Fashion Vs Fitness

Written by Dave Thomas

Dave Thomas is the co-founder of The Foundry, a community focused boutique gym group that offers classes and small group personal training. He also heads up The Foundry's charitable arm 'FIT', which provides free access and instruction to those who need it most, and is a founding trustee of rugby charity School of Hard Knocks.

You can follow The Foundry on Twitter & Instagram.

“I don’t want to get bulky. I just want to tone up”.

It took me a long time to forgive yoga, pilates and the Bar Method for 15 years of having to respond to client requests to ‘sculpt long, lean muscles’.

I hope we’ve finally buried that one (but just in case anyone is in doubt, this is fitness bullshit preying on women’s fears that they’ll become she-hulks by looking at a dumbbell funny) but in its place are a whole new range of aesthetic pressures.

I wrote a piece for The Telegraph a few years ago arguing that fitness marketing has replaced the term skinny for the term strong to create a new, unrealistic aesthetic pressure on women to sell a certain look. I don’t want to repeat myself, but the point remains that the current trend towards female strength training is far more about looking strong, than being strong. The aspirational look has just changed from exposed ribs to exposed abs.

There’s no point moralising about this. Women, and men, have always been under pressure to look a certain way. For early cultures, the practical preoccupation with fertility meant buxum, childbearing curves were prized, as evidenced by early idealistic representations of the female form such as the Venus of Willendorf sculpture. Subsequently every female body type has been considered the ‘ideal’ at some point to suit the fashion and culture of the time.  My main takeaway observing the changing aesthetic pressures which influence our attitudes to exercise over the last 10-15 years is that women confuse fashion’s preoccupation with body shape with fitness.

Fashion has nothing to with your physical abilities. Watching the women’s 6 Nations rugby championship you’ll see a wide variety of body shapes on display; all suited towards specific positional demands. And yet many defined ‘fitness influencers’ could never hope to achieve the athletic capabilities or achievements of these professional sportswomen, which is completely understandable. Yet it’s the latter who are setting the aesthetic goal for modern women, not the athletes. Certain social media celebrities, promoting laxative lollies and dangerous diets with no mention of their own performance enhancing drug regimes, are not only holding a mirror up to society, they’re holding unrealistic ideals for women to constantly compare themselves too.

How you look also has little to do with your health, unlike specific physical markers, such as the levels of visceral fat surrounding your organs. Some women are more likely to have muscle definition than others, and two women can have identical body fat percentages with completely different body shapes. These variations are almost exclusively genetic.  It’s a tough love message, but if you don’t already look like a smaller or bigger version of the fashion shape you envy, then unfortunately you never will. This is where I feel the body positivism movement is a beneficial contributor to the discussion around physical ideals. We absolutely can and should be happy in our bodies but in my opinion it’s also another unqualified voice in fitness, as it’s a commentary on aesthetics.

So what exactly is fitness if it’s not how we look?

As a young man watching Pumping Iron, alongside the wide canon of equally brilliant and terrible 1980s films and TV shows, I appreciated the remarkable physiques of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno, because they were also incredibly strong. In fact, all my fitness idols were physical super humans like Geoff Capes and Jack LaLanne, ripping up phone books and pulling boats with their teeth.

When I consider the fitness idols available to my sister growing up by comparison, the pickings were slim…outside of Gladiators on a Saturday night. Supermodels and movie stars produced ‘Keep Fit’ videos specifically focussed on helping you look a certain way, with zero commentary about how to get stronger or run your first marathon.

“the current trend towards female strength training is far more about looking strong, than being strong. The aspirational look has just changed from exposed ribs to exposed abs.”

The female fitness environment has improved since then.  With the rise of crossfit, strongwomen competitions, fitness events and women’s sport in general, there are more fantastic female athletes than ever inspiring women to get into the gym. However, the rise of social media has simultaneously provided an increasingly confusing message that looking fit is the same as being fit.  Anyone can be a fitness expert, regardless of qualifications, as long as they look good in a bikini. 

I won’t judge anyone who wants to change their body shape. Until my training went out the window after the birth of my first child, I’d always taken my physique for granted and blissfully stated I didn’t care how I looked. An additional 10 percent in body fat later, it turns out I did care.  However, I care far more about my health and inability to get out of bed without grunting in the morning.  Now I have re-focussed my training towards better performance, in the gym and in life, inevitably my body shape and my health has improved.

And from my professional perspective that’s the most useful definition of fitness I can share. Think of it as your personal journey to test yourself mentally and physically whilst making positive improvements to your health.  I can say with complete confidence that the most positive and effective change anyone can make if they want to change how they look, is to tailor their training and nutrition towards challenging their physical capabilities.  Get this right and not only will your mental health improve but your aesthetic goals will follow.