I have been wanting to spend some time exploring pain as a cultural process for a while now. While not a direct insight into the process of pain, fitness movements and subcultures provide valued frameworks of health ideologies that give insight into a culture's view of pain. With a little digging, fitness beliefs often incorporate views of pain into their discourse. Seattle is a really health conscious city and so approaches to health and fitness flourish and are diverse. One of the fitness movements to open up shop here is the CrossFit training method. At first, CrossFit seems somewhat unique in an area where more spiritual and holistic movements such as yoga and pilates have long been thriving. CrossFit emphasizes qualities of endurance, durability, adaptability and capability and uses somewhat graceless pieces of equipment like dumbbells, pull-up bars and kettlebells. Workouts are challenging, simple, 'results-orientated' and are modeled off of military and police force training camps. The CrossFit movement endorses these terms and qualities as assumed 'goods', therefore laying the moral groundwork for health and fitness emphasizing the transformative power it brings. Sometimes termed 'Elite' fitness, the implicit point of view is that CrossFit training brings one to the highest level of fitness they are capable of, according to idiosyncratically set goals but held against the same standard (e.g. military and police training). This both pushes trainees to meet what are societally expected fitness goals and pulls them into the not so personal state of mind that links together form and function (common terms in CrossFit advertising and text), thus supporting the problematic binary of "no pain, no gain". For example, web-text on gym websites emphasizes strength with an implicit moral underlay; "The stronger I am in here the better I will be out there"(CrossFit Belltown). "Out there" is a big motivating component in CrossFit; the qualities and characteristics one cultivates in CrossFit training theoretically should help you face your everyday life with more confidence and resilience. Coincidentally, these are two qualities crucial in a recovering economy. Below are some images from gym websites that I found particularly supportive of these links:
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| CrossFit LiS |
The Spartan reference is pretty
self-explanatory, with strong valuations placed on the
bodily aesthetics of Ancient Greek athletes and
a battling mentality, even posing personal challenges as a battle against one's self.
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| South Seattle CrossFit |
Redefinition of the self is stressed ; vocabulary revolves around transformation, evolution (a glossed
usage here) and meeting challenges.
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| The Lab on Eastlake |
This gym's ethos is centered on one of the
dominate trends in CrossFit discourse, that of the scientific object/subject
and the scientization of fitness. Many gyms focus on fitness as an experience
in and of itself which contrasts to this gym's focus on fitness as an
obtainable standardized object that can be measured and weighed.
What makes this movement so interesting to me
are the many ways the CrossFit mentality penetrates other health practices the individual participates in. In this case, CrossFit's influence can be seen in eating habits (e.g. the Paleo diet), birthing and even child rearing practices (which will be the topic of my next post on this subject). I find an important link here between
the moral 'good' of strength and the experiences of pain and challenge in the
other 'goods' characteristic of CrossFit (e.g. self-sufficiency and independence).
Morality can be curiously linked to health states at times and these links can
be very telling of the psychology of a culture making CrossFit a good subject
for the study of health and disability.
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| CrossFit Belltown |
