Why Are “Fitness” People So Annoying?
There must be a reason why they can’t shut up about how great exercise is.
I’m a “fitness”* person. I like to work out, I do it often, and I want to talk about it.
Fitness people are annoying. They can be smug, self-righteous, bottomless fonts of unsolicited advice. They enjoy doing what many people dislike and want them to do it, too. I know they’re exasperating because they long exasperated me.
You’re supposed to do this thing that’s good for you, but you don’t, and I do, fitness people seem to sneer. They want us to Just Do It. They offer that if you have time for scrolling you have time for a workout, #noexcuses! They’re just bursting to proclaim that pain is weakness leaving the body! When I didn’t Do It or care, I resented them.
Many fitness people yammer on because they sell products or seek clients. Some believe they are — or want to feel — morally and aesthetically superior. They peddle harmful, body-shaming broscience. Some think exercise will make them impervious to disease or injury (it will not). I don’t, so why am I effusive about exercise?
A big-brain friend of mine said it elegantly: “Exercise is the medicine we take for the disease of modernity.” I’ll say it bluntly: I exercise to fix my fucked up life.
It works.
There are two ways exercise can relieve what ails us that don’t regard how we look or move: It allays anxiety, and it yields the confidence to be comfortable with failure.
My life isn’t especially fucked up. I’m grateful that I’m mostly comfortable, personally satisfied, and joyful. The markers of modernity, though, are fucked up. Our anxiety is fed by a perpetual stream of every bad thing happening on Earth and we’re welded to chairs and screens to watch; and a sense of personal failure suffuses our existence because we’re made to believe we’re not enough — not productive enough, not having enough fun, not being good enough parents, partners, employees, or people.
Your mileage may vary, but if I could nudge people to explore exercise for its non-aesthetic benefits so they can feel a little better — not get leaner or faster or more swole, but just feel better — it’s going to be difficult for me to shut up.
Life is a satanic sleigh ride of things that happen and keep happening. Some days, each of those things feels like another thread in the sopping wet weighted blanket that’s being lowered over my prone body from my toes to my face. It threatens to smother me, and I don’t know what else to do but move.
Often I can count on absolutely nothing but that moving my body will make me feel better, even if only for a few minutes. A few minutes is enough. They’ve compounded over time into a net state of “less panicked.” I’m anxious, but less than before.
After my father was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease seven months into the pandemic, I walked the soles of my shoes down. I disappeared into the woods and hiked as fast as I could until I collapsed sobbing next to a tree. I went to the gym and picked up 250 pounds over and over until my limbs sizzled and then ran outside to weep. I exercised — exorcized, I suppose — my emotional pain away for a bit. Exerting yourself physically is a release, an explosive cathartic act, the firing of the wadded T-shirt that is your stress out of a cannon and into the stratosphere. This is simple and elegant in the way that so much is not. It’s almost too good to be true: Move for an hour, or 30 minutes, even 15, and you’ll feel instantly better! If it was bottled and sold we’d call it snake oil.
It’s a fight to quiet the mind. I do therapy, I journal, I sit still sometimes and count that as meditating, but exercise is the only surefire way I can reach a state of “no thoughts, just vibes.” I let the incline of the hill empty my head. I go to class and let someone else tell me what to do so I don’t have to figure out one more godforsaken thing on my own. The headphones are the only input, movement the only task.
When you struggle as I do with the insidious falsehoods that you’re not doing enough or you’re not doing the right things, there’s relief in accomplishing the one thing I hope we agree is a definite good: moving the body around. Sometimes I can’t do anything else, but at least I did that. In my darkest moments this notion has been a life raft.
I’m an eldest daughter, a former “gifted” child, and a Capricorn**, so it goes without saying I’m terrified of failure.
I’ve failed to execute a bench press in front of an audience at a powerlifting meet. I’ve been unable to stand back up at the bottom of a squat more times than I can count. I’ve tried to pull deadlifts off the floor that didn’t budge a millimeter. I then got a kind of summit fever; I got excited about getting better. Over time, you recognize the failures of movement as doors instead of walls.
It’s trite but true: practicing failure makes failure sting less.
You also could exercise just to get it done without much care for getting better. This is a similarly brilliant approach. You might think, “This is as good as it’s gonna get,” and I’d support you because for all of us comes a point where that statement is unequivocally true.
One day my body will do no better. Even now, someone’s always ahead. My deadlift’s cute and all until I see a TikTok of a 16-year-old girl in Hoboken who’s 25 pounds lighter and can pull 90 pounds more. There’s really no point in trying to outdo someone else in the non-competition workout setting because once you “beat” them, there’s someone else to beat. It’s video game bosses all the way down. You really only have to worry about doing OK for yourself.
In that way, weightlifting has alleviated my perfectionism. Most of the time I can leave my workout and think, “I did OK for myself even if I failed.” At least in those moments, I feel something like peace.
That peace has brought me to another trite but truism: The trying is what matters.
As I get older I care much less about what I achieve, but I still know the things I must do in order to live with myself. I’m not going to become a world-class powerlifter, but I came to love the sport so I tried a meet. I’ll likely never become a bestselling author, but I was cursed with the urge to write so I must try to write a messy-ass manuscript to feed the beast. I kind of don’t care what happens anymore. I just care that I try.
Trying is terrifying. Enter confidence. While I’ve cultivated it from other sources too, I can’t overstate how much confidence I’ve earned from being a female human who came to know what she’s doing in the gym. I stand among men in a space many of them think is “theirs” and do OK for myself even if I fail. You cannot scare me.
Becoming comfortable with failure and gaining confidence from exercise has given me the guts to do what used to make my blood run cold — asking for more time off and money at work. Setting boundaries and saying what I mean. Telling stories onstage. Going places alone and striking up conversations with strangers. Asking for help and admitting vulnerability. Doing things I don’t know how to do, just to see.
I don’t care if I do things perfectly. I’ll only fail if I stop trying what matters to me.
Among many other motivational platitudes painted onto the wall of my gym — the fitness people are down horrendous for their motivational platitudes — is that old chestnut, “What would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?”
Meh. I say: What would you attempt if you didn’t care if you did?
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- *I use the scare quotes because I find the word “fitness” to be vague and unspecific, as I’ve gone into on Instagram.
- **I’m not really insinuating that any of these have any bearing on my personality. Or am I?
