A New York Times article about the passing of fitness guru Jack LaLanne discusses and not-so-subtly dismisses “the modern fitness ethos” for which LaLanne’s gym and television show helped lay the groundwork. After briefly noting how he released “[a]n army of spandex missionaries”, author Frank Bruni gets to “the most interesting (some might say insidious) part” of LaLanne’s legacy:
That sense of failure you feel when you haven’t exercised in days? That conviction that if you could pull off better push-ups, you’d be a better person through and through? These, too, are his doing, at least in part. What he left behind when he died last week, at the toned old age of 96, was not only a sweaty culture of relentless crunching and spinning but also the notion that fitness equals character, and that self-actualization begins with the self-discipline to get and stay in shape. In the post-LaLanne landscape, it’s not the eyes but the abdominals that are windows to the soul.
“There seems to be a whole substitute morality, where your obligation is to go to the gym and not ask why,” says Mark Greif, a founding editor of the literary journal n+1 and the author of a widely discussed 2004 essay, “Against Exercise.” “If you don’t, you become a sort of villain of the culture.”
Much of the article simply mocks anyone who take physical exercise seriously. For example, it characterizes the mantra of gym-goers as, “You must run! Or at least pump your fists up and down as you walk fast, preferably on an incline! Don’t forgo hammer curls!” Quoting a personal trainer to the effect that exercise contributes to “a healthy mind and soul and spirit,” Bruni quips, “And if you don’t succeed? To be unfit is to be unfit: a villain of the culture, indeed.”
The article’s tone unmistakably implies that the benefits of regular exercise are simply bigger arms and a slimmer waistline. Bruni doesn’t tell you that, in addition to the obvious health benefits of being fit, exercise also improves your mood, gives you more energy during the day, and provides a healthy outlet for natural aggression.
As to the fitness ethos’s “substitute morality” (“the abdominals . . . are windows to the soul”), the article misses the point. Nobody says that doing more push-ups will make you a better person. It should go without saying that one can physically fit and morally unfit, and vice versa. But one key component of ethical living is self-discipline insofar as morality demands that we eschew the quick dollar and the easy white lie. An exercise regimen is an excellent way to cultivate a disciplined routine that invariably spills over into the professional, social, and yes, moral spheres.
Consider ethical values like generosity, lawfulness, and honesty. Morality calls on us to give of ourself to others, sometimes at great cost, to submit our personal preference to the needs of society, and to value truth above expedience. Regular exercise fosters these values by similarly demanding that we overcome pain and resistance, conquer laziness, and delay gratification. In this sense, physical courage can cultivate moral courage by enhancing our ability to control our bodies and thus, our behavior. Williams James makes this point beautifully in offering the following advice.
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
James’s advice is even more poignant in the religious context, but that’s a subject for another post.
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