Dismantling Hyper-Individualism in the Fitness Industry
Jae's Perspective
Health is a pretty complicated topic to talk about.
Health has different meanings to different people, but I will include a post from my good friend Tom Reardon on Instagram.
However, Tom and I disagree with the WHO’s definition of health.
We see health not as a complete state, but as a continuous process. Human beings are dynamic so is their environment, we cannot define health in terms of a static innate state that needs to be completed.
This definition of a complete state also doesn’t add up to the various domains within and related to health. Even when looking at the social determinants of health, there are various factors that need to be addressed and continuously addressed. This renders the notion of a “complete” state useless as this ideal state cannot possibly be achieved or will continuously need to be worked on in order to be achieved.
But what do the pontifications concerning the nature of health have to do with individualism? It is my personal observation that the fitness industry and influential figures in it center health around the individual.
Health and Individualism
If Health as a construct is seen as a process rather than a state it is a process that must be fought for continuously.
With rampant health inequality based on race and class, environmental threats to health, and worsening psychological health we need to reframe the way we understand health.
It is factually incorrect that health in its various permutations is a function of individual agency alone. Yet this is the prism by which certain people in the space want to view health.
“Well if you just tried hard enough!”
“Work harder.”
“Pull up by your bootstraps.”
We see versions of these phrases fed to us in the fitness space constantly. Fitness professionals are constantly eating up work from people like Jordan Peterson, David Goggins, Ayn Rand, and misinterpretations of Stoic philosophy. These various thinkers and ideologies put the individual at the forefront.
While focusing on the human subject is important in various liberation movements, the individual does not have full agency over their social condition. The social condition which constructs and often dictates their process of health.
This over-emphasis on the individual as the sole arbitrator of their health outcomes is evidentially false, but also morally bankrupt.
The Neoliberal Under Belly of the Fitness Industry
The school of thought that’s often the recipient of numerous criticisms is “neoliberalism”. While neoliberalism as a philosophy is vast and would take too long to cover in its entirety, it is a useful lens for looking at the fitness industry.
“neoliberalism” is now generally thought to label the philosophical view that a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist…
Neoliberalism places a strong emphasis on the individual and laissez-faire capitalism. More bluntly stated neoliberalism sees individual agency as a focal point and market-based solutions as superior to government lead agencies/interventions.
How does this relate to the fitness industry?
The focal point of the fitness industry is the individual- individuals need personal coaches, individuals need to take supplements to take care of their health, individuals need to follow workout plans specified to them, and individuals need to have personalized diets.
The fitness industry is also the market solution for a person’s health problems. Instead of seeing failing health as a systematic or social problem just see health as an individual failing that can be remedied with a product.
The market can solve your health with a supplement, book, coaching, diet, or workout program instead of dealing with possibly more impactful government-regulated policies.
However, it’s widely known that the food industry sets the food landscape and is often the driver of diet, we also see various instances of food insecurity, and barriers to physical activity. I didn’t even mention the lack of access to healthcare, social services, and mental health services specifically.
Health cannot be commodified or bought it needs to be sewn into the very fabric of the society in which a person is living in.
The fitness industry has done a piss poor job addressing the rise of obesity, metabolic-related diseases, and health inequality. Perhaps this is due to the fitness industry being an industry focused on profits, as all industries are, instead of long-lasting systematic change.
Community-Based Health
Dismantling the hyper-individualistic fitness industry will require a radical shift in how we perceive our role as agents of health. By agents of health, I am referring to individuals who see health as a systemic and social condition that are not only seeing this but actually doing something about it.
Agents of health work towards remedying health inequality through social means. This refers to community-based action and policy.
This might mean opening up public gyms in parks, hosting free fitness classes in the community, advocating for the restriction of food advertisements, helping set up programs to give health-promoting foods to populations in need, and more.
The way to break from hyper-individualism is through community.
This introduction to community-based health isn’t anything new or revolutionary, but it seeks to destroy the commodification and individualization of health from the “fitness industry” and give health back to the people.
Coaches, dietitians, clinicians, and other health-related professionals need to view ourselves as agents of health who seek to promote health within our own communities.