Sendyka Fit Over 40

“Pretend-Injury” Time Off

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 08:02:24 GMT

This week’s post is something I wrote for the Graduation Handbook of my course. It describes how to apply the DSY principle on a “life scale”. Below it, I’m also sharing a comment from my BMC member David, who gave a perfect illustration of how it could (and should) be applied":

Let’s talk about deliberately stepping back, what I call a “pretend-injury” time off.

The idea is simple. And you probably know this from experience: you feel so great that you keep pushing it. Your body eventually protests (sometimes violently) and you’re forced to stop. And you are in pain for a few weeks. Why wait for that moment? Why not take the time off yourself, on your own terms, and enjoy it pain-free?

Some fitness influencers talk about constantly improving, about always adding weight, “exploding” their pecs or what may. They talk about pushing the boundaries of human abilities. That path may sound heroic, but it’s insane and is also a clear road to injury. The truth is that no one can improve forever. Eventually, the body demands a pause. Pretend-injury time can be that pause, instead of a real injury. Preemptive and deliberate.

This doesn’t mean completely stopping everything. Certain anchors remain non-negotiable: stretching in bed, Radio Taiso and slow jogging (closer to 20 minutes than to 50). These are your cornerstone exercises, small maintenance procedures that keep your body happy and engaged.

Life itself often provides the cues: the changing seasons, unexpected chores, a burst pipe, or a broken water heater. These are annoying obstacles to life’s not-so-smooth sailing but they are also invitations to let go. Take them. Allow yourself to slow down. Your body, unlike a machine, moves in ebb and flow. The carpenters of Edo respected this rhythm: they didn’t work in winter or when it rained. Just go with it and be guilt-free about it.

You can just chill or you can explore in that time things for yourself that are new and fun and easy on the joints (and can be done at the niko-niko pace while adhering to the DSY principle). One of you suggested rope flow to me. That does sound like fun. Or just walk and be chill. I practice something I call MF, for manual (or meditative) focus when I let my eyes focus far and near on everything I can find. It’s fun to realise that there are so many things in your surroundings that you have stopped seeing. The list of ideas is long and only limited by our imagination. I hope you’ll contribute yours in the comments.

The reward of the “pretend-injury” time is that you rest before rest is forced upon you, and you get to enjoy it in good form and not in pain. When you re-enter your practice it’s with strength, energy, and gratitude.

And here is David’s response

“Hi, Pawel. I’ve just come off a three-and-a-half week break from several parts of my routine: slow jogging, Sendyka sprints, and dead hang. This was occasioned by an unusual weather event for my area, which saw a fairly thin layer of very cold arctic air near the surface surmounted by a slowly moving warm, wet front from the southwest, resulting in a 24-hour period of snow followed by sleet followed by freezing rain. The result was a thick and slippery layer over everything of what local weather reporters were calling “snowcrete”. It was impossible to clear with normal snow shovels. People were resorting to axes, hammers, and even chain saws to cut through this stuff. Given that, sidewalks and many roads were basically impassible.

The temperatures stayed below freezing for the better part of two weeks after the storm, so there was very little melting and it was pretty dangerous to try walk or move over the ice. I heard an interview with an emergency department nurse soon after the storm and she said that they had seen over 40 people that day, all for either fractures from falling on the ice or for heart attacks from trying to clear it. Needless to say, during all this I could not do my regular slow jogging or sprinting, nor could I get to the playground where I do the dead hang.

But as it happened, this post about taking a break appeared as all this was going on, so I took your advice and didn’t worry about it. I did, however, keep up with Radio Taiso, some isometrics, and a few minutes of Asian squatting each day. Also, I finally tried out the animal movements, one of the few parts of your method that I hadn’t yet attempted. After a bit of awkwardness, I’m getting better at these and starting to have fun with it. I like the gorilla walk the most. And yesterday, with the weather having warmed up and almost all the snow and ice finally gone, I got back out for a slow jog and a dead hang and it felt great.”

Good job David, for enjoying your forced time off guilt-free.

And what about you? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Do you have a story of how your body (or circumstances) told you to pause and you listened (or maybe a cautionary tale when you didn’t)?

Let me know.

What Happens When You Asian Squat For 1 Year?

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 10:02:24 GMT

Asian squat is a human primal posture that helps with many things. Watch this video to find out what happens when you do it for one year… and how to do get into it without hurting yourself!

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How Modern Fitness Is Bad For Your Health & What To Do About It

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 10:02:13 GMT

We are still living through the Fitness Dark Ages. (maybe for the ending?) I for one, cannot wait for the Fitness Renaissance and I hope it will come in my lifetime. I’m going to do everything I can to bring it about.

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The Male Body Lie

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 01:01:21 GMT

I would have looked all right in the 90s. These days I get derided in the comments section for being skinny or “sarcopenic.”

It started with a glitch of my AI art bot. It forgot who Shirtless Simon and Jumbo the Cat were and generated something obscene. No, not in that way, but instead of a white‑haired, lean Simon I got a dark-haired young gym‑bro with a likewise dark (and clearly evil) cat. Huge chest, bulging deltoids, wide torso. When I rewired the bot’s rusted memory, restored Simon (and Jumbo) and placed the two images side by side, the contrast was stark. And I thought it’s a perfect snapshot of what’s been happening in the male‑physique department for the past six‑plus decades. What used to be exceptional, even freakish, is now a baseline. Pity the young men.

Physique inflation

When I was a young boy I saw the Bruce Lee films. His physique looked extraordinary. He was fast, lean, and exceptionally defined but still very much human. You could imagine him walking around somewhere in the world, wearing normal clothes, doing normal things.

By the time I was finishing high school, things started to change. The Terminator hit the big screens as well as other Arnold vehicles. They helped to move body building from the freak-show margins into the mainstream. In the nineties it was still Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in Fight Club that captured the imagination as the male ideal. But not long after that the dam broke. The social media came on stage and flooded us with one endless, inflating, comparison feed. And what were once outliers, stopped being perceived as such. Arnold was never normal, yet he was normalised. Everyone below that new reference point started feeling inadequate, unfinished, and behind.

The Damage

We are always a product of our era* and we’re brought up with those images that are considered “normal”. We try, and we inevitably fail to get anywhere close. We get discouraged and, because of the “all or nothing” mentality, we frequently quit the physical development and muscle building effort in its totality. Why bother training if “normal” already looks impossible? I fell into that category too for a while.

Others do the opposite. They chase the image at all costs: ego lifting, ignoring pain and training like recovery does not matter. Injuries make sure that that type of training eventually stops too.

Then there is the problem of…

The Game You Didn’t Agree to Play

There is something we’re not told as young men about today’s male body ideal. Shall we call it “pharmaceutical assistance”? Once that’s spelled out clearly, a lot of confusion and cognitive dissonance goes away. It becomes clear why you can work out and push yourself like the greats, but get nothing but injuries for your troubles. Rick Gervais made this great joke at the Golden Globes in 2022: “Have we got an award for the most ripped junkie? No. No point. We know who’d win that.” If you know the game is rigged you can refuse to play. But only if you know.

As people get older and cling to these ridiculously inflated ideals, things get tragic and comical at once. They disengage early as they can no longer reasonably hope for that picture they were chasing.

Here is my take on it. There is another way. The Arnold body was impressive for a moment, but the Bruce Lee physique is impressive across decades.

Leaner and more capable, not bigger.

An Anthropological Perspective**

Our physiology is shaped by what our ancestors needed to do to survive. We’re not designed to carry massive amounts of muscle. We traded the pursuit of raw strength for larger brains. Hunter-gatherers trained to hunt and gather not to puff themselves on Instagram. Warriors were valued for stamina, precision and usefulness to the group.

Discobolus in the National Roman Museum in Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. Image: Wikipedia.

You can see that in the ancient Greek statues. These bodies look capable, not ballooned out of proportion. You can imagine them running, throwing or wrestling, and sometimes they are portrayed in those actions. Today, the only action most fitness influencers see is preening to the camera.

Let’s tell the young generation the truth. Today’s bullshit ideal is not an absolute, timeless norm. It’s recent, local and extremely fragile.

Opting Out, but What Instead?

So you’ve awakened. You know the ideal is false, now what? Rejecting it does not mean rejecting all effort. It means changing the rules. For yourself, because you have to let the society be, for now.

I “converted” myself to fitness after 40. The benefits are real and the costs in effort are much lower than you’ve been led to believe. The changes I’ve experienced over the last 10 years were very subtle. My weight hardly altered. But my body composition must have. I’m visibly more muscular, and people notice this when at the beach or in other shirtless settings. But with clothes on, I look regular. And the real change is in how I feel and what I can do. And I can do a lot of stuff and they are all fun! Which brings me closer to the Bruce Lee end of the spectrum. Not bigger, but better.

I’m an outlier today, but I wouldn’t be in antiquity.

The real harm of the physique inflation is that it turns you against your own body. It becomes something you have to coerce and drug into submission to get it to look like that fake ideal. And that never ends well. The pile of injured bodies is mounting.

It is clear that Batman has been dipping into a jar with something really unholy since the sixties.

I propose another metric. How about we measure success by how useful your body will be to your future self in 10, 20 or 30 years time? Things are so much more clear when you take the long view; because what good are likes today if you’ll have trouble getting out of bed in 5 years time? It makes sense to be kind to yourself and not try to impress strangers.

Pity the young men, but more importantly, let’s give them a way out.

What I’m doing, and why

I am an anthropologist turned fitness YouTuber, and my work focuses on something most of the fitness world gets wrong: how to build strength and flexibility without surrendering your life to the gym, and without breaking yourself in the process.

The course I have built is shaped by long-term thinking about our bodies, minds, and habit formation. It is designed for people who want to stay capable for decades.

Supporters on Buy Me a Coffee get access to the beta version. This is early access to the system while it is still being refined, before it is packaged and priced and released to the world at large. If my way of thinking resonates with you, this is the moment to step inside.

To those who already support my work, thank you. You are backing a model of fitness that refuses to accept frailty as the default. It’s an alternative to the Fitness Dark Ages we’re currently living through.

Asterisks

*Philosophically, as Heidegger points out it is our job as humans to overcome this “throwness” (being thrown into our time and culture and taking it as “normal”).

**Thanks to Vann Cunningham for exchange of ideas that fuelled this section.

How to Heal, Repair, and Upgrade Your Body

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:02:44 GMT

How your body is and isn’t like a car and how to therefore treat it.

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Angry at Old and Frail

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 01:00:21 GMT

The tragedy is that we’re living through these Fitness Dark Ages and people don’t know just how much they stand to lose by not exercising, how easy it is to be fit, and just how little time it can take.

Something has been on my mind a lot lately. What is it with that whole “old and frail” phrase? Does it really have to be like this?

I don’t believe so. I believe you can be “old and robust”, “old and capable”, or better yet, “ageless and flexible”. Which one you end up as is not an accident. It is the result of countless small choices made over decades, choices you have already made and are still making. I urge you to make the right ones, while the future is still not set in stone, but soft and malleable.

The impulse to write this came from a moment that surprised me. I realised I felt anger, real anger, at a very pitiful old man.

I was slow jogging the other day when I saw him getting to his car. His walking was very stilted, every step seemed to have required planning and careful execution. When he reached into his pocket for the keys, some coins fell to the ground. He groaned. You could almost see the calculation running in his head. Bending down is going to be too much. Getting back up might be even worse.

I considered helping him, but there is a language barrier between us, and the last thing I wanted was an awkward misunderstanding where he thought I was after his coins. I jogged on, almost hearing him think, “How am I going to get down?” If I were him, judging by the way he moved, I would probably have left them alone. It simply looked like too much trouble.

That moment brought the phrase “old and frail” back into focus for me. In English, the two have fused into a single idea. We say them together, as if one naturally follows the other.

I am only in my early fifties, so you will have to check back on me in twenty, thirty, or if I am really pushing it, forty years to see whether my bet on movement pays off. Still, we do not have to speculate blindly. We already know people who are old and robust. They exist. Which means frailty is not an inevitable outcome of age itself.

I do feel sorry for people who are old and frail. Life can deal bad hands. Disease, injury, poverty, and plain bad luck are real. But in many cases, frailty is also the result of decades of neglect, of treating the body as something that will somehow take care of itself. That is where my emotions get complicated.

When I tried to untie what I was feeling, I realised it was anger. I couldn’t help but ask the old man (silently, in my head): “how could you have done this to yourself?” and I also couldn’t help but to scream (also in my head) at society at large: “You’ve engineered this!”

Our societal norms are teaching people not to move. Does it have to be that way, though? We have done remarkably well with our teeth. We teach children to brush their milky whites that will fall out anyway, just to instil in them a habit that will last a lifetime. We accept without question that if you do not brush your teeth, you will lose them.

Yet we do the opposite with bodies. We treat movement as optional. I am especially angry at the fitness industry for portraying fitness as an all or nothing pursuit, one that requires sacrifice, obsession, and surrendering your life to the gym. Faced with that false choice, most people quite reasonably choose nothing. For the longest time I chose nothing too.

We live in strange times. For most of human history, movement was unavoidable. Survival demanded it. At the same time, conserving energy was always sensible. That instinct has not gone away. Now we live surrounded by mountains of food and earning our meals by sitting motionless in front of screens, with no built-in signal telling us to move. There is no thirst for exercise the way there is thirst for water or hunger for food. So we have to do what we did with teeth. We have to make movement a conscious habit.

The good news is that it does not take much. My own daily routine, the one that keeps me strong and capable, takes under ten minutes. Not much longer than brushing your teeth twice a day. And yes, even starting late helps. Our bodies respond to training far later in life than most people realise.

People who do not brush their teeth will lose them. People who do not move stand to lose far more.

What I’m doing, and why

The course I am building is shaped by long-term thinking about bodies, behaviour, and habit formation. It is designed for people who want to stay capable for decades.

Supporters on Buy Me a Coffee get access to the beta version. This is early access to the system while it is still being refined, before it is packaged and priced and released to the world at large. If this way of thinking resonates with you, this is the moment to step inside.

To those who already support my work, thank you. You are backing a different model of fitness, one that refuses to accept frailty as the default and is an alternative to the Fitness Dark Ages we’re currently living through.

How Hanging Heals the Body

Pawel Sendyka — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 10:01:38 GMT

Hanging and especially "dead hanging" is an easy way to help your posture, decompress your spine and even fix shoulder pain and conditions as advanced and annoying as frozen shoulder! Here is how I healed my shoulder and some tips for those over 40 who would like to give it a shot.

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Why You Shouldn't S*** Yourself

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 10:02:29 GMT

In this video I will explain what the DSY principle is and how it applies to your life. DSY stands for Don’t Strain Yourself.

►Why I Avoid Moderate Workouts Like the Plague

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Try Slow Jogging!

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How the Fitness Industry is like a Church

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 01:09:17 GMT

How the Fitness Industry is like a Church

One

The Church of Fitness promises eternal life (but delivers death instead). Well obviously, the fitness industry promises something that sounds more reasonable and believable for our day and age: a long and healthy life. But to get it, you must accept its dogma.

As I’ve said many times, people who follow its advice find out for themselves that its effects are often opposite to those intended. Many race early to the finish line, having exhausted their hearts, others find out that their cartilage, tendons and other soft parts are not taking this advice well. Where there should be mobility and ease, there is pain, regret, and much “gnashing of teeth”.

Two

Guilt. It thrives on it, then charges you to be cleansed. This is not so different from selling of indulgences. Absolution fees come as gym memberships, programs, apps, and home contraptions. Many of them sit unused, quietly accusing you from the corner of the room. Maybe you’ve tucked them out of sight in your garage, but you know they’re there.

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Three

It insists there is no salvation outside the church. No strength without weights. No health without machines. You must get on that (real or metaphorical) treadmill and become one of the faithful, aka a self-optimising piece of meat. Anyone who says otherwise is dismissed as ignorant or dangerous. A heretic.

Four

The priesthood. Trainers, influencers, experts, gurus. They speak with certainty and authority, not because the truth is settled, but because certainty sells. Doing your own thinking is called irresponsible and worthy of public belittling and body shaming. The priesthood isn’t about knowledge, but about power and permission. They grant or withhold legitimacy. They decide what “counts” as real exercise, real effort, real progress. They exert a clerical, bureaucratic power, conditioning people to distrust their own perceptions and to instead seek validation by someone shredded and certified. How many of you got injured because you believed a guru/expert/trainer and not your body? It is wrong, and we need to reclaim epistemic authority over our own experiences. (That, by the way, was a fancy, medieval-sounding way of saying that when it comes to your own body, you’re an expert.)

Five

The Ideology. The fitness industry in our day and age produces a vast amount of that “odourless, colourless gas” and we breathe it in without even noticing. We didn’t even realise quite when the fitness culture stopped serving life and life began serving fitness. In this haze of values lost, your time disappears and your money too.

5 Theses

These are the theses I’m pinning to the door of the Church of Fitness today. Don’t worry, unlike Luther, I don’t have 95 of them.

One

There is salvation outside the Church. You do not need an intermediary between you and your body. The ancient Greeks knew this. So did many cultures before and after them. Body weight exercises, isometrics, stretching, slow jogging. Free, accessible to everyone, and sufficient.

Two

Do not chase someone else’s six pack. Do not feed that monster with your money. What you can, at most, do is to pursue your personal best. Research is clear that genetics dominate how our bodies respond to exercise. It is deeply unfair that the genetically gifted get lecture the rest of us. And it is infinitely more unfair if it is the PED-infused ones that get to make those lectures. The only mistake we ever made was choosing the wrong parents for the job of making us athletes.

Three

Health, not aesthetics or muscle mass, should come first. Fitness defined by abs and Instagram bodies is a category error. The ancient Greeks were very clear about this. Exercise fell into three types: pro-health practices for everyone, military preparation, and athletic competition. The last was considered inherently risky. Pause for a moment (it’s all right, I’ll wait) and ask yourself which one you are doing. And who convinced you.

Four

There should be no priesthood between you and your body. No one gets to interpret it on your behalf. Pain, fatigue, adaptation, recovery. These are not mysteries requiring an expert class. They are signals you can learn to read yourself. And you’d better get good at it. Because…

Five

Enough is enough. Past a certain point, more effort does not bring more health benefits. It buys wear and tear, obsession and fatigue. In life, as in anthropology, context is everything. Bodies age, circumstances change, recovery times change too. What worked at 25 may harm you at 45. Go with the ancient Greek wisdom of doing what’s pro-health and forget the rest.

That’s it. I’m done. May the common sense be with you. I’ll be writing from the Wartburg castle if you need me, for now, leave a comment please.

What I’m doing and why.

I’m an anthropologist turned fitness youtuber and I write about how to build strength and flexibility without surrendering your life to the gym. You can support me as a member on Buy Me a Coffee you will get a special perk, an access to my course beta.

Huge thanks to everyone who already supports my work. I’m supremely grateful and I don’t take it for granted. Pawel

How Stretching Heals the Body

Pawel Sendyka — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 10:02:16 GMT

Imagine if you could adopt a 3-minute exercise routine that stretches all your muscles and leaves you energized in body and mind. Just push yourself into action and sacrifice 3 minutes of your time to do these stretches, and you'll feel revitalized and full of positivity!

In this video, I explain why these stretches are beneficial, debunk the myths around them, demonstrate how to perform them correctly, and discuss the long-term benefits of regular practice.

Join me for this quick, effective, and energizing routine!

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3-Minute Radio Taiso Stretches for Everyone (Follow Along)

Pawel Sendyka — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 10:01:56 GMT

Do this 3-minute exercise routine that stretches all your muscles and leaves you energized!. Push yourself into action and sacrifice just 3 minutes and you'll feel revitalized and full of positivity!

Good news for those of you trying to lose weight: they raise your basal metabolic rate (this means you not only burn more calories while doing them but also increase your calorie burn rate afterward).

But that’s not all! By incorporating this routine into your daily life, you're greatly increasing your chances of living a long and healthy life.

Join me for this quick, effective, and energizing routine!

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►ow to Become a Body Millionaire

Fitness For Normal People

Pawel Sendyka — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 10:00:44 GMT

In this video, I'm going to tell you what is fitness for normal people and why it's important for you.

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►Body Maintenance

►Fix Your Knees

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New Year's Resolutions: From Couch Potato to Fit, Understanding the Transient Risks

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:00:42 GMT

As you may be resolving to get fit in 2026, this one is for you…

I often talk about how the modern fitness industry willfully confuses fitness with training for war or athletic competition (The Renaissance-illustrated triptich on the subject starts here). It generally has its priorities backwards: aesthetics over function, bullshit metrics over health. While the risks involved in getting from fit to super fit are pretty well documented and I have in the past talked about it, as have the cardiologists. Today I’d like to talk about something else: the risks involved from going from zero (couch potato) to hero (fit).

Mortality risks of being a couch potato are higher, but as you move from doing nothing to doing something you are encountering what is know as “transient” risks. Even with something as easy as accessible to everyone as my own approach, some elements of it are more risky than others.

On low-risk end there is Radio Taiso. The Japanese have been testing these 3-minute dynamic stretches on themselves (young and old, fit and with mobility issues, for almost a hundred years now) so you can be pretty sure that you’re doing something safe. To be sure, they too pile on a DSY warning:

“If an exercise feels too much, stop and take a break. If you have any medical conditions or injuries, please ask your doctor before taking part.”

On the other side of this spectrum, there are sprints. These magical 20 seconds of maximum effort give your body a solid “please upgrade your hardware, this is not enough” signal: your body then responds by upgrading the cardiovascular system and producing more mitochondria.

Two Stories – One Cautionary, One Boring

Let me share 2 stories of mine. One cautionary, one boring. The boring one is boring because I was very sensible, as I wish you will be too, always.

Cautionary: Here is how I overdid sprints. First of all, I wasn’t feeling it (which was mistake number 1: ignoring my body’s request for rest and telling it to shut up and get with the program). The first sprint went all right and in the second sprint, I actually accelerated over the last 5 seconds. When I took off the backpack (10kg), I thought “there is no way I can carry it back down to the scooter”. I tried, but gave up. I was so weak I got a bit scared. Am I going to have a heart attack, or a stroke?

Later that day I saw a YouTube thumbnail which screamed at me in big red letters: Russians Have a Supersonic Nuke - NATO Can’t Stop It. I didn’t even watch it but my heart went up to my throat anyway. This was mistake number 2: forgetting that body and mind are one and that neither should be ingesting toxic stuff.

As a result I ended up feeling weak and awful that day and wondered whether I should go to a hospital. I played in my head a conversation I would have with the doctor:

Doctor: “So what’s the problem? Tell me what happened.”
Me: “I pushed myself sprinting this morning when I didn’t feel like it, and later I saw a thumbnail that said ‘Russians Have a Supersonic Nuke - NATO Can’t Stop It’ and my heart doesn’t feel so good.”

This made me laugh. Then I just rested. The next day at noon, more than 24 hours after the second sprint I started feeling great again.

Boring Tale: there was another sprint session when I forgot that my timer was set to to only 12 seconds. I realised this after the first sprint - it was short and effortless (and I covered a lot less ground). I reset the timer and did the second sprint of 20 seconds and then, despite the devil tempting me to do the third “proper” sprint and telling me that the first one doesn’t count, I listened to my own advice and told him to go to hell.

I don’t know about you, but I like these boring stories, where people are coming home uninjured and energised instead of hurt and drained.

On a our small, personal scale they are the kind of stories where everyone turns back in time from attempting to climb Mount Everest and gets safely back to their loved ones . Not making headlines and not staying in the frozen wasteland until the end of time like the guy in green boots who now serves as the marker of how the peak is.

“Green Boots.” Maxwelljo40 via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0

Conclusion

When you are going from zero (couch) to hero (fit), you have to know that there are risks involved. If you do too much too soon, there is a possibility of getting hurt. Which is why the overriding principle of the Sendyka Method is DSY*. This doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes like the one I’ve described above but more often it helps me to make those boring and healthy decisions and feel good, not bad about them.

Trying to become fit has risks, but so does continuing sitting on the couch. The blood clot you might have can kill you when you exercise, or it may kill you anyhow later if you don’t. Do your best to minimise risk and move gradually forward. Because in the end we all have to make individual, informed choices in the world of uncertainty. Let me you with the Radio Taiso’s warning:

“If an exercise feels too much, stop and take a break. If you have any medical conditions or injuries, please ask your doctor before taking part.”

*DSY stands for Don’t Strain Yourself (sanitised version).

The best part about writing in a public space is receiving comments with your thoughts and experiences. So please leave a comment.

A note on what I’m doing and why. I’m an anthropologist turned fitness contrarian and I write about how to build strength and flexibility without surrendering your life to the gym. You can support me as a member on Buy Me a Coffee you will get a special perk, access to my course.

Huge thanks to everyone who already supports my work. I’m supremely grateful and I don’t take it for granted. Pawel

It's Not All Downhill From Here

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 10:01:27 GMT

It’s Season 2 premiere! Here first! Before YouTube. Enjoy the ad-free experience! 😃

In today's video, I'm going to tell you why, unless you're on your deathbed, the story of the decline with age does not have to be true to you...

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On Ego and Training for the Wrong War

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 09:55:03 GMT

The cardinal sin of modern fitness is its willful ignorance about the fact that not all exercise is for health. But there is a subtle, unspoken and perfidious assumption that underwrites this sin: that hardship is virtue. Today, this double-idiocy reigns supreme.

Once you see Mercuriale’s (and the ancient Greeks’) distinction between legitimate, military, and athletic exercise (I wrote about it here and here) , it becomes hard to unsee how much of today’s fitness culture lives outside the pro-health category while pretending to belong. CrossFit is one example. Spartan Races make the point even more clearly.

Historically, military style training existed for a reason. In ancient Greece, if your city state was besieged, the price of defeat for every adult male was death; while slavery was in store for your wife and children. It makes so much sense to train hard when the stakes are this high and accept the risk of injury, exhaustion, and a shortened life.

Today, that kind of threat is gone for most of us. But the training remains. Obstacle races are openly modeled on military training. Crawling under wires, carrying heavy objects while exhausted, running through mud, performing tasks under time pressure. None of this is ambiguous. This is not about health. It is about proving something.

And this is where ego enters the picture. Ego and the story about being a “real man” crafted by the industry. The pointless suffering becomes virtue. A Spartan Race becomes a test of character. The language shifts from defence to self improvement while suffering becomes a proxy for meaning. Difficulty becomes evidence of value. If it hurts, you must be doing something important. That’s the story. I guess the only problem with it is that it’s not true. It’s a false belief system in which exercise designed for extraordinary circumstances is rebranded as everyday self care. Military logic becomes “mental toughness.” Athletic danger becomes “pushing your limits.” Structural risk becomes “discipline.” The harder something feels, the more virtuous it appears. The less sustainable it is, the more impressive it looks on social media.

Legitimate exercise is boring by comparison. It is quiet, reasonable, and repeatable. It’s constrained by wisdom, respects recovery, age, and context. You do not feel heroic doing Radio Taiso or Slow Jogging. But you feel great afterwards and remain capable for other things in your life.

Modern fitness culture struggles with moderation. Ego does not scale down gracefully. It does not age gracefully. You can reduce the load or the distance, but you cannot easily remove the underlying incentive to do more, faster, harder and now! The structural message is that comfort is for weaklings while wisdom and restraint are for cowards.

This doesn’t mean that hard things are meaningless. Training for hardship can be valuable. Competitions can be fun. Testing your limits can be edifying; maybe it can even give you a satori moment. But it is a mistake to pretend that these goals have anything to do with health.

When exercise meant for war or competition, is sold to us as preventative medicine and health, there will be casualties. It’s not stupidity, but a natural result of following the double-idiocy logic of the modern fitness exercise. Few people stop to question it because it requires stepping out of their current frame of reference. I can’t even imagine how hard it is. It was easier for me because I stood outside it to begin with. I’m also an anthropologist. To anyone who broke out of this matrix and reached similar conclusions, congrats. I know it could not have been easy and you might have even lost friends over it.

If you want to train like a warrior - fine. But you should at least be honest about the war you are fighting. And if your goal is a long, capable life, then most of what passes for fitness today is simply the wrong tool for the job.

The best part about emailing my thoughts to strangers receiving comments and engaging with your thoughts and experiences. So leave a comment. Now! 😜

Huge thanks to everyone who already supports my work. I’m supremely grateful and I don’t take it for granted. Pawel

Notes

The illustration comes from Renaissance physician’s Girolamo Mercuriale’s 1569 book De Arte Gymnastica.

►Strength You Can Still Use Tomorrow

The Secret Why I Became a Fitness Contrarian

Pawel Sendyka — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:02:04 GMT

It’s Season 2 premiere! Here first! Before YouTube. Enjoy the ad-free experience! 😃

Here are the mentioned links:

►The Firefighter’s Story

►How I Hurt My Back

►Get A Muista Chair

The Codes:

PAWEL5 - 5% discount, single chair purchase.
PAWEL15 - 15% discount, 2 or more chair purchase.

Is CrossFit a Legitimate Exercise?

Pawel Sendyka — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 22:00:53 GMT

CrossFit is best understood as a military or athletic exercise, not a pro-health one.

This is a follow-on from last week’s piece on ancient Greek training and Girolamo Mercuriale’s 1569 De Arte Gymnastica, where he divided exercise into three categories: legitimate exercise for health, military exercise for preparedness, and athletic exercise, competitive and dangerous by nature. Using this framework, CrossFit is not hard to place.

CrossFit is built around intensity, time pressure, standardisation, and comparison. These are performance variables, not health variables. Even when no one is officially competing, the structure encourages urgency and limit-pushing. That alone disqualifies it as “legitimate” exercise in Mercuriale’s sense. Health does not require racing the clock.

At its best, CrossFit can build confidence and broad physical capacity, especially in people coming from inactivity. But the system does not encourage de-escalation. Progress is defined as more load, more speed, more volume, more tolerance for discomfort. More, faster, now. This is the opposite of training conservatively enough to still be functioning well years later.

That logic is military. The ancient Greek equivalent would be running or swimming in full armour. Useful if you are preparing for war. Entirely reasonable when the survival of the city is at stake. Longevity is not the goal in that context, effectiveness under stress is.

CrossFit’s injury profile is not an accident. It emerges from a specific combination of factors: complex movements performed under fatigue and time pressure, repeated session after session. Even when acute injuries are avoided, joint wear, connective tissue stress, and nervous system fatigue accumulate quietly. This is not a failure of discipline or intelligence on the part of participants. It is a structural outcome.

In Mercuriale’s terms, CrossFit sits firmly outside “legitimate”, preventitive care type of exercise. It can produce impressive humans, just as Greek military training once produced impressive warriors, but it does not optimise for durability. The CrossFit culture doesn’t ask, “Will this make me more capable in ten years?” Its implicit question is, “Can I survive this today?”

CrossFit could only become “legitimate” exercise if it were heavily modified: lower intensity, no time pressure, no leaderboard logic. At that point, it would barely resemble CrossFit as marketed. Competitive CrossFit besides being “military”, by definition, also belongs in the athletic and dangerous category.

CrossFit is often defended as “scalable.” This is true in theory but weak in practice. Scaling does not change the incentives. The structure still rewards urgency, comparison, and doing slightly more than you should, slightly more often than you should. Injuries are not the result of recklessness. They are the predictable outcome of the system.

When training meant for defending civilisation is sold as routine health maintenance, people pay the price.

The best part about emailing my thoughts to strangers receiving comments and engaging with your thoughts and experiences. So leave a comment. Now! 😜

Huge thanks to everyone who already supports my work. I’m supremely grateful and I don’t take it for granted. Pawel

Notes

The illustration comes from Girolamo Mercuriale’s 1569 De Arte Gymnastica.

“Gym Culture” and De Arte Gymnastica

Pawel Sendyka — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 13:18:49 GMT

One of the earliest books on exercise and physical therapy is Girolamo Mercuriale’s 1569 De Arte Gymnastica. In it, Mercuriale revisits ancient Greek writings on physical health. From it a picture of exercise emerges not as much of a spectacle or self-punishment, but as medicine.

The Greeks understood physical training as preventative care. Exercise was there to keep the body functioning, not to test how much damage it could survive. Gymnasia were places for developing the body (and the mind!)

What makes Mercuriale’s work especially relevant today is how clearly he categorises exercise. He distinguishes between “legitimate” exercise, intended for health and medical purposes; “military” exercise, aimed at being ready for war; and “athletic and dangerous” exercise, which is competitive.

Our modern time could use with that distinction. Much of what is marketed today as “healthy” fitness would, by Mercuriale’s standards, fall squarely into the military or athletic and dangerous categories. Marathons, extreme endurance events, and high impact training are not health practices in the preventative sense. They are stress tests. Sometimes impressive, sometimes meaningful, but not neutral to, and certainly not required for, health.

Mercuriale also emphasised factors we now largely ignore: season, age, diet, and sleep. Exercise was never one size fits all, and never divorced from recovery or context. The goal was durability, not domination.

Ancient gymnasia had no machines and no lycra. If you wanted to lift something heavy, you lifted something heavy. Movement was simple, varied, and limited by reality rather than Instagram-fuelled ambition.

We do not need to copy the rules of ancient gymnasia. But we would do well to recover their clarity of purpose. Not all exercise is for health. Some of it is for war, some for sport, some for ego. Confusing those categories is how people get injured while believing they are doing themselves a favour.

Health-oriented exercise should leave you more capable tomorrow than today. When it does the opposite, it belongs in a different category.

By the way, the best part about writing in a public space is receiving comments with your thoughts and experiences. So leave a comment. And if you’d rather find out more about the things discussed in today’s post, check out the links in the Nerd Appendix.

Huge thanks to everyone who supports my work. I’m supremely grateful and I don’t take it for granted. Pawel