"Being fit" is all over TikTok search right now, fitness content, gym content, "body transformation" content, and I've been posting in that space occasionally because people ask me about staying in shape for performing. So here's the full answer, because the short version in a TikTok caption doesn't have room for the part I actually care most about, which is: I work out for completely different reasons than the fitness content industrial complex wants me to, and that reframe changed everything.
Let me back up. I spent years, the back half of my teens and most of my early twenties, in a complicated relationship with my body that I don't think was unusual for someone who grew up in evangelical purity culture. Your body is simultaneously a temple you must maintain and a source of temptation that must be contained. You are responsible for the thoughts of other people by virtue of what your body looks like and how you dress it. Your physical appearance has moral weight. I've written about purity culture elsewhere so I won't do the full thing here, but the relevant piece is: that background made it genuinely hard to develop a healthy relationship with exercise, because in my world exercise was never just exercise. It was always also about being "acceptable," managing the body so it was neither too much nor too little, making it presentable, keeping it from being a problem.
Then fitness content on social media happened, and I want to give it credit for the good it's done. It has genuinely made workout knowledge more accessible, helped a lot of people find movement they enjoy, built community around physical activity. All real and good. But the dominant register of fitness content online is the shame economy. And having already spent twenty years in a shame economy about my body, I was not going to stay in another one. So I had to figure out a different relationship with all of it.
What I Actually Train For
Nobody talks about this in press stuff: performing live is physically demanding in a way that most people who haven't done it significantly underestimate. Not just for dancers or high-energy pop acts. Even for a singer-songwriter type who is mostly standing there and playing guitar, a ninety-minute set is a genuine physical event. Your voice is a physical instrument attached to your body; if your body is fatigued, your voice is fatigued. Your breath support, your posture, your ability to hold a position behind a microphone or a guitar for extended time without tension building up and affecting your performance, all of that is physical. And if you throw movement into the show (which I do, even in a relatively controlled indie rock context) you need actual stamina. Not marathon-runner stamina, but real, functional physical capacity.
So I train for that. I train for stage stamina and vocal support and the specific kind of endurance that live performance requires. That framing changed everything for me. When my reason for exercising is "so I can perform the way I want to perform," it's not about the mirror. It's not about a number. It's not about whether I look a certain way or measure a certain way or compare favorably to some ideal. It's about functional capacity. Can I do the thing? Can I do it well? Can I do it again tomorrow? Those are the questions that matter.
In practice this means I do a lot of core work, not for aesthetics, for breath support and posture. I do cardiovascular work because stamina is stamina. I do some upper body work because guitars are heavier than they look when you're also singing and moving and trying to sustain a high note simultaneously. I stretch more than I do anything else. And I walk a lot, usually with Biscuit (my neighbor's dog who I borrow approximately three times a week because unconditional love is a health supplement). The walking is genuinely as important to me as anything else because it moves my body through space without asking it to perform or improve, just to exist and breathe and notice things.
Quitting the Shame Economy of Gym Content
I want to name the specific things in fitness content that I had to stop consuming because they were not serving me. Not to tell you what to do. If certain content motivates you genuinely, great. But here's what I had to eliminate for myself.
Before-and-after content. I'm done with it. The structural message of before-and-after content is that the before is bad and the after is good, and the delta between them is the value of the person. I know that's not what the creators usually intend, often they're just genuinely excited about progress they've made and want to share it. But the format carries that message regardless of intent, and I spent enough years being told that my before was insufficient that I don't want that information architecture in my feed.
Content that uses words like "earn" and "deserve" in relation to food. You eat because you are a living organism that requires fuel to function. You do not earn food through exercise. You do not deserve food as a reward for movement. That framing is so culturally embedded that many people don't even notice it anymore, but if you grew up with a disordered relationship with food and body (and a lot of people from purity culture backgrounds did, because the same shame architecture that covers sexuality also covers appetite and physical pleasure) that language is genuinely corrosive.
Content with ambient shame about rest days, "cheat days," or any deviation from a prescribed routine. Rest is training. Rest is when your body actually does the adaptation work that exercise initiates. A person who is resting is not a person who has failed. I'm a night-owl insomniac musician who sometimes doesn't get the sleep I need and whose schedule is completely at the mercy of creative and promotional cycles. I cannot maintain a perfectly structured workout routine. Most people cannot. I'm not going to follow content that makes me feel like a lesser version of a person because I didn't do the thing on Tuesday.
What I Do Instead
My actual movement practice is inconsistent by the standards of the fitness content world and consistent by the standards of real human life. I move my body most days in some form. Sometimes that's a structured workout, sometimes it's a long walk with Biscuit, sometimes it's dancing in my apartment like an absolute maniac for forty-five minutes because a new track hit me right and my body just needed to respond to it. I count the dancing. I absolutely count the dancing.
I have found that the most sustainable motivation for physical activity is not aesthetics, not discipline, not identity ("I'm a person who works out"), but how it makes me FEEL in the moment and in the hours after. Moving my body when I'm stuck in a creative block reliably unsticks the block. Not always, but often enough to be a real tool. Moving my body when I'm anxious, which happens a lot during press cycles if I'm honest, is one of the most effective anxiety interventions I have. Moving my body when I'm sad makes the sad more bearable, not because it fixes anything but because it reminds my brain and my nervous system that they are connected to a physical organism that can do things, and that organism is okay.
The research on exercise and mental health is genuinely solid. I'm not going to cite studies in my own blog post because that's a bit much, but you can look it up and you should. The effect on mood, on anxiety, on depression, it's real. That's a better reason to move your body than any of the aesthetics-based reasons, and it's the one that's kept me actually doing it even during the periods when I didn't care about anything else related to fitness.
Specifically for Indie Artists Wondering About This
I get questions in my comments about this specifically. How do I stay in shape without a gym budget, without a personal trainer, without the kind of structure that people with different work schedules can maintain. Here's the honest answer.
You don't need a gym membership. I have had a gym membership and I have not had a gym membership and the periods with and without correlate zero with my actual physical conditioning. What matters is: do you move your body regularly, in ways that elevate your heart rate and challenge your muscles and keep you limber? That can happen in an apartment. Bodyweight exercises exist. YouTube has approximately four million free workout videos of varying quality. Walking is free. Dancing in your apartment is free and also emotionally beneficial.
You also don't need a perfect schedule. You need a commitment to doing something more days than nothing. That's it. That's the whole bar. Get over that bar, however you have to get over it, and you are doing fine. The rest is optimization that matters to you if it matters to you, and doesn't if it doesn't.
Move your body because it's yours and it's remarkable and it can make sounds and perform stories and carry you through ninety-minute sets. Not because it's failing some metric. It's not failing. Neither are you. I love you.