I work as a physiotherapist. I run my own business where we focus primarily on encouraging people to become more physically active where possible.

I go to the gym on the reg and work as a group fitness instructor. I exist in a lot of fitness/wellness/health spaces.

What I notice is that the exact traits that are generally applauded in this area - being highly self-disciplined, goal-oriented, consistent, having a high attention to detail, etc - and the types of messages often used to motivate people to move more (’no excuses!’ Etc) are the EXACT things that can have a negative impact for some.  

It is true that the majority of the population is not adequately physically active. But there is a small group of the population that is quite the opposite. These people often need encouragement and permission to do LESS, not more, and are likely to hear exercise motivation narratives as encouragement to keep doing more and more and more.  

I know this, because I probably am one of these people. 

I got pretty seriously into exercise when I started going to the gym regularly when I was 17. I decided to become a Body Attack and Body pump instructor in 2007, mainly because I wanted access to the music and to be able to pick my own fun mixes to teach. Becoming an instructor meant the technique and fitness focus was ramped up. For the first time in my life I felt really fit, and started to identify more with someone who was a ‘gym/fitness person’.

After a few years of instructing, I felt like I needed a way to measure my progress, having always been a pretty goal-oriented person. Running seemed like a good option as it has clear metrics of progress like distance and speed associated with it. 

This sent me on a 3 year not-so-love-affair with running, where I entered 10 or so half marathons, finally hitting my goal of doing one at a speed goal I had set for myself. Despite achieving this goal, I was surrounded by people (mainly men) who could run much faster than me, so I was not really happy with my time. I decided I needed to do something harder - a full marathon!

I trained consistently for the marathon, took it very seriously, sacrificed lots of social events and gave up alcohol for the 3 months in the lead up. I recall enjoying the long runs as each one gave a sense of achievement of a new distance unlocked, but I remember being upset to the point of crying pretty regularly on any shorter runs I did in an attempt to improve my speed. 

Of course this attitude gradually made me HATE running. I finished, ran the vast majority of the way, but the experience was essentially so unenjoyable I quit running and have barely done any in the 10 years since.

I decided to swap straight into another goal oriented, numbers focused sport - powerlifting. 

As a ‘newbie’ powerlifter, progress is almost guaranteed and you can make lots of gains in your first few years. I was no exception and I enjoyed a continual sense of progress and achievement through my first ~5 years of lifting. Inevitably, as stress levels ramped up running my own business, and probably also in part due to reaching my mid 30s, progress slowed down. Things started hurting, and old injuries kept coming back to haunt me. No more newbie gains. I trained for a competition and essentially did no better than a year before, but did manage to hurt myself multiple times in the process, as well starting to become increasingly fed up and frustrated.  

I started hating when people would ask me how my training was going, or what I was aiming for.

After a year or so of constantly pushing it and getting nowhere, I recognised that continually trying to progress at this thing that kept hurting me (literally and figuratively, in the context of my life at that time), I needed to back off and just chill. 

Over the last 12 months, I have been attempting to simply enjoy the process of training and avoid attaching any achievement or goals to it. 

It has been a strange time, as without making any real clear progress in any measurable way in the gym, I have noticed that it is less exciting, and there are no real ‘highs’. I have questioned whether I even like the type of exercise I am doing numerous times.

Exercise is good for you. Strength training and cardio are both really important to maintain fitness and health and longevity. These things are true. But balancing the truth of these against an internally driven NEED to exercise in order to achieve a certain outcome is definitely a challenge that I suspect is a lot more common in the health and fitness space than people on the outside of it would realise. 

On the plus side, lately, I have had a few moments of doing exercise that I cannot measure in any form where I noticed that I really enjoyed the feeling of my body moving. And I realised it has been a LONG time since I had felt anything like that - enjoyment exercising simply because I am moving my body and it feels good, no pressure to achieve anything in particular.

I have also been working on being more flexible. When training for goals I have set myself, I tend to follow a set training program to the T and never miss a session, regardless of how I feel or what else is going on. The idea that you should ‘never miss a Monday’ in the gym (common social media fitspo rhetoric) is not helpful. I actually have done the exact opposite and set Mondays as my rest day, as I find training on Mondays makes me feel rushed, tired, and gross trying to fit it in before the first work day back after the weekend. 

The exact things that often are applauded as positive traits in the fitness industry: commitment, not missing sessions, continually striving for more, always setting higher and higher goals, training even when you don’t feel like it, etc, are most likely helpful for people who struggle with consistency and setting a habit of exercise, but I find they are pretty unhelpful for those of us who feel bound by our own rules around not skipping workouts.  

I see it in my clients, who have personalities similar to me, that are unable to see when they are over-doing it and probably need to pull back something in some way, because they cannot see past themselves as a fit/busy/high achieving person. Our society glorifies this hustle/ single-minded/ goal-driven mindset SO MUCH. I think its important to be honest about how it does not always serve us well. 

It can be a massive barrier to getting better after an injury, or for those people who are trying to manage a chronic health or pain condition. It can feel like we are losing control or losing who we are, but it is often actually a giant barrier to general well-being that is not really servicing us the way we might think it does.

I think its important to talk about this stuff, because I almost never see this type of content on social media or in the gym space. Rather, it is simply people telling you to work harder, and do more, or show how much progress they have made. While that can be great, and motivating (and I do it too, all the time, honestly), I just wanted to talk about a different side of ‘fitspo’, that encourages listening to your body and giving yourself a break sometimes. 

Frances