Do you even l̵i̵f̵t̵ play, bro?
If you’ve picked up working out but could never follow though, THIS IS YOUR TIME!
GM beautiful friends. 🌞 Sorry for being away for a while. The past few weeks have been emotionally taxing – which explains the procrastination and delay. But I’m back again with full force and with a lot of exciting new newsletters in the works.
Thanks to each one of you to keep opening the emails, supporting me with your appreciation & feedback, and believing in the mission. The open rate is ~40% on average which is pretty great for any internet content (as pointed out by some of my internet-savvy gen z friends) 😀.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve shaken my body over this powering song. So, I thought to include it in this issue. It would serve as a great mood setter while you power through this newsletter. Also, the fact that this song captures the vibe of its composition (please, please read this newsletter with the song 🥹). So, get our coffee ready and put on your headphones. It’s time to play.
You were always a chubby kind. Back then, you didn’t know how you got so chubby but you just were. While time flew by, every day struck you with the undesirable question of “why me”? Although you didn’t want to be chubby, you couldn’t convince people around you why it is the case. They always believed that you couldn’t help it. That it was all your doing. After a few years of fighting with words, you just gave up.
5 years later, puberty hit. Suddenly, the way you looked mattered more than ever. And standing visibly different in the crowd meant welcoming unforgiving gazes and mockery. Before you could catch a breath, the eccentricities of teenage life thinned your social exposure – sinking you into the comforts of food and books. Sports that once you enjoyed suddenly became an invitation for further emotional pain. So, you stopped having wild fun. And slowly you tried shrinking, from the public spaces to invite as little attention as possible. Maybe it is something you still carry with you.
You don’t quite exactly remember it but one day you got wildly frustrated with how your body looked. You took out your prized running shoes that had since become marinated with dust. You put it on and went for a run. It felt surprisingly great. Determined, you ran for a few days straight. But something more urgent came up in life and you had to stop running for a while. You never went again. And the dust settled again. A few years went by. In between, you enrolled for a gym membership but the same fate unfolded. You were shattered for life.
Until one day, you are on your phone scrolling Youtube laying on your couch. Your eyes struck at someone who was having a bit too much fun with a jump rope. Something happened inside you. You were almost an alien to the feeling but at that moment, you knew that it was the most real shit that happened to you in a while. You were confused but elated at the same time. Goosebumps stormed through your body before you could make sense of your sensations. A new life was unfolding but you didn’t know. You ran from the couch, searched through your old junk like a maniac, and found a jump rope. Cut to a few years later and you haven’t stopped since. As a side effect, you lost all the unwanted body fat.
After all the years of trials and tribulations, you finally found out what it truly means to play.
By this point, we all know how modern-age fitness is manufactured. Everyone seems to work out on social media but when you look around, it looks like finding a needle in the haystack. It makes you think - hmmm…where are all these fit and gorgeous people? Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places. Nevertheless, the disconnect is jarring. At the same time, you’ve talked yourself into joining the gym for the 100th time. You’ve figured out everything this time. The plan is in place. Logically, everything seems to check out this fucking time. It’s all a matter of grit and perseverance after all and the fact that you still need to develop that.
However, as of today, while you are reading this, it’s already been 2 months since you enrolled in the gym, lifted weights for a few days and the rest is history. We all have been there – collectively for a million times – and we have lost. Now, you must be thinking that there must be something wrong with you, your motivations, or your desire to fix your health.
There is nothing wrong with you. We all have been blinded by the culture of fitness. An intricate network is at play day and night to box our psychology around what it means to be fit. When we think of being fit, we see a certain aesthetic. We think of fitness, we think of going to the gym. It’s a dream too strong to resist. But it ain’t a game setup for everyone to win. The dream is so hard to achieve for a lot of us that it becomes a perfect excuse to not do any kind of physical exercise. We don’t realize the infinite variables that have to align perfectly, along with a pinch of luck to make you the person who finds working out at the gym pure play. Obviously, anyone can do it theoretically but not everyone has followed the same route.
Since not everyone’s brain is wired in the same way, the gym is not fun for everyone. And when something is not fun, it can never be done consistently. In that sense, for a lot of people, going to the gym is a daily fight. It’s coercive in nature.
Note that it’s not the actual activity of working out that people find resisting. It’s the mental fight that comes before that. Everyone knows how they feel after a good session of their favorite physical activity. Nothing can match that feeling of being light as air.
But…
So, if going to the gym is not for everyone, then what must be the answer?
Worry no more. The fitness industry is always at work for you – to unlock the next level of biohacking. The future of fitness is often projected as a transhumanist utopia with humans equipped with devices to optimize every aspect of their biology, the biology that is somehow not efficient already. While these devices are advertised for the general public, most people don’t have the bandwidth or technical chops to coordinate with these devices in the exact way they need. Essentially, they sort of limit your flexibility in the choice of physical expression –which can work for someone who doesn’t need flexibility in the first place (busy professionals with steady jobs).
Note that the reward systems are completely different. The primary goal of fitness is to feel good in day-to-day life. While the primary goal of using these devices is to score well to feel good. That’s not to say that it’s the wrong way to approach fitness. But it’s necessary to be aware of how you want to approach fitness. Do you want some device that is complementary to your routine or something that dictates it for you? However, more often than not, these subtleties get blurred within the futuristic branding and the general glam of the experience of fitness.
So I want to talk about a different future that also leverages technology. One that doesn’t cost us our human agencies. Rather it compliments our lives – which is what technology is supposed to do. This is the future where fitness has truly been converted into play. And the biggest driver of this subversion is social media. Yes, you heard it right. While social media gets a bad rep for hacking the roots of our psychology, there are players who are using the same system to spark motivation within countless minds. The only difference is that these contrasting cultural shifts are on a different timeline right now. Nevertheless, we are getting close.
But…don’t we already have the wave of fitness going on for a decade?
It’s not that we don’t have the resources to learn and do what is required to get fit, but the current approach is mostly pedagogical. Although we have hundreds of thousands of videos on youtube for every possible exercise, sport, movement, etc. there’s no soul in those videos. The people in these videos might be good athletes but very few know how to tell a good story. And most importantly, how to spark that initial motivation. Most of them depend on motivational hyperboles and try to sell aesthetics. But as we discussed above, not everyone is wired to only use motivation as their driver. The culture shift has been there but it still misses a key element to truly reach everyone in the world.
This changed when the concept of short-form videos was introduced to the world. It took some time for the fitness world to catch up to the format of 30 seconds videos but it took the world by storm, nevertheless. See, with only 30 seconds in hand, you can’t educate in the same pedagogical sense or even in a hyperbolic tone. Words simply fail to set the required context to hook the watcher. But our eyes don’t fail. We are still the same human beings who learned imitation first before there was language. These videos are akin to multimedia candies but as long as they get us moving, they work better than the older formats. So, after a few months of adjusting to this new format, people started inventing games native to this format. Suddenly, gates to infinite opportunities got open. People who never got their peace with grinding in the gyms – to remain healthy and keep exercising fun – swarmed social media with their playful expressions and moves. And while we can miss certain instructions in a recipe, when we see the honest play, we don’t miss it.
For example, take a look at Jump Rope Dudes, a huge community started by just two guys who never had a good experience with the gym. With their relentless determination and playful candor, things aligned at the same time, and magic happened. They started roughly at the same time when Instagram cracked down on Snapchat with its Reels feature launch. And after a while, Covid struck the world trapping everyone in their homes till eternity. Unable to access gyms and outdoor recreational spaces, people swarmed social media to see whatever they can do to not fall into the claws of sedentary life. Any equipment with minimum overhead was extremely favorable. And you know what is a good tool for a full-body workout that only needs 5 square feet of space? It’s this.
Don’t take my word. See for yourself what this nimble tool can do for you.
When physical fitness wins, all you should see is fun and transformation.
For a lack of a better term, I call this phenomenon tacit energy transfer. Tacit because it’s completely based on imitation. There’s no space for instruction by words. I picked the tacit part from tacit knowledge which is a very popular idea in the literature on learning methods. The idea is that for certain skills, purely instruction-based approaches are subpar. For example, if you want to learn to ride a bicycle, you can’t understand it by reading from a manual. You have to imitate someone else riding a bicycle and allow your body a feel of riding, iteratively, until you master the mechanics of it.
However, the energy transfer is the real part. See, this kind of format captures both the necessary element for the spark that makes you jump out of the couch and do something with your body that you can’t with a purely instruction-based approach.
The first element is that these videos get interesting from the get-go. The algorithm serves the purpose here. It roughly knows what kicks people in general and what kicks specifically you. So, there’s no opportunity for evaluation. Either something sparks you or not. It’s 0 or 1. The most fundamental decision-making engine at play.
The second element is energy transfer. Since the diversity of content is limitless, there are high chances that you stumble upon someone doing the kind of physical activity that just ticks you right. So, gone are the days when one person generalizes on all the niche domains of a certain practice in any field. It’s near lossless energy transfer.
To test the framework myself, I decided to do a 15-day pushups challenge on Instagram. The goal was to see if I can inspire at least three people to do the same. Turns out a total of four people came along and completed the challenge (although a lot more agreed to do it initially). For someone who isn’t active in any kind of physical activity, doing it consistently for 15 days is a huge feat. I now realize that if I had posited it for 7 days or even 10 days, more people would have come along. But the important thing to realize is that it somewhat worked. That the potential is already there.
It’s not a question of why fitness has to be like play. It’s a question of how fast can everyone adopt it. The idea of settling in one place for your whole life is going away with the millennial generation. The upcoming generation has uncertainty and dynamism woven into the very fabric of their lives. With that comes an unpredictable and hard-to-maintain fitness routine. So, the modes of exercising have to be flexible while also being sticky. Stickiness is important because flexibility is often a trade-off with stickiness. That’s how gym routines die. You go away for a while. You lose momentum. And since it was already so much effort to start, it manifests itself as mental pain. But the good news is, as we have already established in the previous issue, that going to the gym is just one of several ways of approaching fitness. Ultimately, it’s between your body and the world. And our bodies can move in infinite ways.
So, this finally begs the question - how you, my friend can be a part of this phenomenon and can turn your life around?
Here are some rough steps:
Mindset shift: If you can’t fight social media, harness it for your benefit. Social media is unquestionably bad when you don’t have any purpose for it. When you have a purpose, suddenly it becomes a tool rather than an object of compulsive consumption.
Exploration: Find a community for whatever your fitness-related inclinations are. Since you have a purpose now, you’ll not feel dissociated from a community. Don’t shy away from being part of several ones. Remember, the objective is to find a mode of fitness that comes naturally to you.
Curation: Create a community around yourself. Turn your social feed into a media-rich journal and proof-of-work for your own life. Imitation is great but motivation works both ways. If you are doing things right, there will always be people who will look up to you. That right there is your source of motivation. Remember, at any time, there are always more people who like your work than those who explicitly show their liking.
Reciprocation: Finally, create things in such a way that other people can easily jump in and start conversations. This is the closest you can come to living in a real community. The more spaces for interactions, the more opportunity to play.
Note that the best way to be an active part of this phenomenon is to be a link in the chain and not an influencer to an audience. You have to shape-shift some of your mental models attached to social media.
Whatever I’ve laid out here is nothing new. It’s been going on for years. But it was necessary to have a clear understanding of the phenomenon which is native to our modern culture. Rather than succumbing to dystopic transhumanism where everyone is chasing another biological sugar, completely alone, with a fake community slapped on top of it half-heartedly, you can take a different route. The principles and workings of human behavior don’t change. We merely adapt to the changing times. Human biology and anatomy are flexible enough to adapt to any cultural shift and configuration. All you need is to trust in your abilities to unleash its potential
Hey…worry not. We can still trust evolution.
So, drop your guard. Pick whatever equipment is available and get to the w̵o̵r̵k̵ play. The drums are already beating. The engines are already roaring. Fear not. The whole world is not only watching, they are pining with hope.
Big thanks to Khushi for essential feedback and subtle edits on this issue.
I would love to hear from you about your own struggles with fitness and I can’t wait for you to find something which truly feels like play.
Please share your thoughts in the comments and reach out to me on Twitter at @poetofgrindset or via email at letsharden@gmail.com.