Welcome to
The Anti-Fitness Project
Est. 2019 – No cookies, no pop-ups, no sneaky sales chat… just ideas worth exploring
Explore What Moves You
I spent more than twenty years working in fitness.
For much of that time, I believed in what I was doing. Not because I was stupid, brainwashed, or secretly trying to make people feel bad about themselves, but because the ideas I had been taught made sense. They were supported by professional education, scientific research, public health advice, and a culture that treated them as fairly obvious truths about bodies, health, and human behaviour.
I also knew a lot of very good people working from the same assumptions – hell, I was a good person!
But the problem I found increasingly difficult to ignore was that for an industry that was so confident in knowing what people should do, its methods seemed to work remarkably poorly for a very large number of people.
For years, I thought the answer was to find a better method.
I moved through behaviour change, habit formation, motivation, mindfulness, intuitive approaches, environmental explanations, and broader critiques of fitness and diet culture. Each new perspective helped me see something the previous one had missed. Some changed my thinking enormously.
But over time, another pattern became harder to ignore…
… We are very good at replacing one answer with another.
“Be disciplined” becomes “build better habits.”
“Lose weight” becomes “get strong.”
“Push through” becomes “listen to your body.”
“Do the most effective exercise” becomes “find movement you enjoy.”
The language changes. The values sometimes change. The new approach may be kinder, more humane, and genuinely useful in so many situations.
But the underlying structure this attitude leaves untouched is the belief that there is a correct way to relate to your body, a correct set of things to value, and a correct destination we are all supposed to reach. This is the part I’m interested in now.
The Anti-Fitness Project is an investigation into fitness as a system: the ideas, institutions, measurements, technologies, professional practices, cultural expectations, and economic forces that help shape what we believe bodies are for, what movement is supposed to achieve, what counts as health, and what a responsible person is expected to do about all of it.
It is not anti-movement, anti-exercise, anti-training, anti-science, anti-gym, or anti-health.
Nor is it an argument that everyone should reject fitness.
You might understand everything I write here and still love the gym. You might want to lose weight. You might enjoy tracking your training, chasing performance goals or trying to become stronger. You might decide that exercise matters very little to you. You might remain conflicted about the whole thing.
I am becoming less interested in deciding which of those answers is correct.
I am much more interested in how we came to experience some answers as self-evidently correct in the first place.
What have we learned to value?
Who taught us to value it?
What can science and measurement genuinely tell us, and where do we ask them to answer questions they cannot answer?
When does expertise help us make choices, and when does it begin making choices for us?
What disappears when a complicated human life gets reduced to a handful of measurable outcomes?
What does it cost to achieve the thing we have been told matters?
And once we can see some of the forces that helped shape what we want, what do we choose then?
Now for the bad news… I don’t currently have a new method to give you. But for a reason!
I don’t want The Anti-Fitness Project to become a more enlightened version of the same thing it’s trying to examine. I don’t want to replace fitness rules with anti-fitness rules, body control with body-trust purity, or one supposedly universal definition of success with another.
I am still working out what this project becomes.
For now, I am writing, questioning, revisiting things I once believed, following ideas into uncomfortable places and trying to make some of the water we are all swimming in a little easier to see.
You are welcome to explore it with me.
Explore what moves you.
Who’s Behind This?
I’m Dominique. I spent more than twenty years working in fitness before The Anti-Fitness Project began.
Now I’m trying to understand some of the ideas, systems and assumptions I spent those years living and working inside, and what becomes possible when we stop treating them as simply “the way things are.”