Discipline and self-respect, or an obsession filling a hole nothing else can? When does 'taking care of yourself' tip into a personality you can't put down?
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Add your commentI spent 11 years in evangelical Christianity and left when I was 28. Within two years I was tracking macros, doing 5am sessions, listening to motivational podcasts about 'discipline' and 'suffering building character.' It took my therapist pointing it out for me to see I had genuinely just swapped one salvation framework for another. Same psychological architecture, different logo.
That's one of the most perceptive things I've read on this topic. The 'salvation through suffering' thread running from ascetic religion straight into gym culture is so obvious once you see it — mortify the flesh to purify the self. It never went away, it just got a Spotify playlist.
I tore my ACL eighteen months ago. Couldn't train for a year. And I'm here to answer comment #8's question directly: yes, it destroyed me for about three months. My entire social world, my routine, my sense of myself — gone overnight. I had to completely rebuild who I was without it. It was the hardest thing I've done, harder than the injury itself. So no, the contingency plan wasn't good. I have one now. But it took losing the thing to realize I never had a backup self.
I spent three years thinking I was building discipline. I was actually running from my marriage. The gym became the one place I felt control I didn't have at home. Got divorced, stopped going, realized I'd been hiding there. Not saying it's bad for everyone, just saying — check your reasons.
Spent 11 years as a personal trainer. The saddest clients I ever had weren't the laziest ones. They were the ones who came in with dead eyes, going through the motions, desperately chasing a body they decided would finally make them feel worthy. They'd get there — genuinely impressive physiques — and immediately move the goalpost. The gym wasn't the problem. The hole they were trying to fill with it was.
This is true of literally any goal-oriented pursuit though. Artists, academics, entrepreneurs all do this exact thing. Why is it only pathologized when it's physical?
Because the body has limits that a career or an art project doesn't. You can always write more, build more, create more. The body eventually says no. The pursuit becomes increasingly irrational as you age. That's the difference.
There's a specific type of LinkedIn guy who posts 5AM gym selfies captioned with 'while you were sleeping' energy and then wonders why he has no real friends. The gym isn't the problem. The performative suffering is the problem.
grew up really poor. the gym was the first place i ever felt like i was building something that was actually mine. my body. nobody could take it or repossess it or evict it. you can call that a religion if you want. i call it the first thing that ever felt secure.
The fitness industry profits enormously from you never feeling finished. The next program. The next supplement. The next body goal just slightly out of reach. That's not discipline. That's a monetised treadmill — and I mean that literally. At some point you have to ask who benefits from you believing you're always not enough yet.
This applies equally to the wellness industry, therapy culture, self-help publishing, meditation apps... every single framework for self-improvement is commercially invested in your permanent incompleteness. Why is the gym specifically predatory and yoga retreats at £3,000 a week are enlightenment?
Because yoga retreats don't tell you you're morally inferior for skipping leg day. The tone is different even if the commercial incentive is the same. You can quit a yoga class without it feeling like a character failure.
My therapist and I actually talked about this. She said she has clients who use the gym to AVOID doing the actual work of therapy. Show up, do the hard physical thing, feel like you faced something. Go home still not having talked about your dad. It's a really effective way to feel disciplined while staying completely comfortable emotionally.
That's a suspiciously convenient thing for a therapist to say about a free competitor to her services, no?
What nobody talks about is how much of this is class-coded. Premium gym memberships, specialized coaching, organic protein, hours of free time to train — these are luxury goods sold as universal virtues. 'No excuses' is a lot easier to believe when you don't have two jobs, three kids, and a commute. The moralizing lands differently depending on your postcode.
My eating disorder started at the gym. Not saying that's everyone's story. But the 'gym saved me' narrative is so dominant that there's almost no space to say the gym was where I learned to hate my body in a really systematic and efficient way. Both stories are real. One just gets way more airtime.
Thank you for saying this. I went through something similar. The gym community celebrates restriction and pushing through pain and 'discipline' in ways that are, for someone with a certain history, genuinely dangerous. And it all looks like wellness from the outside.
Important perspectives but I want to gently push back — almost any community can be harmful for people with specific vulnerabilities. Cooking communities, running communities, academic environments. The question is whether the core thing is net positive. For most people, it seems to be.
My issue is the evangelism. I made one comment about being tired and my gym friend launched into a 12 minute speech about cortisol and sleep hygiene. I just wanted to complain about my week. Let me be tired in peace.
What's the alternative being proposed here though? Seriously asking. Less gym? More what? I'm 28 and the social infrastructure that apparently used to exist — clubs, unions, churches, third places — is basically gone where I live. The gym is one of three places I reliably interact with humans. What should I replace it with?
This is the real question and I hate that nobody has a good answer for it. The critique of gym culture is valid. The absence of alternatives is also real. Both things are true and neither camp wants to admit the other.
The second you start skipping your friend's wedding because it conflicts with leg day, you've crossed a line. And yes, I've met that person. He was my ex.
The gym as religion comparison is actually more literal than people realize. You have rituals (warm-up routines), sacred texts (macro spreadsheets), prophets (influencers), confession (tracking apps), and excommunication (missing leg day). The parallel is almost perfect. I'm not even criticizing it — I'm just saying we should be honest about what it is.
The comparison to religion is lazy intellectualism dressed up as insight. Religion makes claims about metaphysics, morality, community, afterlife, cosmic meaning. The gym makes you sweat. These are not the same phenomenon.
I'd push back on that. Religion isn't primarily about metaphysics for most practitioners — it's about identity, community, ritual, and meaning-making. On all four of those, serious gym culture absolutely qualifies. You can be functionally religious about something that has no supernatural component.
The 'religion' framing is actually more accurate than people want to admit. Rituals, sacred spaces, priests (personal trainers), dietary laws, confession (MyFitnessPal), evangelism, guilt for missing a session. The structural parallels are almost embarrassing once you see them.
as someone with a chronic illness who cannot work out the way gym culture demands — the moralizing around fitness hits different when your body doesn't cooperate. the 'no excuses' crowd has never once reckoned with the fact that some people have genuine excuses
This. A thousand times this. The ableism baked into gym culture is casually vicious and almost never acknowledged.
Hot take: the gym replaced church for the working class and replaced therapy for everyone else. That's not a criticism. That's just an observation about what the 2000s did to community infrastructure.
I'm a GP. The number of patients I see whose gym habits have tipped into orthorexia, exercise addiction, or chronic overtraining injury is not small. We have no clean diagnostic language for it yet so it stays invisible. 'He takes care of himself' we say, even watching someone fall apart. The medicalization is coming. It's just ten years behind the behavior.
lmaooo the same doctors who spent 40 years telling us to exercise more are now gonna pathologize exercising. make it make sense
Those aren't the same claim and you know it. 'Exercise is beneficial' and 'compulsive overexercise can be a disorder' are not contradictory. Alcohol has benefits in some studies. That doesn't mean alcoholism isn't real. This is not a hard distinction.
My grandmother never went to a gym a day in her life. She farmed, raised seven kids, walked everywhere, and lived to 94. We built an entire cultural complex around something she got for free by just living. I'm not anti-gym, I'm anti the mythologizing of it.
The mythology IS part of the value for some people though. Ritual matters. Community matters. Grandma had those through farm life and family. Many people today have neither. The gym fills a real gap.
The tipping point for me is whether you can take a week off without a full personality crisis. If rest days feel like moral failure, something is off.
respectfully disagree with the person above. some people SHOULD feel bad about not working out. inertia is real. guilt can be a useful tool
I go to the gym three times a week. I don't post about it. I don't talk about it. I don't want friends there. I'm not trying to optimize anything. I just feel worse when I don't go, so I go. Is that a religion? It feels more like brushing my teeth with heavier weights.
That's because you have a healthy relationship with it. The question isn't about people like you. It's about the ones who can't describe themselves without describing their fitness. You're not who this topic is about and I think you know that.
I actually disagree — the quiet people like the commenter above ARE relevant to this discussion. They're proof the tool works fine when it's not an identity. The topic should be about why some people slide from tool to identity, not about the tool itself.
The thing nobody says out loud: for a lot of men especially, the gym is one of the only spaces where ambition about your own body is socially acceptable. Men aren't supposed to care about how they look but simultaneously are judged for how they look. The gym is the legal loophole. Of course it becomes everything.
My dad worked 70 hour weeks his whole life and we called it 'providing for his family.' He never made a single one of my school events. If he'd spent those same hours at a gym we'd be calling it pathological. The thing that destroys families is ambition we've decided to respect.
I genuinely challenge anyone defending gym culture as 'just a tool' to explain why the culture so consistently produces people who cannot talk about anything else. A hammer doesn't restructure your personality. A tool doesn't make you bore your friends. When the tool becomes an entire worldview, it's not a tool anymore.
this is also true of cycling, true crime podcasts, fantasy football, sourdough baking, and cryptocurrency. the gym just has more visible adherents so it gets diagnosed. it's a monoculture critique dressed up as a health concern.
The difference is none of those other things moralize at you. Sourdough people don't tell you you're weak-willed for buying bread. Cyclists don't say 'no excuses' to people with MS. The gym has a uniquely aggressive evangelism that the other hobbies you listed really don't. That's what makes it feel different.
Better to be 'obsessed' with health than with drinking, gambling, or doomscrolling. If a person needs an anchor, the gym is the least destructive one on offer.
lmao at all the gym bros in the comments right now typing with pre-workout shaking hands trying to defend their lifestyle 😂
I think the question is actually whether the gym is being used as avoidance. Avoidance of grief, intimacy, uncertainty. That's when any habit — gym, church, work, Netflix — becomes something closer to self-harm wearing the mask of self-care.
this is so true and well put. ive used work the same way. its not the activity, its the function. are you building toward something or hiding from something?
The thing I notice is how aggressively gym culture frames rest as failure. 'Rest days are for the weak.' 'Your only limit is your mind.' This is not a health philosophy. This is the language of an abusive relationship with your own body, and it's normalized to a degree that would horrify people if applied to any other context.
Rest days are literally programmed into every serious training protocol. You're describing gym BRO culture online, not actual training science. Don't conflate the Instagram comments with the practice.
The Instagram comments ARE the culture for most people who consume it. Most gym-goers aren't working with periodized programming from a certified coach. They're watching reels at 11pm and feeling bad about themselves. The online culture is the primary culture at this point.
Purpose? My man out here squatting 4 plates and still can't hold a conversation that isn't about macros. That's not purpose, that's an aesthetic prison.
Honestly the most frustrating part of this debate is that the people doing the criticizing are usually quite comfortable — good jobs, stable relationships, interesting social lives. They have the luxury of not needing the gym to be more than exercise. For a lot of people it's the only structured community they have access to. Criticizing it from a position of social abundance is a bit tone deaf.
I work as a therapist and I genuinely see a rise in what we'd call compulsive exercise — it's classified under eating disorder spectrum in many clinical frameworks. The 'discipline' narrative makes it extremely hard for clients to recognize the problem, let alone seek help.
To the therapist above — appreciate the clinical framing but I'd push back slightly. Most people I know at the gym are not compulsive, they're consistent. There's a difference, and conflating the two does a disservice to people who've actually built sustainable habits.
The fitness industry generated over $100 billion globally last year. The 'gym as religion' isn't accidental — it was manufactured. The influencers, the supplement brands, the gym gear aesthetics — there are entire marketing departments whose job is to make you feel like your identity lives or dies on your deadlift numbers. You're not finding meaning. You're being sold it.
This argument could apply to literally anything capitalism touches. 'You're not really enjoying that book, you're being sold the identity of a reader.' At some point personal experience is real regardless of who profited from creating the conditions for it.
Hot take incoming: the gym IS a superior replacement for religion for many people. Community, ritual, sacrifice, transformation, moral code around eating and sleep. It checks every box. Why is that bad?
I've noticed that women who are very serious about the gym get described as 'empowered' while men who are very serious about it get described as 'compensating.' Same behavior, completely different social framing. Both deserve to be examined more honestly.
ok but has anyone considered that maybe having ANY consistent daily practice that makes you feel like yourself is just... good? like im not a philosopher i just like deadlifts and sleeping well. why does everything need to be a crisis
The gym didn't give me purpose. It gave me the mental clarity to FIND purpose. Huge distinction. It's a tool, not a destination.
Honest question for the people defending gym obsession: what happens when you can't go anymore? Injury, illness, age. If your entire identity is built there, what's left? I'm not trying to be cruel — I'm genuinely asking what the contingency plan is.
ok but why do we never talk about the DIET side of this. the gym-bro diet culture — the tracking every gram, the fear of eating 'off plan' at family dinners — that part feels a lot more disordered than the lifting itself
Hot take: the gym fills the same social need that pubs used to fill and we should be relieved about that, not suspicious. Men especially need third spaces where they can be alongside other people without having to perform emotionally. A weight room does that. The fact that some people over-invest doesn't invalidate the function.
The pub comparison is interesting until you remember that pubs fostered genuine cross-class, cross-age, cross-politics mixing. Premium gyms are profoundly homogeneous spaces. They don't replace the pub. They replace community with a demographic bubble that confirms everything you already think about who's worth spending time with.
Here's what nobody is willing to say: a lot of gym devotion, especially in men, is really about sexual competition with other men. Not about women, not about health, not about discipline — it's status performance within a male hierarchy. Admit it and we can have a more honest conversation.
And? Why does the motivation matter if the outcome is neutral-to-positive? Humans do almost everything for status. We act like that's a disqualifying admission but it's just... human nature. The question is always what the status-seeking produces, not whether it exists.
ok but have you considered: who cares? people need structure. the gym provides structure. the end.
The 'purpose' framing in the question is doing a lot of work and I think it's slightly condescending. Humans have always organized their days around physical practice — farming, craft, hunting. The gym is historically weird but the underlying need to use your body deliberately, to have something physical to show for a day, that's not a symptom of modern emptiness. It might actually be the one normal thing left.
When your entire identity, friends, and conversations are the gym, that's not discipline, that's a dependency with better lighting. The mirror became the meaning.
I actually think organized religion had a lot of the same features the gym now provides: communal gathering, bodily ritual, hierarchy of devotion, a shared moral framework. Calling the gym 'a religion' isn't an insult. It's a pretty good description of what it functionally is for a lot of people.
The difference is religion tells you you're accountable to something greater than yourself. The gym tells you you're the greatest thing. That's not a small theological distinction — it's a completely different relationship with the self.
Bold of you to assume religion makes people humble. Have you met religious people? 😂
So let me get this straight — meditating twice a day is spiritual discipline, but lifting twice a day is obsession? The bias here is so naked it's almost funny.
torn on this one honestly. i've watched the gym make my brother a completely different — better — person. i've also watched it make my college roommate miserable and isolated. the tool is neutral. the person using it isn't always.
lol at the gym being 'the least destructive anchor.' have you MET a guy who's been cutting calories for 14 months straight? destructive looks different in compression shorts but its still destructive
Genuinely asking: what's the non-gym version of 'purpose' that you're comparing this to? Because from where I'm standing most people are also just doing things to fill time and feel okay. The gym gets singled out because it's visible and physical. A guy reading philosophy alone in his flat has 'depth.' The guy squatting 140kg is 'avoiding something.' This judgment is almost entirely aesthetic.
The gym pulled me out of the darkest year of my life. Call it a religion if you want, it's the church that actually showed up for me.
This conversation makes me laugh every time. Nobody asks 'is golf a religion for people with no purpose?' Nobody writes think-pieces about weekend gardeners. Fit people make other people uncomfortable, so we pathologize the fit people. That's what this is.
i just want to be able to carry my groceries when im 80. thats it. thats the whole ideology. can we let some of us just exist without it being a think piece
Every serious gym person I know is also just... better at their job, more patient with their family, sleeps better. The outcomes speak. If it's a religion, it's one with measurable miracles.
Correlation ≠ causation. Disciplined people tend to go to the gym AND be good at their jobs. The gym didn't make them disciplined. You're confusing the signal with the source.
religion requires belief in something outside yourself. the gym is literally the opposite of that. its just you and the bar. calling it religion is intellectually lazy
Confidently wrong take incoming: the gym is healthier than meditation, journaling, or therapy because it produces visible, measurable results. You can't fake a PR. You can absolutely fake 'personal growth.'
This is one of the most embarrassing things I've read this week and I read Twitter.
You can't 'fake' recovery from a panic disorder either. You can't fake finally being able to sleep. You can't fake your marriage getting better. These things are real even without a number attached to them. The obsession with measurement is exactly what makes gym culture limiting.
The question assumes purposelessness is bad. Maybe people ARE finding purpose in the gym. Maybe that's fine. Who decides what counts as a 'real' purpose anyway — philosophers? Priests? Twitter?
Nobody mocks people obsessed with their career or their kids. We only call it 'too much' when the project is yourself. Interesting double standard.
I've been going 5 days a week for 11 years. I've missed holidays, skipped social events, planned vacations around gym access. And I'll tell you what: I don't regret a single rep. My body is my longest commitment and it has never let me down.
"planned vacations around gym access" is wild to me. i'm not judging but i'm a little bit judging
People plan vacations around ski resorts, golf courses, wine regions. Nobody bats an eye. The judgment is selective and worth examining.
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