New Year, New Fitness Culture

I will be presenting this workshop at St. Werburgh’s Community Centre on Sunday 26th January from 14:00-17:00.

This workshop is intended as an antithesis to the January body-shaming fitness frenzy. Together, we will dismantle the cultural assumptions and practices of the fitness industry and then build your own unique, super-effective exercise practice in their place.

You will learn the principles of a progressive, sustainable exercise habit, and how to apply these in a way that enriches your life.

We will begin by demonstrating statistically how:

• The ever-expanding gym industry depends on us buying memberships in January and then not using them

• Profit determines what’s offered by most gyms, at the expense of effective training

• A lot of sports science isn’t applicable to the majority of people’s bodies

Having established that context, we’ll identify why are we interested in training in the first place:

• We’ll look at historic definitions of health and fitness and develop our own, personal concepts.

• We’ll learn what exercise can alter, and what it can’t.

• We’ll prioritise various values related to fitness and use these to decide how we should measure the effectiveness of our training.

Then we’ll get into the “how” by:

• Examining the idea of “performance”, before developing an alternative concept that suits our individual circumstances

• Relating the values identified before to different components of fitness, and how each is affected by different types of training.

• Exploring our current movement habits and how they fit with the above, and then proposing adjustments that better fit with your intentions.

• Learning the predictors of sustainable exercise behaviours, and how we can refine our habits to reflect these