Why bother exercising?
Is there a point to doing crunches while the world burns?
Gym culture is an invented thing, and a relatively new one at that. Before the past 150 or so years, exercise was an all but unknown term. Sure, there have been physical activities such as yoga, kung fu, and sport practiced around the world for thousands of years, but exercise as we know it is a relatively new pursuit.
What we know today as exercise largely came about in the 1970s. Yeah, the 70s. People exercised before that, but it was mostly pick-up sports, jogging, and aerobics - and even those activities grew from a post WW2 desire to create citizens that were prepared to go to war at the drop of the hat (if you want to learn more about that there’s a great episode of the podcast Maintenance Phase on the subject: The President's Physical Fitness Test).
Note: I am talking mostly about the North American/US perspective on exercise here - other nations have much different histories and ideas about exercise, though (like many things) the American version has spread its tendrils worldwide.
The late 70s and early 80s were the golden age of bodybuilding, fueled by legends like Schwarzenegger, Ferrigno, Olivar, and Columbo. It was the age of mega gyms and weightlifting to “tone” and “bulk” your body - exercise done primarily for the purpose of making an aesthetic change to the body. There’s been innumerable trends, tools, and methods created since then, but that’s the short story of how we got here.
Interesting bit of history. What’s the point?
Well, the title of the post is “why bother exercising?” so to figure out why we should (or maybe shouldn’t) exercise, we should probably understand the common reasons why people exercise.
People exercise for many reasons, but they usually fall under a couple headings:
Aesthetics: changing the way the body looks. Making muscles larger/more defined or, the most common one: losing weight. Yes, I’m putting this under aesthetic. Weight loss is often touted by medical professionals as a sort of cure-all to all maladies. In fact, weight loss has little to no effect on health - except that fat-bodied people are generally treated significantly worse and receive less effective treatment than their thin-bodied counterparts. I recommend reading some Health at Every Size literature to learn more about the conflation of “thin” with “healthy” (or check out the aforementioned Maintenance Phase podcast for tons of great information).
Health: exercising to improve health, wellness, and longevity (aka fear of death). There’s a lot of fear mongering in health and wellness: if you don’t do all the exact right things, you will get hurt, sick, or die prematurely. While there is a link between exercise and increased lifespan, the truth is, we’re all going to die eventually. Health itself can be a fraught word, and subject to a huge spectrum of understanding, much like fitness. It can be generally defined as the body functioning as well as it can for as long as it can. My favorite advice for increasing your chance at living longer comes from legendary strength coach Dan John: he recommends “Sleep. Drink water. Eat protein and veggies. Walk. Wear your seatbelt. Don’t smoke. Wear a helmet. Floss.” All factors we can control in order to reduce our likelihood of early death. Pretty much everything else is up to genetics and socio-economic factors.
Sports Performance: around the midpoint of the 20th century, people realized that you could do dedicated exercise in order to improve performance in sports. Thus was born cross training.
Injury recovery: doctors have been prescribing exercises to help people recover from surgery for the last 50-60 years as well. It has exploded into its own field, and physical therapy has become a standard part of the health and wellness industry.
These are, by and large, the most common reasons people exercise. They’re all very specific, which in and of itself isn’t particularly harmful, but when a person feels as though they must do these things out of social pressure, or an internalized self-expectation that they ‘should” exercise, autonomy starts to be pulled away from the person and become more of an externally imposed burden. People exercise because they think they have to, and they think they have to do it for the above listed reasons.
But what if they don’t care about the above reasons, or if these above reasons aren’t actually helpful? Now we have people who are doing something they don’t want to do, because someone told them that they have to - if they don’t they’ll die early, be undesirable, unsuccessful, and unloveable. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a person.
So why else would anyone partake in exercise?
Rather, what are some ways that you can exercise in a way that creates a more fulfilling experience that aligns with your personal values?
Wouldn't it be really nice if I wrapped everything up with a nice bow right here and told you an easy answer of how you could make exercise some fulfilling, transcendent practice?
That would be cool.
Unfortunately, I don't have an easy answer.
What I do have is a couple questions to help start the process:
What is meaningful for you? What do you need to be able to be strong and capable in your life?
What inspires you? What are the things that make you feel excited to try?
What kind of movement makes you feel good? Physically, mentally, emotionally?
Exercise is a tool, and it can be used as a means to a variety of ends. There’s lots of different hammers, but they all hammer nails. What you build with that hammer and those nails is up to you.