For those of you who knew one of my earlier websites, you may wonder why Radically Transformative Fitness has been re-named Slowing Down Faster. 

One reason is that I never really warmed up the original title, which was suggested by a well meaning friend back in 2005. “Radically Transformative” always sounded a bit new-agey and even commercial to me–a term I would more expect see in an advertisement for an expensive self-help seminar in Bali, a recently discovered “superfood,” or the latest diet and exercise bestseller. Moreover, the term connotes something otherworldly and instantaneous, perhaps reminiscent of a Hollywood film where Clark Kent runs into a phone booth one second and flies out as Superman the next. Unlike in Hollywood, however, transformation generally occurs over a prolonged period of painstaking attention and effort.  (To be more direct and accurate, I suppose I could use the more generic sounding moniker, “gradual and sometimes painfully slow transformations in fitness”)

Finally, I’m still unsettled about associating the human body with the word, fitness, because of its link to the term, survival of the fittest. Nature kills off those who are “unfit” and in doing so, separates the chaff from the wheat, so to speak—at least that’s how the popularized version of evolution goes. A famous failed Austrian-born artist took the idea and ran with it… all the way to the borders of Stalingrad. He killed some people along the way.