I went to school with a woman named Jessica Weiner, who I randomly ran into recently when another classmate, who, it turns out, works with Jessica part-time, asked me to help her move some furniture in Jessica’s office.

 

We had a nice reunion:  I didn’t know her well at school, but I had heard her name pop up in various contexts over the years, and wondered if that was the Jessica I knew.

Turned out it was.  Jessica is an expert on women’s body image:  she’s the author of a two books on the topic, Life Doesn’t Begin Five Pounds From Now and A Very Hungry Girl; she writes a column for Seventeen called "Body Peace;" she lectures and teaches across the country.  She’s one of the brains behind Dove soap’s body-image building ad campaign (which I recently linked).  So she’s something of an industry.

Inevitably, we chatted about fitness.  She mentioned that, in her capacity as a Seventeen columnist, she got lots of questions about exercise:  how to change this or that, lose weight here or there, make this bigger, make that smaller.  No real surprise—it’s a magazine for teenage girls who are interested in how they look--also known as a magazine for teenage girls.

In response, I spouted off on the newer fitness modalities that focus on performance rather than appearance.  As I’ve written in this space before, keeping the klieg lights on appearance in a fitness program can be counterproductive, not to mention discouraging and demoralizing:  our bodies evolved primarily to run from predators and to hunt down prey; to cover long distances on foot in search of food; maybe to lift a log or two to build shelter.  That they also look good from all this sweaty, snarly activity is a happy side-effect. 

But somewhere between 2.2 million years ago and the 1970’s, we decided that looking like magazine people was more important than functioning well, and an industry that promised flat abs and toned arms was born, along with machines that claimed to isolate just about any spot on the body, making thighs tighter, deltoids rounder, erogenous zones erogenouser.  Billions of dollars spent in pursuit of a side-effect. 

Most of the recent protests against this approach focus on the damage it does to our functioning, how doing leg curls, say, overdevelops the knee-flexing function of the hamstring and neglects its hip-extending function; how lots of bicep curls can overstress the shoulder.  

But when I was talking to Jessica I realized that the ‘isolation’ model—the one that involves using exercise to nip and tuck here and trowel on the contractile tissue there—may itself constitute a part of the problem that people like Jessica are trying to fight.

Some explanation:  the workouts in these programs are derived from the programs of professional bodybuilders, who, taking nothing away from their efforts, compete in human dog-and-pony shows for a living.  Their vocation encourages them to see their bodies as living sculptures to be shaped and reshaped with exercise.  It’s useful—perhaps essential--in bodybuilding to see the body as a collection of disparate parts to be aesthetically harmonized through endless sets and reps.

But for the rest of us, this approach is problematic, not only because it’s impractical and potentially unhealthy, but because we can start to see our bodies in that way too:  good parts and bad parts, stuff to hide and stuff to flaunt. 

Compound exercises, full-body workouts, and tough exercises like squats, deadlifts, and chins—not to mention athletic movement like sprints and obstacle course work and CrossFit-style workouts--are not only more effective at building muscle and burning fat than all those isolation moves, they also integrate the body, encouraging us to see it as a functional whole rather than a collection of parts that need to be worried into place. 

I’m no fancy psychologist, but I think a performance-focused style of exercise actually fosters a healthier relationship to one’s body.  We wind up perceiving our bodies as effective and useful, rather than as the bad pet that won't behave. 

Are we ever going to stop goggling over images of young, healthy men and women, and will the media ever stop cranking them out?  Probably not.  But we might be able to come around to redefining "health and fitness" as something that’s more than skin-deep.