Kanika Gahlaut

We live in an age of image projection where we carefully cultivate choices and in turn are easily defined by them. When even our use of emojis is examined as an indicator of our personality, naturally, when it comes to exercise, it’s no different.
What should perhaps be a personal choice becomes a conversation point, a social media declaration, and an extension of our overall image we cultivate.
While multiple lifestyle choices should free our minds collectively, instead, often we use them to further box both ourselves and others in.
When I tell people I have recently taken up dance classes as a form of exercise, they express surprise and look at me as if seeing me with new eyes. I have to repeat that it’s as a means of exercise, and I’m not planning on a second career as a pole dancer.
Similarly when for some years I took up yoga for exercise, I found people seemed more inclined to begin conversations on spiritual topics in which I have zero interest.
Dance is for fun girls, Yoga is for spiritual girls. Weight lifting is for aggressive girls. If you cycle you’re bold and daring. And so on…

Our need to define analyse and attribute deeper meaning to mundane lifestyle choices which we often may pick as casually as clothes in a mall leads to a culture of over sentimentality and avoidable stereotypes not fit for a modern age.

We all agree we have to exercise, this is not contested with so much awareness of the need of physical activity today. For the professionals in the industry as well as for many consumers it probably helps to turn an everyday chore into something exotic. I’m not saying all people with fitness routines don’t love them. Maybe they do or maybe they don’t. Maybe like me they are merely trying to stay fit. We all brush our teeth in the morning but no one goes around making a case for it as an activity with deeper meaning. Yet, cults are built around our exercise routines.
Well I am practical when it comes to this. Dance is fun to watch and wonderful to admire, but it’s a pain to do oneself. It’s not the pain of yoga where one is required to sit still and hold poses, but it’s still a pain and requires its own effort and discipline and technique – and in the case of dance, tricky footwork – that any other form of physical training will require.
Yet I barely find anyone who doesn’t absolutely love their chosen physical activity of the moment. I find it slightly incredulous. My theory is that in an attempt to live up to the strong multi tasking superhumans we have convinced ourselves we are, we have created illusions that everything we do is our calling, and therefore not only do we love it, it is who we are. We want to focus on the science of the happy pheromones released in exercise, but avoid any mention of the excruciating hell in the moments we are trying to touch our toes. We don’t want to talk of the pain in the gain because it goes against our theory of positive vibes pop psychology we have become slaves of.

You can argue that fitness being the end, the fitness circus culture is a means to pique curiosity and creates interest for others who need motivation. However, it’s also equally possible it deters people from joining a structured work out activity class – they feel inadequate in their passion for the chosen form of exercise they see around them and perhaps wait endlessly for a similar calling.

I take dance classes. I don’t do it because I’m a secret Shakira at heart. Or because it’s my divine calling. I dance because i want to stay fit and I owe it to myself. That should be reason enough. Must we attach a sentimentality to it?