Society is obsessed with fitness, but few people are fit. Ubiquitous gyms and influencers don’t inspire us to exercise. Why? It’s complicated, but the solution is simple.
“We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.”Are we a generation — a society — of spectators?On social media, fitness celebrities are so omnipresent that we’ve had to torture our language to describe them and what they do .
“Our data shows that more Americans than ever before are actively engaged in fitness,” said Anton Severin, vice president of research for the Those good-news, bad-news numbers are emblematic of Americans’ love-hate relationship with exercise. It’s been that way for a long, long time.“Looking fit, being fit, and the act of partaking in fitness is all very aspirational,” said Danielle Friedman, a journalist and author ofVic Tanny’s facilities
By the 1980s, with the increasing popularity of strength training, all the trends converged to give us fitness facilities as we know them today: treadmills for running; studios for aerobics, yoga, and other group classes; and acres of floor space for lifting, stretching, or, increasingly, looking at your phone while people around you lift, stretch, and look at their phones.Fitness trends often inspire corresponding fashion trends. Non-runners started wearing running shoes.
New clothing can get someone into the gym. But can it keep them coming back? The challenge, then as now, is converting that initial motivation to exercise into a lifelong habit.First, she said, “there’s the aesthetic of it. People like to look at fit, healthy bodies.”Finally, there’s the emotional catharsis we get from seeing someone’s accomplishment or transformation.That’s especially true of “thinspiration” content on social media.
“We’re conditioned to have a really narrow understanding of what fitness looks like,” Friedman said. Our perceptions are so skewed that even elite athletes like NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes and NBA point guard Luka Doncic“If you’re going to be in a public fitness space, you have to look like you know what you’re doing and look like you belong,” Friedman added. “If you don’t fit that mold, it creates an extra layer of challenges and barriers that require some fortitude to push through.
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