Please Join My New Fitness Cult
Worker wellness requires more than standing desks & creatine
When I switched jobs two years ago, I started playing volleyball at noon with my new coworkers, who, as I soon found out, took their bump-set-spikes very seriously. One even emailed me some advice about my form on the court:
“Use your forearms, not your fists,” the note said. The advice helped.
Until it didn’t. A few days later, a spiked ball smacked into my face and exploded my glasses. So much for using my forearms.
These days, to save my spectacles, I work out by myself. But I miss the group. They were a kindly and earnest congregation, and leaving their Church of the Righteous Forearms has forced me to find guidance elsewhere. There’s a lot of it on offer.
I could, for example, follow Andrew Huberman’s rituals for early morning sunlight. You can’t just look out your bedroom window and smile. There are a lot of rules for how to get the light right.
Plus, there’s Pamela Rief guiding millions of workers to better stretching and a better day. She’s a part of the high-intensity short-workout movement, and advice like hers turn my office into a sanctuary for the seven-minute workout.
And where shall I flee from Joe Rogan? He’s quite simply everywhere urging the purchase of more and more supplements. Stuff like alpha brain, flora beet crystals, deer antler velvet, and triphlectimol. (Okay, I made that last one up.)
Let me not forget Reagan Poltrok, the Treadmill Girl, who shows how low-intensity exercise can be perfect for the remote job. (Dramamine also helps for reading the face of her Apple Watch as she treads her way to productive health.)
The sheer proliferation of workout gurus crosses the eyes. But it also raises questions about what the fragmentation of fitness culture does to wellness in work culture.
Why Are There So Many Fitness Movements?
You might think of yourself as a free-spirited, data-based skeptic who’s impervious to religious zeal of any kind. You might derive your notions about standing desks and natural light and mid-day stretches and creatine from scientific studies. Good for you. But often “what the science tells us” gets tangled what the YouTubers tell us.
Last week, a Mode/Switch reader recommended a Vox piece that helped me understand why we’re so susceptible to athleisure-sporting influencers. In “Everything’s a Cult Now” Derek Thompson and Sean Illing discuss the breakdown of broadly shareable worldviews. In the absence of big frameworks of meaning (like organized faith), self-appointed gurus have generated a lot of sub-groups. These “cults,” as Thompson calls them, define themselves not by who they are but by who they’re against. He explains:
I’m not just thinking about a small movement with a lot of people who believe something fiercely. I’m also interested in the modern idea of cults being oriented against the mainstream…. And cults, especially when we talk about them in religion, tend to be extreme, tend to be radical, tend to have really high social costs to belonging to them.
I’m personally interested in the unfortunate conceptions of God that these cults are replacing: white, aggressive, masculine, prone to spiking the ball at your nose. My colleague Kristin Dumez has done good work deconstructing these conceptions of the divine in American evangelicalism. But for now, I’ll just echo Thompson’s observation that we seem to have a God-shaped hole in our hearts. And we fill it with SoulCycle.
What Fitness Cults Do to Workplace Culture
I’m not hating on the influencers. Some days, I’ll admit, I wish for the good old days when the only fitness advice was to go jogging. (When I wasn’t exercising, that was the exercise I wasn’t doing.) But I guess it’s good there are all these denominations of sled-pushers and 7-7-7ers and pickleballers and hot yoga studios. Their proliferation makes clear that you get to decide what health feels like. With a billion different regimens and diets, nobody believes that there’s just one way to be fit.
I have a friend who’s suffered hip displacement from birth. When people tell her she should take a walk during lunch, she just shakes her head and smiles. When people tell her she should jog after work, she shakes her head again. But this week, she texted a jubilant testimony: “I started Reformer Pilates about 5 months ago, and even though I’m not losing weight (which is how people seem to judge success of working out) I really love class and feel much better when I do it consistently. Less pain even.”
I love the way that fitness movements help people listen to their own bodies. But I don’t love how fitness trends pressure the individual to optimize.
Thou shalt eat 2000 calories, exercise 150 minutes per week, drink 100 ounces of water, sleep 8 hours, do 7-minute workouts, buy new shoes every 6 months, go for 5-minute sprints.
None of this is bad advice. All of it together, coming from so many different directions, feels like being fitted with a VO2 mask and told to sprint till you drop.
What You Get If You Subscribe to My Fitness Cult
Anne Helen Peterson notes that individualized approaches to life and work all too often create “The Optimization Sinkhole,” in which we obsess “on the self and the space around it.” Were I to start a health movement in support of better work culture, I’d preach one big idea: employee wellness is more than a personal question. Your life-and-work, in other words, is larger than the space between your AirPods.
The problem with wellness movements is not that they’re cult-like. The problem is that they put all the pressure for your wellness on your woundable body and your restless brain. Never mind the food industry and, behind that, the technology industry and, behind that, the dubious doctrine that we should all pursue whatever looks like progress to billionaires right now.
Fitness cults do their best work in workplace culture not when they help us resist the mainstream but when they help us notice what’s upstream.
Which is what I hope this Mode/Switch has helped you to do. So, please subscribe.
