Is a post-election fitness frenzy coming?
"a fascist worked out today. did you?"
Body Type brings you insights about body image and body culture from me, Mikala Jamison, an independent writer who’s been through big body changes and worked in the fitness industry. I keep most of my posts free, but will be putting more behind the paywall in 2025. Now’s a good time to upgrade. Just $4.17/month for an annual subscription helps me keep writing and building this community.💚
In case you missed it: I’m in The Atlantic this week, writing about why group fitness classes are the best way to make friends as an adult. Read here (gift link)! I also went off on Notes about a big important body thing. Notes is fun. It’s like Substack’s Twitter but less insane. Follow me there:
Listen, a handful of online posts does not a movement make, and my algorithms know to show me anything lifting or exercise adjacent, so I don’t yet take this seriously as something happening in huge numbers outside of my or anyone’s online bubble. These posts, though, have captured my interest should they signal an imminent trend or long-term shift. I won’t be caught unawares if they do! The question is: Are more politically-left people going to start exercising routinely in response to the second presidential election of Donald Trump?
Take a look at just a few of the posts like this I’ve seen since Nov. 6:
Just for kicks even though it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, I checked out Google Trends and found that since the election, searches for “weight lifting,” “strength training,” “workout plan,” and “exercise” are all consistently up, too. “Self defense” saw a huge spike from Nov. 6-8 and then fell again. Hmm!
My sundry thoughts:
First, the “If you’re a leftist … there’s no excuse” tweet was summarily flamed on Twitter for being ableist – and then the flaming was flamed; same as it ever was in that digital hall of horrors. The framing that to be a “good” anything (a leftist, a person in general) you must exercise every day because there’s “no excuse” does not contribute to making the world of exercise more welcoming, and it needs to be. Even as a gym rat, I’m sick to death of this take.
Sure, some people have endless excuses to avoid doing things they don’t want to do. You know what else people have? Reasons. There are legitimate reasons someone might find it nearly impossible to exercise 4-5 days a week (and yes, the physical conditions or limitations of their body are among those). To posit that they’re only doing activism or life correctly if they somehow work around those reasons is ignorant of the complexities of people and of bodies. Each person is responsible for being honest with themselves about whether they’re making excuses or really have their reasons; it’s not for scolds on social media to arbitrate.
Anyway, my first thought when I saw the posts about getting into exercise was, Well, I hope you’re serious. Would it be a net positive in my opinion if more people started exercising, specifically strength training? Gentle reader of Body Type, famously a strength exercise-focused newsletter, I think you know it would be. I’d love for more people to dig exercise the way I do because it’s made everything about my physical and mental life better. I’d also love more people disproving the horseshit notion that fitness is inherently rightwing.
But I have to wonder if the I’m going to start exercising now of it all is an (understandably) emotional but ultimately temporary reaction to a situation that’s made us feel powerless; I wonder if people are feeling fired up to “fight back” in this way right now but their motivation won’t last.
I wonder that because I, too, have been fired up post-election once before; I loudly proclaimed all the things I intended to do and was doing, as I wrote about here:
My motivation to do many of these things, though, waned over time because: 1) Life gets in the way and since I had no realistic, sustainable plan for getting involved in political actions or civic engagement, those efforts tumbled down toward the bottom of my priority list; and 2). My motivations then were more extrinsic than intrinsic.
In other words: I’d go to marches or volunteer or fundraise, and while those actions were better than nothing, it would have been better if I joined up with an existing group and routinely worked with them on specific things; and I was grasping for things to do – the obvious things a lot of other people were doing – instead of considering what I valued most and really wanted to do.
How this relates to fitness: If people are getting into exercise now only because of the election, it’s better than them not getting into it at all, sure. It’s tough to observe, though, that it takes a crisis to motivate them to do it. I see this not as a personal failing but a systemic one: As I wrote for ’ Mental Hellth newsletter in 2022:
As is the case with so much in this country, the powers that be have designated benchmarks we might hit to advance our physical and mental well-being, but have afforded us so little in the way of tools to realize those outcomes. … You might say: Anyone can do jumping jacks in their apartment, anyone can get some exercise somehow, for free or close to it. I do think that some exercise is possible for most people, even if it doesn’t come easy. And even just an hour per week can reduce depression symptoms. But a significant barrier we can’t ignore is that a lot of people don’t know what to do, how to do it, or how much of it to do.
Many people have not started exercising until now because getting into and staying into exercise is incredibly difficult for a lot of people in this country. I worry that anyone saying they have a post-election swole goal isn’t going to stick to it not because I think they’re inherently full of shit, but because American life is generally unsupportive of habitual exercise.
What I believe can make it easier relates to the two points I made above: 1.) You need a realistic and sustainable long-term plan, and 2). You need to be intrinsically motivated — meaning you need to exercise because it supports what you value in life beyond the ability to maybe punch a Nazi in the street one day because that’s what good leftists should be able to do. Not to downplay the seriousness of the result of the election, but I think it’s much more likely that you’ll need exercise to shore up the other areas of your life than it is you’ll need it to do hand-to-hand combat.
It’s a noble and sensible thing to want to get stronger and fitter as a means of potentially defending other people and yourself. If you are never in a position of having to do that, though – and I hope you never are – are you going to kick exercise to the curb? Are you going to let it fall off if the next four years turn out to be anything other than the violent and chaotic hellscape of our nightmares (let’s hope)?
Exercise isn’t something contained behind in case of emergency glass, ready for us to engage with only when we feel we’re out of other options. It’s something to engage with as often as we can, however and as much as we can, in any circumstances, forever, as a means of feeling better in every conceivable way. That in turn helps us show up in the world with more energy, potency, and enthusiasm to improve it.
Exercise helped me get much more physically strong and fit, yes. Do I consider it more likely than I did 15 years ago that I could fight back if someone fucked with me? Sure. But – and sorry to get macabre – any fascist foot soldier with more size and raw strength than I’ll ever hope to gain1 is in the winning position. I don’t really see a point in training exclusively for the scenario that I’d have to defend myself or anyone else against such a person one day.
Some better reasons to train for life are these: It makes you less anxious and depressed; it makes you more confident and curious (learning how to exercise makes you more comfortable with learning how to do other new things, too); it improves your sense of embodiment; it makes you more comfortable with failure in all areas; it makes you nicer; it makes you less frustrated with your body if you do it to feel embodied instead of only doing it to get hotter. I wrote about a lot of this here:
To those ends, you’ll need to develop a sane, safe, sustainable exercise routine. My number-one recommendation for getting into sensible strength exercise is Casey Johnston’s Liftoff: Couch to Barbell program/book and everything she writes in her newsletter, She’s a Beast. The Stronger by the Day program is great as well. I discussed more about getting into strength training as a beginner on the Slate “How To!” podcast, which you can listen to here. Here on Substack, has great resources in How to Move. I plan to offer more specific guidance about this here in Body Type, too.
The bottom line: If this moment serves as your entry point into the world of lifelong habitual exercise, great. If you’re feeling pressured to get into it because you see social media posts saying you must in order to be a good activist or whatever, though, I encourage you to ignore that. That’s just tiresome gatekeeping and virtue signaling, and such guilt-driven motivation will not sustain you, anyway. What will is getting into some form of routine exercise – if and however you can, however your body will allow – because you truly believe it will be good for your unique body, mind, and life despite whatever else is going on in the world.
And also probably a gun.
Ahh I've been waiting for this one! Great piece (and thank you for the shoutout).
The "no excuses" concept is especially sinister when you consider the impacts this new administration may have on so many barriers to exercise — I'm extremely skeptical that things are going to improve economically for working-class people, many of whom already have to work so hard and so much that they don't have time or energy left for exercise; one can only imagine that the childcare and family support systems are going to get even worse; who the hell knows whats going to happen to our healthcare infrastructure. It all feels very rugged individualism-coded and not at all realistic.
Obviously I too am a HUGE fan of exercise, and if this motivation is sustainable for folks (or even if this specific motivation itself is short-lived but inspires people to try a new form of exercise that they may end up sticking with because they enjoy it or get something out of it), that's great. And of course exercise is a wonderful antidote to stress. And feeling stronger and taking care of yourself are excellent things, especially during difficult times. But this idea that it's going to be what saves us… yikes.
Very good points. This reminds me of the continual discussions on why people do martial arts. There's a lot of marketing around learning an art for self defense but the reality is that there are few situations where martial arts will be useful, especially if you are new/not training for a black belt. If someone is bigger, stronger, surprises you or has a weapon then there won't always be much you can do.
The best instructors are the ones who admit this and primarily focus on other reasons for doing martial arts (for movement, strength building, or spirtual reasons depending on the practice).