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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

Almost everything written about fitness assumes a particular life.It assumes you finish work at a predictable hour. It assumes evenings are broadly yours. It assumes a disposable income that stretches to a membership, and probably a car to get there, and a home with somewhere you could put a bench if you wanted to. It

A friend of mine once apologised to me for a biscuit. We were in her kitchen, she took one, and she said — genuinely, unprompted, to another adult who had not asked and did not care — “ooh, I shouldn’t.” Then she laughed in that slightly strained way people do, and ate it, and I

My mother could not tell you where I was between about nine in the morning and whenever I got hungry. Not vaguely — genuinely could not have told you, on most Saturdays of my childhood, which of about four fields I was in. This wasn’t neglect. It was the standard arrangement. Everyone’s mother didn’t know

I had a bad night’s sleep in March, and I know it was bad because my watch told me so at 6:40 the next morning, with a score, in red. The thing is, I’d woken up feeling perfectly fine. I’d have described it as a decent night. But then I saw the number, and within