Chess and Fitness
Dojo Blog • January 5, 2026
Why Chess Goals Are Harder Than Fitness Goals
The New Year is a natural time for reflection. After weeks of eating too much, relaxing, and spending time with friends and family, many of us feel the urge to reset. We want to begin again. And for a lot of people, that reset involves two familiar resolutions: getting fitter and getting better at chess.
At first glance, fitness and chess improvement seem very similar. In both, we’re flooded with information—training plans, influencers, systems, shortcuts, and strong opinions coming from every direction. That overload can be paralyzing. It creates anxiety, confusion, and ultimately inaction. One of the founding ideas behind structured training programs like the Dojo is simple: you don’t need the perfect plan—you need a plan that you actually follow.
But despite these similarities, fitness and chess differ in one crucial way.
Fitness Is Easier to Measure
Fitness feels obvious. You can measure your weight, your body fat percentage, your lifts, your running times, and your endurance. Even if defining “fitness” turns out to be more complicated than it first appears, progress is still tangible. You feel it. You see it. You know when something is working.
You can also break fitness down into clear components: strength, endurance, stamina, coordination, and speed. Some of these are more genetic than others, and most people have a pretty good sense of where they fall on the distribution. Over time, you learn what’s realistic to improve and what probably isn’t.
Chess doesn’t work like that.
Chess Improvement Is Slippery
In chess, we also talk about components—openings, middlegames, endgames, tactics, calculation, intuition, memory—but measuring progress in any one area is incredibly difficult. What does it even mean to say you’re “better at endgames” now? How do you quantify intuition? How do you measure deep thinking?
Unlike fitness, chess improvement often hides itself. You may be training consistently, doing the right things, and still feel stuck. Progress shows up late, unevenly, and sometimes only after long periods of frustration. That slipperiness is one of the reasons chess is so beautiful—and so hard.
We Gravitate Toward What Feels Good
There’s another similarity between fitness and chess that can quietly sabotage progress: we tend to do what we enjoy and avoid what we don’t.
At the gym, this looks like the runner who never lifts, or the lifter who never does cardio. In chess, it’s the player who only does tactics, or only plays games, or only studies openings. These activities feel productive—and sometimes they are—but neglecting other areas eventually creates imbalance.
Real improvement requires someone—or something—to push us toward the uncomfortable parts. Sometimes that’s a coach. Sometimes it’s a training program. Sometimes it has to be an honest voice in your own head saying, “You’re avoiding the work you actually need.”
Fitness Supports Chess More Than We Admit
It’s obvious that poor physical fitness affects chess performance, especially over long games. When physical endurance drops, deep thinking disappears. Players stop calculating and start making impulsive decisions. You can often see it clearly in time usage graphs: around move 30 or 40, the thinking stops.
What’s less obvious—but just as real—is how good fitness supports cognition. Sleep, nutrition, balance, and general health all form the base of the tree that supports mental performance. Among older players in particular, declining physical fitness often leads directly to declining results, even when chess understanding remains strong.
Mental Fitness Is Harder to Feel
Physical fitness gives immediate feedback. You feel stronger. You move better. Life becomes easier. Mental fitness doesn’t offer the same clarity. You can’t easily measure how “healthy” your thinking is. You only see indirect signs: how well you play, how focused you feel, how long you can sustain effort.
That makes chess goals harder to trust and harder to stick with. Improvement is slower, feedback is fuzzier, and motivation is easier to lose.
The Takeaway
If you’ve set New Year goals around fitness or chess—or both—understand this: chess improvement demands more patience, more structure, and more trust in the process than physical training does. You won’t always feel progress, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Build a plan. Balance your training. Do the uncomfortable work. Take care of your body so your mind can do its job. Chess may be slippery, but with consistency and guidance, it does reward those who stay the course.
And that, like fitness, is a lifelong pursuit worth committing to.
