About Fitness Revelation

Allow me to give you a brief synopsis of why I started Fitness Revelation. Currently, seven in 10 Americans are overweight and 30 percent of Americans are classified as obese. For the first time in history, we have almost as many people in the world dying from lifestyle diseases brought on by poor diet and lack of exercise as those suffering from malnutrition. These are alarming statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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My background bridges the two worlds of Christian leadership and Health and Fitness. I am an ordained minister, having been blessed to lead in three churches and a para-church organization. I have also lived a fitness-focused existence, having spent much of my adult life as a master trainer and nutrition specialist. I have trained hundreds of clients from all walks of life. In my own training and in the training of my clients I have observed a number of factors that challenge our wellbeing:

  • Too much stress
  • Physical and behavioral challenges
  • Lack of time due to busyness
  • Lack of self-confidence
  • A lack of purpose in our lives
  • Lack of understanding on how to be healthy

We hear it said that time is our most valuable resource. That is true, but ill health and lifestyle diseases restrict our function and abilities restricting our time. So, isn’t our health and wellness a more valuable resource than simply time? The sad reality is that if our bodies fail, our time is up. We are only gifted one body.

Life is a gift, and it breaks my heart that so many people are living a life that is less than what they could be because of their health. I know I cannot help everyone, but I can help you. My focus will be on connecting your physical life with your spiritual life, then teaching you how to think when it comes to exercise and nutrition. I am here to integrate your health with your spirituality. Giving you a “Why” and a ‘System” to help you create habits that will equip you to live a healthy lifestyle.

While most training systems are limited to physical exercise regimes, I have found that this holistic mind-body-spirit approach makes an incredible difference in the pace and the magnitude of improvement in our overall wellbeing. Better yet, the result of that approach is a level of fitness most people never experience.

I believe I was put here to teach and lead people in the restoration of their bodies, the temple of God that we all are.

“Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?” – 1 Corinthians 6:19 NKJV

Jeffrey Szakonyi

Fitness Revelation Philosophy

Movement is Healing

Movement is Healing, is the core philosophy. That we were created to move is a given. The human body is beautiful in form and function. It is the epitome of God’s creation on the sixth day he created man and woman;

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So, God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. – Genesis 1:26-27 NIV

Man and woman were the crowning glory of His creation. The ultimate of all He could bring into being. Given great purpose and power. Created to live and love. To move and function in a wholeness that was unfortunately lost. Yet has now been regained. If all of this is true, and I believe that it is, how did we as a people end up here. How did we end up so lost physically? How did our health so suffer that we are no longer able to do basic things in life? The core question is how did we lose sight of the glory in which we were created.

I believe, as I have said earlier, there is a conspiracy of hell against us. That said, we bought the lie. We bought the lie of poor food and the lie that somehow being sedentary was a sign of prosperity; that physical work somehow was beneath us. Most of us live in abundance and at some level rest, we have lost sight of the gift that God has given us in that and have become lazy and slovenly.

Movement is healing—so move! In any way shape or form just move. Your body will begin to respond immediately to movement. I have seen it time and time again. I’ve watched people with debilitating pain begin to go through very prescribed movements and become pain free. Is that by accident? I would say no. I’ve seen people with injuries that should have stopped them forever healed through movement. Again, is that just coincidence? No! We were created to move and I promise you that if you begin to move everything else in your health will change.

Work is an act of worship

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. – Genesis 2:15 NIV

Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. – Genesis 3:17b NIV

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters. – Colossians 3:23 NIV

Work has a bad connotation for most. Though many people enjoy what they do for a living, there is rarely a time in which the task to accomplish the end goal or result does not produce some level of toil, strain and stress.

The dictionary describes work as:

“an activity in which one exerts strength or faculties to do or perform something.”

Work was given to man in the garden. I believe that it was given as an act of worship, because life was worship for Adam and Eve. They walked with God in perfect love and relationship. The ground yielded willingly to the man. In other words, things grew and flourished with very little effort on their part, and without them experiencing any stress. The curse that was placed upon Adam for his rebellion was that the ground would no longer yield to him.

Through toil and strain, he would work the ground to produce food to eat. And for centuries this was true, until Christ’s death on the cross.I’m often asked why I enjoy exercise. How can I possibly take pleasure from arduous workouts and training programs? For me, they produce a desired result, but that’s just the basic reason. As I said earlier, much of my motivation to build my body arose from the turmoil and pain of childhood. (This was my initial “why”)

We were meant to move

Once I became a Christian everything changed. It became a joy and a desire! I was recently re-watching the 1981 Best Picture Academy Award winner, Chariots of Fire. I only caught the last thirty minutes or so this time, yet it was a God-ordained moment that I came across it on television at that moment. The movie is a fact-based drama about the 1924 Olympics. It tells the story of two British athletes: Eric Liddell, a devout Scottish Christian who runs for the glory of God, and Harold Abrahams, a Jew who runs to overcome prejudice.

In the segment I caught, Liddell is telling the British Olympic committee that He will not run his race because it was being held on a Sunday and Sunday was the sabbath, the day to honor God. To solve the issue, another teammate offered to switch races with Liddell, to which the committee agreed.

As I watched the next few scenes unfold, I was caught up in a holy moment. The narration is Liddell’s reading from a letter to his wife. As he prepares to run, we hear him speak. The starter’s pistol sounds and they are off. Remember that he has never run this particular race before and had prepared himself for a totally different distance. As the field rounds the turns he says in voiceover:

“I know that God created me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

As these words are spoken, Liddell throws his head back in an act of ecstatic worship and runs on down the straight away to win the race. I tell this story because I sat on the couch in tears for twenty minutes. I was struck that this devout man who spent the rest of his life in obscurity as a missionary to China, understood something that most Christians do not, our bodies were meant to move and that his speed was a gift from God. He saw it as a way to connect with God in a way that many of us have never felt.

Feel His Pleasure

Now, I won’t begin to tell you that when I train, I feel the same way, but I have had times when I’ve felt His pleasure. I felt His pleasure when I competed after all the surgeries to repair my body and my routine was put together to honor God. As I moved from pose to pose accompanied by an acapella version of Amazing Grace, I felt His pleasure. And when the crowd erupted in a standing ovation, I felt His pleasure. When I came back from knee replacements and trained to compete, I felt His pleasure at my will to overcome and not quit. When I feel all the cares of the world weighing me down and I choose to workout despite how much I don’t want to, I feel His pleasure.

Build The Temple
My point is this: Christ took all the curses upon Him on the cross. Work for the believer is no longer under the curse. So, I’ve been asking the question for the past few years, why do we work like the world works? Why do we toil and strain? Why do we grumble and complain? Why do we not move? Why do we allow our bodies to become prisons from inactivity? Why?

One of the participants in the Fitness Revelation Temple Transformation program, Brian Chock, took my admonishing to journal the process to heart, Here is what he writes about he and his wife, Bobbi:

But did Scripture line up with all of this? Has God really asked Bobbi and me to each “build a better body in Christ listen to Haggai 1. Look at the subtitle that the ESV version of the Bible gives Haggai 1:1-11: The Command to Rebuild the Temple! Is that not what we believe God wants us to do right now? We moved from California last year and have spent so much time working to beautify and keep the house that we live in that we neglected God’s house. In Haggai, the house of the Lord had sat in disrepair for some 70 years (just as God had prophesied). Our eating habits and lack of exercise and comfortability and complacency and disobedience (there, I said it) caused our bodies—our temples—to sit in ruins and disrepair. Just like Israel, we had sown much and harvested little, ate but never had enough, clothed ourselves but remained cold, worked day in and day out to earn the “almighty dollar” only to see that at the end of the month, we had nothing to show for it (verses 4-7).
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And so, God gave us the call, the command: go up to the hills and bring wood to build the house (the temple) so that God might take pleasure in it and be glorified! Our pastor preached today and mentioned how the word, “go,” denotes action. Bobbi and I needed to “go” (verse 12), to walk in obedience and take immediate, evasive action so that we might begin to rebuild the Holy Temple that God has blessed us with. But verse 15 is the kicker! Any success we have over this process will be accomplished not by Bobbi or Brian or Brian and Bobbi together. Whatever success we enjoy will be accomplished through the Spirit of God in us! May we bring glory to God in the process and may we be bold in our witness for Christ!

The Gift
When we do the work of exercise as an act of worship with a desire to glorify God and honor Him by being good stewards of the greatest resource and gift He has given us, we are set free at a level that I cannot describe. Our bodies begin to transform. Exercise can become desired as opposed to despised and avoided. Thus, we have the opportunity to look forward to our workouts as another time we are spending with God. I go as far as to pray before most of my training sessions. Thanking Him that I can move and exercise. That I am healthy and can care for His temple. That He resides in me and has a purpose and destiny for my life. That my health will never be a hindrance to my calling and destiny. That without Him exercise is a self-focused activity just like any other activity in this life without God. We must remember we were not created for ourselves; we were created for Him. So, everything can and should be done in relationship with Him.

How, then, do we train? How do we exercise with intent, focus and purpose? How do we not waste time, how do we get results through movement to change our bodies, restore our temples and regain our health? Having spent a lifetime exercising and most of my working life training people to exercise, I have landed on some philosophies of exercise and some short cuts. First the philosophies.

Closing Thoughts

This is the way
You may be asking yourself at this point what is the pathway to this life of health I keep talking about. For most businesses of this type, the focus is on the guru trainer’s meal plan or workout. Though I have those, there is something else I think is just as important. As the wisest man in the history of the world—Solomon—once said, “there is nothing new under the sun.” As a master trainer and nutrition specialist with more than 30 years in the fitness industry, I certainly have some expertise in those areas and have great training protocols and nutritional insights that unlock people’s bodies. What I would like to do is shine a light on your heart (the metaphoric one in this case, although your physical heart will be greatly improved by your new, healthier lifestyle as well). For it is the heart that lies at the center of unhealthy living and my goal is mainly to give you a pathway to deal with that core issue.

I am calling you to community and to a better understanding of your body’s connectedness to God. Therefore, to simply give you a workout program and meal plan without giving you a support network that can truly change your life just doesn’t seem right. The goal of Fitness Revelation is to open your heart to a deeper relationship with God and then offer you access to a community of people that are seeking the same life change. I promise you if you engage you will succeed.

The Challenge
Let me share with you the biggest obstacle you will face.You will have days when you fail. The question is will it derail you? Will you live from regret or from your identity? It’s just that simple. And here is the secret that I hesitate to tell you because it flies in the face of so much self-help and fitness doctrine:

You don’t have to be perfect in the path, however, you do have to persevere.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that…

Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. – Romans 5:1-5 NIV

This is how we overcome. It may seem trite to say it, but this struggle against all the forces of hell that are arrayed against you in our culture of fast and processed food, along with the counter-productive things done to us and by us, produces a suffering that can only be overcome through Him. And if we press through, hope will not put us to shame. There is no shame in Christ, only love.

Set Yourself Free
It is my desire to see you set free of the bondage in which your body has placed you. Humanity was not created for bondage; we were created for God. To restore your temple is to take on perhaps the most challenging task of your entire life. It is an act of will and discipline that leads to a lifestyle that must and will continue for all your days, all the while covered in God’s presence and love in the Holy Spirit. To restore your temple is a response to His love with your love—and that love sets us free to love others. The world is dying to see one person live free. The church is crying out for one person to step away from the bondage of ill health and live a life of divine health.

You can be that one. It is my goal to be your biggest fan as you run this race of a lifetime.