A new ethos is helping make fitness more attainable and less toxic

Paul Landini is a personal trainer and health educator in Kitchener, Ontario.

I occupy a unique arena in the world of personal training. Most of my clients are adults like me, normal people who appreciate the value of exercise but feel at odds with the fitness culture in general. Like me, they tried to keep an open mind in the face of what is clearly idiotic ideology (“No pain, no gain”? Really?). They spent hours in the gym every week, wishing they could be outside. In short, they sipped the steroid-laced Kool-Aid until it became too bitter for their stomachs, and then looked for a more palatable option.

The approach I use when working with these intrepid souls is the same one I use to keep my own training/life demons at bay. Instead of chasing big, bold fitness goals—goals that typically take a lot of time and emotional energy—we aim to achieve a very achievable but equally challenging standard that I like to call “reasonably fit.”

The spirit of “reasonably fit” stands in stark contrast to the typical hard-training attitude. We prioritize the quality of movement over the number of reps and sets. Our performance standards are based on what our real bodies can do in the real world we inhabit. This means that if you’re a middle-aged office worker, you probably don’t need to train for a 600-pound squat. For most people in that demographic, just being able to get up off the floor in one fluid motion is a more productive and attainable goal.

It was a long road that led me to this niche. I have been immersed in the fitness world for as long as I can remember. Elementary school gym class led to high school weight training, and from there I jumped into boxing and martial arts; and although I was never that good at these athletic endeavors, they became the cornerstone of my burgeoning masculine identity. The gym has become my home away from home. Men’s Health, Muscle & Fitness, Flex – these glossy magazines provided the filter through which I began to see the world.

I can remember feeling a disconnect between the real me and this character that I had created. The aggressive take no prisoners stance; the egocentric attitude; the mistaken notions of what it means to be a man: everything seemed fake because, well, it was. But real men don’t care about this kind of navel gazing. Real men lift weights. So that’s what I kept doing.

Is it any wonder my twenties were such a mess?

Fortunately, after a decade lost in the retouched wilderness native to this particular subculture, I began to see the light. My “aha moment” came when I was tending to shoulder pain that had been bothering me for God only knows how long. It hit everything at once, an existential punch that left me feeling deflated and embarrassed, but also emboldened.

It became clear that my relationship with fitness, and my body, was toxic and dysfunctional, to say the least. I’ve never wondered what exactly I’m looking for when I commit to an eight-week training plan. I had never given any thought to the aesthetic or performance standards I had been chasing or who set these standards in the first place. I just nodded along with the rest of the Gym Bros and pressed my next set.

But you can’t help but see the light. My faith had been shaken and the questions kept coming. Why am I so concerned about muscle mass and body fat? Is it because I place so much importance on health and vitality that I bust my butt on a regular basis? Or is it because of a deep-seated inferiority complex that manifests itself as a constant and desperate search for the approval of others?

These are the kinds of questions that Fitness Industrial Complex would rather we didn’t consider, as these are the kinds of questions that lead people to cancel their gym memberships. But I know they ask me because, in addition to expressing them myself, as a coach I hear them all the time from the people I work with.

Wanting to be reasonably fit is not a compromise or an avoidance. You still need to work hard, you still need to show up and push yourself regularly. It just means there are other aspects of life that are more important than benching twice your own body weight. Leave the training hours for the so-called Alpha. For us reasonably fit people, we train to live and not the other way around.

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