Make Us Over
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
James Baldwin
Of all the cultural memes that are making the rounds in the modern world, “makeover” has become one of the most popular. Everybody’s getting one, or at least desiring one. Our bodies, our homes, our cars, our careers; every dimension of our lives has become a candidate for wholesale renewal. We have come to believe in quick transformations, powered by money and expertise. And of course, we, as health and fitness professionals, are more than happy to provide this service.
But what of the H&F industry itself? Perhaps it’s time to put the industry in front of the mirror and see how it looks. What do we see? Some might say that the industry needs a few tweaks, maybe a little Botox around the edges. Other might say that it needs to lose a few pounds or firm up around the middle; perhaps some core training would do the trick. But others might call for a more drastic revision. Some, myself included, will call for a wholesale, top-to-bottom revamping. The H&F industry, I propose, needs a makeover.
the “me industry”
The problem begins with orientation and objectives. For the modern H&F industry, the focus is almost entirely on the individual, especially the individual human body. It’s all about your weight loss or my athletic performance. It’s all about your hair or my skin. It’s all about your abs and my butt. It’s never about our community or our human predicament. In other words, H&F is a primary agent of the modern “me industry.”
This industry is dedicated to promoting the primacy of the individual. One look at the magazine rack is all it takes to get the idea. We see beautiful individual bodies on display in their fully-Photoshopped glory; gorgeous, wonderful bodies, all completely devoid of background, context, environment or habitat. These bodies are spectacular, but they lack a life-support system. Spectacular, but irrelevant. Gorgeous, but doomed.
The “me industry” is built on the belief that the human body is a stand-alone organism and that health is all about individual appearance, performance and well-being. There’s no appreciation for community or habitat. Even in the world of “holistic health,” a practice ostensibly dedicated to “mind, body and spirit,” the focus remains on the individual’s mind, the individual’s body and the individual’s spirit. It’s all about me, it’s all about you, but it’s never about us.
It would be one thing if H&F existed as a cohesive industry with its own voice, but such is not the case. H&F is dwarfed and tyrannized by the magazine industry, an industry with an altogether different set of objectives. Incredible as it may seem, H&F magazines are not about promoting H&F. In fact, just the opposite. They are about creating physical discontent and unhappiness.
This, after all, is the operating philosophy of all modern marketing: Provoke sales by the intentional creation of anxiety and discontent. Make people unhappy with impossible images of physical perfection and offer “solutions” to their discontent. Once consumers are made aware of their physical imperfections and limitations, they will buy almost anything. And they do.
disempowerment
Not only does modern H&F focus almost exclusively on the individual, it also conspires, unconsciously we must hope, to disempower those very individuals that we claim to help. This may sound paradoxical to those who believe in empowerment, but in fact, the professionalization of human physicality can be seen as a step backwards for human health.
We can see this clearly in our imagery. The icon for physical disempowerment appears in nearly every H&F publication. It’s an attorney-approved image of a buff male trainer spotting a beautiful young woman as she performs a biceps curl with a comically small dumbbell. Lawyers and magazine editors love this image because it demonstrates safety and due diligence, thus immunizing them against lawsuits.
But does the average human really need a high-priced professional to protect him or her against injury whilst doing curls with a 5 pound dumbbell? Isn’t it the case that human beings have been doing vigorous physical movement for hundreds of thousands of years, entirely without professional instruction? What did people do before personal trainers anyway? How did our ancestors ever make it from Africa to the New World? Haven’t we been hunting animals, lifting rocks and traveling long distances for millennia?
George Bernard Shaw once quipped that “All professions are conspiracies against the laity.” In other words, professions make a claim to knowledge that might just as well be owned by individual non-specialists. In some fields, such as medicine or law, such specialization might make sense. But in the realm of personal physicality, such claims can actually deprive individuals of their primal powers.
Consider some of the unstated implications that come with exercise specialization and the credentialing of physical trainers:
You, as a lay person, don’t know how to move, train or educate your body.
You don’t know what’s good for you: You need an expert to tell you what to do and how to move.
Only we know what’s good for your body.
There is a “right way” to exercise, with “proper form” and we know what it is. This is something that you can’t possibly discover yourself.
If you try to get yourself in shape, without our help, you’ll be putting yourself at considerable risk.
You are incapable of self-knowledge in physical fitness. If you try to train yourself, injury and frustration are inevitable.
You need us.
Taken together, these implicit messages strike fear into the hearts and minds of would-be exercisers. This creates a backfire effect that actually makes people less likely to exercise.
The paradox of fitness professionalism is that it tends to produce the precise opposite of what it claims to do. The original objective, we have to assume, is to teach or inspire people to create healthier, happier bodies. But when professionals lay exclusive claim to expert knowledge of people’s bodies, they disempower the very people they are supposedly trying to help. To the extent that it reserves physical knowledge for an “expert class,” the fitness certification industry may actually be a threat to public health.
who’s holistic?
It’s also the case that, contrary to popular declarations in the marketplace, most modern H&F is not holistic. Not even close. We fail in several ways. First, is our myopic focus on selected systems of the body. You know the favorites: adipose tissue, muscle tissue, cardiovascular tissue and skin. We throw some token attention to immunity, digestion and bone health, but that’s about it. In the process, we pay scarce any attention to the most vital of all systems: the nervous system.
We also neglect other holistic elements of the human experience such as community. We write customized programs for individual weight-loss and individual athletic enhancement. We put people in isolation on treadmills. But humans thrive best in community and therefore we must take tribe into account by emphasizing and creating positive social experience. Isolated training sessions fail this test. Human health cannot exist in isolation.
Similarly, we neglect the land, our habitat, our life support system. Every detail of human anatomy and physiology evolved in outdoor settings, under the influence of heat, cold, wind, rain and sun. Unless you’re making some effort to get people out of the gym or studio, you can hardly make a claim to holism. Indoor living can never be holistic.
Finally, there’s our biological context, the grand scope of human experience and history. Most H&F programs treat the body as if it simply fell out of the sky one sunny day, fully-formed, but in desperate need of conditioning. In fact, we are aboriginal beings with a deep history; we have ancient bodies, intimately connected to other creatures and habitat. The failure of H&F to honor human evolution demonstrates profound ignorance and a lack of vision.
irrelevance
The most striking rap against H&F is its increasing irrelevance in the face of accelerating social and environmental breakdown. In his landmark book and movie, Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore gave us a compelling set of reasons to take climate change seriously. Often described as “the most important environmental issue of our time,” climate change demands our immediate attention.
But important as it is, atmospheric warming is only one of the social-environmental challenges that we now face. The list is daunting: fresh water shortages, deforestation, loss of habitat, species extinctions, death of fisheries and oceans, toxic pollution, topsoil erosion, infectious diseases, poverty, injustice, social and economic dysfunction. No matter how we choose to look at it, the facts are inescapable –we live in an extremely inconvenient world.
Our predicament is a genuine emergency. As such, it demands a stark re-evaluation of every assumption, every behavior, every discipline, and every profession of the modern world. The questions are inescapable and we are compelled to ask: How does my profession, (discipline, industry, avocation) make the world a better place? How does my life contribute to the health of the biosphere? These questions demand answers from every person and every segment of our culture. No person, discipline or industry gets a pass.
If all was well in our world, it might make sense to focus our energies on the condition of our abs, our butts and our thighs. It might make sense to devote resources to incremental improvements in athletic performance. But all is not well. Habitat is dying before our eyes and our health is going with it.
It is time for health and fitness relevance. It is time to make our health practices consistent with environmental realities. And yet, the H&F industry refuses to step up. The modern gym carries on with business-as-usual as if the outside world didn’t exist.
failure of vision
Given the scope and magnitude of today’s social-environmental crisis, it becomes obvious that the H&F industry displays a spectacular failure of vision. That is, we fail to see how important and influential our profession might actually be in today’s world. Fitness could be much more than mere body improvement for individuals. It could be a powerfully transformative force for an entire culture.
The H&F industry could be taking a leadership role in the world today. After all, who better to speak to the crisis of the modern world, and the breakdown of the body-environment relationship than fitness professionals? We know the body’s predicament better than anyone. We ought to be passionate, even militant health advocates, fighting for a better world. We ought to be subverting the culture of sedentary living and environmental destruction. But instead, our industry is weak, passive and subservient to the dominant paradigm of image, weight-loss, skin care and fashion. We are cultural cowards.
make us over
So, here is my assessment: The H&F industry is in terrible condition. It’s out of shape and out of date. It focuses on the wrong things, it undercuts its own objectives and it fails to offer a coherent, holistic message. It is weak, passive and fails to show leadership. It clearly needs a makeover.
But where shall we begin? Minor tweaks would be akin to painting the toenails on an industry that’s facing a terminal illness. What we need is a wholesale reevaluation of our purpose, our objectives and our values. What we need is a face-to-face encounter with the realities of the modern world. What we need is a revolution.
Or, we could just shoot up some Botox, take a few pills and pose on a magazine cover.
What will it be?
