Welcome to
The Anti-Fitness Project
Est. 2019 – No cookies, no pop-ups, no sneaky sales chat… just ideas worth exploring
Remember when…
Remember when the internet was a place to wander and discover rather than a series of sophisticated sales funnels? When websites were quirky digital cabins built by passionate people sharing ideas, not conversion-optimised marketing machines? When you could spend hours falling down fascinating rabbit holes without once being asked for your email address?
The early web was chaotic, unpolished, and gloriously human. It was built for exploration and connection, not extraction and commodification. Websites existed to share information and build community and the possibility that you might eventually buy something was secondary to the experience of simply being there.
Movement has followed a strikingly similar path. What began as natural, curious exploration of our bodies in space gradually transformed into pre-packaged products: workout programmes, fitness classes, and personal training packages with precisely defined outcomes. The wild territory of human movement became increasingly mapped, standardised, and commodified.
To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with exercise programs or fitness professionals (I was one for 20+ years). They serve a purpose. But just as today’s web focuses overwhelmingly on conversion at the expense of connection, our movement culture has narrowed to emphasise only what can be packaged, measured, and sold.
This website is my small rebellion against both trends. It’s a digital space that celebrates exploration over extraction and a movement philosophy that values the unmapped territories over the well-trodden paths.
What the bloody hell is this place?
You’ve stumbled onto something different. This isn’t another fitness site promising to transform your body/life/relationship with food through 6 simple steps and an overpriced programme.
This is a digital clubhouse for people who’ve tried every fitness approach under the sun and found them all lacking. For those who suspect there’s something fundamentally off about how our culture approaches movement and bodies. For the misfits who never quite fit into conventional exercise spaces and wonder if perhaps they’re not the problem after all.
The Anti-Fitness Project doesn’t offer a new map to follow. It teaches cartography.
Here’s the deal
Our modern relationship with movement is utterly bollocks. It’s been shaped by centuries of puritanical values, industrial efficiency, colonial thinking, and capitalist commodification. Yet we’re told our movement struggles are personal failings rather than predictable outcomes of these systems.
The fitness industry handed us a single, mass-produced map drawn with the compass of physics, the ruler of economics, and the ink of standardisation. Their map emphasises certain landmarks (weight loss, muscle gain, performance metrics) while leaving vast territories completely blank or marked with “here be dragons.”
The Anti-Fitness Project isn’t about burning this map. That map served a purpose for a time and still does for many people. The conventional fitness approach isn’t wrong… it’s just incomplete. It’s one small part of a much larger territory that’s gone largely unexplored as we’ve rushed to commodify movement.
This project is about recognising that no single map can accurately represent the full territory of human movement and embodiment, and learning to create maps that actually reflect YOUR unique landscape rather than forcing you into someone else’s version of “normal”.
Beyond Movement
What fascinates me most about movement is that it’s never just about movement. Our relationship with movement often serves as a direct reflection of our relationships with ourselves, others, and the environment around us.
What began for me as simple curiosity about different approaches to fitness gradually revealed itself as an exploration of much deeper territories like how we experience our bodies, how we relate to authority, how we navigate cultural conditioning, and how we understand our place in the world.
The way you move (or don’t move) tells a story about how you inhabit your body, how you process information, how you relate to pleasure and discomfort, and how you’ve been shaped by systems larger than yourself. Change your relationship with movement, and you often change far more than just your physical experience.
The Anti-Fitness Project starts with movement because it’s tangible and immediate, but I’ve learned this is definitely not where it ends. This exploration inevitably expands into how we think, feel, connect, and create meaning – becoming less about exercise and more about how we navigate being human in a world that often tries to standardise our experience.
Maps as Metaphor
Once I realised that movement was a gateway to these deeper territories, I needed a framework to make sense of such complex terrain. That’s when the cartography metaphor emerged as the perfect way to understand our relationship with movement and embodiment.
Traditional approaches hand us a single, standardised map and insist it’s the complete picture. But just as no flat map can perfectly represent our spherical Earth, no single perspective can capture the full complexity of human movement. Each approach, each map, reveals certain features while inevitably obscuring others.
The power comes not from finding the “right” map, but from learning to layer multiple maps and developing the skills to navigate the rich, multidimensional territory that emerges when various perspectives converge.
This is where the real adventure begins… not in following someone else’s directions, but in becoming your own cartographer.
Map Layers
Think of how understanding changes when you overlay different perspectives:
- The Traditional Fitness Layer shows you the world through measurements, before-and-after photos, and energy pathways
- The Historical Layer reveals how Victorian-era class distinctions and colonial ideologies shaped what we consider “proper” movement
- The Economic Layer exposes how movement was stripped from daily life, then repackaged and sold back to us as a product
- The Embodiment Layer illuminates internal sensations and wisdom that standardised approaches typically ignore
- The Gender Layer maps how movement expectations and experiences differ based on gendered conditioning
- The Neurodiversity Layer charts movement through minds that process information differently than the assumed “normal”
Each layer tells partial truths. The magic happens when you learn to overlay them, revealing both new possibilities and important complexities that no single viewpoint could capture.
Under Construction
This site, like your relationship with movement, is perpetually evolving. I’m gradually expanding each map layer with essays, reflections, and practical tools for exploration. No slick content calendar or SEO strategy, just genuine exploration of territory worth mapping.
Current expeditions in progress:
- The origins story (how I got from fitness professional to Anti-Fitness cartographer)
- Unpacking the historical layer (how we got here)
- Developing sensorial navigation tools (practical ways to reconnect with embodied wisdom)
Who’s Behind This?
I’m Dominique, a reformed fitness professional with 20+ years in the industry who gradually realised I was perpetuating systems I no longer believed in. The Anti-Fitness Project emerged from my own frustration with prefabricated maps that led to predetermined (and often unsatisfying) destinations.
This isn’t about rejecting movement. It’s about reclaiming it from industrial packaging and reconnecting with the wild, complex territory that is your embodied experience.