“No pain, no gain.”
“Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
“When others quit, I keep going.”
These are only some of the thousands of quotes you’ll find on the internet when looking to get into exercise. To someone who’s never done it before it almost feels like a war which needs to be won. A fierce, aggressive battle full of tears, sweat, pain and hunger in order to achieve your goal, no matter what that is. Yet you’d be surprised to know that after 15 years of working for the fitness industry, anywhere from being a cleaner in a gym to being assistant manager, my experience has been the complete opposite.
My World
I got into exercise pretty young by playing basketball with my friends. When I had to go to University and lose any relation to the sport and my friends, I nearly became depressed. That’s when I found weightlifting which I really enjoyed for 6 years. Once I got bored of weightlifting dancing came to my life at an amateur level and that led me to a career in Group Exercise.
Throughout those years exercise was not a battle for me, it was the place I’d go to escape my battles, my refuge. And if you think I’m the only one, the majority of my clients would come to the gym in order to escape their every day lives. The social aspect of being and working out with others, the feeling of doing something good for themselves and of course the feeling of accomplishment once they could complete a choreography or a Pilates move. Exercise was the goal, not a means to achieve a goal. And in my opinion that is what’s lost in the social media era, the feeling that when you exercise you have a good time and it’s not a punishment you have to succumb to, in order to reach some higher goal.
Competition
Of course that doesn’t mean that people who wish to push themselves to their limits are doing something wrong. That is the way of expressing themselves. Crossfit, Hyrox, Bodybuilding and other competitive sports which have been on the rise over the last decades, offer an environment where people can push past their physical and mental barriers, in order to achieve something bigger than mere participation.
The problem starts when that becomes the norm and anything less than that is not acceptable. There’s no point in exercise if you’re not striving for greatness, there’s no point doing a certain training method if you don’t look a certain way. In that aspect exercise becomes exclusionary instead of what it’s meant to be. And that discourages people who are already intimidated by the idea of walking into a gym or a facility. Why would someone endure daily physical punishment, when they already have to deal with what, they might consider a hostile environment to be in the first place.
So Why This Blog?
The reason I decided to start this Blog is to encourage more people to come into exercise and help those that are already in it. Over the past 4 years I’ve taught hundreds of students in Pilates, reformer, massage and group exercise and every weekend that I’m there, I feel really bad about the preconceptions that they have about themselves and the industry. They feel like they need to fit the mould when all they need to do is be themselves. An industry that is intimidating and prejudiced to people who don’t fit the age and size range, or people who don’t dress or behave a certain way.
This Blog will be a trove of my experiences, opinions, information and hopefully your feedback and conversations. I hope you manage to find something in it that changes your life even in the slightest of ways!
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