Is today’s fashion for fitness, healthy?

© Tony Cearns, on exercise in Norway, 1982.

Is today’s fashion for fitness healthy?

To be fit is to be well adapted to a set of stressful conditions. For example, you can be thumb-fit for tiddlywinks or cardio-vascularly fit for running. Health is less easily defined. The presence of a well-defined pathology can be readily established, perhaps, but identifying the absence of such is trickier.

The base word "ill" comes from Old Norse "illr" meaning "bad, evil, difficult," which replaced the Old English word "yfel" (which evolved into "evil") in some contexts. By the 13th century, "ill" began to be used to describe poor health, and the form "illness" emerged later to describe the state of being ill or unwell.

What about the territory between being healthy and being unhealthy? We can all relate to being free from illness but not feeling tip top. Biology teaches us that our immune system is constantly at work scrutinising and sifting, sorting self from non-self. As we grow older it does this less well, mistaking self for not-self. We succumb to an over-alertness where the immune system is in overdrive at the slightest sniff of contagion. A chronic low-grade inflammation becomes the norm. Injuries are slower to heal.

Fitness is measurable, surveyable by any observer. One thinks of VO2 Max, heart recovery rate, one-rep-max, time-to-fatigue, body fat percentage, the Wingate test, the Y balance test, and so on. Health has subjective elements only known to the individual. It is a private affair.

And here-in lies part of the problem. Being fit can be displayed like a set of freshly ironed clothes. ‘Pumped up’ from the gym, we seek admiring looks. Feedback, being crucial to self-worth, plays its pivotal role. Social media’s ‘likes’ and ‘claps’, the kind of clothing we wear, the places we frequent, the type of friends we make, the stories we tell about ourselves, all pressed into the service of self-aggrandisement and a world of self-bestowed superlatives.

Feedback is engineered. We influence the feedback we obtain by presenting ourselves in a certain way. We display at times and places chosen to maximise our return. Presenting ourselves to the outside world in the way we want to be perceived, we obtain a thumbs up, validating the story we are telling about ourselves. We feel great. It’s very addictive. Except, like any mirror, it can be shattered by poor health, age, injury, stress, change of circumstance and so on.

Thoughts about how fitness and health are related go back millennia. In ‘The Republic and Laws’, Plato emphasized physical training (gymnastics) alongside music for a balanced soul. He saw the body as an important vessel for cultivating virtue. Aristotle advocated for moderation in diet and exercise as part of eudaimonia (human flourishing). He viewed health as a natural good. The Stoics valued discipline and self-control, which can overlap with fitness practices. Epictetus saw the body as a tool to train the will.

Nietzsche contested asceticism but celebrated health, power, and movement as expressions of life-affirmation. Merleau-Ponty wrote about the body as a lived experience in ‘Phenomenology of Perception’. While not directly about fitness, his work underpins later thinking on physical presence, movement, and being-in-the-world. Foucault in ‘Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality’ discusses how bodies are shaped by power structures, including regimes of health and fitness. He looks critically at how health norms are produced. Heather Reid, a philosopher and former competitive athlete, writes on the ethics and meaning of sport, drawing from Aristotle to explore how athletics contributes to character and virtue. Yuval Noah Harari touches on transhumanism, longevity, and biohacking as philosophical issues about the future of the human body. Sloterdijk in ‘You Must Change Your Life’, explores "anthropotechnics” - how humans train themselves, including physically, to transcend themselves.

There is no shortage of views on the matter. Here is a favoured one.

‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’, said Simone Weil (in a letter to Joë Bousquet, 13 April 1942). She realised the profound importance of paying careful attention to oneself, to other people, to the wider world. ‘We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will’, she continued.

Fitness regimes emphasise the participation of the will. Bodies are treated as machines to be overcome, individuals become projects with metrics, deadlines and goals.

Attention can give rise to attunement. The psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs writes about resonance, particularly how recovery and health are relational. Attunement involves paying attention to bodily sensations, emotional responses, and the relational dynamics with people, animals and plants and inanimate things.

We see something similar in the Daoist concept of health and fitness, finding balance between opposing forces, and harmony with nature through wu-wei. Fitness might be seen as the body's ability to respond appropriately to challenges without being damaged by them—in the way that bamboo bends but doesn't break in strong winds.

The image I’m trying to convey is not one where hard physical training is avoided but rather embraced in a different way to the ‘mind over matter’ approach. Just as Rainer Maria Rilke explores (in the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus) how poetry can open us to the presence of things, allowing them to speak through us, so too physical training. Exercise is not compartmentalised into a gym session. It is part of daily living. When walking the dog, gardening, climbing the stairs, kneading bread dough and so on, the idea is that all our activities incorporate elements of physical challenge if we are sufficiently attentive.

That’s not to say that we stop going to gyms. I spend an hour each day in my home gym. But that’s a small part of my daily physical work. From when I rise early in the morning until I close the day tending my vegetable garden, I am constantly at physical work. I hardly sit down. That fact has probably contributed to my good fortune of health. Coming from a family most of whom have had serious diabetes, I cannot but think that I was spared because of the way I live, always on the go.

Many years ago when I was young, I joined an elite territorial army regiment. During the selection fortnight in Scotland I was paired with another young man in a buddy-buddy system. He was slightly built, about 5 foot 10 inches tall. Not an imposing physique. The selection fortnight was quite tough and involved long marches and runs with heavy bergens, milling, sleeping out in trenches in poor weather, lack of sleep – all the usual stuff.  At the end of the fortnight my friend (as he became) came first from about 180 would-be recruits in the 10-mile forced march in full battle gear.

Interestingly, in his work life he was a gardener, working up to 12 hours a day in all weathers. The fortnight’s selection wasn’t that unusual for him. A normal day for him was to be physically at work tending gardens. The selection week was more demanding, of course, but years of gardening had built a resilience and stamina. The kind that farmers used to have before the era of satellite guided combine harvesters.

So, is today’s fashion for fitness healthy? Well, it’s better than not exercising at all, but it brings with it its own problems. A better strategy for health is to incorporate exercise routines liberally across a day of being on the go. But not just any old ‘being-on-the-go. Being on the go as being attuned to how things around you continuously change.