The point of fitness is not to become the next Tia Toomey, Mat Fraser or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even thinking about the commitment required to achieve world-class levels of fitness sends most ordinary humans into a cold sweat. Most people are happy just to be strong enough to carry the groceries into the house in a single, herculean lift.

And that’s okay. Fitness isn’t about being the strongest, it’s about being strong enough.

Seventy percent of Americans live a sedentary lifestyle, sitting at work, sitting in traffic, and sitting at home. Unless you are one of the minority who seek out strenuous activity (according to national statistics, only 15% of Americans have gym memberships), everyday life doesn’t present a lot of opportunities to improve your speed, strength, or stamina.

So, how do you make yourself strong enough? It doesn’t take a herculean effort; small steps pay big dividends.

Functional fitness is, by definition, building strength to do everyday tasks. Doing a kettlebell farmers’ carry builds the same muscles as carrying your dozen bags of groceries. A sandbag ground-to-overhead feels a lot like putting a heavy crock-pot away in a high cupboard. Burpees (heaven help us all) give you the strength and mobility to get up after you fall down.

At MC Corporate Wellness, we provide onsite fitness classes for corporate clients. The employees who join us aren’t the next Tia or Mat or Arnold, they’re ordinary people who just want to be strong enough.

One client—we’ll call her Claire—recently thanked one of our coaches for just this reason. As a middle-aged woman with a sedentary job, Claire’s exercise goal was simply to get moving and improve her fitness a little. And she did. However, she didn’t realize how much stronger she’d become until the day she caught her elderly mother as she fell down the stairs.

Claire herself was recovering from a recent surgery. She admits that before starting our onsite classes, she wouldn’t have been able to catch her mother. They both would have gone tumbling. But now, Claire not only caught Mom, but supported her there on the stairs, holding a lunge position for four minutes until Mom was able to recover.

That may not seem like much, but for Claire it was everything.

That is the point of fitness. Strength and cardiovascular training pay dividends well outside of the gym. They are what allow us to do everyday things. They give us the power to do more than we ever expected. They make us more than we thought we could be.

Strong enough.