I have one personal training client who has multiple sclerosis, or MS, which is an autoimmune disease where an individual’s immune system attacks his or her central nervous system over time. In doing so, the nerve cells in the brain and the nerve cells in the spine lose the ability to communicate. This leads to certain types of physical deterioration– specifically, the body’s inability to move and react in certain manners that you would normally be able to control. Your lose a certain degree of control over your body with MS. There is no known cure, simply different methods of trying to manage and deal with the lifestyle associated with the disease.

I have a second personal training client who has Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease, or PD, is a central nervous system disorder that affects the patient’s motor skills, speech skills, and other functions of the body. The symptoms of Parkinson’s disease are expected to worsen the longer you have it. There is no known cure, simply different methods of trying to manage and deal with the lifestyle associated with the disease. In this sense, it is very similar to MS.

My client with MS is a bit younger, and definitely more “functional” overall than my Parkinson’s client. Upon meeting her, most people would never suspect there was anything at all “wrong” with her. In fact, before I trained her, she trained for a long time with another trainer, and I distinctly remember walking over and making fun of her form as being “terrible” and “imbalanced”, only to later on find out that she did, in fact, have certain physical imbalances due to the MS! I felt a little guilty for a while afterwards. However, we ended up becoming great friends, and when she would no longer fit into the other trainer’s schedule, I took her on as my own client. The client with Parkinson’s, by contrast, is a bit older, and has been battling her disease a bit longer. Upon observing her movement and walking patterns, it becomes readily apparent that she has certain difficulties walking and moving in a “normal” manner. She does not have noticeable tremors, but she definitely shuffles.

In the year and a half I have trained my client with Parkinson’s, I have rarely seen the effects of the disease affect her personality or workouts very much. To put it bluntly, I don’t see the disease beating her, I see her beating the disease. She doesn’t wallow in misery, or get bitter, or blame the world for her condition. I think maybe once, maybe twice total, have I seen her focus specifically on the issue of her own mortality. Rather, this client– and friend– of mine comes in twice a week, and works her butt off. There are many exercises we cannot do that I would do with a “normal” client. She lacks certain types of coordination, balance, proprioception, strength, flexibility, and range of motion. But she still comes in and battles for every rep, and does so, generally, with a smile on her face.

The Parkinson’s client leads what I would call a “big life”. She takes numerous trips and vacations to locales she is intrigued with, and loves. She pursues ridiculous clothes and shopping binges, indulging in outfits others might think odd. She does things in a manner that makes one think, “This woman loves life, and is living it to its fullest”.

Somewhere down deep, I’m sure her awareness of her Parkinson’s disease colors nearly every moment of every waking day. I imagine she is rarely unaware of the fact that she is “different”, both from others, and from how she used to be. But she doesn’t show it. She doesn’t dwell on it. She accepts it, states it, and moves on. She has no control over having Parkinson’s disease. It’s the “given”, that which is out of her control. So instead, she focuses on what she knows she can control, and makes the most of it. In this sense, she is inspiring.

It’s important to differentiate here between two things: my client with PD is in no way evading the fact that she has Parkinson’s, or suppressing, or being a Pollyanna. Rather, she doesn’t use it as a central, defining factor of her day-to-day existence. It’s merely an unfortunate aspect of life, and she accepts it for what it is, and she moves on.

Now, this is not to set up my client with MS as being miserable. She’s not. She’s a wonderful woman, and an incredibly hard worker. She is a proud mother, and sports a great physique. When she comes to the gym, she busts her ass on every rep of every set. She makes constant strides to improve her diet and her behavior patterns to achieve her health and fitness goals.

HOWEVER, that being said, there is definitely a different approach to life, or mindset, between my client with Parkinson’s and my client with MS. My client with MS definitely lets it affect her quite a bit. At least once every few weeks, it becomes apparent that she is upset about her inability to do “normal” stuff, and she lets it positively depress her to the point of affecting her performance.

At first, I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with this. I have a tendency to be a bit callous and tell the individual to “Suck it up”. But how do you look at somebody with a chronic disease– somebody who has physical problems the likes of which you will probably never know– and tell them, “Too bad, suck it up”? Even for the non-empathetic individual such as myself, such a statement would be a bit harsh.

But then I started thinking: in a broader sense, realistically, we all have a “chronic disease”. It’s called life, and it happens to the best of us.

I first noticed the phenomenon with my wife, Nikki. Nikki played collegiate volleyball, and was a monster on the court. From the ages of 10 until the age of 21, being awesome at volleyball was the singular defining criterion of Nikki’s life. Insofar as she received gratification and joy from this world, it was from being great at volleyball. And obviously, this involved a huge physical component. After college, Nikki would still (and does still) play with a league of other girls that grew up playing. When she plays, you can see she still loves it and enjoys it, yet is torn– she knows she is past her prime, and can’t hit like she used to hit. As she gets older, this will probably run in one of two directions: she will either become bitter at her inability to play like she used to, or she will become somewhat accepting of her limitations and continue to enjoy the sport she always loved, in whatever capacity she is able to play.

This same phenomenon occurs frequently with athletes. Many will describe watching an older athlete as somewhat “pathetic”, seeing them trying to recapture glory past their prime. This leads to endless debate– did it make sense for George Foreman to keep coming back after the title? How about Michael Jordan– wasn’t he going to tarnish his legacy by coming out of retirement and playing for the Wizards after leaving the Bulls?

I faced a similar situation a few years back. My left shoulder was injured, and severely limiting how well I could pursue my bodybuilding goals. Most of the time my workouts were pretty good, but for two years straight, about a third of the time, my left shoulder would act up badly and make it so that I had a terrible workout. I would get pissed off. Pissed off at who? Well, at the world, I guess. There was no direct object for my anger to attach to. I was simply mad. It felt unfair, like I shouldn’t have to experience this pain for no reason at all.

Yet I persisted in trying to find new exercises and new angles to stimulate muscular growth until I had my surgery. Sometimes I was successful, and sometimes I just grew even more frustrated by the lack of progress. Overall, however, I tried to retain a positive outlook and figure it out like a problem to be solved. I knew my shoulder was injured, and no amount of bitching about it or being upset was going to fix it– or, was going to allow me to win a bodybuilding competition, even if I gained the empathy of others.

Watching the differences between my MS client and my client with Parkinson’s is telling and educational. It lets me know how I want to face my life as I get older and my body breaks down. I know it is inevitable that my body will begin to rebel against me. With the intensity with which I train, it is only a matter of time before I have significant chronic injuries and overuse patterns. I will train intelligently to fight them as long as possible, but realistically, it’s still part-and-parcel of being a bodybuilder. It’s a price I’m willing to pay right now in pursuit of my goals.

But how about afterwards? Once I’m older, and I have, say, chronic back pain, or knee problems, or shoulder pain, or whatever, will I look back disgruntled at what I did? Will I be angry about my lot in life? Or will I smile and accept it, relegating it to the backburner of the unimportant, and instead try to focus my efforts and attention on that which I can now control?

Life is a constant process of oscillating back and forth between looking at the past, looking at the future, and assessing the present. You can’t dwell exclusively on any one of the three to the exclusion of the others. Your past experiences define your present situation, and hopefully, inform how you will make decisions in the future.

But in the future, when my body is beat up and I am older and can no longer perform like I currently do, I hope a few things hold true. I hope I look back on this time period and, rather than regret it, I embrace it– I embrace it as defining who I am, and what got me to my end goal. I hope I smile at all the times I did stupid stuff, even if it lead to disaster and injury. I also hope that I think back to my Parkinson’s client, and how she faced the world. She might have been slightly afraid, or in pain, but she never showed it. She always smiled and looked at all the awesome things she was accomplishing, and talked about the future things she would accomplish.

We come to find, in this world, that there are very few things we have full control over. Most aspects of the universe are out of our hands, from our genetics, to the chronic diseases we encounter, to certain natural catastrophes. But we can control a few things.

First of all, we can control what we focus on. We can focus on the negative aspects that are out of our control, and dwell on the bullshit that is ultimately a part of everybody’s life, or we can turn our attention to the triumphant and heroic aspects that define our days. I would rather spend my time laughing ridiculously, and training like a ferocious beast, than worrying about injuries or pain or remorse or future-regret My time on this planet is too limited to define it according to negatives. I want to be wheeled to the grave knowing I couldn’t have given any more than I gave. Knowing you left something in the tank– that, to me, is the definition of “regret”.

Second of all, we can control how we face our adversities, which is a slightly different issue. Cliché, yes, but there is a great line from the movie Gladiator, spoken by Proximo: “Ultimately, we’re all dead men. Sadly, we cannot choose how but, what we can decide is how we meet that end, in order that we are remembered, as men”. When life deals you something less than ideal, how do you face it? Are you afraid, or bitter, or upset, or angry? Or, by contrast, do you find a way to overcome it, to rise over it, to smash it and conquer it? And even then, when all is said and done– given that nobody will overcome and rise and smash and conquer indefinitely– are you able to proudly stare death in the eye and say you fought as hard as possible? Are you able to find acceptance deep down within?

It’s a delicate balance between the two. “Acceptance” of something less-than-ideal is often the consequence of quitting prematurely– “Well, I’m never going to get there anyways, so why bother? I’ll just stop now and save myself the pain”.

The balance is achieved by fighting your struggle on a daily basis– to achieve your physique goals, your health goals, your career goals, your spiritual and emotional goals, your intellectual goals– and then, once the evidence becomes overwhelming that you can no longer achieve your goal realistically in this world, wiping the sweat from your brow and smiling. The accomplishment of your goal is more in the satisfaction of knowing you fought as hard as you possibly could, than it is in having the tangible end by itself. Learning to take the least ideal situation, and make the most of it, is what defines success in this world.