I was Exercised by Wolves

So, ladies, let’s first put down the two-pound, pink dumbbells. We have been sold a false story about fitness, health (and its connection to weight loss).

I was exercised by wolves. And I’m going to tell you all the secrets and tricks I learned by avoiding the fitness-industrial complex.

The biggest secret? Almost everything you need to know fits into two or three sentences, and a few pages for the implementation. I’ll have most of it down before this article is over.

It’s almost March, that time of the year when eagerly-purchased home exercise gadgets evolve into permanent coat hangers, and the attendance in exercise classes, spiked up by Groupon-facilitated mass purchases right before or after the new year, starts to fall off.

Only about 20% of us get the minimum exercise we actually need, though most of us are interested in learning how to exercise. News items that promise shortcuts, new inventions, or magical potions tend to go viral. Last year, New York Times health blog The Well had back-to-back viral stories: first, how to exercise in seven minutes, and then how to exercise in one minute. There are a constant stream of allegedly better, novel ways to exercise.

I’m a lifelong exerciser, and also an academic with interest in, and access to, research, so I tend to read the research about most things I do regularly. It was all a lucky coincidence, there is nobody in my family who exercised (or was in the least interested in healthy behaviors.) I just stumbled into that world, and I was lucky enough to have avoided the fitness industry aimed at women. Instead, I was trained by serious (amateur) athletes, in thai-boxing rings and in running tracks, in basketball courts and in actual gyms by people who knew what they were doing, not for-profit fitness clubs.

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