Despite — or perhaps because of — his unorthodox approach to client relations, Glassman’s methods exploded over the ensuing decades. At its peak in the late 2010s, there were more than 15,000 CrossFit-franchised gyms, known as “boxes”, across the world; when it was sold in 2020, it went for a reported $200 million. The brand answered a call for the return to machismo, offering regular dudes beyond Muscle Beach the chance to get swole. Today, grunting over kettlebells is standard fare in any old provincial PureGym, while competitive metrics — logging public runs on Strava, tracking cardio loads and recovery rates on sport watches — are integral to fitness culture (if you’ve left your Garmin at home, did the jog really happen?). In both respects, CrossFit got there first. 

Witnessing the physical transformation of your body, with scoreboards to prove it, is motivating enough. Throw in a charismatic leader with a penchant for larping as a drill sergeant and you’re really cooking on gas. Glassman, an outspoken patriot, was deeply inspired by the war in the Middle East; his lieutenant Dave Castro (who would ultimately replace him) was a former Navy Seal. From its early days, CrossFit had a big military and police client base, a fact which shouldn’t be overlooked: for men in particular, it must have been freeing to belong to a “fitness community” which shrugged off the distinctly effeminate vibe of Olivia Newton-John and Jane Fonda honing perky buttcheeks in fuzzy legwarmers. This was not about looking your best as much as being the best, embodying muscular American prowess. Now get down and give me 20 you fat fuck!  

For those who struggle to see the appeal of an expensive fitness club whose owner hurls insults at you until you throw up in a specially appointed bin in the corner of the room, CrossFit was all about winning. Workouts were timed and turned into races; everything was marked on the leaderboards. Every year a CrossFit Games event would bring together global champions to find the “fittest [athlete] on Earth”. Its leaders, Glassman included, became exercise evangelists, transplanting secular Californians’ religious inclinations into a new temple of the body.  

Glassman’s unhinged managerial style was all part of the program. Marsh frames this very Noughties CEO as a sort of muscle-head Charles Manson — a magnetic leader with a “twitchy, slightly manic brio”. His then wife and business partner Lauren Jenai put it more forcefully: “This guy is either the biggest fucking con man in history, or he’s on to something pretty fucking spectacular.” (Jenai was not far off the mark on either count, it turned out: Glassman was found to have hemorrhaged money to fund ridiculous extravagances for he and his apostles, while overseeing less than fastidious bookkeeping, according to Marsh.) His “spectacular” discovery, as it turned out, was that “men will die for points”. Pushing paying clients to the limits of endurance would keep them coming back, wads of cash in hand.

The bellowing, the aching, the vomiting — it bonded bros together. “Everyone was so freaking passionate,” says one attendee of the 2010 Games. “They were drinking the Kool-Aid at every level,” they added, in a hopefully inadvertent nod to Jonestown. Not unlike Jonestown, CrossFit promised a sort of immortality. Jenai said CrossFit’s founders “felt like we had the cure for cancer”. The results were remarkable: like any guru worth his salt, Glassman claimed to have cured his clients of maladies, vanquishing high cholesterol and diabetes like a new Jim Jones come to heal the broken legs of his congregants. Like all the best prophets, Glassman had mastered miracles. Here was a man fighting the good fight against the evils of Fat America (Glassman constantly berated Coca-Cola and Pepsi, whose corporate partners he denigrated as “soda whores”). 

As in every cult, there were reprisals for stepping out of line. Belief in the project was ruthlessly enforced. CrossFitters were derided — including by the glorious leader — as “incredibly weak” or “morbidly obese”. During one of the annual Games, two pudgy volunteers were hustled out of view: “Get those fat people out of here,” said a disgruntled exec.  

In the ignoble traditions of Bikram yoga, NXIVM, Osho and more, the CrossFit cult enriched its high priests. The C-suite, stocked with Glassman’s yes-men acolytes, enjoyed Four Seasons stays, cocaine binges, lavish dinners and “rampant adultery”, from the top dog down, according to Marsh. Glassman became megalomaniacal, insisting on $5,000 detours in his prop plane to get Chick-fil-A. The flock was disciplined; its shepherds enjoyed the perks. 

As might be expected from a band of bruhs, locker-room chat was rampant. Marsh reports that the gym’s WiFi password was “wet pussy”. Understandably, any whisperings about the noxious vibes at head office were viciously countered. As CrossFit’s star rose, true believers took the crusade online. Marsh describes Glassman’s PR heavies, “two guys on a company laptop”, deploying “dozens of fake Facebook profiles” to slap down critics and create the impression of an army of defenders ready to body-slam those who said, for example, that CrossFit encouraged poor lifting form. Sometimes, animosity turned inwards, with beef between the CEO and his right-hand man, the irritatingly well-liked Dave Castro, who hogged Glassman’s “Jesus”-like spotlight by turning the Games into a mainstream TV success.  

More from this author

Women shouldn’t settle for mid men

By Poppy Sowerby

The darkest expression of Glassman’s philosophy — “men will die for points” — came in 2024. Four years after Glassman was forced out over heretical comments about George Floyd, the new evangelist-in-chief Castro presided over the summer Games in Fort Worth, Texas. The event was held in a sweltering August — during the swimming event, the lake was warm. Conditions were, in other words, extremely dangerous. An uber-fit Serbian athlete called Lazar Dukic, whom many had expected to win, drowned. At the suggestion that the event should be canceled to respect Dukic’s memory, some CrossFitters questioned what the “big deal” was; “people die every day”. Here was the central contradiction: a movement devoted to perfecting the body had become disturbingly casual about its destruction. 

CrossFit still exists today, but has a dwindling cultural footprint since Dukic’s death raised concerns about the method’s safety compliance and reporting around its toxic corporate culture. Its natural successor is Hyrox, another hellish indoor fitness competition combining runs with workout stations; I know this all too well, frequently being woken on a Sunday morning by the maddening whoops and hell yeahs of jockish acolytes from my neighborhood gym. I recently heard the brand used as a slur (“Oh you mean his new Hyrox girlfriend? Good luck…”). 

Like CrossFit, Hyrox elevates suffering and abasement as noble and purifying rites. Much purification was needed last month when Joanna Wietrzyk, an Australian champion, got the runs during a Beijing competition and inexplicably carried on. “A win is a win,” she declared after contaminating the course and claiming the crown. Her unhygienic heroics went uber-viral; the outrage it prompted eclipsed that which followed Dukic’s death in 2024. Of course, it tracks — the story was spectacularly gross — but something else unsettled the untoned masses. Why had finishing seemed more important than stopping? It was difficult to escape the sense that this otherwise normal woman was in the grip of indoctrination, just like the vomiting votaries of CrossFit’s heyday.   

Extreme fitness offers benediction in the secular age. Shared ordeals bind. Injury, collapse and even death are offerings. The official purpose of fitness culture is about health and well-being; when gymgoing becomes a jihad it shifts to something else — sacralized suffering, control of the self and, at the very top, others. Like most religions, extreme fitness touts its doctrine as unfalsifiable: a rockin’ bod is proof of concept, while physical or psychological damage is proof you didn’t believe hard enough. For some searchers in the post-modern world, salvation is always just one more rep away. Glassman’s vision may by now seem an ancient cult thoroughly displaced by more glamorous upstarts, but all of today’s die-hard gym bros have CrossFit to thank for the spread of extreme faith in fitness.

Inside, the air was thick and immaculate, heated to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (“NYC temp,” they told me, “the LA class is even hotter”). The teacher was not Anderson, but a smiling Spanish man named Javi. “No talking,” he said, citing the first rule of Tracy World. “Just music.” We began, and he adopted Anderson’s uncanny-valley grimace. Movements started with small arm pulses, before escalating into kicks and angular twists. To the uninitiated, the signature Anderson method might look something like a jacked-up combination of Pilates and dance, but from within, it is one woman’s unique and vast accomplishment, a sprawling universe of moves (more than 200,000 in Anderson’s library) and routines that comes complete with a creation myth, esoterica, and, of course, merch.

Halfway through, I was drenched. The middle-aged woman beside me, with an enviable six-pack and sparkling gold jewelry, smiled when I asked her after class how long she’d been doing it. “Three months?” she ventured. Javi laughed. “You’ve been here a year!” Time, it turns out, works differently here.

Anderson leads a cult-like empire that frames its offering as more than just a workout. To practice her method is to change your life — it is, as she proclaims, “revolutionary.” Women like me answer her siren call in droves. Hers is the lingo of gentle space, physical truth, creation, purpose, aura, passion, empowerment, and personal transformation. Those of us seeking these things — plus a closer conformity to that beauty standard — have made her $100 million dollars so far, cementing her cultural position with the liberal rich and making her rich-rich in the bargain. Men across the Hamptons wear T-shirts that say ‘MY WIFE IS AT TRACY.’ 

More from this author

Joan Didion’s husband was the original ‘wife guy’

By Lily Isaacs

Online, Anderson reaches far beyond the 1%, connecting to more than a million followers on Instagram. She has a subscription “online studio,” a kind of mini-Netflix of fitness through which you can tune into her live classes or do them on demand. Her p.r. team wouldn’t tell me how many people take her classes — but the more than 15 million on TikTok who have posted videos doing her workouts would indicate the number is high. She first came to fame as Gwyneth Paltrow’s trainer, and offers a similar brand of aspirational wellness as the actress. But Anderson’s has an edge: exercise has become a luxury product, necessary for self-worth and available only to those who can afford it. 

The cult of exercise and its promise of personal magnificence are not new. The German-born Joseph Pilates rebelliously invented the choreography that became the global Pilates industry during his internment in England during World War I. About 40 years later, across the world in California, the perverted yogi Bikram Choudhury exported his heated sequence to the West, spawning a proliferation of hot-yoga studios and a culture of sweating it out in sweltering rooms. Both promised their exercise was not just to make you look good — it was to heal you. 

With the rise of a new crop of female fitness gurus, the tenor of the promises changed. After escaping the Nazis in Germany, Lotte Berk invented ballet barre and opened a studio in London in 1959, to strengthen, “without adding bulk.” In the 1960s, women — always the target audience of these fitness figures — were gaining sexual and financial freedom, and were discovering that the freedom to do with your body as you pleased meant that the practical activity of losing weight might become a kind of leisure hobby. Huge industries were born. Blond Californian Jacki Sorenson invented “aerobic dance” in the late 1960s, soon to be known everywhere as aerobics. By the 1980s, the “Jane Fonda’s Workout” videos were popularizing the term “feel the burn” and funding Fonda’s political activism by promising women they could “burn off fat” and find “energy for living.”

What’s different about Tracy is not just that she combines the promise of transcendence with weight loss, but that she has harnessed the immensity of the internet to do it. Her rise to stardom coincided with the two great forces: the flourishing of the fitness industry in the 2010s — it grew by 75% mostly driven by women — and the burgeoning world of streaming services. The medium is the message, and Anderson’s message was about to be everywhere. Women, her customers, were getting more money, too. In 2010, women controlled an estimated $5 trillion in the United States. By 2023, that figure had risen to $10 trillion by conservative estimates; McKinsey projects $30 trillion by 2030.

With women’s growing financial power came a trap: we would find ever more things to spend money on. This was the era of #GirlBoss capitalism: Dior sold a $700 We Should All Be Feminists T-shirt, and Sheryl Sandberg wanted us to “lean in.” Chelsea Clinton hosted a presidential fundraiser for Hillary at Soul Cycle, where classes run $40 a pop. Exercise studios proliferated. 

The high prices and turbo-charged clientele meant that the fitness offerings needed to promise more: it wasn’t just that working out could make you look good or feel good anymore; it was that it could make you be good. Tracy’s waist-trimming DVDs sold in the tens of thousands, and so she set up brick-and-mortar studios, which she could charge even more for. Buying into something was seen as moral participation. To pay was to believe. 

Through social media, millions could now see what Tracy did, what she wore, what music she liked or didn’t. Her association with figures like Paltrow, Madonna, and J-Lo, all of whom she’d trained, boosted her own status as a quasi-celebrity. As legend would have it, her fallout with Madonna was so bad no one is allowed to play her music in any TA studio. The fact that people spread such a legend mattered. Watchers formed parasocial relationships with her, enough that when she launched her online studio in 2015, they signed up from all across the world to watch her sweat daily. A subscription allows you not just a workout, but access to the “TAMILY.” And the workouts became an ever-more-expensive commitment. Anderson added “heartstone weights,” and bands, and “premier membership,” and “summer camp.” 

In 2020, as the exercise studios were shut down for the pandemic, so were the managerial-class women. Capitalist feminist figures fell down like dominoes: Glossier’s Emily Weiss, Man Repeller’s Leandra Medine, The Wing’s Audrey Gelman, all burned in the flames of cancellation. They had bred “toxic cultures” (an accusation later lobbed at Anderson by various ex-trainers). Fitness studios everywhere were going bust. The rest of us were crawling inside, too, kept away from work or school, slinking reluctantly into domestic confinement. Right where Anderson was waiting for us.

More from this author

Meet the new MAGA girlies

By Lily Isaacs

I discovered Anderson in that strange, suspended pandemic time. Anderson streamed daily workout classes from her ranch in Montana, always following her non-speaking rule, but offering comforting platitudes at the end of class about our inner and outer transformation. She told us the best way to spend these wasted days was doing exactly as we were — spending money on her.  Her business grew by 120% that year, according to an article in WWD, as the work-from-home world had more time on its hands to move, and to think about how it looked. Consultations for teenage eating disorders increased threefold during the pandemic. Anderson advised we eat fruit puree for breakfast and vegetable puree for lunch. 

In the decade leading up to the pandemic, wellness had already slipped its moorings from public health and become a kind of private religion. Anderson’s dialect of health (“detox,” “raw milk,” “natural healing”), once the parlance of liberal hippies and weight-loss aficionados, was consistent with the tenets of what we now know as the MAHA movement, which makes the body, once a source of human frailty, “an object of almost religious devotion,” as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her book Natural Causes, published in 2018. In Tracy World, the body is both temple and test, a site where moral character is performed through effort.

Capitalism is the perfect companion for such efforts. In On Immunity, a book on vaccines written years before the pandemic, the critic Eula Biss identifies in the anti-vaccine movement, “evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us.” She argues that it is understandable that such huge swathes of people would feel that the system is up to no good, because in so many other ways they are right. Now, our distrust in systems is being rechanneled into consumption, and the market sells you back the very faith it helped erode. 

Anderson knows it well. Last week, she announced a one-day “TracyFest” in Labelle, Fla. She called it an “inaugural rite of realignment festival” for the “global Tracy Anderson” community. The ticket costs $500, not far off the price of a Coachella weekend. The staff that accompanies her workout costs $779. Memberships to her physical studios across America start in the tens of thousands; joining her London studio runs more than $13,400 a year. Small rocks to hold in your hands are $285. You can buy every type of clothing from her, and her new $125 perfume and candle set smells like “sweat.” 

When I left Anderson’s studio I felt elated — manic even. I grinned at my fellow travelers on the bus. The world looked beyond beautiful, and the rest of the day felt ridiculously promising. But hours later, I was tired, achy, and fed-up. If I could go to that studio daily, perhaps I’d be able to maintain the euphoria. But who could ever pay that much money, when movement is the one thing the body can do for free? The fantasy of “taking health into your own hands” only works if you have hands free to begin with, if you can pay for the gym, the supplements, the time. The rest are left behind, instructed to “blame themselves” for their sickness. Slumped on the sofa later that night, watching television, my body had returned to itself, untransformed. I told myself I was “fighting capitalism” by refusing to move — and perhaps it was true. 

It’s a tendency that no fitness company has reflected better than CrossFit. Once a branded fitness regimen combining different gymnastic and strength-training disciplines into a competitive community of leaderboards and point-scoring, the company has crystallised into a cult-like movement.

As someone with a lifelong interest in fitness, I was ripe for grooming and initiation, and duly became a dedicated member. And proselytiser, too: I helped expand the Panther CrossFit affiliate at the University of Pittsburgh in 2008 and practised the CrossFit methodology for three years. While many criticise the programme — for its links to supposedly Right-leaning first responders, its internal issues with sexual harassment, or past controversial remarks by its former CEO concerning the BLM movement — these issues never bothered me during my years of practice; the entire fitness world leans Right. No, the simultaneous appeal and sickness of CrossFit lies deeper, beyond the headline controversies, reflecting an undying hunger for a slickly-marketed blend of fitness, community, and competition. It’s an obsessive, dogmatic programme that I ultimately couldn’t handle.

CrossFit has achieved one feat that many thought impossible: it motivated a multitude of women to embrace heavy lifting. Even though many often demonstrated unsafe or improper form, it persuaded both genders to experiment with Olympic lifts, deadlifts and squats. It highlighted the value of plyometrics, kettlebells, and standard circuit training. As strength coach Mark Rippetoe — himself a critic of CrossFit — aptly stated; “Since the invention of the equipment a hundred years ago, nothing has placed more hands on more barbells than CrossFit.”

More from this author

Steroids won't cure toxic masculinity

By Oliver Bateman

However, a crucial distinction arises when one looks more carefully into CrossFit’s methodology. The programme, with its emphasis on “Workout of the Day” and techniques introduced in their certifications, can be categorised as exercise rather than training. At a fundamental level, exercise denotes physical activity undertaken for immediate outcomes, often limited to the workout session’s duration. In stark contrast, training is an orchestrated endeavour, meticulously designed for long-term goals. While training maps a well-planned route towards a future objective, CrossFit’s randomness, typified by time-bound, randomised, and often high-intensity sessions, fits snugly into the exercise bracket.

This scattered approach reflects a deeper issue with the programme which goes well beyond exercise praxis. When executed diligently, the CrossFit inductee’s life begins to revolve around CrossFit. Suddenly, their social media brims with CrossFit-centric images, their routines become unyieldingly anchored to its workouts, and to question the ordained methodology becomes borderline blasphemous. A poignant instance came when a friend experienced a catastrophic injury in a car crash due to not wearing a seatbelt. CrossFit, to its credit, produced a video highlighting his predicament to raise funds for his medical needs. Yet, it seemed almost reflexive for some in the video to attribute his survival to his CrossFit-honed fitness, overlooking the undeniable importance of basic safety measures.

Such an approach is symptomatic of CrossFit’s sales technique, of how it appeals to a world desperate to look good. It positions itself as a unique sanctuary, an oasis of elite fitness in an otherwise out-of-shape, indifferent, normie world. The plethora of CrossFit documentaries and the seemingly ceaseless surge in CrossFit-centric social media postings reveal an insular, almost narcissistic universe. Sure, showcasing routines in minimal attire may garner “likes” and comments — perhaps even “sponsorships” and a little money (always less than one thinks). But beyond the digital applause lies an unsettling truth. The exercises might not be groundbreaking, but they are elevated to an undeserved pedestal by a community reluctant to explore beyond and a company ultimately motivated by one thing.

As a business model, CrossFit resembles a pyramid scheme, with enthusiasts splurging on costly monthly affiliate memberships in the hopes of ascending to the elusive apex. The irony is stark: many top CrossFit athletes likely spend more than they earn, often on performance-enhancing drugs. The world of competitive CrossFit has experienced its fair share of doping scandals, with men and women constantly searching for loopholes in a system perennially playing catch-up. And the nature of the allegiance to CrossFit becomes evident when the workouts, which are ostensibly random, are treated as gospel, exactly the kind of reverence that leads to injuries.

The more enlightened trainees soon realise that there isn’t a singular path to fitness. CrossFit’s branding as “the sport of fitness” is almost cyclical: you train using CrossFit to excel at CrossFit. Unlike, say, baseball, where exercises enhance specific skills like pitching or running, CrossFit lacks a distinct endgame. The CrossFit Games are mere amplifications of standard routines, chosen for spectacle rather than substance. In an age dominated by digital personas, CrossFit provides an enticing avenue for social media optimisation, not physical contentment. It relies on constantly stimulating a demand for perpetual improvement, a demand born of perpetual feelings of inadequacy. It’s the process by which an interest can become an isolating dogma.

Two decades ago, Robert Putnam offered a prescient diagnosis of this sense of atomisation in his book Bowling Alone. He observed that while more Americans in the late-20th century were bowling, they were increasingly doing so not in leagues or teams, but on their own. Though most easily observed in sports clubs, it’s a tendency across Western societies, from Masonic lodges to trade unions. The associative networks we used to practise leisure in have been swept away by the tide of hyper-individualisation that has rushed across all of civic life.

More from this author

The men who worship Yukio Mishima

By Oliver Bateman

CrossFit has updated and exacerbated this to a terrifying degree. In a world where community ties continue to fray, it creates a semblance of togetherness (at a hefty price) while actively pitting its participants against each other. Beneath all the surface camaraderie and personal pride lies a more solitary reality. This isn’t akin to community sports leagues of yesteryears, woven with continuity and local legends. It’s a dog-eat-dog competition to climb a rope, thrust a barbell into the air, and then row on a rowing machine rather than the open water. Not for achieving personal bests but for social media clout in the relentless race to determine who looks coolest while exercising.

Unfortunately, there’s no singular path to holistic health — not raw eggs, raw meat, SoulCycle, CrossFit, or any other smartly-marketed fad coming down the line in 2023. As we navigate the maze of modern fitness, here’s a golden opportunity to remember that diversifying our approach to health might not only protect us from injuries but also from the empty echo chambers that modern fitness cults, like CrossFit, can all too easily become. The world of fitness is vast, filled with myriad effective ways to train and grow. But it shouldn’t become a route to better social media posts, or reduced to a game that, years in, you forget why you started to play.

The Times last week reported that steroid use in the UK has increased tenfold over the past decade, while recent studies have shown that 2% of Canadians, and between three and four million Americans, have used steroids in their lifetimes — with roughly a quarter of those users reporting “psychological dependence” on the otherwise-non addictive drugs.

I have been on the periphery of the strength and fitness culture for my entire adult life, and steroids have always been part of the athletic game: if you want to win, not just at bodybuilding and powerlifting but at any sport, you take performance-enhancing drugs. Initially, I had primarily positive views about the drugs: steroids, I thought, were merely a means to an end, a way of getting stronger and increasing functional capacity, something reams of academic and anecdotal research have confirmed they do. However, I gradually learned that the individuals using them in this way are few and far between.

That small pool of people largely consists of pro athletes, driven by financial incentives or competitive instincts to pursue every conceivable advantage. But recreational users have always outnumbered professional users, whose livelihoods depend on athletic performance. And that gap has only widened as these drugs have become available everywhere from internet forums to legally operating testosterone clinics. Their pull is irresistible: a relative of mine who never played sports or even took to the bodybuilding stage was arrested for felony possession of steroids in 2014. 

These recreational users are trying to win a different kind of game. When I started investigating steroids, an increasing number of users were following in the footsteps of Aziz “Zyzz” Shavershian, a Russian-born Australian who built a following on YouTube at the end of the Noughties. One of the first notable influencers to emerge on the now ubiquitous site, Zyzz preached a gospel of “aesthetics”, relying on steroids consumed in conjunction with exercise to develop a physique similar enough to his idol Frank Zane’s that it would win him the undying admiration of his followers.

More from this author

How to get ripped and alienate people

By Oliver Bateman

The key difference, of course, was that Frank Zane — whom I interviewed a year ago — was a professional athlete, training his body to win bodybuilding pageants, and Zyzz was merely someone who wanted to look the part. Zane detested selfies and self-recorded footage, believing it to be deceptive and no substitute for up-close, objective inspection of another person’s body; Zyzz relied on these methods to project a particular self-image. Taking steroids arguably made him weaker and sicker, not stronger. Zyzz died after a cardiac arrest aged 22, the victim of a congenital heart defect and cardiomegaly — an enlarged heart — worsened by the drug use that, like many fitness influencers including the recently disgraced Brian “Liver King” Johnson, he had spent the majority of his career denying he used. (Zyzz’s deception was exposed a month before his fatal heart attack, when his brother Said was arrested for possession of anabolic steroids.)

Zyzz’s early death should have made him a cautionary tale. Instead, he became a “muscle martyr” beloved by other fitness posters. People like my felonious relative saw him and wanted to be him, while emerging social media platforms provided convenient playgrounds for their carefully-curated exercises in brand-building narcissism. I’ve now interviewed hundreds of users, and the reasons for their use all arise out of some sense of absence, some internal emptiness. A gay user whose steroid-abetted transformation I profiled explained to me that he wanted to transition from being a chubby, schlubby teen to a “hyper-masculine” man. Others said they added mass in the hope of “becoming someone”; all that hypertrophied flesh would obscure an essential lack of self. Several steroid users who were attending bodybuilding pageants merely as spectators told me how eager they were to be mistaken for competitors, that passing for one would constitute the highlight of their year. 

“The first casualty of steroid use is the truth,” the fitness journalist and bodybuilding competition coach Anthony Roberts has told me repeatedly. Even if steroids are obtained with a perfectly valid prescription, there is still a cultural taboo that prevents most users from admitting to using them. As Roberts tells it, lying is the oldest and most effective performance enhancer of all: lying about what you take, how much you take, what else you take — because steroid use, for many, is but a small part of a drug-filled lifestyle. Certain fitness influencers, in addition to denying or at least staying silent about steroid use, have gone even further, inflating their on-screen workouts with the use of fake weight plates and exaggerated claims about their performance.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Richard V. Reeves

Meanwhile, they are risking their health. Heavy steroid users are already uniquely susceptible to cardiovascular problems — and so many influencers are using steroids in excess of what a physician would prescribe for therapeutic use. Those with pre-existing heart problems, like Zyzz, are uniquely vulnerable, particularly in recent times. During the pandemic, each widely-publicised bodybuilder death was met with waves of accusation: at first, it was the evil virus that did them in, then it was the “clot shot”. Never mind that most of these so-called “recreational users” are teetering on death’s doorstep at all times, aware that even a common cold could stop their engorged hearts.

Bodybuilding prodigy Dallas McCarver, for example, died in 2017 with organs so enlarged that they strained credulity, and a recorded testosterone level of 55,000 nanograms per deciliter (the normal range for a male falls between 300 and 1,000 ng/dl, and the highest recorded testosterone level captured in a failed Olympic drug test was 20,000 ng/dl). So, as they near peak muscularity, and fame, these bodybuilders are also nearing the end of their lives. Their spectacular bodies serve as both temple and tomb. 

Hours of conversations with men like these have led me to believe that their behaviour is, in part, a response to the socioeconomic situation in which we find ourselves. Since the early Eighties, in the West, deindustrialisation has proceeded apace and the world of finance has become dominant. To people coming of age, it might appear as if nothing is made anymore but money. Farmers and manual labourers, such as the steamfitter captured in Lewis Hine’s famous 1921 photograph, sometimes exhibit a high degree of muscular development related to their jobs. By contrast, middle-class workers, performing increasingly less strenuous work for more than a century, have to actively cultivate muscular physiques to project power for which there might be little purpose — beyond showing that they aren’t subject to the degenerating tendencies of their age. In the absence of any tangible construction projects, the only thing that you can gain approval for building is your body — a body that is both an “aesthetic” calling card and a prison for your enlarging viscera and solipsistic thoughts.

More from this author

The men who worship Yukio Mishima

By Oliver Bateman

In more recent years, there has been much commentary on declining male testosterone levels. Blame is assigned to everything from poisoned food to sedentary lifestyles. Some pundits, such as manosphere influencer Mike Cernovich, have urged men to set aside $80-100 a month for testosterone replacement therapy. Whereas Cernovich’s cohorts would most probably deride the prescription of SSRIs for depression, or oestrogen for transgender-identifying individuals, they accept a pharmaceutical solution for the crisis of masculinity. At least testosterone administered in a clinic is accompanied by regular blood tests that can detect cholesterol issues and other problems before they become dangerous. But it is still another of modernity’s many panaceas: here is a weekly or biweekly needle to the thigh or buttocks that will make you feel and perhaps even look like someone you are not, but feel entitled to be — or at least appear to be, on social media.

The overdiagnosis of SSRIs, the superfluity of steroids, and the legions of men killing themselves to look strong are tragedies. They are disordered responses to a kind of existential emptiness, a world in which our identities are all we have left to display and sell. And we know, deep down in our hearts, that such a meretricious product is worth nothing at all. 

Johnson admitted in an apology, made after emails that confirmed his long-denied use of performance-enhancing drugs, that he spent thousands of dollars a month on steroids. The aim was to endow himself with a physique that implied the extreme fitness that he was attempting to sell to others. But that fitness was illusory: one powerlifter who knew him recently mocked his 455-pound deadlift, a decent number for a novice lifter or a teen boy but unimpressive for someone spending as much on steroids as the Liver King.

The Liver King’s story is a microcosm of the ever-evolving Right-wing manosphere, which emerged from self-help roots in the early 2000s to attain a quasi-political, quasi-spiritual status, alongside the ascendancy of Donald Trump. The most obvious Trump train rider in the manosphere was former advice blogger and accused rapist Mike Cernovich, who published the political book MAGA Mindset as a follow-up to his Gorilla Mindset self-help text, between blogging about topics such as grip strength when choking a woman during sex. Liver King never became explicitly political the way Cernovich did, but his message was a streamlined and extremely dumbed-down version of the MAGA-adjacent ideology being preached by anon fitness influencers such as Raw Egg Nationalist — whose alignment with Tucker Carlson led to appearances in a documentary, The End of Men, as well as on Fox News.

For all these men, there is some kind of secret — an ancient secret, in the case of the Liver King — that gullible, inward-looking initiates must uncover, via various steps. The navel-gazing nature of all this recalls the fitness fads, cults, and other New-Age quests for meaning of the Seventies that cultural critic Tom Wolfe labelled America’s “Third Great Awakening”.

The previous two awakenings concerned the revival of Protestant spirituality in the mid-18th and early-19th centuries; all three were spurred by a sense of social disorder. First, New England Congregationalists strayed from the true light of the lord that led them to the New World. Second, newly Independent Americans found themselves facing down the settlement of the frontier with little assistance from their laissez-faire government. And in the Seventies, hippies and flower children found themselves grappling with the violent disappointments of popular protests, while a bloated, bureaucratic state struggled to bring about even a stalemate in Vietnam.

Throughout these three centuries, but with increasing velocity and urgency from the Sixties onward, the personal began to substitute for the political. Now, as Malcom Kyeyune recently noted, we are in uncharted territory: now, with “proliferating numbers of belief systems and fringe political narratives on the Web”, the political is personal. In other words, the “personal” — abetted by the technologies like social media that centre the user, indeed making them the narcissistic centres of their virtual worlds — has completely subsumed the “political”; everything everywhere is personal and filtered through some sort of Freudian superego that functions as a “self-marketing machine”, with the rest of life merely incidental. Online, various quasi-faiths and crude scientism are offering people personal uplift combined with the promise to fix their little communities, the only parts worth saving, the parts open to the elect.

More from this author

Glenn Youngkin is the Republican future

By Oliver Bateman

Though influencers such as the Liver King, Raw Egg Nationalist, and Bronze Age Pervert are new to the scene, relatively speaking, nothing about their appeal is novel (even though certain practices, such as directing red light on the testicles to stimulate testosterone production, are only now technologically possible). They themselves emphasise this: their appeals harken back to past practices, times when “men were men”, even if they cannot agree when exactly that was. Hesiod’s age of gold? A Twenties naval port, with nattily-attired “wolves” awaiting the hearty “rough trade” from the high seas, sure to appear whenever the “fleet’s in?” A seedy Forties YMCA, where the bodybuilding demimonde has gathered to “slonk” raw eggs before proceeding to grease up and commence lifting in jockstraps? Regardless of the time of the last real men, it was very different from our present fallen, failed, and low-testosterone state of existence.

Calls for the rebirth of masculinity echo throughout recorded history, issued by everyone from the aforementioned Hesiod to Japanese author and extreme nationalist Yukio Mishima (a favourite of this current round of fitness-cum-politics influencers). The “Third Great Awakening” of the Seventies ended with the emergence of religious groups such as the Promise Keepers, an Evangelical movement seeking to call men back to “courageous leadership” and “marital” fidelity. Meanwhile, in secular literature, the breakdown of masculinity and paternal authority was addressed in Robert Bly’s influential 1990 book Iron John: A Book About Men — a text which inspired any number of subsequent manosphere efforts, including Tom Matlack’s “The Good Men Project”  (a website that launched the careers of everyone from Hugo Schwyzer and Harris “Dr. Nerdlove” O’Malley to yours truly) and even the pickup artistry of Neil Strauss and Mystery (Iron John, like Robert Greene’s works on power and seduction, found itself on many “PUA” reading lists).

More from this author

The evangelist who united America

By Oliver Bateman

I mention my personal involvement here — the personal is political, after all — because I’ve followed the manosphere’s trajectory since the early 2000s. I’ve also spent decades strength training and eating raw meat and raw eggs, as well as interviewing and writing about some of the world’s leading strength coaches and athletes. These activities would suggest, on the surface, that I am sympathetic to the cause of egg-slonkers, bronze-age warrior worshippers and bodybuilding aesthetes. Far from it: I see their Liver King-style marketing as sophomoric, the sort of thing I’ve attacked in print whenever possible.

My interest in strength stems solely from viewing it as preferable to incapacity. The enjoyment I’ve derived from weight training arises, to quote venerable strength coach Mark Rippetoe, who I recently interviewed, from “completing a task you couldn’t do previously”. And yet, throughout my career as a journalist covering sports and fitness, I have been asked what I have learned from figures such as Raw Egg Nationalist. When I interviewed the paleo diet influencer John Durant, during the early days of the alt-Right’s emergence as a media phenomenon, he assumed I shared his belief that eating raw or rare meat is a radical political act. I do see it as political, but only in the sense that I stand with politicians who support regenerative grazing practices and increasing access to meat for poor and undernourished children; meat is merely a means, not an end. I’d gladly eat something less primal, including biologically identical lab-grown meat, if such a thing could ever be manufactured cheaply and at scale.

That’s not to say that these fitness influencers don’t offer some useful advice. All popular gurus and spiritual leaders do. Eating organ meats, getting adequate sleep, spending time in the sun, and even taking some pride in one’s body — an edifice that is both temple and tomb — are not bad practices in and of themselves. However, this advice is chained to a lot of gobbledygook, from bizarre, hero-worshiping misreadings of history to faux-scientific racism. The noted dissident author Zero HP Lovecraft, for instance, once used a voice changer to record a podcast in which he argues that the different races are different species.

Suggested reading

The importance of Bronze Age Pervert

By Murtaza Hussein

It is almost impossible to say how influential these figures are; on the one hand, they will claim that they directly created the Trump phenomenon, but on the other, they will joke that they’re just “frogs” who “shitpost online”, unlike the “facefags” (people whose identities are public) who genuinely care about things. Bronze Age Pervert, whose book Bronze Age Mindset is the sort of amusing Nietzschean pastiche one might expect from a PhD student having a spot of fun, is known to be read by congressional staffers; and yet, he huffily complained about City Journal allowing Kyeyune to publish an article that’s mildly critical of him. Like the Liver King, these figures take zero responsibility for the failures and shortcomings of their acolytes — but unlike him, most of them will never be seen at all, so what difference does it make?

Here, then, is the great weakness that stems from the evolution of “the personal is political” into “the political is personal”: far from allowing the development of strong convictions, the new creed is so malleable as to be meaningless. If one argues that the job of the Republican Party is to win elections and reward its constituencies, those on the Right who preach that “the political is personal” won’t help. Why would they bother? Most are already arguing that the nation or the world has collapsed, which is far easier than facilitating real political change, which would require moving the GOP to the centre.

Things are fairly hopeless, according to the manosphere. Yet if pressed, the Liver Kings and Bronze Age Perverts won’t turn on, tune in, and drop out like millenarian hippies bound for the commune; they’ll hang around, continuing to offer advice on how to infuse the self into politics and vice versa. They and many of their followers — some of whom left the Left by way of the so-called “post-Left” — would gleefully ridicule such “personal-political” posturing were it to issue from gender identitarians or committed anti-racists. Zero HP Lovecraft, however, says the quiet part out loud (in the same podcast in which he compares white and black people to wolves and coyotes): if one side is doing racism, then we will do racism as well.

This is the grave danger behind the very online Right’s turn towards “the political is personal”: at the back of the ironic fitness, the talk of physiognomy, and the IQ-test silliness, there lurks an us-versus-them mentality. And it’s a mentality that allows the manosphere to gleefully join the progressive Left in bidding farewell to any of the remaining civil norms that facilitate debate and compromise. It will do nothing to break the sclerotic gridlock in the body politic — and nothing, ironically, for the young men of America who are actually trying to get stronger.

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here.

As I learned from her new graphic novel The Secret to Superhuman Strength, we both eschew team sports, preferring to compete primarily against ourselves. (Bechdel skis, and though I play tennis instead, I prefer rallying for hours on end to matches.) We were both regarded by schoolmates as mediocre athletes; that is, we were both chosen in the middle of the pack for kickball teams. We both took up running as a lark, beginning with short solo distances — in junior high, I did circuits of the football field while the rest of the class scarfed down miniature pizzas; Bechdel started spontaneously running to visit her grandmother. We both steadily increased this distance, and we both pushed our route to ten miles. Over the course of artistic careers, we’ve both been as dedicated to working up a sweat in a literal sense as we have been to our exertions on the page.

We’ve both gone through similar phases: weight training, long-distance cycling. Why, I positively seized on the fact that Bechdel spurns swimming — a difference! — and has got into yoga, which (so far) I’ve resisted. But over the last 50 years, we’ve both also been subjected to the larger western world’s gathering fixation on fitness, which has overtaken our meagre private labours and crashed over our heads like a 30-foot breaker. Overwhelmingly, then, what Bechdel and I have most in common is that at nearly the same time we both took a step back from what Bechdel calls an accelerating “cardio-pulmonary frenzy” and wrote books about it.

A word from our sponsor: my 2020 novel The Motion of the Body Through Space regards a woman of 60 who’s pursued a rigorous, albeit intensely private, fitness regime since childhood.  At the very point that regime has almost entirely destroyed her knees — so much for those ten-mile runs — her sedentary husband announces he’s going to run a marathon. When he ramps up to the triathlon, for which he engages a sexy younger trainer, the marriage, to put it mildly, is imperilled. The purpose of my project was to examine what in God’s name is propelling this latter-day preoccupation with fitness and whether the trend is a force for ill or good. (Answer: both. Now you needn’t buy the book.)

More from this author

I'm sick of fighting moronic culture wars

By Lionel Shriver

Yet the graphic novel may be an even better form than the straight prose kind for exploring this topic. Illustration brings to life various forms of self-torture, and Bechdel’s rendering of her multiple exertions throughout the years is dryly self-parodic. The drawings are stylish as well as entertaining. The narrative moves nicely along. Simultaneously detailing her romantic and career travails, Bechdel’s accompanying text is lush enough to parse with some profundity our mysterious exaltation of roundly unproductive suffering. The whole package is presented with more than a soupçon of welcome self-derision. I loved it.

Nevertheless, I confess to some ambivalence about discovering that the powers-that-be created two of me, just in case something unfortunate happened to the spare. One reason people like Bechdel and me avoid competitive sports is that by nature we’re too competitive, and so might take conclusive defeat fatally to heart. Thus the rivalrous devil on my shoulder jeered over these pages, “Oh, yeah?  You’ve biked a hundred miles in a day? Well, I’ve cycled so-called centuries cross-country for months!” I know. Pathetic. Indeed, an aim of both my novel and Bechdel’s is to question why we’ve come to invest so much status in fitness. How come many of us now compare ourselves to others in accordance with who does more repetitions of deltoid dips, even more so than with who earns more money or builds the more dazzling career?

When I started running around the football field at lunch and keeping a secret chart of my daily sit-ups, I imagined that these quirky absorptions were entirely my idea. Now I’m not so sure.  Recognising my double in Alison Bechdel (though she’s massively taller than I am, damn her) made me suspect uneasily that there might be other copies of me out there, hundreds, thousands, even millions.

Suggested reading

The empty promise of pop psychology

By Sarah Ditum

Rare must be the parent who looks up “1,000 most popular names for girls” and exclaims, “Look! ‘Olivia’ is number one! Let’s call our baby the same name everyone else is choosing!” Something more enigmatic and subconscious propels “Olivia” to that top slot. “Olivia” is in the air. It burrows into the brains of parents-to-be from the side like an earwig. Meanwhile, all those parents who christened a daughter “Olivia” last year thought the name was fresh, unusual, and their idea.

So with fitness. I think both Bechdel and I were suggestible. The nascent cultural obsession with exercise was already in the air. We were early adopters. But we were still earwigged.

I acknowledge this apparent conformity with no pleasure. Like any proper American, I prefer to regard myself as self-created, not as a predictable product of outside forces, like pasta dough forced through the mould for fusilli. But the amount that Bechdel and I have in common cannot be a coincidence. We started out the same loner, high-achiever type and grew up in the same country at the same time.

Suggested reading

The emptiness of the millennial world

By Gavin Haynes

In one respect the graphic artist and I may part ways. Strewn throughout Superhuman Strength are mini-bios of philosophers and poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jack Kerouac. These inserts are a little tedious. The bolstering of Bechdel’s personal story with historical heavy hitters suggests an insecurity about the worthiness of her theme. Writing my own novel about exercise, I shared that insecurity: is this topic meaty enough to justify a book? For me, what came to seem important about the subject was making it seem less important.

Despite her playful, self-deprecating approach, Bechdel portrays her churn through multifarious routes to exhaustion as a form of spiritual seeking. By contrast, I’ve come to see this mystical elevation of exercise as a route to enlightenment as part of the problem — and there is a problem. Obviously, a greater focus on fitness comes with undeniable health benefits, but worship of the hard body is a form of idolatry. Taken to excess, fitness fanaticism naturally nurtures narcissism (the endurance-sport-convert husband in my novel becomes unbearable). What we need is not to go back to being slobs, but to restore a sense of proportion.

Keeping the body in working order is a mechanical matter, one best decoupled from status and virtue. I adore tennis. I happily impute to the sport an element of, yes, spiritual satisfaction — because for me tennis engenders joy in its purest form. By contrast, plain exercise — calisthenics, running when you’re not in the mood (almost always) — is drudgery. Exercise constitutes the dullest part of my day. The fact that I keep doggedly at it is one of the least interesting things about me, and I’d rather talk about almost anything but.

The elevation of fitness to the highest of attainments is a sure sign of a culture grown neurotically inward and stunted. It’s a sign of diminished aspirations. When “self-improvement” entails not learning German but doing star jumps, we’re aiming to clear the lowest of bars. We’re not producing superheroes, but gym bunnies. In the end, no matter how much agony we undergo to build our biceps, those perishable muscles will still atrophy in old age and then end up on the scrap heap — at which point, what have we got to show? We could stand to demote the press-up back to the floor where it belongs.

The whole purpose of maintaining a functional body is to be able to do something else: write books, invent new software, land a rover on Mars. Theoretically, Michelangelo could have spent all his time on chin-ups and never have got round to the Sistine Chapel. Alison Bechdel won’t be remembered for her running time, but for exuberant drawings, droll captions, and candid self-reflection. The West’s obsession with physical strength, perversely, is a weakness.

Lionel Shriver’s novel The Motion of the Body Through Space is now out in paperback.