Gym Culture Has Always Been Political

This morning, I took five grams of creatine powder (and an anti-histamine), ate a muffin and biked to the pool. I’m training for a marathon swim later this summer. When I got home, I drank what I call protein gruel — a combination of whey protein isolate, peanut butter powder, maple syrup and milk that adds up to 40 grams of protein.

It has been fun to work my deadlift up to 235 pounds. And to get my first ever pull-up at age 41. And to bicep curl my giggling eight-year-old and her cousin in efforts to show them that it’s important to eat something other than straight carbs.

Objectively speaking, I maintain a relatively high level of physical fitness. Aesthetically, however, it’s unlikely I’ll ever look fit — at least, not in the ways our culture often expects a person to.

In addition to swimming, you’ll often find me biking or walking across town, carrying library books or groceries. I’m mildly jacked from all the strength training, but do I have a Marvel comics-style six-pack or the long, lean physique of a 25-year-old Pilates instructor? Nope. And that’s fine.

But we are in a weird, upside-down world when it comes to body size, strength, aesthetics and political signalling right now. So weird that my own expressions of health and wellness inadvertently contribute to a burgeoning leftist weight-lifting ethos that has emerged as a response to the fascistic bid to control people’s bodies through the veneer of MAHA, or “Make America Healthy Again.”

Because fitness culture is inherently political, and we’re seeing its sharpest points crystallizing on opposite ends of two poles.

On one hand, we’ve got Robert F. Kennedy Jr., once considered a fringe figure, who is now the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. We’re seeing a rise in popular use of GLP-1 medications for weight loss, such as Ozempic. People are working hard to control their own bodies through trends like “looksmaxxing” and the pursuit of the sought-after “Pilates body.”

On the other hand, my personal Instagram algorithm is currently prioritizing strength training for bone density, not compulsory thinness. My social feeds place an emphasis on women eating enough, and women getting their first pull-up. Whenever MacArthur Fellow, sociologist, and writer Tressie McMillan Cottom posts a new personal weight-lifting best, I’m there.

Most of the time, I’m exercising because it’s good for my mental health and I appreciate the dopamine boost.

Sometimes, I’m exercising because I’m aware that we’re living through an era of rising fascism, Christian patriarchy and white supremacy — and a lot of the men who are active in those movements are honing their ideologies at the gym.

In the United States, the overlap between wellness and war-mongering is mainstream — look no further than the “Pete and Bobby challenge,” featuring Kennedy Jr. and U.S. States Secretary of War Pete Hegseth doing pull-ups and push-ups in the “bowels of the Pentagon.”

“It’s all about Make America Healthy Again,” Hegseth says. “We’re going to be fit, not fat. We want recruits that are ready to go.”

I’m a queer person who’s been jumped before. In my late teens and into my 20s, I dated a particularly mouthy dude who was fond of wearing skirts; it got us into several scuffles in early 2000s Ontario. Looking at the American news headlines of 2026, I think to myself, if we’re going back to that world of insecure, bullying jocks, I’ll do everything in my power to be able to defend myself.

The way politics are interwoven with gym culture is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as I use the local rec centre, a microcosm of the dissonances we see playing out in the wider world.

There’s a woman who encourages everyone to wear pink shirts on Fridays, and who knows all the regulars by name. And then, the other day, one of the gym bros was wearing a “Make Canada Great Again” T-shirt while he was working out.

Legibility on the body

The idea that fitness is written on the aesthetics of the body is corrosive.

To start, nobody owes the world any kind of body. And nobody owes the world health. Yet with the rise of fascism in the United States has come a new wave of “health” policy with clear roots in eugenics. It shows up in everything from Kennedy Jr.’s views on autism to his views on mental illness, ADHD and chronic illnesses such as diabetes.

Kennedy Jr.’s ideas about root causes lack a clear foundation of scientific evidence. They have focussed on things like vaccines and food dyes — and on wholly incorrect, racist views about, for example, Black children on ADHD medication needing to be “reparented.”

Americans are overworked and underpaid. Racialized Americans have worse health outcomes than white Americans. Rich Americans have better health outcomes than poor Americans. The United States has godawful vacation, maternity leave and minimum wage policies.

No amount of focus on personal choices, SSRIs, food dyes or pull-ups will meaningfully address any of these issues. Increasing vaccine skepticism in the U.S. population will, in fact, make everything worse.

It is telling that when the MAHA right has focussed on “health,” they’ve focused on disability, on race, on fatness. On the outward presentation of what they perceive health should look like. On the idea of “wellness farms.” As one legal historian of eugenics put it in a Vanity Fair article: “‘Wait a minute, I know that tune.’”

Where this shows up in online fitness and wellness culture is multi-faceted.

For women, the pressure to “de-bulk” (if they have built muscle weight-lifting) or achieve a “Pilates body” is linked — intentionally or not — to a stated right-wing desire to return to “traditional” heterosexual gender roles, where women are subservient to men. (Or under their “headship,” if you prefer the Christian patriarchal phrasing.)

For men, particularly young men, there has been a corollary uptake in the conception of their “value,” with a focus on money, material goods and physical appearance. On the extreme end, it’s shown up in “looksmaxxing,” a trend that zeroes in on achieving a particular ideal of masculinity — lean and muscular; broad jawline; “deeply rooted hierarchies of race and class.”

And for everyone in the online fitness space, there’s been a general trend toward “physique inflation” — that is, the normalization of bigger muscles on leaner frames, and a higher and raising bar for what is considered an impressive physique. Originally a problem for bodybuilding and superhero movies, it’s bled into the mainstream, leading to an uptick in steroid use.

In this paradigm, understanding an impressive physique as the pinnacle of health brings with it increased health risks — the mis-use of anabolic androgenic steroids has long been linked to hypertension, cardiovascular events and depression.

My road to pull-ups

So where does this leave a 41-year-old open-water swimmer focussing on deadlifts and pull-ups?

There are certain political lenses to view it through. Being strong as a non-binary person disrupts the rigid gender ideals present in current right-wing political movements. For some queer people, going to the gym feels like reclaiming a world that previously ostracized them.

And then, of course, there’s the swoletariat — swole + proletariat — the marrying of leftist politics and fitness, and the idea that one is training for their community, to fight back or effect revolution.

My own motivations spring less clearly from my politics. As a bipolar person, exercise has been a powerful tool — alongside lamotrigine — for treating lifelong, persistent depression.

I also hope it will help with longevity and mobility. Not as a measure to prevent or eradicate chronic illness — rather, to help navigate chronic illness.

Then there’s my own vanity and spite. It’s amusing to be mildly jacked. And it will be a fun middle finger to warmonger Pete Hegseth when my pull-up form is better than his.

Finally, there’s the community component. I swim and work out with a heterogenous group of folks with a variety of abilities, ages, body types and fitness goals.

What we have in common, I think, is an idea that the process — showing up, moving, hot tub social hour — is far more important than physical or aesthetic outcomes.

That’s the vision of fitness I’m comfortable with, and the vision that aligns most closely with my politics, which prioritize structural changes over the atomized individualism of capitalism, and understands that we should help each other make the most of what we have. That starts with honouring the bodies we’re in right now, not the ones we’re told to want.