On Sunday 11th August 2024 I was invited to talk at a Men's Event hosted by the Women's Equality Party. I was given 15 minutes to chat about any topic I felt was relevant to men's issues within my field (health and fitness). Below is what I wrote and used as a springboard for the talk.
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When I was coming up with subjects to discuss today, I threw away a hundred different ideas. There’s so much that could be spoken about at this event. One potential topic was “The Impact of Toxic Masculinity in the Fitness Space.” Another was about “Challenging Gender Roles.” I almost landed on “Redefining Masculinity.” All worthy subjects, all great discussions. But instead, I chose to talk about “The Price of Perfection.”
When it comes to our health, our fitness, how we look, and how we feel as men, the world seems to be pushing us toward an extreme ideal that just isn’t sustainable. There seems to be this push toward hypermasculinity that is savagely impacting our mental health.
If you’ve ever started a health and fitness journey, I’ve no doubt you’ve come across this in some way. I certainly did when I started back in 2019. Alpha male content. Discussions about health and well-being by massively jacked dudes. Programs being sold with questionable marketing and promises. A sprinkling of “boys get sad too” style content, but quickly followed up with “but men don’t cry, you’re a stoic warrior, depression isn’t real, only women cry, and you’re not a woman, so man up.”
Men’s mental health is an important, complex topic. Statistically, men are often the most likely to end their lives by suicide. For many reasons. Men are most likely to not ask for help. Because we’re men. Men protect. Men solve. Men build. Men don’t get sad or break down, right? Right?
The Cost of Unattainable Ideals
Not so much. The reasons behind how we’ve ended up in this position are complex but have slowly built up over time. These unattainable, unhealthy, hypermasculine “ideals” seem to be entrenched in the minds of men and are often the goals they land on when starting to look at getting their health in order. This can lead to disappointment and, at worst, a fatal end for them or the people close to them when they don’t feel “man enough.”
If I asked you right now to imagine a personal trainer in a gym, what image comes to mind? I bet most of you would imagine the same kind of person. The same if I asked you to think of a fitness influencer or social media figure. Some jacked dude peddling supplements.
But who came up with this ideal and planted it in our heads? We, as men, have done ourselves a disservice by setting up this standard in the health and fitness space. We think that a fit and healthy man, a man worth listening to about fitness and health, must look like that image you have in your mind. A man can only “look like he does fitness” if he looks a certain way.
Some of you might be thinking, “So what if we want to look jacked? It’s our body, right? I have the autonomy to do what I want with it.” And you’re absolutely right. I have the same goals, and despite everything I’ve spoken about, I also would love to reach my 60s and be the biggest, bearded, jacked granddad out there. But that’s us. What about everyone else?
The Dark Side of Aesthetic Pursuits: Bigorexia
Research has shown, and a lot of the guys I’ve worked with have highlighted, that there is a point when mixing your health with aesthetics can go wrong. Has anyone heard of “bigorexia”? Bigorexia is the antithesis to anorexia. Gym rats up and down the country are becoming mentally distressed about how they look and are spiraling into this mindset of never being big enough. This leads to depression, anxiety, and turning to performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids, unregulated testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), and SARMS (Research Chemicals). Even UNTESTED performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) are finding their way into gyms and are being used by kids as young as 14.
All of this is born from not feeling good enough. From not meeting the ideal. Not being a strong enough or big enough man.
God help you if you’re a small man. And God help you even more if you cry about it. Men don’t cry, right? We’ve got to be stoic. Strong. We build. We provide. We carry our families. A good man isn’t a weak man.
But that’s not true. Emotion, size, strength—none of these are indicators of a man’s worth or whether they are “man enough.” You can be a strong man without looking like one. You can be a good man, a provider, without once getting aggressive.
Whenever I have a new client, and they indicate their main goal is to get jacked, I always press them for why. Sometimes they’ll say it’s for health reasons—they want to get stronger and fitter. When I ask why they are using their size as a metric for success in their health and fitness, they will reply: “Because I don’t want to look weak.”
The Evolution of Male Body Ideals
A great litmus test of how things have changed over the last two decades is comparing Hugh Jackman’s promo pics as Wolverine from the first X-Men film to now Twenty years ago his 'wolverine' was a regular looking guy who looked like he lifted occasionally. Now, he looks shredded to the gills. There’s been a massive shift in how “healthy” and "strong" looks from a male perspective. The goalposts keep changing. Perfection shifts every year. And we can't keep up.
Social media has only made it worse. It’s warping what a healthy male looks like. And I see it from such young kids all the way up to grown adults looking to make a change. Men are becoming confused. A healthy diet is no longer balanced. It’s meat and fat, and that’s it. You can’t just go for a run to be healthy. It’s got to be a half or ultra-marathon. You can’t just go to the gym to use the machines—God no, they’re for women. You’ve got to be on a high-frequency bodybuilding split, or you’re doing the gym wrong as a man.
Influential figures are perpetuating this and, objectively, negatively impacting men's mental health from afar by telling men that “perfect” is this unattainable ideal: rich, strong, massive, stoic.
It’s easy to pretend it’s not there, and that it’s all normal “male” behavior. But it’s clear to see how it’s warped over time and, also, how it’s often other men that continue to perpetuate it.
Course Correcting: Toward a Healthier Definition of Manhood
The pursuit of perfection, often fueled by the demands of hypermasculinity, is relentless and ultimately destructive. It only delivers emptiness.
It’s crucial that we try to course-correct this narrative and move away from the idea that being a worthy man includes status, strength, looks, and power. Health, fitness, and well-being don’t necessarily include that. Strength often doesn’t have a look. If the Olympics has shown us anything, it’s that an athlete comes in many shapes and sizes. And there’s more than one way to win a medal.
And in a roundabout way, that’s why I created BRIDGES. To help men and women move away from that hyperfixation on how they look, to move health and fitness back into the well-being space, and move more toward “doing fitness” for the sake of being fit and healthy.
More often than not, your physique follows by approaching things that way. And your mental health has a better chance of staying intact.
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