What is exercise, really?
Contained within the vault of this email lies the truth.
Here it is: the hard truth about exercise.
Right here, in this tiny little substack newsletter.
The truth is…
Exercise is fake.
🤭
But really, it kinda is: some scientists were like “how do muscles work?”
And then they did a bunch of experiments and came to a consensus on how they generally think muscles work (the details of which is something that is still hotly debated in biomechanics circles).
Then people were like “hey, we don’t go outside as much any more and our bodies hurt, what can we do?”
So scientists looked at what they’d learned about muscles, etc, did some more experiments, and said “move like this, it makes your muscles do lots of stuff.”
And exercise as we know it was born.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk: The History of Exercise As Explained By a Guy You Loosely Know Through The Internet.
After that a bunch of people (including yours truly 👼🏻) tried to make money selling exercise to the general public.
Part of the marketing of exercise was/is a push to create a need in the public to justify the sale of said product (exercise). This “need” manifested as creating a fear of injury, of incorrect exercise execution, and making people feel bad about the way their bodies look, move, and feel.
The point is this: exercise is heavily moralized, not just in terms of policing bodies (color, gender, fatness, able-ness), but also Rightness.
As in, there is a Right Way to do something and a Wrong Way.
You are Bad if you do things the Wrong Way, and Good if you do them Right.
It’s a morality construct we see in many parts of modern society.
The thing is, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Exercise is a construct. It has no morality: no right or wrong. It is one perspective on the body and how it moves. Science operates on consensus, and consensus changes over time. Exercise is movement based on a scientific understanding of the body, and can also change over time.
This does not mean it is the only way to move, nor the singular right way to move. In fact, people have moved throughout their entire lives without ever doing a day of exercise.
Can you even imagine such a thing?
Get this: animals don't exercise at all! Not even a little bit. And yet, they perform feats all the time we would consider incredible if a human did a comparable act. But this isn't some call to primitivism, nor a reductive "be more like an animal" sermon.
Think of it like this: if exercise is a construct—a tool—why should we let it control our lives, or be the jury on our personal value? Our ability to perform an exercise does not determine our worth as a person.
What if we thought of it like this: exercise is a tool, and we can learn about it and how use it in a way that works for us and our bodies in a way that feels good. Because if it's all fake, and doesn't really matter, why can't we do stuff we enjoy when we want?
Exercise is just one way to look at how the body moves. It can be a helpful guide to get us started, but it is not the final word on how bodies move, or how we experience our own bodies.
Try it as a jumping off point to spend some time with your body, finding what feels good. Take what works for you, discard what doesn’t. Try different things, embrace challenges that MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD!