you are is a freaky, sore, mess 24-7.

So: work out, sure, but enjoy your fitness, too. Do things with it. Get involved in a sport, an active hobby, something vaguely social and physical at once. Make it about learning some new physical skill, not just pounding yourself into a sweaty oblivion all the time. Consider it cross-training, yet, but it's also a way to continuously make your body smarter. If I had to guess I'd say that's half of what makes exercise effective at delaying the onset of many of the symptoms of old age: it keeps those neurons plastic.