For More Than Muscle
How God Transformed and Redeemed Our Time in the Gym
It started with a question…
As collegiate athletes, we devoted hours upon hours of our lives to training. Even after our playing days ended, we continued working out. But eventually, we were both challenged by the same question:
If God really is Lord of my life, what does that mean for my time in the gym?
Scripture began to create even more pause around how we approached working out:
Anthony & Luke // FaithFit Co-Creators
For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.
1 Timothy 4:8
We knew well the value of physical training, but these questions created a beautiful tension. We kept being convicted by God’s word. Passages like 1 Corinthians 10:31 that reads:
Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.
Not “Do it all for the glory of self.”
While we were pursuing our post-college lives in different parts of the country our eyes began to open. We began to see that our spiritual growth should intersect and even supersede every other thing in our lives. No area is off limits to God’s Word, and we should not only keep His truth in mind before and after working out, but also allow it to guide us DURING our workout.
And thus began the journey of inviting God into our training. It started small — reading the Word in between sets, listening to Christian podcasts as we stretched, getting hype with playlists with Lecrae and Trip Lee, and praying while we ran.
Through these small, yet intentional changes, we discovered something life-changing. By inviting Him in, workouts transformed into a powerful time of connection with God. We found ourselves released to worship God and be changed by Him in a whole new way: heart, mind, soul, and body. Mark 12:29-30 took on a whole new meaning:
Jesus answered, ‘The most important commandment is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
Matthew 12:29-30
God was asking for complete ownership over our time in the gym and for priority over all other reasons we had for training. We could no longer avoid it. As God would have it, it was at this moment we both met while working for a sports technology company. Our friendship grew as we bonded over a shared conviction to being our Faith into our time of Fitness.
Texts like this started to become the norm.
Anthony to Luke: Bro, this weekend, I was in tears during my last set of squats. One of my favorite worship songs, “More of You.” hit at the right time. In the midst of my workout, quads on fire, I was overwhelmed with His presence and thoughts of Him as my ROCK, my strength. If I can keep this perspective outside of the gym in the midst of life’s trials, it makes training that much more meaningful!
The gym became a laboratory for life. We started combining elements of Scripture, music, and prayer to create custom spiritual workouts to accompany our physical workouts: birthing the “Devotional Workout”.
As we got stronger physically, we found that our spiritual capacity to be used by God was growing at the same time. Our motivations came from a new, deeper level and training was never the same. The benefits of exercise (getting stronger, feeling better, having more energy) became a byproduct rather than our main motivation. Workouts evolved from being a time of self-glorification into a sacred period of worshiping and honoring God, and that began to extend into every area of our lives. We had to share this!
This is why we created FaithFit.
Our mission is to help others use fitness as a vehicle to experience the life-transforming work of the Gospel. Our hearts’ deepest desire is to transform individuals' time of working out and ultimately redeem the fitness industry for Christ.
Anthony & Luke
