How healthy is our relationship with exercise?
To read the current sports headlines is to know who’s been winning and who’s been losing, or, more accurately, which team or player has “beaten”, “thrashed” or “destroyed” their opponent. Sport, by the natures of its games, has always been deeply entwined with competition, and the media wastes no words in transforming each match, game and race into a pressurised, high-stakes battle.
Ecstatic winners and tearful losers exist side by side as the two possible, extreme outcomes of sport. The resultant jeopardy drives spectatorship and its equally entrenched, polarising rivalries. But, what about the players themselves? How have professional athletes responded to the challenge of competition?
Sports that are judged through a combination of scores often incorporate a difficulty grading: the higher the difficulty, the higher the athlete is scored (if they achieve the move). Degree of Difficulty can be found in sports such as gymnastics, diving, and figure skating, and, though it is a useful way of objectively measuring ability, its incorporation into the scoring system has resulted in the creation of highly dangerous moves which have only been banned after athletes suffered life-changing injuries.
Simone Biles’ withdrawal from this year’s Olympic Games drew much needed attention to the danger of gymnastics, a sport with an already lengthy and varied history of abuse of its athletes as a result of coaches piling on the pressure for them to succeed. Marta Prus’ 2017 documentary, Over The Limit, spotlights the harsh treatment of the Russian rhythmic gymnast, Margarita Mamun, by her coach, that both of them believe to be necessary for their team to achieve gold medal results. During the documentary, Margarita is told, “there is no such thing as a healthy professional athlete”, posing the question: in what other line of work is it considered inevitable to sustain such injuries or experience such abuse?
What are your motivations for exercising, really?
Doping is also a global issue among professional athletes needing to maintain a certain, unnaturally attainable standard to remain in the job that they love. Doping is so commonplace in professional sport that there have been calls made to legalise and regulate it for the safeguarding of athletes who are risking a multitude of ill effects - both physical and mental - to achieve top performance.
Unfortunately, this practice is also affecting those many miles from the top: anabolic steroids, often taken to build muscle, are being abused by children as young as thirteen - as reported by the USA’s National Federation of State High School Associations. While funding for adolescent sport and, therefore, pressure to achieve is much greater in the USA than in the UK, the launching of a dissuasive campaign by the UK’s anti-doping organisation (UKAD), alongside calls for the school curriculum to cover “clean” sport education, indicates that steroid abuse is similarly prevalent in UK youth.
Evidently, competitiveness in sport at all levels has reached the point of threatening the physical and mental health of its participants, regardless of age. Many people, therefore, seek out an alternative, low-pressure way to exercise, in the form of fitness activities. These can range from high intensity gym workouts, such as interval training, to low intensity activities, like weight lifting or aerobics.
The fitness industry - particularly at-home fitness, is currently experiencing rapid growth, to rival sport as a form of non-competitive exercise. One could argue that fitness provides a relieving solution: intrinsically motivated by self-improvement, or even just maintenance of a certain fitness level, participants in fitness-oriented activities can exercise without the overwhelming pressure to succeed or overcome an opponent.
This is the ideal; unfortunately, the fitness world continues to be tied to other sources of stress: body image, outer appearance, perception, and beauty.
Not only are amatuer athletes experiencing the same pressure to perform in sport that professional athletes understand and have accepted as part of their jobs, but they are also under increasing pressure to appear athletic to their peers and maintain this en vogue body image, as achieved more commonly by fitness enthusiasts, models and influencers. Indeed, anabolic steroids have had to be reclassified from PEDs to APEDs - appearance and performance enhancing drugs - due to consumers’ expanding motivations.
Throughout the pandemic, at-home fitness has provided a source of exercise for those in lockdown; however, emerging studies are showing that our motivations to engage with fitness during this time have been grounded in body dissatisfaction as opposed to in seeking more positive effects such as nurturing our physical and mental health. Images and advice pertaining to ‘fitspiration’, a portmanteau of ‘fitness’ and ‘inspiration’, are rife in social media, and are paving over our motivations to exercise with the pressure to achieve fitness of body without any regard for fitness of mind. Evidently, removing the competitive aspect from exercise does not remove the pressure, it just changes the source of our stress.
A possible remedy is one of introspection: What are your motivations for exercising, really? Consider that, whether you take part in sport, fitness or both, how and why you choose to move your body need not stem from pressure to achieve a certain look or certain level, but from somewhere much more healthy and relaxed. Perhaps we can still aim to be ambitious with our bodies without losing the all-important sense of joy that exercise provides. When it comes to casual exercise, shouldn’t we aim to enjoy ourselves first and foremost? Anything else can be considered a bonus from now on.
Sources:
https://www.nfhs.org/articles/infographic-steroid-abuse-in-high-school-and-college-athletes/
Simone Biles: What are the twisties in gymnastics? - BBC News