fitness culture – FIT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE

Are you familiar with the term “friend homework”? My yoga instructor friend Jess introduced me to this term a while back. It means any digital interactions with friends: liking posts, reading blogs, watching reels in your DMs. It’s the online things you do between the in person interactions that keep your friendships going.

I see it as an aspect of kin keeping, the emotional and social work we do to define who our people are.

In person is best

Last weekend I enjoyed seeing some of my fellow Fit is a Feminist bloggers. Some I met for the first time!

We talked about things we don’t necessarily blog about, the deeply personal stuff as well as sharing about our lives outside of fitness.

It was a great afternoon. Thank you Sam, Sarah and Kathleen for hosting us!

Kudos, likes, shares and comments

Whatever platform you share your fitness activities on (Strava, Peloton, Zwift, Facebook, Instagram…) there is some way for your friends to acknowledge your workouts.

A tiny human takes a break from riding a cool toy to give you encouragement. Way to go!

And I’m here for all of it. Ellen mentioned at the barbecue how great it was to get consistent kudos from me on Strava. I check it almost every day and I do my best to thumbs up all the activities. It’s a tiny connector and positive reinforcement. I see you friends!

Normalizing active living

Seeing what everyone is doing normalizes daily activity for me. I see your daily cycling commute. I see you lifting heavy things. Nice walk!

Two women walking, holding coffee and wearing athletic shoes on a paved path in a park.

I especially appreciate seeing activities when I only know folks from one sport. Like Randonneur Luke is a triathlete. I didn’t know he also swam and ran like he cycles. I appreciate him even more!

Making the invisible visible

When I went to the gym I’d see some friends but only those whose workout timing synched up with mine. Everyone else’s time in the gym was invisible to me.

For cycling friends, they live all over Canada: Ontario, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan….all kinds of places. Aside from the occasional event I would otherwise have no sense of the kind of season they are having.

Having some way to see what everyone is doing gives me a better picture of what it means to be fit.

Sharing is caring

I’m lucky to be in a group chat with some London area Randonneurs. We share car rides to event starts and other strategies to reduce costs of events. We problem solve to eliminate barriers to participation. Sometimes we just share a silly reel or meme that is about cycling. It all counts!

Cheerleading and consoling

I’m here for your wins. HIGH FIVE!

High fives feel great to give and receive!

More importantly, I’m here for the DNFs, the mechanicals and the injuries. Because these are important moments in our fitness stories.

A Lycra clad cyclist bent over to help a friend loosen the quick release on the front of their bike

CASE study

I’m also doing that friend homework as a Copy And Steal Everything (CASE) study. Oh is there a great 50 km route with a delicious pastry shop? Thank you for the idea!

Ohhh you can open water swim there? ON IT!

There are free kayak rentals from the library? Hello! I’m going!

Wins all around

I hope this post encourages you to share your workouts and activities on a platform that works for you. It helps with accountability and a sense of community.

I also hope you realize that when you do your fitness friend homework you are making a real difference to your friends.

Sure, nothing beats Kim grabbing me by the shoulder, shaking me and exclaiming “Keep cycling! You are awesome!” but a little digital thumbs up is a sweet taste of that in person sugar. I encourage you to give it a go.

I just got back from guest lecturing in a Women’s Studies class called “The Body,” taught by our friend and colleague, Wendy Pearson. Here’s the course description:

How we understand the body, whether through scientific investigation or through its representation in media, literature or art, has material effects on how people’s lives and experiences are shaped. We will examine social and scientific constructions of the body, including concepts of beauty, health, fitness, sexuality, and questions of representation.

The course will also consider how our relationship – both personal and cultural — to our bodies shapes our sense of self and both prescribes and proscribes certain possibilities for how we may live our lives. We will look, for example, at the way in which only certain very fit bodies qualify as athletic or at the ways in which the relationship between musculature and class identity has changed since the early 20th century. We will examine particular social problems, such as our society’s difficulty with understanding the disabled body as sexual, the current cultural obsession with children’s body size, and the psychiatric and medical response to people who feel that their bodily sex does not match their gender. We will consider changing definitions of beauty and how that affects the ways in which different people understand themselves. We may also look at questions of representation, the various ways in which bodies and body parts are represented in the media and the issue of why some forms of representation of the nude body count as art while others are considered pornographic.

Sam and I shared the three-hour class tonight. She took the first half to talk about “Obesity Panics” and the trouble with framing obesity as an illness and its prevalence as an “epidemic.”

When I arrived shortly before the break, the packed room of 180 keen students was challenging her claim that there is something wrong with obesity being considered a disease. I got there just in time to hear Sam say that unlike cancer, obesity isn’t something you “get.” It’s something that the charts say you “are.”

After the break, it way my turn. My topic: “Fitness and Normative Bodies.” By the time Sam was done with them, they were afraid to say that there was a relationship between fitness and fatness. So hesitant were they to draw any connection that when I asked them about what measures or indicators they might use to judge whether they were physically fit or whether they’d made any progress, not a single person said anything about body weight or even about body composition.

We had a lively discussion about the impact of subtle forms of exclusion in fitness media and representations of fitness culture, in which only a narrow demographic of youthful, lean, toned, nondisabled, people, mostly men and mostly white are depicted. When women do appear in fitness media, there is a very narrow range of acceptable body types that pass muster.

I saw heads nodding (not nodding off!) when I said that engaging in physical activities that challenge us can be a real source of confidence and empowerment.

It took some convincing, but after hearing both of us I think the majority of the class was at least willing to entertain the idea that there is a pernicious form of exclusion going on in fitness culture. Though sometimes subtle, it makes it very difficult for people who do not fit the normative ideal body type to feel as if they belong.

This then becomes an equality issue, given that health, well-being, confidence, and a sense of your own power are all desirable social goods that can benefit everyone.

I ended by talking a bit about Olga Kotelko, who took up track and field at the age of 77 and had over 750 gold medals to her name by the time she turned 95 (at which age she died).

Olga Kotelko, who began her 18 year track career at age 77 and had 750 gold medals to her name by the time she died at 95.

The upshot: a more inclusive fitness culture that doesn’t preoccupy itself with the narrow demographic who occupies “the normative body” would have enormous social and political benefits that extend way beyond physical fitness.

Thanks, Wendy, for an opportunity to talk to your class. What a fabulous idea for a course and what fun it was to be there!

Tag: fitness culture

Guest Lecturing in “The Body”

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