How the Fitness Industry is like a Church

and 5 Theses I pin to the door

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.

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 pay 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