I’ve spent years teaching others the ins and outs of exercise and nutritional discipline. From working in a secular gym in Yonkers, New York, to leading group fitness classes in Austin, Texas, to what I do now with my online company, Hypuro Fit, my passion has always been helping people grow stronger; not just physically, but mentally and spiritually as well.
One core belief has guided me through every season of this journey: Catholic professionals should strive to be technically excellent and authentically Catholic in everything they do. That doesn’t mean we should try to “Catholicize” our craft in superficial or gimmicky ways. (You don’t see a surgeon trying to sew rosary beads into a patient during surgery.) Rather, it means that we aim to be the absolute best we can be in our field, while intentionally living as disciples of Jesus Christ and observing the duty of the moment with humility and love.
With that said, I’ve had to do some serious introspection about what I do as a personal trainer and nutrition coach. I don’t want to help people become healthy for the sake of vanity—mine or theirs. I want to be sure that everything I do advances the Kingdom of God. That includes the ways I teach people to treat their bodies.
Over time, I’ve wrestled with the question: How do I rightly order physical health in light of our call to holiness? What does it look like to pursue fitness not as a god, but as a tool for sanctity?
Two saints have helped me find a “golden mean”: Pope St. John Paul II and St. John of the Cross.
Let’s make something clear right away: you do not have to work out to be a saint. You don’t need to deadlift your body weight, run marathons, or count your macros to live a holy life. The vast majority of saints never touched a dumbbell, and most never even saw one. I’m fairly certain St. John the Baptist wasn’t doing burpees in the desert (though, I’ll admit, the image is amusing). But while physical fitness wasn’t part of their lives in the modern sense, self-mastery absolutely was.
Every saint, without exception, practiced heroic virtue (including temperance) and sought to master themselves so they could give themselves more fully to God and others. That principle is timeless.
This is where my two saintly mentors come in.
St. John of the Cross speaks extensively about the idea of purgation, both active and passive. Without diving into a full theological treatise, here’s a simplified explanation: active purgations are the mortifications we voluntarily choose to discipline the body and will (such as fasting, sleeping on the floor, wearing a hair shirt, or choosing silence). Passive purgations, on the other hand, are the sufferings and trials that God either allows or directly wills for our purification and sanctification. Things like illness, rejection, dryness in prayer, or unexpected hardship.
Here’s the catch: passive purgations are often far more painful and difficult than active ones. But active purgations prepare us for the passive. They train us to respond to suffering with grace and trust when it comes, not if, but when.
That’s where I believe exercise and nutritional discipline can serve Catholics today. We live in a time when food is abundant, comfort is idolized, and physical ease is often mistaken for peace. In this context, choosing to push your body through resistance training or denying yourself instant gratification through nutritional discipline can become powerful ascetical tools. They can teach us to say “no” to the flesh and “yes” to something higher.
That leads us to Pope St. John Paul II. In Theology of the Body, audience 15, he writes:
In fact, in order to remain in the relation of the “sincere gift of self” and in order to become a gift, each for the other . . . they must be free in exactly this way. Here we mean freedom above all as self-mastery (self-dominion). Under this aspect, self-mastery is indispensable in order for man to be able to “give himself,” in order for him to become a gift, in order for him to be able to “find himself fully” through “a sincere gift of self.” (TOB 15:2)
Think about that: we cannot truly give ourselves to others unless we first possess ourselves. Because you can’t give what you don’t have. And we cannot possess ourselves unless we have trained our will to rule over our impulses, not the other way around. That’s the heart of asceticism: not repression, but freedom. Not punishment, but preparation for love.
This is the key to understanding why Catholics can and should incorporate a healthy lifestyle into their spiritual lives; not for vanity, not to become the next Instagram fitness guru, and certainly not as an act of pride, but as a way of becoming more fully the gift we were created to be.
Our health is not the ultimate goal. Holiness is. But when approached rightly, physical health can serve that greater goal.
For now, I want to leave you with this encouragement: begin something hard. Choose an active purgation. Whether it’s waking up earlier to pray, going for a walk when you don’t feel like it, skipping that extra snack, or lifting weights even when it’s uncomfortable. Let your body feel the discipline. Let your will be strengthened by the challenge. Let your self-denial be an offering.
Fall, and then rise. Sweat, and then pray. Be like Jesus, who gave Himself totally and completely to the Father, even unto death. And remember: we conquer ourselves not for our own glory, but so we can better give, love, and serve, just like Him.
Author’s Note: If you want to dive deeper into this integration of body and soul, and get some practical guidance on how to start, check out the book The God of Endurance: A Practical Guide for Incorporating Exercise and Nutrition into Your Spiritual Journey, which I co-wrote with Dan Burke. In it, we explore these themes in more detail and provide tools to help you begin your own path of self-mastery through body stewardship.
Photo by Anastase Maragos on Unsplash
