No, I'm not going to make clickbait videos of myself doing cable kickbacks
Two years ago at a work Christmas party, I told a man I was starting a personal training business.
His response: “Oh, are you going to make clickbait videos of yourself doing cable kickbacks?"
This didn’t really hurt my feelings, but it was revealing. Is this what women in fitness have been reduced to? His comment revealed that the months or years of studying anatomy, programming, nutrition, and fast- and slow-twitch fibres didn’t matter - to him at least. What mattered to him was content. Preferably in a good outfit, preferably from behind.
No shade at all to the women making those videos. But the reductiveness of it, and the assumption that this is the only thing a woman in fitness could possibly be doing is what got to me.
What I actually spent months (years) learning
I want to build something that looks nothing like what that man imagined.
A space where the focus is on what your body can do, not just what it looks like, and not what cute little matching set you’re wearing on that day. Where a programme is built around your life — what you enjoy, your schedule, your restrictions, your history, your actual goals — not a template that worked for someone with a completely different body and a completely different life. Where you are not expected to show up already knowing everything, already looking a certain way, already convinced you belong there.
A word on ai generated content
The fitness algorithm is designed to prioritise platforming those click-bait videos, and though there are amazing fitness creators who are working on inclusive fitness, they sadly aren’t platformed as much as the click-bait videos our old Christmas party friend was talking about.
Recently, a video of a woman with big boobs in a sports bra skipping racked up millions of views on Instagram. It was revealed that this was AI generated content, and the original video was stolen from an account called Jump Rope Sisters (thank you Ben Carpenter). This is not a one-off, and AI-generated fitness content is everywhere on social media. From influencers to transformation posts (yes, really), it’s getting impossible to dinstinguish real from fake. Are you as freaked out by this as I am?! If genetics, filters, angles, and editing weren’t enough to make us feel like shit, now we have to contend with people that aren’t even people.
More and more people are putting down social media. Your phone is not going to make you feel strong. It's not going to make you feel capable, or proud of yourself, and it’s certainly not going to teach you how to move intuitively. This happens in real life, in real bodies, doing real things.
Social media can be a great educational tool to use alongside exercise that is designed for you as an individual, but it can’t replace the freedom, joy, and happy hormones that you can reap by just getting out there and starting to learn your body. This is your invitation to go and move your body in a way that feels good to you.