Redefining Exercise: Finding Joy in Movement Beyond Unrealistic Standards
Our relationship with exercise has become complicated. While physical activity is fundamental to human health, we’ve developed expectations that have transformed movement from a natural, enjoyable part of life into something laden with pressure, perfectionism, and unrealistic standards. Exercise hasn’t always been fun for many people, but the situation has worsened as societal ideals about physical performance, health metrics, and aging have escalated to unsustainable heights.
The modern fitness industry often portrays exercise as something that should be intense, transformative, and aesthetically rewarding. Social media feeds showcase perfect bodies performing perfect workouts with perfect results. This portrayal ignores a fundamental truth: humans evolved to move in varied, practical ways throughout the day—not to perform specialized routines aimed at sculpting ideal physiques or achieving extreme performance metrics. The gap between these idealized versions of fitness and the reality of most people’s lives creates significant psychological barriers. Many individuals feel inadequate before they even begin, believing that if they can’t exercise “properly” or achieve visible results quickly, there’s little point in trying at all.
Our definitions of health have similarly narrowed and intensified. Being healthy once meant having sufficient energy for daily life, freedom from illness, and the ability to enjoy physical activities. Today, health is often reduced to specific numbers: weight, body fat percentage, muscle mass, resting heart rate, and countless other metrics that can be tracked, compared, and optimized. This quantification of health has created a binary where people feel either “healthy” or “unhealthy” with little room for the nuanced reality that health exists on a spectrum, varies between individuals, and encompasses mental and social well-being alongside physical measures. The pressure to meet these numerical standards creates anxiety that paradoxically undermines the very health people are trying to achieve.
Perhaps nowhere have expectations become more disconnected from reality than in our approach to aging. Society increasingly expects people to maintain the physical capabilities and appearances of their younger selves indefinitely. Celebrities and fitness influencers in their 50s, 60s, and beyond who maintain exceptional physiques are held up as examples of “aging well,” creating the impression that physical decline is optional rather than an inevitable biological process. This narrative ignores that these exceptional cases often reflect genetic advantages, significant time investments, access to resources like trainers and chefs, and sometimes medical interventions that are unavailable to average people. The result is that normal, natural changes in the aging body become sources of shame and disappointment rather than accepted aspects of the human experience.
What’s been lost in this evolution is the understanding that movement can and should be pleasurable, sustainable, and tailored to individual circumstances. Historical forms of physical activity—walking to destinations, manual labor, dancing, play—were integrated into daily life and social interaction. They served practical purposes and often provided intrinsic rewards beyond physical benefits. Modern exercise, by contrast, is frequently isolated from other meaningful activities, performed in specialized environments, and motivated primarily by extrinsic goals like weight loss or muscle gain. This shift has stripped physical activity of many elements that make it sustainable: social connection, immediate purpose, variety, and most importantly, joy.
The path forward requires a fundamental reconceptualization of what exercise means and what constitutes success. We need to embrace an approach that celebrates movement in all its forms, acknowledges the limitations and changes of the human body across the lifespan, and prioritizes consistency and enjoyment over intensity and perfection. This might mean walking rather than running, dancing rather than lifting weights, or gardening rather than spinning classes. Success should be measured not by comparing ourselves to others or to idealized standards, but by asking simple questions: Did I move today? Did I feel good doing it? Will I want to do it again tomorrow? By lowering the bar for what counts as “exercise” and what it means to be “healthy,” we paradoxically make it more likely that people will engage in sustainable physical activity throughout their lives—and derive genuine physical and emotional benefits from doing so.
