Outside Your Comfort Zone: Why Challenge Is Essential for Fitness and Healthy Aging

Weekly Wisdom #61

September 18, 2026

On Sunday, we had our Q3 Empower team training. As per tradition, we started with a team workout. This time, Head Coach Savitar had Bobo coach us through a mini partner HYROX workout.

Those of you who know me know that this is not my favourite flavour of workout.

In fact, HYROX somehow manages to take all of my least favourite things about CrossFit and put them together.

All my weaknesses (cardio), and none of my strengths (lifting and gymnastics).

So, it wasn’t a good day.

But it was good for me.

And a sick part of my brain, which I will deny exists, whispered, “You should probably drop into a HYROX workout from time to time.”

Not because I enjoyed the experience, but because I didn’t.

And no, I’m not a masochist. But I do believe that comfort is killing us. Not just physically. Michael Easter’s book The Comfort Crisis, which I’ve written about before, does a great job of exploring this subject.

Your Body Needs a Reason to Adapt

We all understand the physical part. At least I hope that we do.

Your body adapts to the demands placed upon it. That’s what fitness training is: imposed demand, followed by adaptation.

Strength training challenges your muscles, bones and connective tissues. Conditioning challenges your cardiovascular system. Learning new movements challenges coordination, balance and mobility.

Then your body adapts.

But adaptation is the key here, because the law of diminishing returns applies. If you keep following the same routine to which your body has already adapted, eventually it stops presenting much of a challenge. You become habituated.

That doesn’t mean you need to destroy yourself every workout or constantly chase something harder. Good coaching means applying an appropriate challenge for your current ability and giving your body the opportunity to recover and adapt.

But you do need challenge.

Why CrossFit Is Constantly Varied

This is where CrossFit’s principle of constantly varied functional movement comes into play.

It is one of the things that attracted me to CrossFit and, more than 20 years later, one of the things I continue to value most about it. Rather than specializing in one narrow expression of fitness, CrossFit asks us to develop strength, stamina, endurance, mobility, coordination, balance, power and skill across a wide variety of movements and challenges.

The goal is broad, functional fitness: developing a body capable of handling whatever life might throw at you.

“What does a typical CrossFit workout look like?”

It’s the perennial, unanswerable question.

Sure, folks who have never done CrossFit before but have seen glimpses of it on social media have an image in their mind of what they think a CrossFit workout is. But after 20+ years CrossFitting, my answer remains:

“I don’t know.”

All I can tell you is that it will include one or a combination of full-body, functional movements performed at an intensity appropriate for the person doing them—and that one day will not look like the next.

That variety matters.

Not only does it prepare my body for the unknown and unknowable, it prepares my mind to take on unfamiliar challenges.

Fitness After 40 Is About More Than Exercise

This becomes increasingly important as we age.

For adults over 40, 50, 60 and beyond, fitness isn’t simply about what your body looks like. It’s about maintaining the strength, mobility, confidence and physical capacity to continue participating fully in your own life.

That is health span: not merely adding years to your life, but preserving your ability to live those years well.

And that requires us to keep adapting.

Let’s face it, few of us enjoy being pushed outside our comfort zone. At home, at work and at the gym, we tend to gravitate towards familiar routines.

We are creatures of comfort.

We prefer to spend our time on tasks at which we possess a level of competence. The idea of stepping into the gym every day, not knowing what to expect and occasionally being faced with new or unfamiliar movements can be confronting.

Most people would rather cling to their familiar old routine, even after it has long since stopped serving them.

Are You Setting Boundaries—or Avoiding Growth?

This is the question explored in the TED Talk below.

Not just the physical consequences of failing to explore the world beyond your comfort zone, but the way our bias towards comfort can shrink us as human beings.

Intellectually. Emotionally. Socially.

The same old familiar routine can rob us of opportunities for growth.

Aging is inevitable; growth is not.

Once we leave the education system and rise to a certain point in our careers, the tempting option to coast through our last several decades becomes available to us.

We don’t have to take it.

The People Around You Matter

This is one of the things that strikes people about the CrossFit community.

There are few places in your adult life where you will encounter such a vibrant group of people deliberately choosing challenge.

CrossFit attracts folks who thrive on challenge and personal growth—and exposes other, less adventurous souls like myself to that intrepid spirit.

Between the unpredictable workouts and daily association with growth-oriented workout partners, you cannot help but be drawn out of your shell.

And as much as I bless CrossFit for the robust physical health it has provided me with, the daily opportunity to surround myself with positive, growth-minded individuals has been the biggest gift.

That’s something we see every day at Empower here in Vancouver.

People arrive with different backgrounds, ages, abilities and reasons for training. Some are experienced athletes. Others are complete beginners. But they train alongside people who are trying to get a little stronger, learn something new and become capable of a little more than they were yesterday.

That community changes you.

These are the type of people who, when shattered physically and emotionally by a workout, lie on the floor thinking:

“Well, that was awful. I should probably do something like that again sometime soon.”

Your Comfort Zone Can Become a Cage

Modern life makes physical comfort extraordinarily easy to find.

We can sit, order, stream, scroll and outsource much of the physical effort that once formed an unavoidable part of daily life.

But staying inside your comfort zone doesn’t only affect your physical health. It can shrink your world and rob you of the wide variety of experiences available to you.

Because at the end of your days, all you have are your experiences.

You are only as rich as the memories that you make.

On your deathbed, you are not going to reflect back on the number of Netflix series you successfully binged.

You are not going to smile at the recollection of the hours you spent doomscrolling social media.

And you will not bask in the warm glow of reminiscences about your daily routine.

You will remember the friendships forged in fire.

The challenges conquered.

The adventures you took on.

And the moments that pushed you beyond yourself, forcing you to become someone bigger, stronger and braver than you ever realized you could be.

Because that is how life is supposed to be lived.

The Gym Is Where We Practise

None of this happens inside the gym, by the way.

The gym is just where we train ourselves to do hard things and go beyond ourselves.

It’s where we practise lifting something heavy. Learning something unfamiliar. Failing at a movement and trying it again. Discovering that the thing we thought we couldn’t do was simply something we couldn’t do yet.

It is also where we meet like-spirited people with whom we can take on adventures outside the gym.

CrossFit is the launching point.

Or at least that’s what it has been for me.

And I am loving the adventure that I’m on, none of which would be possible had I not first forged an appetite for doing hard things courtesy of CrossFit.

Apparently that now includes HYROX.

I’m not happy about it.