“You are only as strong as your willpower.”
“Don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done.”
“The pain you feel today will be the strength you feel tomorrow.”
Sounds familiar? Probably because too many people in your social circle, ranging from your coworker in Marketing to every 3rd influencer you follow on Instagram have probably used these. And admittedly, my younger self is guilty of having mindlessly reposted something similar.
My older self has some issues with these ‘inspirational’ fitness marketing ways. Because 1. they make exercising or doing fitness sound so d$mn hard or even painful. And 2. to make matters worse, they are almost always backed with an image of an unrealistically fit body that looks nothing like mine.
But, oh man, it looks good, and I want it. What pain & suffering do I need to go through to look like that? SIGN ME UP NOW!
I call this the marketing of unattainable physical ideals. Keyword being unattainable. Unattainability ensures continued effort. But make it unattainable long enough, and everyone, EVERYONE, will run out of time/energy to produce effort. Energy AND OUR TIME TO LIVE is finite.
Here’s another ‘harmlessly’ familiar one – “Impossible is nothing”.
Impossible is literally not nothing, impossible is impossible. Not everyone was born to become the next Muhammad Ali. Most people don’t need to train, feed, and live like world-class elite athletes. We are ordinary humans, living ordinary lives.
We need ordinary training to fuel and energize our daily living.
And if you look closely, these ‘inspirational ads’ are somehow subtly masked as tactics of shame marketing.
You could argue that shaming is harmless because it pushes people to action. But consider that because of how long and how much we have been exposed to images of unattainable physiques, it’s affecting our abilities to see ourselves clearly. We are misled into thinking we are not ‘normal’, we are either too slow, weak, fat, skinny, or all of the above. We are constantly belittled and shamed into believing we are not enough.
It’s 2023, why are we still using superiority, guilt-tripping, and ultimately shame to bully customers into compliance?
Consider that you’re not actually being inspired to positive action, you’re being shamed into feeling negative emotions, so you can then be manipulated into buying whatever product is being peddled to you next, to overcome those negative emotions.
Potentially what happens in the short term, is that you decide to get off your couch and run until nobody will ever dare to fat-shame you again.
Or you purchase that 1200-calorie diet hoping to finish with chiseled abs and never feel hungry again.
Or you sign up for that gym membership and hurdle jump until you look like the guy from that ad.
What happens next?
If you made it to day 7, you’re already tired/bored from running, but you still look the same. Your chiseled abs are not showing yet, although you’ve been starving every single day. Your knees are hurting from all that jumping, and you still don’t look like the guy from the ad.
Most people give up here.
You’re back to exactly where you started or worse, a little further back and likely poorer. Until the next ad/salesman comes along, and the cycle begins again.
I hope you see where I am going with this. These tactics of fitness marketing are unsustainable in the long term.
Do you know that it doesn’t need to be this way? There is another way to exercise.
One that is sustainable, progressive, AND feels good.
We have an approach to exercise that keeps the long game in mind. Our approach to inspiration is education. We teach you how to train, we help you identify progress so that you never need the metaphorical carrot to keep going. You just do, it because it feels good.
Let me try to rewrite those fitness marketing quotes so that they can work for us.
You are only as strong as your will.
Willpower is finite, you don’t need to rely on it to feel strong; you feel strong when you are strong.
Don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done.
Definitely stop when you’re tired. Working out in an exhausted state is counter-productive.
Mindset is what separates the best from the rest.
You define your own best, same as the rest. Many things separate us from the rest, including but not limited to our favorite colors and DJs.
The pain you feel today will be the strength you feel tomorrow.
You don’t need the pain to gain physical strength. You need to lift weights correctly to gain physical strength.
If you resonate and want to learn more, send me a message @jenneec or jen@riseshanghai.com !
With love,
Coach Jen x
Love the article