Today, I heard Louis Theroux talking about the documentary he made about Joe Exotic, long before Tiger King showed up to entertain us all during lockdown. Louis was talking about interviewing people, and about how, underneath all the complexity of whatever subject he is investigating, his aim is always to try to answer a very simple question. In the case of Joe Exotic, the question was, “Do you think the tigers like being in a cage?”
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that. Not particularly about tigers, although I do now feel like I should clarify that I would also quite like to know whether the tigers like being in the cage – I’m leaning towards “fuck no!” What stuck with me was the idea of the “simplest question”.
Theroux’s documentary could have asked all sorts of much more sophisticated-sounding questions about animal captivity, exploitation, conservation, power, ownership, money, and the weird relationships human beings have with wild animals, but underneath all of it was this almost childishly simple question: do you think the tigers like being in the cage?
So, naturally, I started wondering what the simplest question I’m trying to ask with The Anti-Fitness Project is?
I’ve spent about twenty years in fitness, and a totally unreasonable amount of time thinking about what fitness actually is. I’ve pulled apart ideas about health, exercise, bodies, weight, movement, science, expertise, personal responsibility, motivation, measurement, optimisation, and all the other things that seem to get bundled together into this thing we call “fitness”. I’ve made diagrams, read papers, gone down historical rabbit holes, and spent hours thinking and talking about systems theory, ecological psychology, sociology, public health, medicine, capitalism, culture, etc, etc, etc… Then Louis Theroux comes along with a fucking tiger.
So, I spent my day trying to find that most simple question…
… and after a few false starts, umms and ahhhs, and “nah this just isn’t my vibe”, I finally landed on: Has fitness made anything better?
At least for now, this seems like the perfect simplest question.
I like it partly because it sounds feistier than I actually intend it to be. Back in the early stages of The Anti-Fitness Project, the question “Has fitness made anything better?” would have been asked because I had already decided the answer is “Fuck no” and I’m now going to spend 2,000 words telling you why. But now I feel more grown up and able to hold multiple answers at once. Plus, obviously, the answer is yes, of course it’s made things better.
Training has made people stronger, faster, more physically capable. People have discovered movement activities they love doing. They’ve made friends, found communities, learned things about their bodies, achieved things they never imagined they could achieve, recovered function, pursued meaningful goals, and experienced enormous amounts of pleasure through things we would reasonably call fitness.
I don’t need The Anti-Fitness Project to pretend none of that happened just to give some kind of shitty “hot take” on social media.
In fact, the fact that the answer isn’t simply “no” the exact reason why I think the question’s interesting. Because by asking, “Has fitness made anything better”, I’m not really asking whether anything good has ever happened in a gym. I’m asking someone to list what this crazy complex and undoubtedly successful cultural Fitness™ thing we’ve constructed has made better. And when they’ve got the list, tell me if they match the thing that Fitness™ believes it is making better. Do both lists match?
I think that maybe fitness has made some things much better and other things much worse. Maybe it has solved problems while also creating new ones. Maybe it has helped some people enormously while making other people feel as though there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Maybe some of the things we attribute to fitness actually belong to sport, medicine, rehabilitation, recreation, community, or simply moving around and doing things with other people. Maybe we’ve become much better at changing measurable things about human bodies without ever stopping to ask whether changing those things necessarily makes a human life better. Maybe fitness has given us access to forms of movement we would never otherwise have encountered while simultaneously helping to create the idea that movement is a specialised activity we need to deliberately obtain. Maybe our knowledge about exercise has become vastly more sophisticated while our relationship with movement has become stranger. Maybe instead of opening our lives to more possibilities and freedom it has made us more obedient and more reliant on others to decide what’s best for us.
Or maybe I’m wrong about some or all of that.
I genuinely don’t know, and I think that’s important to what I’m trying to do. The Anti-Fitness Project has never really been about proving that fitness is bad. I’m not anti-exercise, anti-training, anti-gym, anti-science, or anti-health. I’m interested in fitness as a system, and in making some of the assumptions underneath it visible enough that we can actually look at them and decide whether they’re working, rather than simply accepting them as the natural order of things.
Perhaps that’s why, “Has fitness made anything better?”, feels like such a useful question. Before I can answer it, I have to work out what I mean by fitness, what I mean by better and I have to ask better for whom, according to whom, compared with what, over what period of time, and at what cost.
Most of us are conditioned into a preconceived notion as to what counts as success before we start looking. A programme produces weight loss, so it worked. Someone gets stronger, so it worked. A biomarker improves, so it worked. A race time comes down, so it worked. And maybe it did if that was the specific goal. But I’ve discovered that it’s just as important to see what the cost was too? What happened to their time, energy, pain, relationships, food, money, identity, attention, joy, and everything else that didn’t happen to be the thing we were specifically measuring? That doesn’t mean the measurable outcome doesn’t matter. It means I’m no longer convinced that it gets to tell the whole story.
But all of that’s OK. Despite having no answers, I don’t feel like it was a wasted day, because the thing I liked about Louis Theroux’s tiger question wasn’t that it made the complexity disappear, but that it gave him somewhere to start.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this question if you have any.
But right now, I’m off to watch Tiger King and try to decide how I feel about Carole Baskin!