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I once spent an entire month tracking my macros down to the gram. I had an app that buzzed at me, a food scale that lived permanently on my kitchen counter, and a spreadsheet that would have made an accountant proud. By the end of the month, I was more anxious about food than I’d

My uncle used to joke that after forty, your body starts sending itemized bills for every year you skipped the gym in your twenties. He wasn’t entirely wrong, but he also wasn’t telling the whole story. Yes, things change after forty — recovery slows down, old injuries make themselves known at inconvenient moments, and you

“I just don’t have time to work out.” I’ve said this sentence myself, more than once, usually while scrolling through my phone for twenty minutes before bed. It’s not that the sentence is a lie, exactly. It’s that it’s usually pointed at the wrong problem. Most people who say they don’t have time for fitness

A friend of mine once told me she “wasn’t a gym person.” She’d tried three different memberships over the years, quit each one within a month, and had basically decided that fitness just wasn’t for her — that some people were built for it and she wasn’t one of them. I asked her what actually

A few years ago, I asked a guy at my gym — the kind of guy who looked like he was carved out of granite — what his secret was. I expected something complicated. Macros cycled just right, some obscure periodization scheme, maybe a supplement stack with a name I couldn’t pronounce. He just shrugged

I used to think getting fit was something you did to yourself for six weeks before summer, then quietly abandoned once the beach photos were taken. Sound familiar? If you’ve ever bought a gym membership in January and let it gather dust by March, you’re not lazy, and you’re not broken. You just picked a

Fitness is often presented as if it were a simple formula: work out harder, eat less, lose weight, and repeat. Social media is filled with perfectly shaped bodies, intense workout videos, strict meal plans, and dramatic before-and-after pictures. It can make getting fit look like a competition that you are already losing. But real fitness

For most of the history of exercise science, the participants were men.There were reasons given — hormonal fluctuation made female subjects “noisy” data, recruitment was easier through university sports teams that were mostly male, and there was a long, unlovely tradition of assuming that findings in men generalised to everyone. The result is that a

A man at my gym owns a percussive massage gun, a foam roller, compression boots, a bag of magnesium flakes, and a subscription to a cryotherapy place in town. He also sleeps about five and a half hours a night and eats lunch at his desk in eleven minutes. I like him enormously and I

My grandmother stopped going upstairs at eighty-one. It wasn’t a decision anyone made or discussed. The stairs got a bit harder, so she went up less, so they got harder still, and at some point a bed was moved into the front room and that was the end of the upstairs of a house she’d