Train Like an Athlete? Not So Fast

“Train like an athlete.”

It’s a phrase that, for some reason, irks me. I hear it constantly in the gym and see it repeated across social media. Call an influencer an athlete all you want, whether that truly makes it so, I’m not so sure.

Most people are not athletes even if you are into fitness. I’m not an athlete. I never was. Even during my strongest and most demanding training periods, I wasn’t. I simply understood that fitness was an important tool in life, and I pushed myself within that context.

Fitness Must Fit Your Life, Not Replace It

Training should work with your life and circumstances or with the life you’re building toward.

You need to evaluate where you can genuinely fit fitness and training into your world. It is important, so you should definitely try and fit in and give it the attention it deserves. However, not in the way that it’s pushed to you as the all life encompassing existence. That is for the athlete. For us mere mortals, it means fitting it into our real, everyday reality.

An athlete must dedicate their existence, their entire being to their sport. Dedicating hours each day to fitness and training, structuring their lives around it and competitions, and sacrificing many personal and life moments along the way.

This is because an athlete’s entire being revolves around their championships and winning in their sport. Their sport isn’t a hobby or a life tool, it’s the centre of everything.

Most of us don’t have lives that revolve around a sport or a championship.

We have careers, families, businesses, studies, responsibilities, and competing priorities. Even the most naturally gifted athletes know that peak performance requires near-total dedication.

We all make sacrifices to achieve our goals, but our goals and central focus are not always around fitness and therefore, it shouldn’t be pushed to be made us such. If anything, we should understand where our sacrifices should stem from. 

What We Can Learn From Athletes

However, and this is a big however, there is enormous value in learning from athletes as there is value in learning from everyone and everything. Just not in the literal “train like one” sense.

For me, it’s the mindset. I’m inspired by the work ethic, the resilience, the dedication, and the refusal to quit. These are the things you can take away and apply to your life, your career, your goals, not just the time you spend on fitness and training, and almost definitely dedicating the hours to training of an athlete. 

That relentless drive is often what separates the crème from the crop. Not medals alone, but attitude.

You don’t always see this clearly in highlight reels or even gold-medal moments. You see it in the struggle, the setbacks, the recovery, the grit. And many athletes are not glamorous, overpaid superstars. Many operate with modest sponsorships, limited funding, or even self-financing. They succeed not through luxury, but through persistence.

Interestingly, it’s often while watching actual athletes that brings this thought back to my mind.

It’s the Winter Olympics and It’s Great

I love watching the Olympics. Winter or Summer, it doesn’t really matter. There’s something deeply captivating about witnessing people operate at their limits and pushing the boundaries of human ability.

The Winter Olympics feels underrated. It doesn’t receive the same level of hype or notoriety, yet it delivers extraordinary moments, brilliant stories, and remarkable athletes competing in disciplines most of us can barely comprehend. It is practically a full schedule of extreme sports.

It’s perfect viewing while I sit and work at my comfortable desk, going about my day-to-day life. A little bit of irony there, yes I know.

And of course, it hasn’t disappointed.

There have already been so many memorable stories. From the American 41-year-old monobob athlete finally securing her long-awaited gold medal, surrounded by her children after her fifth Olympics, to the day Britain won two golds in a single Winter Olympics day. Yes, you read that correctly. Something unprecedented, and if we’re being realistic, unlikely to be repeated anytime soon.

Yet one particular moment stood out for me over these games so far.

Moment of the Olympics

My favorite moment came during the women’s 4×7.5km cross-country relay.

The Swedish team were favourites, firmly expected to take gold. They had one of the best in this discipline athletes in the world lined up for the third leg. The race began exactly as predicted. Their first athlete delivered an exceptional start, building a small lead heading into the second leg.

It looked like a procession. It was going exactly the way it was expected to.

Until it wasn’t.

With team Norway chasing hard, Ebba Andersson, the second Swedish racer fell. Seconds slipped away. First place was lost. She got back up and continued, recovering well and moving back into a strong position. Then while in P2, pushing hard, she took a massive tumble. A broken ski. Eighth position. Gold seemingly gone. Even bronze appearing out of reach.

An easy moment to accept defeat.

But she didn’t.

With a broken ski, she pushed forward in a strange, painful-looking combination of skiing, running, and hobbling, determined to complete her leg. In an almost comedic twist of fate, the member of the support team bringing the replacement ski then took a tumble along the way, hustling to get her the fresh piece of equipment.

It was chaotic. Stressful. Almost absurd.

Yet she kept going.

She finished her leg. The third racer set off. The Swedish team rallied, closed the gap, and ultimately secured silver.

A monumental recovery made possible by one decision: refusing to quit.

It’s the Getting Back Up That Matters

That moment reinforced something important for me.

Fitness is an extremely important part of life, don’t let me underplay it. It’s simply part of a bigger picture for myself and most of us. We can apply that dedication to other or all the important elements in our life, not just fitness. Elite athletes structure their entire lives around performance and competition. Their sport is not a component of life, it is life. For them, sport is life. For me, life is my sport.

I don’t try to train like them, I learn from them. And what I learn most from athletes is the don’t give up attitude. It’s the getting back up that counts as this moment shows us. This is why this moment has been my favorite of the games so far.

Because if you get back up in sports, in fitness, in life, you at the very least give yourself a fighting chance.