Why did we start woven? (Part 1)

There are so many things pulling us in different directions these days and the nature of our modern lives often require us to make sacrifices for what is most important. We want to be healthy, but so many of us choose to sacrifice our health for other priorities in the early stages of our lives, only to realize the ramifications of that decision too late. When we do finally decide to prioritize our health we don’t fully grasp how difficult it is to reclaim what we have lost. We struggle to balance our careers and families with our declining health, confused and overwhelmed. It has never been more difficult to be healthy as a human being; our modern world is misaligned with how we were designed to live. But we cannot escape this reality, we need new systems and strategies to adapt our lives to fit the world around us. The story the fitness industry is telling us is not helpful. It blames us for our struggles because it does not fully grasp the challenges we collectively face. This story didn’t work for Lisa and I so we decided we would tell our own version. This is why we started Woven. 

The fitness industry should be in charge of keeping us healthy. We think of that as the purview of the medical system, but that’s not actually true. The medical system exists to fix our health problems after they have already presented themselves. Sure, we go in for a check up each year to try to understand our risk for developing certain ailments, but doctors can’t or won’t tell us how we should live our lives to avoid getting sick in the first place. The system was designed to catch problems after they have developed, and once detected, is incredibly effective at treating those illnesses. We have developed incredible medical technology based around extending our lifespan, i.e. the amount of years we live, but where our medical system has fallen short, however, is in extending our healthspan, i.e. the quality of those years. Never in history has there been a greater gap between these two realities. 

In 2024 you are most likely to die from a disease that is entirely preventable. Save for a global pandemic a few years ago, we have created vaccines and medicines to keep us from dying from the type of sickness that would have killed our hunter-gatherer ancestors swiftly. At this point in history we are more likely to die from heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's or cancer than something like the Black Plague. These diseases are entirely preventable, prevented through ‘lifestyle’ changes. If that sounds vague, it’s because it is. When we ask our doctors for advice on what we should do to be healthy, we hear the same useless advice over and over again: “eat less and move more.” But what does that actually mean? 

This is where the fitness industry steps in and is currently failing. Exercise is the most powerful tool we have to affect the way we age, but that message is not getting through at a societal level. Nearly one in three people in this country is obese, with that number only slated to rise. The average American walks three to four thousand steps a day, less than half of eight thousand a day that research shows is optimal for our health. Only 24% of Americans meet the guidelines set forth by the American College of Sports Medicine of twice a week strength training and 120 minutes of moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise. These should not be unrealistic goals for the vast majority of our people, the type of exercise that our hunter gatherer ancestors would have completed easily. 

But right now the fitness industry is completely broken and it's failing all of us. If you are a large corporation raking in record profits or someone with a six pack naturally who can flaunt their abs online you are thriving in this industry. But it’s failing everyone else. Maybe most insidiously, it's failing its young coaches, as personal trainers have a turnover rate of 80% and the average coach only lasts a year. Let me explain to you why exactly this number is so high by walking you through an average day in the life of a 22 year old personal trainer at a luxury big box gym. You wake up at 4:30 am to commute to the gym for your first session at 6 am. Today you have sessions at 6, 7:30, 9 am, 1 pm, and then 7pm. That’s 5 sessions today, which after earning $60 per session is $300 in total. But even though you made $300 dollars that day you actually worked from 6 am to 8 pm, in reality only making $21 dollars per hour. The reality of any personal trainer is you are working when your clients aren’t, which often means working in the morning and evening. On top of that, almost every big box gym has performance incentives based on productivity and you are paid entirely on sessions delivered. That means if you don’t work you don’t get paid, so there really is no way to take vacation. And when your client who you see three times per week is going out of town for the next two weeks, you actually won’t hit your bonus this month, which you were relying on to pay rent this month. No wonder the average lifespan of a fitness coach is a year.  

This consistent turnover leads to a revolving door of inexperienced coaches, which is a massive detriment to the industry. We rely on our personal trainers and fitness coaches to act as the first line in the battle to help the general public stay healthy through exercise and right now these people are parroting the story posed by the fitness industry that is actively doing harm to their clients. I remember having this incredible realization while I was traveling in Colorado as I watched trainers working with their clients. The training clients were smaller, weaker, and more unfit than everyone else around them and the workouts their coaches gave them were a big part of the problem. These coaches self righteously took each of their clients through 60 minutes of banded activations and corrective exercise, obsessing over their posture, making sure every single joint was perfectly aligned. An hour of this myopic focus on movement and their clients left without breaking a sweat. We have such good evidence how important being strong and fit is, but the workouts these trainers were giving their clients were making them weaker and less fit, more afraid to move their bodies. Is it the young coaches fault that they are so worried about hurting their clients that they avoid actually giving them any useful exercise? Or should we blame the larger narrative pushed by the fitness industry that has convinced us that we are weak and fragile in order to sell us posture correctors and online courses?